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The archer and the arrow: Zen Buddhism and the politics of religion in Nazi Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2022
Abstract
Zen may be most commonly associated with Japan, but the ‘art of Zen’ was made in Germany. This article reconstructs the reception of Zen Buddhism in Nazi Germany as an extension of the regime’s project to transform Christianity. Although Japanese reformers emphasized Zen’s universal qualities, in Nazi Germany it became associated instead with a combination of völkisch nationalism and spiritual mysticism mirroring Nazi aspirations for a ‘positive’ German form of Christianity. That project may have been discredited after 1945, but the image of Zen cultivated by Nazi ideologues transitioned more or less seamlessly into the post-war New Age movement. This phenomenon thus merits attention not only for what it reveals about the extent to which Germany remained engaged in global intellectual and cultural currents during the Nazi era but also in complicating our historical understanding of how Zen came to be part of the contemporary global vernacular.
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References
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89 Ōhasama was a lay practitioner of Rinzai Zen, although he was connected through his own teacher to the great Rinzai abbot Shaku Sōen, who was D.T. Suzuki’s mentor and instructor. Shūei Ōhasama, Zen. Der lebendige Buddhismus in Japan, ed. A. Faust (Gotha/Stuttgart: Verlag Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1925). Bieber, SS und Samurai, 135.
90 Herrigel recalled that his acquaintances in Japan, upon learning of his interest in mysticism, cautioned him away from delving immediately into the more strenuous practice of meditation, suggesting that an aesthetic discipline like kyūdō or ikebana would be more ‘accessible’ to him as a European. Eugen Herrigel, ‘Die ritterliche Kunst des Bogenschießens’, Nippon. Zeitschrift für Japanologie 2, no. 4 (October 1936): 198.
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93 Ibid., 194.
94 Ibid., 209.
95 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, trans. Vivian Bird, Quoted in Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 41–2.
96 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), xi. See also, Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism (Boston, MA: Brill, 2014); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
97 Junyu Kitayama, Heroisches Ethos, 62.
98 Much of the controversy on the question of Suzuki’s complicity with Japanese militarism has centred on the scholarship of Brian Victoria, who previously claimed that Suzuki was an active supporter of Japanese aggression in China and whose more recent scholarship focuses on Suzuki’s supposed sympathies for Nazism. See: Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War. 2nd edition. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006); ‘D.T. Suzuki, Zen and the Nazis’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 11.43, no. 4 (October 2013): Article ID 4019. https://apjjf.org/2013/11/43/Brian-Victoria/4019/article.html [Accessed October 30, 2021]. For a critical response to Victoria, see: Kemmyō Taira Satō and Robert Kirchner, ‘Brian Victoria and the Question of Scholarship’, The Eastern Buddhist 41, no. 2 (2010): 139–66.
99 For a sympathetic reading of Suzuki, see: Victor Sōgen Hori, ‘D.T. Suzuki and the Invention of Tradition’, The Eastern Buddhist 47, no. 2 (2016): 41–81.
100 D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: MJF Books, 1959), 63.
101 Although Jung studiously maintained his distance from National Socialism, he was influenced by ideas taken from the völkisch movement. See, Petteri Pietkainen, ‘The Volk and Its Unconscious: Jung, Hauer, and the “German Revolution”’, Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (October 2000): 523–39.
102 C.G. Jung, ‘Geleitwort’, in D.T. Suzuki, Die große Befreiung. Einführung in den Zen-Buddhismus, Heinrich Zimmer, trans. (Leipzig: Curt Weller & Co. Verlag, 1939), 12.
103 Jung, ‘Geleitwort’, 16–7.
104 Ibid., 28.
105 Ibid., 33.
106 Otto Fischer, ‘Zur Einführung’, in Zen und die Kultur Japans, ed. D.T. Suzuki (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1941), 15.
107 Zen und der Samurai, ‘Von der Todesbereitschaft des japanischen Kriegers’, Völkischer Beobachter. Süddeutsche Ausgabe no. 11 (11 January 1942), 2; Ernst Meunieur, ‘Mitsuru Tōyama’, Völkischer Beobachter. Süddeutsche Ausgabe no. 16 (16 January 1942).
108 ‘Japanische Kultur’, Westfälische Landeszeitung (22 June, 1941), BArch R 64IV/272, 123.
109 Herrigel, ‘Das Ethos des Samurai’, 7.
110 Ibid., 11.
111 Ibid., 3.
112 Herrigel, ‘Entnazifizierung.’ Unpublished typed manuscript (ca. 1947). Herrigel family history file. Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg.
113 Yamada, Shots in the Dark, 99–101.
114 See, Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 177–217; Clemens Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung. Politische Säuberung und Rehabilitierung in den vier Besatzungszonen, 1945–1949 (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), esp. 259–338.
115 Yamada, Shots in the Dark, 10–18.
116 Gershom Scholem, ‘Zen-Nazism?’ Encounter 16, no. 2 (February 1961): 96.
117 Yamada, Shots in the Dark, 94–8.
118 Arthur Koestler, ‘A Stink of Zen: The Lotus and the Robot (II)’, Encounter 15, no. 4 (October 1960): 16.
119 Ibid., 21.
120 Ibid., 31.
121 D.T. Suzuki, ‘A Reply’, 58.
122 Ibid.
123 David McMahan, ‘Repackaging Zen for the West’, in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, eds. C. Prebish and M. Baumann (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 218.