Yoga in Germany

Boris Sacharow [de] founded Germany's first school of yoga in Berlin in 1921; it was reestablished in 1946, teaching the Rishikesh Reihe sequence of asanas.

Sacharow had founded Germany's first school of yoga in Berlin in 1921; it was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and reestablished in 1946.

[6] The anthropologist Sarah Strauss noted that the sequence was still inspiring German students of yoga to travel to Rishikesh in the 1990s.

Strauss adds that yoga was introduced to Germany almost entirely through written translations, rather than through the visits by charismatic teachers seen in the English-speaking world.

Strauss comments that the absence of personal contact with a guru allowed for a wide variety of interpretations, not least the old search for the "linguistic and biological roots of 'Aryan' northern Europe".

[6] The Buddhist Hans-Ulrich Rieker founded the European branch of the Arya Maitreya Mandala in 1952,[7] and translated the Hatha Yoga Pradipika into German in 1957.

[8] The Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade's 1954 book Le Yoga: Immortalité et Liberté[9] appeared in a "popular"[10] German translation in 1960.