Adolf Holtzmann Jr.

"If we were ever to succeed in determining the oldest cultural stage of the Indian race . . . and to dissolve away almost by means of a chemical process all influences of . . . Brahmanism . . . we would find conditions before us only a little different from those described by Tacitus as unique to the ancient Germans. But even in its contemporary ruined form the Mahābhārata often delivers us the best commentary on Germania. Here we read of the passion for gambling of the Germans, of how they wagered possessions and property, wife and child, [and] finally even themselves: extremo ac novissimo iactu de liberate contendunt [sic]."

"[A] sign of ancient brutality . . . common to both the Mahābhārata and the Nibelungenliede [is that] the blood of the slain foe is drunk. As he had already sworn at the game, Bhīmasena drinks the blood of Duḥ çāsana who is slain by him and calls out: never did I drink so sweet (this is even better than wine, it is said in the Nibelungenlied). This trait was too horrific to the later redactors; with lamentable sophistry they present the state of affairs as though Bhīmasena never really drank the blood, it reached his lips and not his throat and then he spat it out again."

"Holtzmann Jr. saw himself as taking up arms on behalf of a lost antiquity. As was typical of the Romantic age, he valued the old merely because it was old."

"As was true of Romanticism in general, Holtzmann activated an ideal of the past as an element of a critique of modernity itself. This made his work, for all its restorative tendencies, thoroughly modern. If Lassen was the founder of German Mahābhārata studies, Holtzmann Jr. can, with justification, be called the father of modern Mahābhārata studies."

"Oldenberg was well aware of the Christian, medievalizing aspects of Holtzmann’s work. He accurately diagnosed Holtzmann’s work as having, “full of enthusiasm for the newly discovered idea of Indo-Germanic tradition, seen Germanic tribes in the Indians.”"