Yoga in Der Spiegel: 1948/1949
Part 1
The 1940s: Yoga as mental control
Yoga Dixon, Neue Deutsche Wochenschau, 1951
„A Hamburg reporter hits a four-inch-long nail through the tongue of an Indian called Yoga Dixon. The journalist passed out. The cameraman’s hand and camera trembled. Only one remained calm: Yoga Dixon. In addition to the tongue’s puncture, the fakir also masters the nineteen hours sleep and three to ten minutes underground. Doctors were critical of the prestidigitation. They dragged him into their operating rooms and did the most horrible things to him. The Indian fellow had quantity of nails hammered through his tongue and hands. His trick, he said, is to direct his thoughts into nothingness. He believes that it is natural. He hardly knows hunger. He always gives away half of his bread.“
This fascinating historical curiosity can be read in the 23rd issue of Der Spiegel, in 1948. It is the first mention of yoga in the Spiegel Archive, which began in 1947. The story relates that a reporter from Hamburg hammered a ten centimeters long nail through the tongue of an Indian yogin, who even made yoga a part of his name. Think about it! If this was to happen in Germany today, would social media not make it viral?
Some years after his first feat, Yoga Dixon is seen in action again, this time in the German city of Neuss. He now performs together with his six-years-old son (?), as reported in the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau (55/1951), recorded in a video available on the website of the German Federal Archives (from 0:03:14):
„A six-years-old boy lies on broken glass. A plank is laid over him. A motorcyclist drives over the plank. The boy gets up. People clap. The fakir lies down. A plank is laid over his head. A Volkswagen transporter drives over the plank.“
As far as one can see in the video, the audience who attended the “demonstration of the famous Indian yoga doctrine” consisted exclusively of men. They applauded, obviously entertained, after little Wilko Dixon was seen alive and unwounded.
Yoga Dixon, it appears, was mainly concerned with manipulations of, and control over, the body, achieved through sheer mental strength. The theme of body-control is typical of medieval Haṭhayoga, which so-called fakirs of pre-modern India liked to show off. The Dixons seem to have mastered such yogic techniques which, even after decades of practice, are likely neither possible to, nor desired by, today’s yoga enthusiasts. But, remember, the extreme display took place shortly after the Second World War. Back then, the public taste for Yoga differed starkly from today’s health-conscious yoga discourse.
Seventy years ago, yoga was considered an exotic technique in German media, exhibited by eccentric Indians in turbans. It was admired by Germans with a certain taste for the strange. For yoga to become the mass phenomenon it is today, much needed to change.
Reflecting on this curious story, I repeatedly asked myself how such a spectacle would be presented and perceived today. Certainly, I imagined, it would be shared widely by the sensation-greedy media. As was the case back then, medical examinations would likely be initiated, perhaps revealing amazing facts about Yoga Dixon’s brain and body constitution. But, Dixon’s painful practices would hardly be widely accepted as typical of ‘true yoga’.
Why?
My conclusions are based on personal experience and academic studies. For example, I remember a philosophy lesson taking place during one of the yoga trainings I participated in, where I showed the students an image of a sadhu performing a practice still somewhat common among Indian ascetics (in fact, we should properly call them ‘yogis’). Therein, one arm is held up in the air and never lowered again, until it eventually dies out, after having painfully decayed and rot by lack of blood circulation. This harsh yogic practice is referred to as ūrdhva bāhu. While I was in awe, considering the deep inner conviction needed to strengthen one’s willpower to such an extent, and how the practice unveils the unexplored potential of the human body, my students were horrified by the mere mention of this phenomenon, reoccurring throughout the history and practice of something also to be called ‘yoga’.
In their eyes, ‘yoga’ is definitely something else. It is something ‘internal’, ‘personal’, something ‘beneficial’. Surely, it is not so physically demanding and transgressing as the sadhu’s arm-killing practice. This practice now makes no sense. For, yoga is not assumed anymore to be painful, though it is expected to be transformative, but in a pleasant and healthy way. Our Western view on what Yoga is has changed completely. From an entertaining, oriental circus play to a deeply personal practice.
The second, more detailed article on yoga appearing in the Spiegel Archive, titled “Gymnastik. Am geöhlten Holzpfahl” (Gymnastics. On the oiled wooden pole) helps to illustrate even more, how, since the 1940s, the definition and perception of yoga have changed radically, both in the Indian and in the Euro-American cultural spheres.
