Heinrich Zimmer

This article is about the Indologist (1890-1943). For the Celticist and Indologist (1851-1910), see Heinrich Zimmer (Celticist).

Heinrich Zimmer
Heinrich Zimmer (1933)
Born	1890
Died	1943 (age 53)
Occupation	Academic, Indologist, Historian of South Asian art

Heinrich Robert Zimmer (1890–1943) was an Indologist and historian of South Asian art, most known for his works, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization and Philosophies of India. He was the most important German scholar in Indian Philology after Max Müller (1823-1900). In 2010, a “Heinrich Zimmer Chair for Indian Philosophy and Intellectual History” was inaugurated at Heidelberg University.

Early life and education

He was born in Greifswald, Germany. Zimmer began his career studying Sanskrit and linguistics at the University of Berlin where he graduated in 1913.

Career

Between 1920-24 he lectured at the University of Greifswald, moving to Heidelberg University to fill the Chair of Indian Philology (1924-1938).

In 1938 he was dismissed by the Nazis, and he emigrated to England where between 1939-40 he taught at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1940 he moved to New Rochelle, New York where he eventually accepted a Visiting Lecturer position in Philosophy at Columbia University. Here, Joseph Campbell, who was then working on his first book, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) attended his lectures, the two men became good friends.

Zimmer died there, of pneumonia, the following year (1943). After his death, Campbell was given the task of editing and posthumously publishing Zimmer's papers, to which he did over the next 12 years to turning Zimmer’s lecture notes into four books, in the Bollingen Series: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Philosophies of India, The Art of Indian Asia, and The King and the Corpse, which in turn became Zimmer's lasting legacy.

Work

Zimmer's method was to examine religious images using their sacred significance as a key to their psychic transformation. His use of (Indian) philosophy and religious history to interpret art was at odds with traditional scholarship. His vast knowledge of Hindu mythology and philosophy (particularly Puranic and Tantric works) gave him insights into the art, insights that were appreciated by Joseph Campbell among others. Campbell edited many of Zimmer's writings after his death. The psychiatrist Carl Jung also developed a long-standing relationship with Zimmer, and incidentally edited a volume of Zimmer's entitled Der Weg zum Selbst (The Way to the Self), the two men first met in 1932, after which Zimmer, along with Richard Wilhelm, became one of the few male friends of Jung.

Zimmer is credited by many for the popularizing of South Asian art in the West, as he was the first to identify the radical difference between Western classical and Indian art.

Personal life

He married in 1929 Christiane, daughter of Austrian novelist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Works

• Kunstform und Yoga im Indischen Kultbild (Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India [1926];Translated and edited by Gerald Chapple, James B. Lawson and J. Michael McKnight [1984])
• Maya: Der Indische Mythos. (1936)
• Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Edited by Joseph Campbell. (1946)
• Hindu Medicine.Edited by Ludwig Edelstein.(1948)
• The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil. Edited by Joseph Campbell. (1948)
• Philosophies of India. Edited by Joseph Campbell. (1953). ISBN 0691017581.
• The Art of Indian Asia, its Mythology and Transformations. Completed and edited by Joseph Campbell. (1955)
• Heinrich Zimmer : Coming Into His Own. Edited by Margaret H Case. (1994)

Quotes

“On all levels there are rituals capable of transforming man. But it is everywhere the tradition and trend to rank the spiritual, sublime practices above the sensual and magical ones, since the general course of cultural development has favored the spiritual element over the material and feminine. This development has taken place under the predominance of the male principle. But with the cult of the Great Goddess in late Hinduism, the archaic heritage of sensual earth-bound rites rises once again overwhelmingly to the zenith.” (pp. 91-92 in Zimmer, Heinrich. The Indian World Mother [1938] from The Mystic Vision: Papers from The Eranos Yearbooks, Bollingen Series XXX, 6. Princeton University Press, 1968, Edited by Joseph Campbell and translated by Ralph Manheim.)

• "We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason, why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy and yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom." - Eastern Religious Thought - Hinduism, Edited by Allie M. Frazie. vol 1. p 17.
• "The radio station WOB, Wisdom of the Buddha, is broadcasting all the time: all we need is a receiving set."

• "The only man who gives me a genuine inferiority complex is Ananda K. Coomaraswamy."

Further reading

• Case, Margaret H. (1994). Heinrich Zimmer: coming into his own. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691033374. 

References

• Duke University Library

External links

• Heinrich Zimmer Profile