Philosophy, Art & Culture
Philosophy, literature, art and music, and the long history of scholarly exchange between India and Germany.
Background
Since 1823
The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin holds about 10,000 South Asian manuscripts, more than 1,500 of them on palm leaf. Its first acquisitions were two Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts bought by Alexander von Humboldt in Paris in 1823.
1825–1827
Wilhelm von Humboldt read two papers on the Bhagavad Gītā to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, on 30 June 1825 and 15 June 1826. Hegel answered in a long two-part review, published in 1827.
11–17 July 1930
Rabindranath Tagore exhibited his paintings in Berlin and visited Albert Einstein at Caputh on 14 July.
Today
The Spitzer manuscript, palm-leaf fragments found on the Silk Road, is the oldest known philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit. It contains the oldest surviving list of the books of the Mahābhārata. Berlin’s Turfan collection of Silk Road manuscripts, about 40,000 fragments, is digitised and online.
Today
There are six Goethe-Institutes (Max Mueller Bhavan) in India. The Tagore Centre in Berlin, run by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, opened in 1994.
“The Gītā seems to me, as much as a Platonic dialogue or a book of Aristotle, a metaphysical essay – if one could call a poem that.”
German original: „die Gítá scheint mir ebenso wohl, wie ein Platonisches Gespräch oder ein Buch des Aristoteles, ein metaphysischer Aufsatz, wenn man ein Gedicht so nennen könnte“. Translation: Sangam Europa.
In preparation for issue one
The Spitzer manuscript in Berlin
Feature
German philosophy and Indian thought
Essay
Sources
- Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: South Asian manuscripts
- H. Herring (ed. and tr.), Hegel on the Episode of the Mahābhārata known by the name Bhagavad-Gītā by Wilhelm von Humboldt (ICPR)
- K. Rosenkranz, Life of Hegel: the late critical essays
- Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin: Tagore in Berlin, 1930
- Austrian Academy of Sciences Press: E. Franco, The Spitzer Manuscript (2004)
- BBAW: Digital Turfan Archive
- Goethe-Institut India: locations
- ICCR: Tagore Centre Berlin
- Wilhelm von Humboldt to A. W. Schlegel, 18 Sep 1826 (Digital edition of A. W. Schlegel’s correspondence)
Facts and figures checked 17 October 2026.