Beware the Wily Woman: German Women, Indian Men, and the Security Psyche

Abstract

My paper examines how sexual relationships between male Indians and German women provoked “spy mania” among British intelligence analysts and Indian nationalists alike. I focus on fears surrounding German screenwriter Thea von Harbou—especially her relationship with Ayi Tendulkar and an array of Berlin-based Indian students between the early 1930s and 1945. Von Harbou features in the British security psyche as a spy and a threat—a perceived metamorphosizing figure who traded ideologies, men, regimes, and selves with ease. She was a screenwriter and the ex-wife of renowned expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang, with whom she shared most writing credit throughout the Weimar era. She had a lifelong obsession with India, the subject of many of her films and the inspiration for the design of her Berlin flat. While Lang, who was part-Jewish, fled to Los Angeles in 1933, von Harbou stayed in Berlin, becoming a committed Nazi with channels to the upper echelons of the Reich. It was not her Nazi ties that attracted the attention of British intelligence, but rather her perceived role as driving force behind Indian nationalists’ romantic entanglements with German women. These relationships, they feared, breached the boundaries of the British Empire and undermined British world power. After WWII, several interrogated Indian captives mirrored British concerns about intermingling and von Harbou in particular. Mukund Ray Vyas, a student who had attended von Harbou’s dinner parties, described romances as at best an irritating distraction, and at worst, a sign of nefarious enemy infiltration. Von Harbou, he believed, had seduced Indian men to subjugate them, undercut Indian anticolonialism, and advance the Nazi new order. Von Harbou had herself earlier satirized the relationship between transnational romance and espionage. In her 1928 novel-turned-screenplay Spione (Spies), enemy agents tasked with seducing each other for information instead sincerely fall in love, to the chagrin of their respective spy masters.