HEINRICH ZIMMER
To
Heinrich Zimmer
The Great Indian Scholar
Returned with Thanks
445
The acknowledgment had not appeared in the German edition, pub–
lished in Stockholm in 1940. It was a welcoming hand extended across
the continent, from Hollywood, where Mann had built his American
home, to the Port of New York, where Zimmer with his wife Chris–
tiane-daughter of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet-author
of
Der Rosenkavalier-and
three small sons had just landed, self-exiled
like Mann himself. In mid-career, Zimmer had been dismissed in 1938,
because of his anti-Nazi attitude, from the chair of Indic philology at
the University of Heidelberg. He had paused at Balliol College, Oxford,
1939-40, to lecture on Oriental philosophy. Arriving in America and
settling with his family in New Rochelle, in the usual American frame
house (to which he added, presently, a fox terrier-type mongrel puppy,
rescued from the dog pound for a dollar, whom he coddled as one of
the minor manifestations of Devi, the goddess mother of the world), h e
began composing, with his phonograph booming Wagner, those extra–
ordinary lectures on Indian art, mythology, and metaphysics which he
continued delivering until the very week of his death from pneumonia,
March 20, 1943.
The first of his posthumous volumes appeared the following year,
edited by the eminent psychologist, C. G. Jung: "The Way to the
Self,"
Der Weg zum Selbst
(Zurich, 1944). "Zimmer," wrote Dr. Jung
in his introduction, "not only through his rich knowledge of his sub–
ject but also and above all through his inspired grasp of the meaning
of Indian mythology, has in our work together made possible for me
invaluable insights into the Oriental soul. Unfortunately the saying con–
cerning the early death of those beloved of the gods has been fulfilled
in him, however, and we are left to mourn a spirit who, having tran–
scended the limitations of specialization and addressed himself to hu–
manity, offered the beatifying gift of 'immortal fruit.' "
Zimmer's chief endowment was a genius for language, in the service
of extraordinary insight: an ability not only to translate with deceptive
ease the profoundest concepts of the Orient, but also to capture in a
word the secret of a personality, the quality of a work of art, or the
feeling of a landscape. And this almost incredible competence was no–
tably manifest in his continuously facile reading of symbols, whether
of the Orient, of primitive iconographies, of dream, or of the Western
arts. Because of his quick surety, furthermore, neither his speech nor
