WALDSCHMIDT, ERNST i. Life

Ernst Waldschmidt (Figure 1) was the only child of Ernst and Elise Waldschmidt. His parents married in 1896, and his father, a bookbinder and merchant, died shortly before his birth. Waldschmidt spent his childhood and youth in Lünen, a small town in northwest Germany, near Dortmund. In order to obtain his university entry exam (Abitur), Waldschmidt left his hometown in 1913. During the last years of high school (Gymnasium), Waldschmidt became interested in philosophy and started to read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant. In the summer of 1915, immediately after high school graduation in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Waldschmidt moved to Kiel and joined the Navy to serve in World War I. Since in high school Waldschmidt had studied English, instead of Classical Greek, he was eventually employed on reconnaissance missions of the Naval Air Unit.

Figure 1. Ernst Waldschmidt. Anon. and undated black-and-white photograph. (Courtesy of Thomas Oberlies)View full image in a new tab

While in the Navy, Waldschmidt was stationed in Kiel from 1915 until 1917, and he used the opportunity to enroll as student at the Christian-Albrecht Universität, where he met the renowned philosopher and Indologist Paul Deussen (1845-1919). In November 1918, Waldschmidt was honorably discharged with the rank of ensign (Leutnant der Reserve), and, following the advice of Deussen, he immediately returned to Kiel to continue his studies. As a full-time student, Waldschmidt took classes with Deussen and Emil Sieg (1866-1951), one of the pioneers of Tocharian studies. After the sudden death of Deussen and Sieg’s appointment to the chair of Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920) at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen in 1920, Sieg advised Waldschmidt to continue his studies in Berlin, where the Indologist Hermann Lüders (1869-1943) would become Waldschmidt’s mentor.

In 1924, Waldschmidt was awarded a Ph.D. and joined the curatorial staff of the Museum of Ethnography (Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin) as assistant to Albert von Le Coq (1860-1930), who had participated in the German Turfan Expeditions between 1903 and 1914. Waldschmidt was promoted to curator in 1929. Thanks to private funding from the Arthur Baessler Stiftung, the Museum sent Waldschmidt from October 1932 until June 1934 on a research trip to Sri Lanka and India so that he could acquire artifacts complementing the museum’s extant South Asian holdings. Parallel to this curatorial and administrative work, Waldschmidt pursued his philological research. In 1930 he submitted his Habilitationsschrift on a Buddhist text in Central Asia, drawing on Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection, and began to teach as Privatdozent at the University.

Waldschmidt left Berlin in 1936 to succeed his teacher Emil Sieg as the chair of Indian Studies in Göttingen. Already the following year Waldschmidt was elected to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen). As reserve officer with experience in the Naval Air Unit, he was immediately called up to active duty in the Air Force in September 1939, at the beginning of World War II. He worked as staff officer and in intelligence gathering, rising through the ranks to be promoted to major (Major) in 1944. As far as possible, Waldschmidt continued to teach and publish despite the war, but for most of the six years his courses were taught by Sieg. In May 1945, Waldschmidt surrendered to American forces, was taken prisoner of war, and released at the end of July 1945.

In September 1945 Waldschmidt returned to his academic duties of teaching and research at the University of Göttingen. Soon thereafter he resumed his work on the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection in close cooperation with the Institute of Oriental Studies (Institut für Orientforschung) at the German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin). The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 put an end to this cooperation, and subsequently Waldschmidt established Göttingen as the German center for research on the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection. In 1965 he became professor emeritus.

As a student in Berlin, Waldschmidt met Rose-Leonore Orlich (1895-1988) at the university, where the professional textile designer was auditing art history courses. The couple (Figure 2) married in 1927; their only child, Ulrich (1925-45), died in World War II, serving in a submarine unit. Rose Leonore Waldschmidt accompanied her husband on his extended field trip to South Asia between 1932 and 1934, and the couple co-authored several books.

Figure 2. Ernst and Rose Leonore Waldschmidt, Göttingen, 1970s. Undated black-and-white photograph by Fritz Paul. (Courtesy of Lore Sander)View full image in a new tab

Waldschmidt was an active member of the German Oriental Society (DMG: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft; cf. Härtel, p. 5), serving as vice-president (1948-52) and president (1952-59), and a veritable Maecenas of Indian Studies. It was highly gratifying that he lived to see the opening of the new building of the Museum of Indian Art (Museum für Indische Kunst) in West Berlin in 1971, since its establishment in 1963 was largely due to his personal engagement. In 1971 the DMG made him a honorary member. Already during his lifetime Waldschmidt bequeathed his research library and his house to the Indian and Tibetan Studies Institute (Seminar für Indologie und Tibetologie) at the University of Göttingen, whereas in Berlin he set up the Ernst Waldschmidt Foundation (see http://www.stiftung-ernst-waldschmidt.de/), which supports Indian Studies and publishes the book series Monographien zur indischen Archäologie, Kunst und Philologie. Ernst Waldschmidt died in Göttingen on 25 February 1985.

