Kris Manjapra has written an important book. Age of Entanglement not only provides a lively narrative of German and Indian “entanglements” across nearly two centuries, but also offers an innovative model for writing transnational cultural and intellectual history. Manjapra is not the first scholar to observe, as the dust jacket suggests, that “German-Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan.” Much recent historiography has emphasized the anti-Western, anti-democratic, even racialist assumptions underlying German and Indian cultural encounters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But by placing these diverse transcultural exchanges in the context of a post-Enlightenment “reenchantment” of the world, Manjapra has produced an extraordinarily rich, conceptually original contribution to the burgeoning field of German-Asian studies.

The book is divided into two parts. The first four chapters, collected under the heading “Stages of Entanglement,” provide the cultural and intellectual framework for the second part, “Fields of Encounter.” The three stages of entanglement include a colonial (for India) and precolonial (for the Germans) nineteenth-century phase, when German intellectuals and experts “provided foundational support for the establishment of British colonial institutions”; a middle phase from 1880 to 1945, when Germans and Indians were most “entangled” in their mutual project to “destroy the nineteenth-century Anglocentric world” (5); and a final stage of “delinking” between German and Indian cultural and intellectual life after 1945. Following recent trends in postcolonial studies, Manjapra has clearly moved beyond Saidian and Foucauldian approaches to East-West encounters that highlight Western orientalism and imperialism. After all, as the author illustrates throughout Part 1, much of what united Germany and India was an emerging “post-Enlightenment” antipathy toward a British-dominated, materialist, liberal imperialist world order.

Having explained how these intellectual entanglements mirrored the “breakdown of the cohesive force uniting the ideals of ‘Europe’ and ‘Empire,’” Part 2 examines the ways in which “this wreckage and rearrangement of geopolitics tracked transformations in the history of thought and the history of transnational encounter” (111). Chapter 5, “The Physical Cosmos,” follows the transition from an interwar emphasis on “scientific internationalism,” exemplified by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, toward a more nationally oriented physics in the 1930s, particularly in India, where scientific authority, exercised in concert with German research universities, could be employed to challenge British imperial constraints. The next two chapters, “International Economies” and “Marxist Totality,” explain how Germans and Indians cooperated in working through the pressing socioeconomic problems of the twentieth century. Whether it was Indian intellectuals embracing Werner Sombart's “capitalist anti-liberalism” (160) or German Socialists invoking India's sociopolitical subjugation in developing an anticolonial “Marxist Orientalism” (176), the interwar convergence in social and economic theory suggested more than superficial entanglements.

Despite the inherently “internationalist” nature of these encounters, German and Indian thinkers developed mutually reinforcing nationalist perspectives on economic and political matters. Manjapra shows in Chapter 8, “Geocultural Wholes,” how “post-Enlightenment scholarship revealed maps of supposedly resilient flows of culture, history, and even race,” producing “inherently interdisciplinary” projects in “cultural geography” that simultaneously “defined new territorial boundaries and made new claims of difference” (191). In short, German and Indian entanglements in the realm of political geography and cultural history generated essentialist discourses of race and space that informed Nazism—even as they called into question in postcolonial fashion “the normative nineteenth-century world map centered around the North Atlantic” (191).

Nowhere was the “reenchantment” (292) that characterized these encounters stronger than with respect to psychology and art, the subjects of Chapters 9 and 10. Manjapra is careful to highlight here the prevalence of both cosmopolitan and racialist, natural scientific, as well as mystical elements within these entanglements, reflecting the full range of multiple modernities we have come to associate with Germany in the interwar period. For example, Sigmund Freud worked closely with Indian psychoanalysts such as Girindrasekhar Bose in drawing on a “transnational community” (219) of psychologists for methodological innovation. Still, Freud was more skeptical than his colleague Carl Jung “of both the escapism and the exoticism of Indic Orientalism” and the “degree to which Orientalist fascination was taken up by the radical right, especially in terms of the vindication of an ancient Aryan identity to supersede the Semitic” (219).

Manjapra finds a similar mix of cinematic innovation and Nazi exploitation in the artistic entanglements of the 1920s and 1930s. During the Weimar Republic, both Indian and German filmmakers began appealing to the German market for “Indic Orientalism.” Whereas Bombay, like Hollywood, turned to lighter themes of romance and entertainment in the 1930s, the Third Reich doubled down on the quasi-religious fetishization of the Himalayas and other orientalist tropes.

As Manjapra observes in the final chapter, the particular geopolitical context that made these mutual entanglements possible dissipated in the wake of the post-1945 “New Order.” In a Cold War context where both Germanies invoked Eurocentric theories of scientific positivism, economic development, and modernization, their quasi-mystical, illiberal, anti-Western connections to India dissipated. If Konrad Adenauer's West Germany was particularly allergic to “positive identification with the Indic Orient” (286), such feelings did survive for a time in East Germany––at least insofar as they demonstrated Soviet solidarity with the peoples of the East (not dissimilar from the “Marxist Orientalism” of the interwar period). The last vestiges of German-Indian entanglement nonetheless perished with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Studying German-Indian “patterns of entanglement” between 1880 and 1945 is crucial, Manjapra concludes, because they remind us “of the way attempts to overcome the monster of one hegemony can all too often give birth to new monstrosities” (292). It is here that the author comes closest to restoring a new kind of continuity to German history—namely, in suggesting that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century entanglements with India helped foment darker illiberal tendencies that paved the way for fascism. For historians of Central Europe, this conclusion will be provocative––all the more so because of the impressive research, extraordinary scope, and innovative scholarship upon which it is based.