Walther Eidlitz
Austrian Indologist and historian (1892-1976)
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Biography
Eidlitz was born on 18 August 1892 in Vienna, Austria. He studied civil engineering before serving as a prisoner of war camp guard in the First World War, during which time he also began writing. He published poems from 1913, and released his first book in 1919. He won the Bauernfeld Prize for literature in 1920. After the war, Eidlitz worked as a freelance writer. It was around this time that he converted to Christianity, but was also was drawn to humanistic Zionism and aspects of anthroposophy. He regularly contributed to the newspaper Neue Freie Presse, and occasionally the Jewish magazine Menorah.
In 1923 He married Hella Spira, a former Zionist youth leader. Their son Günther was born in 1933. Through his wife's family, he was introduced to occultist Erna Benthien, who in 1930 led her followers out of the Anthroposophical Society after she had expressed Nazi sympathies. He continued to publish plays and novels until 1932. When the Austrian PEN Center spoke out against intellectual oppression in Nazi Germany in 1933, Eidlitz left the organization. He associated Hitler with the anthroposophical idea of the 'Christ-Impulse'. He documented his travels, including to Sweden, in Reise nach der vier Winde (1935), in which he described a Scandinavian master race. He made successful efforts, including manipulating birth registers, to be recognized as an 'honorary Aryan' despite being of Jewish descent.
In pursuance of his religious and philosophical interest he left his family in Austria in 1938 and traveled to India. He spent time in an internment camp in India during the Second World War, where he was converted to Hinduism by German bhakta Sadananda Das. Eidlitz was initiated into Gaudiya Vaishnavism by Swami Bhakti Hridaya Bon. His mother, Friederike Eidlitz, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and died there in 1944.
He moved to Sweden in 1946. In 1975 he received an honorary doctoral degree from Lund University. He has written about his spiritual journey in his autobiography, but his main work is Kṛṣṇa-Caitanya, The Hidden Treasure of India: His Life and His Teachings. He died in Vaxholm.