In 1938 in the highlands of British Ceylon, the island now known as Sri Lanka, a Buddhist monk named Nyanaponika sat down to pen a letter to a childhood friend. He had recently moved from a hermitage in the southern part of the island, where he had been ordained. Exchanging the crushing heat of the jungle for the milder climate of the highlands, he felt more comfortable. It was the third year since his arrival from Europe and, during that time, the climatic conditions had proven to be his greatest challenge. Somewhere between the ancient capitals of Kandy and Gampola, Nyanaponika had erected a hut to protect himself from the elements on a small piece of land enclosed by rice paddies. For food, he visited the nearby villages where he begged for alms. It was a simple life, but one he had strived for. When he was not busy begging or meditating, he spent his time learning Pali, the holy language of Theravada Buddhism, and Singhalese, which was spoken by the local population. In the letter to his childhood friend, who had also left Europe and resided in Mandatory Palestine, he wrote in his mother tongue, German:
My dear Max! How many things have changed for worse and the worst since the last time I wrote you—and not just the Jewish fate!1
The “Max” in question was Max Kreutzberger, then head of the Hitachdut Olei Germania, an association for German immigrants to Palestine, and later, among other functions, first executive director of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Behind the name Nyanaponika was Siegmund (Shlomo) Feniger, who would ascend to become one of the twentieth century’s foremost Buddhist intellectuals in Sri Lanka, a towering figure who left an indelible imprint on the Buddhist landscape, and whose legacy lives on today in Sri Lanka and beyond.
Feniger was born in Hanau on July 21, 1901, to Jewish parents, and he was raised in a traditional Jewish environment.2 Even after discovering Buddhism in the 1920s and immigrating to British Ceylon in 1935, throughout his life he retained a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Even though he wrote his most accomplished works decades after the destruction of German-Jewish culture, Nyanaponika was a scion of the encounter between German Jewry and Buddhism in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is the story of this encounter that I want to tell in this book.
This encounter includes some of the most prominent German-Jewish voices, as well as unknown figures, from philosophers and novelists to journalists and rabbis. Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Jakob Wassermann, and Lion Feuchtwanger are included, as are relatively unknown figures like Paul Cohen-Portheim and Walter Tausk, among others. This study spans the decades before the First World War up to the destruction of German Jewry during the Holocaust. Many of the people in this story went into exile, and many others were killed. Yet, as Nyanaponika showed, the story would live on. We begin in the 1890s, although it would take nearly two more decades for Buddhism to become an important topic in German culture and to exert an influence that is both near-ubiquitous and yet seldom acknowledged. However, I have not chosen the date by chance. The 1890s mark the threshold between the extant concern with India (and also by extension Buddhism) during the nineteenth century and the emergent rise of Buddhism as a religion. The idea that Buddhism was a religion, even a “world religion,” comparable to Christianity and Judaism, had proliferated during the previous decades and gathered momentum in the 1890s.3 Famously, Arthur Schopenhauer declared himself a “Buddhaist” in 1856, but only in the 1890s was the time ripe for a figure like Theodor Schultze to emerge, a senior Prussian state employee (Oberpräsidialrat), who described himself as a Buddhist and published books like Der Buddhismus als Religion der Zukunft in 1894.4 German thinkers and artists like Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche already had something of a penchant for Buddhism, but only in the 1890s did Buddhism garner enough social capital to be considered in its own right. Buddhism was no longer automatically subsumed under Indian thought or East Asian religion. And the (bourgeois) public fervently embraced it. In 1899, the Professor of Indology Leopold von Schroeder stated that “every newspaper wants an essay; every Verein wants to have a lecture about the Buddha.”5
