Myers, P. (2009). Leopold Von Schroeder’s Imagined India: Buddhist Spirituality and Christian Politics During the Wilhelmine Era. German Studies Review, 32(3), 619-636.
Abstract: Since the late eighteenth-century, India had served as a backdrop for German intellectuals to project stressful cultural transformations in Germany. Thus an 1876 play by the Indologist Leopold von Schroeder (1851-1920), Konig Sundara, embraced Buddhism at the height of the Kulturkampf in an attempt to reconstitute spirituality under threat. Yet a decade later the same author denigrated Buddhism and Eastern thought vis-a-vis Christianity in an adamant readoption of Christian historical mandates. This suggests that much of the famed German fascination with the high culture and religions of India was “Orientalist” and yielded swiftly to a militant reassertion of Christianity in a climate of growing colonialist consciousness.