Fellow Tribesmen

Fellow Tribesmen
Author: Frank Usbeck
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782386556

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

Age of Entanglement

Age of Entanglement
Author: Kris Manjapra
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2014-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674727460

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

Indianthusiasm

Indianthusiasm
Author: Hartmut Lutz
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1771124008

Indianthusiasm refers to the European fascination with, and fantasies about, Indigenous peoples of North America, and has its roots in nineteenth-century German colonial imagination. Often manifested in romanticized representations of the past, Indianthusiasm has developed into a veritable industry in Germany and other European nations: there are Western and so-called “Indian” theme parks and a German hobbyist scene that attract people of all social backgrounds and ages to join camps and clubs that practise beading, powwow dancing, and Indigenous lifestyles. Containing interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists, and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples, Indianthusiasm is the first collection to present Indigenous critiques and assessments of this phenomenon. The volume connects two disciplines and strands of scholarship: German Studies and Indigenous Studies, focusing on how Indianthusiam has created both barriers and opportunities for Indigenous peoples with Germans and in Germany.

The Sign of the Tiger

The Sign of the Tiger
Author: Rudolf Hartog
Publisher: Spotlight Poets
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2001
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Subhas Chandra Bose is among the most controversial figures of the Indian freedom struggle. 'The Sign Of The Tiger' unfolds those days of his political career, mostly unknown to Indians-when Netaji recruited Indian prisoners of war to form the Indian Legion under the aegis of the German army and describes how they fought valiantly against the British in the Second World War. Written from a German perspective, the book focusses more on Bose's political vision than on his magnetic personality. A refreshing and enlightening read, specially to all those interested in the mysteries of Indian freedom struggle and Bose's lesser known exploits.

For Free India

For Free India
Author: Martin Bamber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN: 9789460190162

Germany and the Indians

Germany and the Indians
Author: Nirode K. Barooah
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 3752820462

Germany always enjoyed a natural sympathy from the Indians primarily because of Max Müller, that renowned Oxford professor of Comparative Philology of German descent who, while doing painstaking pioneering researches into ancient Indian scripture, called India "the very paradise on earth", without ever visiting the country. In spite of this, because of the latent racism among the German commercial classes and the social aloofness of the German diplomats in India in order to avoid giving any chance of suspicion to the British rulers, a normal relation based on mutual trust and friendship between the Germans and the Indians remained a desideratum. Yet during the chequered period between the two World Wars, Germany was compelled to reckon with the growing self confidence of the Indians. Even Hitler had to appease the Indians in order to save the German trade in India. The book is a pioneering work on the extra-ordinary German Indian relations between 1922 and 1939 and based on German archival materials.

The German Gita

The German Gita
Author: Bradley L. Herling
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135501882

How did the Bhagavadgãtà first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgãtà around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgãtà and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews.

Kindred by Choice

Kindred by Choice
Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2013-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469607654

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As H. Glenn Penny demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. This affinity stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Locating the origins of the fascination for Indian life in the transatlantic world of German cultures in the nineteenth century, Penny explores German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational worlds of American Indian performers. As he traces this phenomenon through the twentieth century, Penny engages debates about race, masculinity, comparative genocides, and American Indians' reactions to Germans' interests in them. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.

News from Germany

News from Germany
Author: Heidi J. S. Tworek
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 067498840X

Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.

The Indian Contingent

The Indian Contingent
Author: Ghee Bowman
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0750995424

'An incredible and important story, finally being told' - Mishal Husain On 28 May 1940, Major Akbar Khan marched at the head of 299 soldiers along a beach in northern France. They were the only Indians in the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. With Stuka sirens wailing, shells falling in the water and Tommies lining up to be evacuated, these soldiers of the British Indian Army, carrying their disabled imam, found their way to the East Mole and embarked for England in the dead of night. On reaching Dover, they borrowed brass trays and started playing Punjabi folk music, upon which even 'many British spectators joined in the dance'. What journey had brought these men to Europe? What became of them – and of comrades captured by the Germans? With the engaging style of a true storyteller, Ghee Bowman reveals in full, for the first time, the astonishing story of the Indian Contingent, from their arrival in France on 26 December 1939 to their return to an India on the verge of partition. It is one of the war's hidden stories that casts fresh light on Britain and its empire.