However, von Schroeder, the clearheaded scholar, was not pleased that the rise of Buddhism was inconceivable without the widespread popularity of theosophy, which took interest in Buddhism to a new level. However, while innumerable mystical or occultist movements played a major role in the spread and reception of Buddhism in German culture, Buddhism quickly emancipated itself from its theosophic roots. After the turn of the century, for many people, Buddhism was about to become the main attraction (see Chap. 3). Its followers wanted Buddhism to be seen as a full-fledged religion, and in 1903, German Buddhists found their first institutional home in the Buddhistischer Missionsverein in Deutschland. Following the ascendance of Buddhism to a religion around the 1890s, we can observe the dissemination of Buddhist ideas among the intellectual and cultural elite, concomitant with a renewed interest in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In 1916, a bibliography (albeit an incomplete one) of available German titles on Buddhism already listed more than 2500 entries.6 As such, at the start of the twentieth century, we can see Buddhism’s sudden transformation from an obscure topic, largely of interest to a few misfits and lonesome scholars, into a fashionable subject that left its mark on the writings of the foremost—not only Jewish—authors of the period. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is certainly the most famous example, but others including Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Mauthner, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, and many more integrated Buddhist ideas into their writings. The diverse understanding of what was passed down as genuine Buddhism offered something for everyone. From the turn of the century until the First World War, when interest in Buddhism peaked, one can note both a shift and a bifurcation. Scholarly attention waned during this decade, but it was now up to committed Buddhists and less committed literati to come to terms with this new phenomenon. Committed Buddhists often struggled with the question of what it meant to be a Buddhist in Germany. Literati, on the other hand, used their ideas of Buddhism quite freely. Buddhism was for many a flexible, malleable mass that could be used, combined, chopped up, and reassembled. The coexistence of rational and spiritual interpretations of Buddhism underlines the fact that, in the end, the mind was the only Procrustean bed to which one had to conform.7 The severance of religious practice from philosophical ideas, which we can identify in the West’s approach to Buddhism to this day, facilitated the adoption of the latter. Once Buddhism had become popular and capable of standing independently, it was taken up by those looking to supplement their Weltanschauung without subscribing to all of Buddhism’s sweeping claims. This bifurcation was most visible in the kind of questions that were raised in the respective circles. On one side, some pondered if Buddhism entailed vegetarianism or celibacy for German laity. Should they live as monks and wear robes? Should they erect a stupa or found a Buddhist monastery on the island of Sylt?8 More generally, should Buddhist customs be transported from Asia to Germany, and if so, to what extent? These were practical questions, most of which did not find ready-made answers in the Pali Canon. Indeed, they often required some hermeneutic effort. As a result, different German schools of Buddhism were established. On the other, philosophically inclined, side, the key question was whether Karl Eugen Neumann’s German translations from the Pali Canon were an intellectual achievement comparable to Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible (as George Bernhard Shaw and Edmund Husserl believed) or Shakespeare’s plays (a position held by Thomas Mann and Jakob Wassermann).9 This was a discussion of lofty intellectual ideas and such was their Buddhism. It is unlikely that Thomas Mann, Alfred Kubin, Karl Gjellerup, or the other writers and artists enamored with Buddhism ever contemplated robing up. Their interest was chiefly confined to the ideas that the Buddha (re-)presented and less about practical concerns.
Following the rise from the obscurity of homegrown German Buddhism to a cultural phenomenon that enticed many writers and intellectuals in the interwar period, a notable decline is visible with the rise of the Nazi regime. Subsequently, the bevy of those with a penchant for Buddhism became dispersed. Most literati were now less interested in Buddhism and their preoccupation with it often had to yield to the more pressing demands of simply surviving. They became more attentive to worldly issues and only a few (among them Lion Feuchtwanger, whom we discuss later) dared to connect a Buddhist message to the shift in the political sphere.
Others argued that National Socialism and Buddhism shared common ideas. The joint usage of the swastika was the key piece of evidence in this regard. The antisemitic undercurrent that had plagued German Buddhism from its inception was now in plain sight. Intellectually meager as this current was, its disappearance during the 1930s was hardly noticed outside of the circle of its most dedicated adherents.
While some would continue to hold on to Buddhist ideas privately or even start successful careers in the Buddhist world, like Nyanaponika, German Buddhism lost its cultural clout during the 1930s. The Second World War marked the temporary end of the German fascination with Buddhism.
This study draws from a myriad of sources—such as philosophical treatises, novels...