Article

From romanticism to colonial pragmatics: Malay language and literature studies in Germany 1800‒1945

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From romanticism to colonial pragmatics: Malay language and literature studies in Germany 1800‒1945

Abstract

This article deals with the various approaches of German-speaking scholars towards Malay language and literature studies from c.1800 until the end of World War II. Early German scholars in the romantic age tended to impose their view of European peoples and cultures on the native populations of the Malay Archipelago. Thus, romantic notions of ‘folksongs’ or ‘original poetry’ strongly dominated the writings of this time, the majority of these authors being armchair scholars. In the late nineteenth century the first university chairs of East Asian studies were established; the most important were held by Georg Conon von der Gabelentz in Leipzig (East Asian Studies) and Adolf Bastian (Social Anthropology) in Berlin. In 1919 Otto Dempwolff became professor of ‘Indonesian and South Seas Languages’ at the University of Hamburg. Both Bastian and Dempwolff had travelled widely and had worked in Asia and elsewhere. Thus their data were based on personal observations and are still important works in the field of Malay studies. Finally, from the 1890s up to the 1930s a large number of Malay language books were published chiefly by and for German planters in Sumatra and Java. These books deliver not only fascinating insights into day-to-day conversation with plantation workers, but also social relations between planters and their workforce.

Summary

Holger Warnk traces the evolution of German engagement with Malay language and literature from the early nineteenth century through the end of World War II, identifying a clear trajectory from romantic idealism to colonial pragmatism. The early phase, dominated by armchair scholars such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Bopp, and Adolf Bastian, was shaped by Herder’s philosophy of the Volksgeist—the idea that a people’s authentic spirit could be excavated from its vernacular poetry and oral traditions. Chamisso’s 1822 article on the pantun stands as the first academic study of Malay literature in German, while Humboldt’s monumental three-volume study of Old Javanese (1836–39) established a hierarchical framework in which Malay was deemed grammatically “imperfect” and “poor” relative to the Sanskrit-inflected classical languages of Java (pp. 4–8). Bastian, who visited the Malay Archipelago four times between 1851 and 1903, carried these romantic notions into the empirical domain through his theory of the Elementargedanke (elementary idea), producing a five-volume ethnographic study of Indonesia that, despite its lack of systematic rigour, remains a valuable source for comparative vocabulary and oral traditions (pp. 8–9).

The institutionalization of Malay studies at German universities in the twentieth century marked a decisive shift toward empirical linguistics. Georg Conon von der Gabelentz taught Malay at Leipzig from the 1880s, Emil Luning delivered courses in Frankfurt between 1913 and 1916 drawing on his twenty years of missionary work in the Malay Peninsula, and Otto Dempwolff established the first dedicated chair of Indonesian and South Seas Languages at Hamburg in 1919. Dempwolff’s posthumously published Malay grammar (1941) and his three-volume comparative phonology of Austronesian vocabulary (1934–38) represent the apex of German academic Malay studies, both heavily dependent on the linguistic expertise of native speakers such as Oesman Idris, the first Malay speaker to teach at a German university (pp. 10–16).

The third and most socially revealing strand consists of the numerous practical Malay language booklets published between the 1890s and 1930s by German planters and traders working in Sumatra, Java, and German New Guinea. These texts—by authors such as Richard Hindorf, Heinrich Huttenbach, Max Bucksath, and August Seidel—document a pidgin Malay used on plantations and expose the harsh social relations between European supervisors and their Asian workforce. Warnk argues that these “amateur” publications, though dismissed by university scholars as linguistically unsound, provide irreplaceable evidence for the sociolinguistic history of pidgin Malay and the everyday realities of colonial plantation labour (pp. 16–23).

Key Findings

  • Chamisso’s 1822 article “Über malayische Volkslieder” is identified as the first academic study of Malay literature in German, characterizing the pantun as “real folk songs” (wirkliche Volkslieder) and “original poetry” (ursprüngliche Poesie) (pp. 4–5).
  • The University of Leipzig established Germany’s first chair of East Asian Studies in 1878 under Gabelentz; the University of Hamburg created the first dedicated chair of Indonesian and South Seas Languages in 1919 under Dempwolff, with the first Malay language course taught in 1920 (pp. 10–11).
  • By 1892, more than 2,700 workers from Indonesia and Malaysia were living in German New Guinea, with a further 950 arriving in 1893; epidemics of influenza (1892) and smallpox (1893) led Dutch and British authorities to halt further immigration (p. 21).
  • Hindorf’s Leitfaden zur Erlernung der Malayischen Umgangssprache (1890) saw four subsequent editions (1898, 1904, 1913, 1927) and documents a pidgin Malay with strong Javanese and Jakarta elements spoken on plantations in German New Guinea; several Malay loanwords (klambu, tiang, kasang, mandur, binatang) entered Tok Pisin through this contact (pp. 20–22).
  • Dempwolff recorded Malay oral literature (including Pelanduk Jenaka stories and historical legends) from a Johore-born sailor, Muhamed bin Hadji Abdurahim, in a prisoner-of-war camp at Ruhleben in April 1917; the surviving transcripts show a form of spoken Johor Malay (pp. 13–14).
  • Oesman Idris, a Minangkabau from Payakumbuh, arrived at the University of Hamburg in 1922 and served as Dempwolff’s primary informant for both his Malay grammar and his comparative Austronesian phonology; he also co-produced the first academic editions of Minangkabau oral texts in German (pp. 14–15).

Conclusion

Warnk’s definitive takeaway is that German Malay studies before 1945 cannot be understood as a single coherent tradition but as a layered field in which romantic philosophical assumptions about the “people’s soul” persisted well into the university era, while simultaneously a parallel tradition of practical, empirically grounded language documentation emerged from the colonial plantation world. The “amateur” planter booklets, though linguistically crude by academic standards, deliver what university scholarship could not: a realistic picture of spoken Malay variants and the social power dynamics of colonial labour, making them indispensable for both pidgin linguistics and the social history of the Malay Archipelago (pp. 23–24).

Context

  • The study draws on archival materials from the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (Dempwolff Nachlass, folders IX and LVII) and the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt (Ms.Ff.L.H.Schutz), as well as extensive engagement with published primary sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 24).
  • The article contributes to the historiography of German Oriental studies by foregrounding the role of native Malay-speaking collaborators (Oesman Idris, M. Rasjid Manggis, Muhamed bin Hadji Abdurahim) whose contributions have been largely invisible in the standard narrative, and by linking German romantic philology to the broader European colonial project of cultural classification (pp. 14–15, 24).

References