The article appears in the 38th issue of 1949, one year after the previous one. This short sequence of consecutive publications indicates a noteworthy interest in the phenomenon of ‘yoga’ on the parts of Germans. Yet, for the time being, they remain mere spectators. How could it be otherwise, given the yoga techniques known and displayed at the time?
In this second Spiegel article, a whole “team of Indian yoga experts” is invited to offer a demonstration by the mayor of Hamburg, attending along with a list of 40 “prominent guests”:
„The team of 28 men plus two women sent to Europe by the government of liberated India, with the orange-white-green national flag in its luggage, had come from India’s sports university Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal, in Amraoti (Central India), to Stockholm, in order to take part in Sweden’s gymnastics “Olympiad-Lingiade”. They made a sensation with their “High Fakir School”.“
Back then, Yoga was regarded as an artistic form of gymnastics. Noteworthy: it was already associated with a vegetarian lifestyle. However, this vegetarianism seems to not have been taken too seriously by the Indians themselves, but quite so by the hosts:
„Germany’s former organizer for the Olympics, Professor Dr. Carl Diem, arranged the Indians‘ tour to Germany by telegraph. The team manager, Des Pande, wired back something about vegetarian food. However, after their first meal on German soil, consisting of scraped turnips, there was a slight Indian discomfort. They had not meant it that literally. Hamburg’s food authority had approved rice. [Hence,] curry was constantly served, in addition to fruit juice and water. After two days [of the unexpected diet], the Indians [gladly] switched to Munich beer, mutton, and omelets.“
Interestingly, along with its rather limited understanding of ‘vegetarianism’, the article aligns various assumptions about yoga which remain in vogue today. For example, yoga is said to be a thousand years old monastic technique of body control. It is portrayed as concerned with ‘health’ and ‘meditation on a deity’. The article even says: “Through the regulation of breathing, the temporary oneness with the universe, the “Atman”, shall be made possible already in this world.”
Next to such common motives the article also mentions that the yogis brought with them “sabers, spears, daggers and battle axes”, to be used in their demonstrations. To what extent these weapons served the exercises mentioned by the reporter, through which, as he noted, “the lymph gland and the liver would be kept in good function”, remains unclear, however interesting. In any case, the group of Indians enthused the 2000 spectators with their gymnastic performances on the oiled wooden pole.
Let’s observe that themes such as ‘self-discovery’, or sentences like ‘listen to your body’ or ‘respect your limits’, along with other famous emotional motives typical of our 21st century yoga, are completely absent in the report. The same is true for the articles on Yoga Dixon’s practices. Conclusion: the yoga of the 1940s, as it appears in the Spiegel, is not a practice intended for ordinary citizens. It is extreme, foreign, Oriental…
What was yoga, back then? Can those ones who were willfully run over by trucks, who wandered around the world for mere entertainment purposes, who amused themselves with battle axes and who so easily traded vegetarian food for beer and meat be called ‘yogis’? Was this real yoga?
In my opinion, this was indeed yoga.
History shows how yoga was and remains a generic name for very diverse practices.
Karl Baier (1998) and others have shown how Haṭhayoga in the West, from the late 19th century onwards, was commonly equated with Fakirism. It remained so for quite a while. For example, such a view is prominent in Richard Schmidt’s book “Fakire und Fakirtum im alten und neuen Indien” (1908), in which he translated the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā. This late Haṭhayoga text, from the 18thcentury, is still presented today as one of the four fundamental works of Haṭhayoga, along with the Haṭhapradīpikā, Gorakṣaśataka and Śivasamhitā.
Let’s be honest. The fact that the association of Haṭhayoga with Fakirism or with gymnastics was so common is reasonable. As the Spiegel articles show, Indians themselves spread this image in the West, at least until the late 1940s. Moreover, the above-mentioned Haṭhayoga texts frequently advocate the practice of bodily mortifications.
Yet, it should be noted that, already in the period of the 2nd World War, Haṭhayoga was slowly being promoted in Germany as a healthy relaxation body-technique, if only through the little-known work of Boris Sacharow, a student Swāmi Śivānandas. Sacharow initially disseminated his ‘modern’ yoga practices in secret, through snail-mail, before he published them in book format in the 1950s.
Nonetheless, before the public image of yoga mutated into a widely consumed healthy movements and relaxation technique, a few decades needed to pass by.
Book cover by TV star and Germany's first well-known female yoga teacher Kareen Zebroff, 1976
Adaptation into English: Many thanks to Dr. Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette for the review!