Rudolf Otto’s Receipts: Representations of Hinduism in German Special Collections

The Religionskundliche Sammlung in Marburg, Germany houses the university’s special collection of religious objects. It is not a museum, but rather it is a series of galleries where researchers and students can gather to study religious objects during their coursework at Philipps-Universität Marburg, a public university founded in 1527 and the oldest still-operating Protestant university in the world. 

This collection of religious objects was conceived of and founded by German theologian and author of The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (d. 1937). It was formally founded in 1927 and had Otto as its director for only two years at which point Heinrich Frick took over the collection from 1929 until 1952. Otto lived until 1937, and is thought to have continued to be active in and around the collection well after the collection was formally passed to Frick. Due to changes in leadership, local patronage, and promises of permanent space for the collection, the religious objects have been housed and displayed in several different buildings all within walking distance of each other in Marburg. The first exhibit opened in 1929 in what is now the Marburg Art Museum. The collection was then settled into a permanent site at the Marburg Landgrafen castle in the 1950’s until the collection moved down the hill in the early 1980’s to its current dedicated building.

In this presentation, I explore the making of museums and museum-like spaces through the acquisition of objects and the practical mechanics of assembling a collection with the aim of representing Indian Religions to European audiences. Rudolf Otto’s interest in world religions as he conceived of that concept included several different sects of Hinduism and he took two trips to India under the auspices of his role as founding-director of the special collections. While Otto also acquired religious objects in Egypt, Japan, China, etc., I focus on his travels in South India where Otto fortuitously sourced a significant number of his “Hinduism” objects. Otto collected books for his library, he collected objects, and he undoubtedly collected ideas for his museum while meeting with Indian academics, artists, and missionaries.

I begin with a photograph of the Hinduism exhibit in its original design for the Landgrafen castle gallery. I ask which objects were selected for display, from where they were sourced, how they were placed in relation to one another, and what aspects of Hinduism were they selected to emphasize. Finally, I also report and reflect on where the objects are located today. I trace the activity of three objects in particular: a goddess painting, a goddess statue, and a dancing Ganesh bronze.

The goddess statue has remained a significant image and display piece for the collection today. It also has relationships with materials displayed in the Gallery of China and South Asia at The British Museum in London, UK, as well as the ethnographic museum in Leipzig, Germany (GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig). The painting was selected from a group of seeming “duplicates” of the same painting, paintings of different deities depicted in the same style, and presumably paintings acquired at the same time. I ask why Otto acquired three of the same painting and how was the one painting selected for display over the other two? One of the goddess paintings was also nominated for the cover image on the early printed copies of The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917)) and thus has its own history of public-facing circulation outside of India. Finally, the bronze dancing Ganesh, according to the object card in the current gallery case, was purchased by Otto in India in 1927. I use this third object to raise additional questions about other statues in the India collection in Marburg. For example, I will present a letter written to Otto by a person in India who asks Otto to send him a list of the statue heights that he wanted made. We learn from this letter and other surviving receipts that Otto commissioned works from Indian artisans, in this case a stone relief depicting Krishna. In this portion of the presentation, I explore a series of questions related to the bronze and wooden statues in the collection: How many objects in the collection are copies or replicas or made to the specifications of Otto or his missionary friends? Do the custom objects contradict indigenous design principles? Did the objects get made to his specifications? How many of the objects actually arrived in Marburg and survive in the special collection’s storage spaces today?

In addition to the material objects collected, selected, and displayed by Otto, the Religionskundliche Sammlung is also home to a large archive of receipts, shipping programs, work orders, letters, photographs, postcards, posters, newspapers, and reports authored or received by Otto during the formation of the collection. In these archival materials we find explicit intentions and conscious collection practices for use in a Hinduism exhibit aiming to represent world religions for the education of Germans and Europeans more broadly. Receipts even bear witness to the orders made to local German carpenters and glassworkers who built the exhibition displays and framed the sacred objects from India. At the conclusion of my presentation, I use the combination of the original exhibited objects, their object histories, and the archived receipts to interrogate not only the collection as a whole but also the process of collecting and the role that said process plays in the formation of cultural history, the actions of not only building but also displaying heritage, and finally the role of displayed objects in the dissemination of religious education.