The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century

1116 Pages·2011·4.28 MB·English

by  Peter Watson

The German Genius

Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific
Revolution, and the Twentieth Century
Peter Watson
Contents

Author’s Note
Introduction: Blinded by the Light: Hitler, the Holocaust, and “the Past That
Will Not Pass Away”

Part One

The Great Turn in German Life

1. Germanness Emerging
2. Bildung and the Inborn Drive toward Perfection

Part Two

A Third Renaissance, between Doubt and Darwin

3. Winckelmann, Wolf, and Lessing: the Third Greek Revival and the
Origins of Modern Scholarship
4. The Supreme Products of the Age of Paper
5. New Light on the Structure of the Mind
6. The High Renaissance in Music: The Symphony as Philosophy
7. Cosmos, Cuneiform, Clausewitz
8. The Mother Tongue, the Inner Voice, and the Romantic Song
9. The Brandenburg Gate, the Iron Cross, and the German Raphaels

Part Three

The Rise of the Educated Middle Class: the Engines and Engineers of Modern
Prosperity

10. Humboldt’s Gift: The Invention of Research and the Prussian
(Protestant) Concept of Learning
11. The Evolution of Alienation
12. German Historicism: “A Unique Event in the History of Ideas”
13. The Heroic Age of Biology
14. Out from “The Wretchedness of German Backwardness”
15. “German Fever” in France, Britain, and the United States
16. Wagner’s Other Ring—Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
17. Physics Becomes King: Helmholtz, Clausius, Boltzmann, Riemann
18. The Rise of the Laboratory: Siemens, Hofmann, Bayer, Zeiss
19. Masters of Metal: Krupp, Benz, Diesel, Rathenau
20. The Dynamics of Disease: Virchow, Koch, Mendel, Freud

Part Four

The Miseries and Miracles of Modernity
21. The Abuses of History
22. The Pathologies of Nationalism
23. Money, the Masses, the Metropolis: The “First Coherent School of
Sociology”
24. Dissonance and the Most-Discussed Man in Music
25. The Discovery of Radio, Relativity, and the Quantum
26. Sensibility and Sensuality in Vienna
27. Munich/Schwabing: Germany’s “Montmartre”
28. Berlin Busybody
29. The Great War between Heroes and Traders
30. Prayers for a Fatherless Child: The Culture of the Defeated
31. Weimar: “Unprecedented Mental Alertness”
32. Weimar: The Golden Age of Twentieth-Century Physics, Philosophy,
and History
33. Weimar: “A Problem in Need of a Solution”

Part Five

Songs of the Reich: Hitler and the “Spiritualization of the Struggle”

34. Nazi Aesthetics: The “Brown Shift”
35. Scholarship in the Third Reich: “No Such Thing as Objectivity”
36. The Twilight of the Theologians
37. The Fruits, Failures, and Infamy of German Wartime Science
38. Exile, and the Road into the Open

Part Six

Beyond Hitler: Continuity of the German Tradition under Adverse Conditions

39. The “Fourth Reich”: The Effect of German Thought on America
40. “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”
41. “Divided Heaven”: From Heidegger to Habermas to Ratzinger
42. Café Deutschland: “A Germany Not Seen Before”

Conclusion: German Genius: The Dazzle, Deification, and Dangers of
Inwardness
Appendix: Thirty-five Underrated Germans
Notes and References
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Peter Watson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note

I
n The Proud Tower, her splendid book about Europe in the run up (or run
down) to World War I, Barbara Tuchman, the American historian, describes an
incident in which Philip Ernst, the artist father of the surrealist Max Ernst, was
painting a picture of his garden when he omitted a tree that spoiled the
composition. Then, “overcome with remorse” at his offense against realism, he
cut down the tree.
It is a good story. If one had to make a criticism it might be that it falls into
the trap of stereotyping Germans—as sticklers for exactitude, as pedantic and
literal-minded. Part of the point of the book you are holding (as with the
quotations given before the Table of Contents) is to go beyond stereotypes but
also to show that the stereotypes peoples have of themselves can be as
misleading—and as dangerous—as the stereotypes their neighbors, rivals, and
enemies have of them.
That is far from being the only point of the book, of course, which aims to be
a history of German ideas over the past 250 years, from the death of Bach. No
one can be an expert on such a long period, and in the course of my research I
have been helped by a number of people whose assistance I would like to
acknowledge here, some of whom have read all or parts of the typescript and
offered suggestions for improvement. None of the names that follow, all of
whom I thank warmly, is responsible for such errors, omissions, and solecisms
that remain.
My first debt is to George (Lord) Weidenfeld, who encouraged me in this
project and opened countless doors in Germany. I next thank Keith Bullivant, an
old friend, now professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Florida
but someone who, in 1970, with R. H. Thomas, founded the first ever
Department of German Studies, at Warwick University. This is a direction now
followed throughout the English-speaking world. But I also extend my gratitude
to: Charles Aldington, Rosemary Ashton, Volker Berghahn, Tom Bower,
Neville Conrad, Claudia Amthor-Croft, Ralf Dahrendorf, Bernd Ebert, Hans
Magnus Enzensberger, Joachim Fest, Corinne Flick, Gert-Rudolf Flick, Andrew
Gordon, Roland Goll, Karin Graf, Ronald Grierson, David Henn, Johannes
Jacob, Joachim Kaiser, Marion Kazemi, Wolf-Hagen Krauth, Martin Kremer,
Michael Krüger, Manfred Lahnstein, Jerry Living, Robert Gerald Livingston,
Günther Lottes, Constance Lowenthal, Inge Märkl, Christoph Mauch, Gisela
Mettele, Richard Meyer, Peter Nitze, Andrew Nurnberg, Sabine Pfannensteil-
Wright, Richard Pfennig, Werner Pfennig, Elisabeth Pyroth, Darius Rahimi,
Ingeborg Reichle, Rudiger Safranski, Anne-Marie Schleich, Angela Schneider,
Jochen Schneider, Kirsten Schroder, Hagen Schulze, Bernd Schuster, Bernd
Seerbach, Kurt-Victor Selge, Fritz Stern, Lucia Stock, Robin Straus, Hans
Strupp, Michael Stürmer, Patricia Sutcliffe, Clare Unger, Fritz Unger, and David
Wilkinson.
At the end of this book there are many pages of references. In addition to
those, however, I would like to place on record my debt to a number of books on
which I have relied especially heavily—all are classics of their kind.
Alphabetically by author/editor they are: T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of
Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford,
2002); John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact
(Penguin, 2003); Steve Crawshaw, Easier Fatherland: Germany and the
Twenty-First Century (Continuum, 2004); Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der
Will, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture (Cambridge,
1998); Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in
Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago, 1982); Bryan Magee, Wagner
and Philosophy (Penguin, 2000); Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus:
Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996); Peter
Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley,
1975); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and
Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, 2002). I also wish to thank the staff
of the Goethe Institute, London, as well as the staffs at the cultural and press
sections of the German Embassy in London, at the London Library, the Wiener
Library, and at the German Historical Institutes in London and Washington,
D.C.
A few paragraphs of this book overlap with material used in my earlier
books. They are indicated at the appropriate places in the references. A handful
of German words, difficult to translate, are used throughout the book. They are
shown in italics at their first occurrence in each chapter, in roman thereafter.
INTRODUCTION