Heinrich R. Zimmer: A Biographical Profile
Heinrich Robert Zimmer was born in Greifswald in 1890, and went to Berlin and Munich to study Sanskrit philology, art and literary history, and comparative linguistics.
After graduating in 1913, he served in the military during the First World War as an interpreter of French.
This experience was a real rite of passage: “Four year of human, sub-and
superhuman experience, initiations in the trenches, staffs, meeting more people than I ever did before and watching them in all kinds of revealing attitudes.
The initiation of Life (including Death) playing its own symphony
with the fullest possible orchestration.”
Afterwards he took up the study of Sinology, Indology, Buddhist and Tantric texts, mythology, and symbolism, and in 1920 was appointed associate professor in Indian philology at the University of Greifswald.
In 1926 he was named professor of Indology and mythological research in Heidelberg and published Kunstform und Yoga im indischen Kultbild: a work which served, as the leading perennialist and historian of Indian art Ananda Coomaraswamy stated in a 1932 review, to change the direction of the study of Indian art in the West, for “no more valuable book for the understanding of Indian art [. . .] has yet been published.”
This book brought Zimmer a recognition that continued to grow with his other major studies from the interwar period.
In 1928, Zimmer married Christiane von Hofmannsthal (only daughter
of the celebrated Austrian writer and poet), who gave him three children;
after his father-in-law’s death in 1929, he served as co-publisher
of the Nachlass and anonymously edited some of Hofmannsthal’s posthumously published works.
He also had another lifelong relationship, known to his wife, with Mila Esslinger Rauch, with whom he had three more children.
Zimmer was not only a brilliant scholar and popularizer of Indian
thought and myths, but also a prolific translator from Sanskrit.
He maintained, moreover, a vast network of relationships with intellectuals, philosophers, and literati, including Karl Jaspers, Emil Nolde, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Weber, Alfred Kubin, and Raymond Klibansky.
He was also a friend of Thomas Mann, and provided inspiration for Mann’s novella of 1940 Die vertauschten Köpfe—Eine indische Legende (The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India).
Zimmer’s personal connection with Jung from 1932 was a turning point in his life, which also opened up to him several new possibilities and audiences158 (though not everyone welcomed Zimmer’s growing closeness to analytical psychology:
several “head-shaking colleagues,” such as Ludwig Edelstein, “regretted these diversions of his activity, valuable as they were in themselves.
We wished that he would devote himself entirely to his own field, in which he could make a unique contribution.”)
The Eranos conferences proved moreover to be a further occasion for the meeting of kindred spirits, and Zimmer’s opening lecture on Tantric yoga at the first conference was followed by three more appearances, in 1934, 1938, and 1939.
Yet for political reasons, and because of the non-Aryian ancestry of
his wife, from 1933 Zimmer came under surveillance by the Heidelberg
police.
Despite “severely reduced publishing possibilities” he continued to
publish also in non-academic journals on various topics (“ranging from
Indian temples to Richard Wagner to a playful treatment of Sisyphus as a
neurotic”), but, as Gerald Chapple notes, “the tragedy was that Zimmer,
still in his forties and at the height of his powers, was being cut off from
communicating his discoveries at a time when he was profitably expanding
his interests in so many directions.”
After escaping arrest in November 1938, in March 1939 he emigrated to Oxford where he received an (unpaid) position as visiting professor at Balliol College. Subsequently, on June 1, 1940, he entered the United States, where despite difficulties he adapted well, moving his family to New Rochelle in New York state.
Already in November he gave three lectures on Hindu medicine at the Johns
Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine in Baltimore (to be published
in 1948).162 In the United States as in Germany, however, a degree of
ostracism, on the part of two powerful established academic figures in
particular, contributed to the obstruction of his career, so that only in
early 1943, a few months before his sudden death, was he eventually appointed visiting lecturer in Hindu Philosophy and Religion at Columbia
University. ~G.V.R. SORGE, On Dreams in the East, Page 47-50
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