Otto Max Helmuth von Glasenapp (8 September 1891 â 25 June 1963) was a German Indologist and religion scholar specialized as a historian of Indian philosophy, who taught as a professor at the University of Königsberg in East Prussia (1928âÂÂ1944) and Tübingen (1946âÂÂ1959). He was a member of several academic and literary institutions in post-war Germany, including the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, and PEN Centre Germany.
Von Glasenapp came from the widely ramified Pomeranian noble family of Glasenapp, belonged to an aristocratic branch of the family founded in 1805, and was the son of Otto Georg Bogislaf von Glasenapp, later Vice President of the Reichsbank, and his wife Lilli, née Jähns. His uncle was , a notable film censor in the German Empire.
From 1910 to 1914, von Glasenapp studied Sanskrit, PÃÂli, and general Religious studies at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, the University of Munich (LMU Munich), the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn. In 1914, he received his doctorate in Bonn under the German Indologist Hermann Jacobi with a dissertation on the doctrine of Karma in Jain philosophy. During the First World War, he worked for the German Foreign Office in its newly founded Intelligence Bureau for the East. Due to his expertise in PunjÃÂbi and Hindë languages, he also became part of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. The aim of the commission was to record the approximately 250 languages spoken by the internees in the German prisoner-of-war camps.
In 1918, von Glasenapp was habilitated in Bonn with a thesis on MadhvÃÂ's system of Vaishnava beliefs and gave his inaugural lecture in May 1918, but was unable to take up teaching due to the turmoil of war and was finally rehabilitated in Berlin in April 1920, where he taught as a private lecturer until 1928. In 1927âÂÂ1928, he travelled to British-ruled India with his cousin Udo von Alvensleben. Von Glasenapp travelled to India for the first time in 1927, and undertook numerous other study and lecture trips to various countries in colonial Africa and the East over the following decades.
In 1928, von Glasenapp succeeded as Associate Professor of Indology at the Albertus University in Königsberg, a position he held until the end of the Second World War. On 6 May 1946, he was given the chair of Indology and Comparative Religious Studies of his former teacher Richard Karl von Garbe in Tübingen, which had become vacant following the dismissal of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. He retired in 1959, but continued to lecture until his death in 1963, primarily in the field of Religious studies, while the field of Indology was taken over by his successor Paul Thieme. Von Glasenapp was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961. He died at the age of 72 as the result of a road accident. His final resting place was in the Bergfriedhof cemetery in Tübingen. His autobiography, Meine Lebensreise, was published posthumously in 1964.
In addition to numerous individual historical-philological studies on works of Sanskrit literature and German translations of Classical Sanskrit poetry, von Glasenapp published a series of comprehensive overviews of the three major Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism) and their respective philosophies, some of which are still regarded as standard works today, have been reprinted numerous times in various languages and have also met with a wide reception in India. Von Glasenapp also analysed the relationship between modern German philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder, as well as ancient Indian philosophical systems in several academic publications.
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