SV: SV: Sanskrit translations in Nazi hands

[Lars Martin Fosse]

Alf Hiltebeitel wrote:

> I agree that Sheldon Pollock's article, cited below, is indispensible
> reading to anyone who wants to think seriously about the issues raised,
> but it is quite a stretch to say that he "claims that the academic
> standards of these scholars were impeccable." Having just reread the
> pertinent pages, I see what might be quoted in that direction: "They are
> for the most part unimpeachable with respect to scholarly 'standards'"
> (p. 94). But those quotation marks around "standards" are not making it
> into the paraphrase. To interpret them, one may turn two pages:
> "Whatever other enduring lessons this may teach us, it offers a superb
> illustration of the empirical fact that disinterested scholarship in the
> human sciences, like any other socal act, takes place within the realm of
> interests" (96). For a "closer reading" of some pertinent NS period
> German Indological texts, see Carlo Ginzburg, "Germanic Mythology and
> Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumezil," in _Clues, Myths and
> Historical Method_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uniersity Press, 1989), pp.
> 126-45.

Obviously, I was a bit too quick. It's a few months since I read the article.

> Perhaps it is a question of whether anything can rise to the level of
> unimeachability.

Probably  not, not even Clinton. What struck me, when I read Pollock's paper,
was that most of the people he mentions as members of the Nazi party (in
several cases, members even BEFORE the Nazis came to power, an important
difference), are regarded as "staple food" for students of Indology, yet their
political leanings had never been mentioned - to me, at least. If you know that
a person was an active Nazi (or has some other aberrant ideology), you read his
work with more attention  than if you deal with a non-fascist indologist. When
doing my Ph.D., I had to read several works by Walther Wuest, apparently one of
the more vicious Nazis from what I have been told. Although you could see in
dications of his political ideas in the texts, they were rather subdued (at
least in the texts I read), and most of what he had to say, was put forward in
a competent manner and had to be taken seriously. We cannot reject works by
competent colleagues simply because of their political leanings, however
abominable they may be. Scholarly arguments have to be treated on their own
merit as long as they are made competently by knowledgable people. And most of
the German scholars who were members of the Nazi party, happened to be
competent. I guess it is a bit like Werner von Braun, a major of the
Schuetzstaffel and involved in acts that perhaps should have brought him to
Nuremberg. He was instead, on the pure merit of his competence, transported to
a better life in the US, his background whitewashed by the US army and, since
his arrival in the land of the free, apparently of an impeccable democratic
mindset. Possibly, some of the old Indologists of Nazi leanings changed their
ways and ideas after the war. Even intellectuals can learn, given a hard enough
blow! :-)

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse



Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19
Email: lmfosse at online.no