A Chaste Fire: Johannes Hohlenberg – Life and Times

In 1906, Johannes Hohlenberg (1881-1960) left Copenhagen for Paris to

be a professional painter and artist. He had apprenticed with Joakim
Skovgaard (1856-1933) and Kristian Zahrtmann(1843-1917) from whom
he had shared a passion for art as a spiritual expression of human
individuality. This passion would remain for the rest of his life even as
he chose to be a philosopher, author, political economist, visionary,
yoga practioner, and founding leader of Anthroposophy sections in
Scandinavia.

In 1915, this passion for spiritual self-development led him on an

extraordinary journey to India to meet with Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950),
a philosopher, mystic, and nationalist who had recently exiled himself
in French Pondicherry from colonial British rule in India. In these
meetings, Hohlenberg found a new way of understanding spirituality
not as an ‘otherworldly’ matter but as a life-impulse towards freedom
and creative self-expression of human individuality. Furthermore, in
conversations with Sri Aurobindo, he grasped principles of yoga that
were material as well as subtle, practical, and rooted profoundly in the
natural world and in social interrelationships. He learned that yoga was
really anchored in the same forces (‘Kraft”) that worked in plants and
trees and allowed each form of life to reach its consummate fullness of
individuality without diminishing any other form but reciprocally.

Returning to Denmark in 1916, he began lecturing on yoga and wrote a

book ‘Yoga Dens Forhold Til Europa’ which was circulated widely across
Europe. In this book, he laid out some basic principles as he had
understood them for cooperation and peace across a Europe that was
in the grip of the First World War. At the same time, the book was also
intended as a message for individuals genuinely seeking spiritual self-
development.

In an ironic twist, the newly discovered passion for India and yoga went
deeper than the surface. His great grandfather was Johannes Sobotker
Hohlenberg (1795-1833), governor of Serampore from 1827 to his
death in India in 1933.

In the following years, Hohlenberg became a prolific writer, authoring a

definitive biography of Soren Kierkegaard and Nostradamus as well as
books on political economy and anthroposophy. He remained
passionately opposed to Nazi occupation of Norway and Denmark
during the years of World War II and published a series of articles in
‘Vidar’ for which he was forced to leave the Anthroposophical Society
of Norway and return to Denmark where he launched ‘Ojeblikket’, a
journal on the arts and literature as well as economics.

A constant theme that remained all through his life, however, was his
passion for yoga and Indian systems of philosophy – especially Sri
Aurobindo. Even as early as 1922, when he was in Oslo lecturing on the
‘Eddas’, he visited Sri Ananda, an Indian yogi, and together they
translated the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ for Scandinavian readers. He continued
to write on yoga in ‘Ojeblikket’ at the end of his life. Indeed, his last
publications were three essays on the subject of ‘free will’ by Sri
Aurobindo. In these essays, we see Hohlenberg attempting to grasp the
paradox of individual liberty and ‘destiny’ or a larger, universal, and
inscrutable body of forces that unite and harmonize discrete patterns
of lives to a common end.
Hohlenberg died on the 10th of May, 1960 in Copenhagen of a paralytic
stroke. His last interview, a few days before, was with a violinist who
performed for him and remembered the flash of fire in Hohlenberg’s
eyes.