A Complete Record of the Document HinduReich Credited to George Razinsky, 1944 Nicholas of Hitchin, 2012
Privately published in 2012 by Courage Les Garçons © Nicholas of Hitchin 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
(i) Introduction (ii) HinduReich (iii) Discovery (iv) Condition and Content (v) Analysis, First Part (vi) Analysis, Second Part (vii) Acknowledgments (viii) Photographic Record (ix) Appendix I (x) Appendix II
(i) Introduction HinduReich is a found book, a folio of 47 loose photographic plates (the remainder of a probable original count of 50), each showing a major figure from the last 1000 years and each with a bindi imposed on their forehead. The book has no provenance and no record of either author or publisher exists.
(ii) HinduReich Why record this document, and why now? The two questions are really the same. When I found the book in Buenos Aires and subsequently learned of its apparent uniqueness and absence of formal record, I felt that its loss would be a loss to the little histories of Europe: the histories of individuals, the histories that inspire a more nuanced and enduring understanding of our world, and that salt the things we think we know In this instance ‘salt’ may be the wrong metaphor altogether. HinduReich doesn’t so much augment or amplify our reading of the history of Nazi Germany as confound it. To the Führer himself, had he been paying attention, it may have been repellent, a cockroach in his Kartoffelsuppe. Such exceptions to a dominant historical record have an energy of their own. To paraphrase Clive James in his essential book Cultural Amnesia, what is history if not a record of how things might have been different? Razinsky’s HinduReich illustrates this idea with a wily elegance, and as such deserves this record of its own.
(iii) Discovery Libreria Huemul is an attractive bookshop. Located on Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, rare and fine texts line the walls as part of a catalogue of over 120,000 volumes. Buenos Aires has many such bookshops but