Exile in Europe 91ciples. He was given a reception by the Oriental Institute of Warsaw
and introduced to prominent citizens, including Professor Michalski, a
venerable scholar of Sanskrit. Bose found his visit to Poland inspiring:
it showed how a people “held down for centuries could rise to the oc-
casion.”^13
The Czechoslovak and Polish nationalist movements fascinated Bose.
He felt a deep sense of empathy with the trials and tribulations of these
aspiring nations living under the shadow of great powers. For him,
they presented both negative and positive examples of various strate-
gies for coping and staying in de pen dent in the face of tremendous
pressures from larger neighbors. He studied how they took advantage
of the international war crisis of 1914–1918 to wage an armed struggle
for freedom, and he analyzed the prospects of applying some of their
tactics to the Indian situation as it evolved.
Bose’s first visit to Germany was as disappointing as the ones to
Czechoslovakia and Poland had been encouraging. On July 17, 1933, he
traveled by train from Warsaw to Berlin. Lothar Frank, a young liaison
of fi cer deputed by the Indo- German Society, received him on his ar-
rival at the Friedrichstrasse train station. The German government of-
fered him accommodation at the place where Rabindranath Tagore had
been put up in 1926. Bose declined; he preferred to stay at the Grand
Hotel am Knie in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin at his
own expense.^14 Berlin was a key diasporic space where Indian revolu-
tionaries had gathered since World War I to strengthen the interna-
tional dimension of the anticolonial movement, and Bose was follow-
ing the trail of his predecessors in deciding to travel to this German
metropolis. Now it had become the cap ital of the Third Reich, led by
Adolf Hitler, who would “rather see India under En glish rule than un-
der any other.”^15
It was unrealistic to expect any sympathy for India’s cause among of-
fi cials in Nazi Germany, its rivalry with Britain notwithstanding. Hitler
viewed the British as a superior race, but it was not just his deep- seated
racial prejudices that in flu enced his dim view of Indians. A streak of
brutal rationality in the German Führer led him to believe in the possi-
bility of an imperialist collaboration between Germany and Britain for
mastery over the world.^16 In such circumstances, Bose’s unhappiness in