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his writings ever suffered from that pedantic strain which passes gen–
erally for the principal idiosyncrasy and guarantee of learning. "Zim–
mer's work is stimulating," wrote the great Indian philosopher, Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy, in a memorial read before the New York Oriental
Club, "precisely because he is always alive to the significance of
his
material; it is never for him a matter of mere curiosity or 'pure' schol–
arship, but a source of wisdom as pertinent now as it was in the 'my–
thopoetic' past." Zimmer's power to scoop "from
that
abundance,
this
abundance" made him one of the most challenging interpreters to the
modern world of humanity's heritage from the teachers of old.
His power, which impressed immediately everyone who met
him,
was not a mere talent. For years, he had submitted to the disciplines
of a mighty generation of scholars. His father, Heinrich Zimmer
(b. 1851), professor of philology at the University of Greifswald and
later the first full professor of Celtic philology in the world, in a
chair especially established for him at the University of Berlin, died
in the summer of 1910, but the most distinguished philologists in the
universities were proud to teach his son, and the young man acquired
prodigious learning. He must have met in boyhood, at the dinner
table, practically every important scholar in Europe. Besides studying
the Gaelic, Gothic, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Pali, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, English, modern Persian, Pahlavi, and Zend, that were taken
for granted on the paternal hearth, he applied his avid mind to Arabic.
And in 1913 he received his Ph.D in Sanskrit and Comparative Phil–
ology,
magna cum laude.
From 1913 to 1918, however, he was in the army : one year of com–
pulsory peacetime service and four years of the First World War: "the
initiation," as he once described it, "of Life (including Death) playing
its own symphony with the fullest possible orchestration." This broke
him out of the mold of the brilliant student following the usual
academic tasks indicated by the pundits. "After those generals," he once
said with a laugh, "the professors couldn't fool us." Demobilized from
the defeated German army at the age of twenty-eight, he said to him–
self, "I do not criticize anybody or anything. But henceforth I shall de–
cide what I shall take seriously, if anything at all. I am a
revenant,
a
ghostly
revenant .
It is mere irony that I have come back. Many much
better did not. I offered my life for the ideals and purposes of the .
community, and did it naively, willingly. With this life I brought back
I am free to do what I decide to do-free as a guest from the other
world. They have no claim on me any more." Like his compatriot Hugo
Ball, who in the winter of 1916 had founded Dada in protest against
