Nationalismus is a German-language edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential lectures on nationalism, originally delivered and published in English during the First World War. Tagore, the Bengali poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate, offers a searching critique of the nation-state and the spirit of aggressive nationalism he saw spreading across the world.
The text is in German. In these essays, Tagore distinguishes between the nation as a political and economic machine and the deeper life of peoples and cultures, warning against the dehumanising effects of organised national power. Addressing the nationalism of the West, of Japan, and of India, he pleads for cooperation, spiritual values, and human unity over rivalry and domination. The work remains a powerful and prescient meditation on one of the central forces of the modern age.