WALDSCHMIDT, ERNST ii. Research

Towards the end of the 19th century, Russian scholars inaugurated the scientific exploration of the Turfan oasis in Chinese Turkestan, on the northern Silk Road. Until the mid 1930s, British, French, Japanese and German expeditions followed in the footsteps of their Russian colleagues. All teams removed from the site thousands of art objects, as well as many more fragments of manuscripts, in order to pursue the study of these artifacts at their home institutions. In 1904, F. W. K. Müller (1863-1930) succeeded in deciphering some of the manuscript fragments in Berlin’s Turfan collection, written in the Manichean script, which is closely related to the Estrangelo script of Syriac. Müller identified these texts as pieces of Manichean literature, a momentous discovery since up to this point scholars had assumed that no Manichean literature had been preserved. In the following, philological research, primarily on manuscripts from the Turfan collection, allowed for the recovery of Manichean dogmatic and liturgical texts. Since the religion had spread from the Near East to China, some Manichean manuscripts, such as the important scroll which Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) had brought from Dunhuang to London, preserve Manichean literature in Chinese (BL Or. 8210/S. 2659). Since Waldschmidt had a masterly knowledge of Chinese, he was asked to prepare with the Iranian studies scholar Wolfgang Lentz (1900-1986) the edition and translation of this Manichean manuscript, known as the Hymns Scroll. In addition, they co-authored two probing contributions to Manichean studies.

But the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection were even more important for Waldschmidtʼs academic career. When Waldschmidt moved to Berlin in 1920, Lüders introduced him to the Turfan collection and to the intricate work with very small manuscript fragments. Lüders himself had started to work with the Turfan collection after 1908, when he had been appointed to the Indian Studies chair in Berlin, where his predecessor Richard Pischel (1849-1908) had published shortly before his premature death the first edition of Sanskrit texts preserved in the Turfan collection (Pischel, 1908; cf. Oldenberg and Pischel, 1883). Lüders continued Pischel’s research on the Turfan collection with the assistance of his wife, Else Lüders (1880-1945), editing not only several Sankrit texts, but also identifying a huge number of greater and smaller fragments. This painstaking work provided the foundation for the later cataloging of all the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection, a project initiated by Waldschmidt in the 1950s and currently under the direction of Jens-Uwe Hartmann at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (cf. Wille).

Lüders supervised Waldschmidt’s edition of the Sanskrit Bhikṣuṇī-Prātimokṣa of the Sarvāstivāda school, based on Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection, since Waldschmidt was well-versed in the basic languages in which Buddhist scriptures circulated in Central and East Asia (see also ). This challenging project produced an edition, which Waldschmidt defended as his doctoral dissertation in 1924 and published in 1926. In 1932, Waldschmidt published his edition of fragments of Buddhist sutras from the Madhyamāgama of the Sarvāstivādins. A careful transcription of the text as preserved in the manuscripts is followed by a critical reconstruction of the literary work on the basis of parallel versions in Pāli, Chinese, and Tibetan whenever available. The juxtaposition of transcription and reconstruction became the model for all later editions of Sanskrit texts from the Turfan collection, such as Waldschmidt’s own masterly editions of the Mahāparnirvāṇa, the Mahāvadāna, and the Catuṣpariṣat sutras. Waldschmidt continued to publish about every year, almost until his death, an edition of a Sanskrit text from the Turfan collection; these articles were republished in two monographs in 1967 and 1989, respectively. Editions of a great number of smaller fragments were made available in the first five parts of the catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection, edited by Waldschmidt with colleagues and published between 1965 and 1985. To further facilitate research on the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Turfan collection, Waldschmidt conceived the project of a Sanskrit dictionary-cum-thesaurus for the Turfan collection, the fourth and final volume of which will be completed within the next few years. Several of Waldschmidtʼs students, in particular Herbert Härtel (1921-2005), Valentina Stache-Rosen (1925-1980), Chandrabhal Tripathi (1929-1996), Dieter Schlingloff (b. 1928), Kusum Mittal, and Lore Sander, have continued the philological research of their teacher.

As a young curator at Berlin’s Museum of Ethnography Waldschmidt developed an abiding interest in the arts and material culture of India and Central Asia. His very first book was the 1925 introduction to the arts in early medieval Central Asia (see GANDHARAN ARTS). Even though his proposed dates for the Buddhist murals in the Turfan oasis, published in 1928 and 1933 in co-authored books on Buddhist art, were not universally accepted, Waldschmidt prepared, together with his wife Rose Leonore Waldschmidt, the revised edition of the seminal study of Buddhist art in India by Albert Grünwedel (1856-1935), the first edition of which had been published in 1893. Traveling widely in South Asia, Waldschmidt became also interested in folk art and handicrafts. After his retirement, he and his wife published books on ragamala miniatures and the arts of Nepal.