Curling up with a good book: The German Genius

Complete title: The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
Author: Peter Watson

Here's is Brian Ladd's review, originally published in the New York Times on July 16, 2010. I apparently thought more of it than Ladd did, although I did find the author's habit of long lists of names a bit frustrating (and normally I like to read long lists of names!)

By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans. Their philosophy was more profound--to a fault. So was their music. Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their soldiers were unmatched.

Did this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers. Richard Wagner's English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Many Germans were happy to agree.

After world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Thomas Mann (left), for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity.

Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.”

It is, of course, the Nazis who have made it hard for us to appreciate what Peter Watson calls “the German genius.” Goebbels spoiled the brand when he marketed Hitler as the apotheosis of German culture. Too many Germans and (for opposite reasons) plenty of foreigners readily agreed with Goebbels. Watson, a British journalist and the author of several books of cultural history, would like us to leave the Nazis aside and appreciate that our modern world--at least the world of ideas-- is largely a German creation. But as he might have learned from his fictional fellow Englishman Basil Fawlty, it is futile to insist that we “don’t mention the war!”

“The German Genius” is a lengthy compilation of essential German contributions to philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural and social science and the arts since 1750. Watson enshrines a vast pantheon of creative thinkers, not dwelling very long on any of them. Perhaps the single most important figure is Immanuel Kant, who explored the limits of Enlightenment rationality without handing any authority back to revealed religion. Ever since, Watson argues, the Germans have led the way in plumbing the depths of the human mind and body in search of truth and meaning.

Watson reminds us that the age of Kant produced (among much else) Haydn’s symphonies, Goethe's poetry, Herder’s discovery of national history and Winckel­mann’s archaeology of ancient art — the last in particular ushering in what Watson, in his subtitle, calls the “third renaissance” (after those of the 12th and 15th centuries). Long before Darwin, Germans showed that the natural world was a place of restless change. So, too, was human society: we owe them our sense of history. German Romanticism and German erudition placed truth and creativity firmly inside the human mind. Later, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud sought meaning in a world in flux, while lesser lights concocted their racial theories out of a fatal mixture of biology and philology.

“The German Genius” is a great baggy monster of a book, mixing passionate advocacy with biographical trivia amid compressed summaries of some exceedingly difficult ideas. The range of subjects is impressive, from painters to physicists, and includes important names most of us may recognize only from science class, and then only as units of measurement: Hertz, Mach, Röntgen. (Before Hitler, Nobel Prize ceremonies were in large part a German affair.)

In some ways this is also a very German book: long, earnest, plodding. Yet it is not really up to the exacting standards of German scholarship (or of English narrative sparkle), relying, as it does, largely on other scholars’ accounts of the great thinkers in question, and quoting the secondary sources far more than the original works of “genius.” Too often Watson urges us to revere people or books “now recognized,” “widely viewed” or “generally regarded” as brilliant. Readers may grow weary of being told what to think.

In effect, Watson has given us a kind of Dictionary of German Biography, along with a great deal of name-dropping. There were many German geniuses. But what was “the German genius”? To understand what was special about Germany, we need to know more than Watson tells us about the world that produced these thinkers. He does offer some valuable hints, insisting, for example, on the importance of the 17th- and 18th-century religious revival known as Pietism, which urged believers to devote themselves to improving life on earth. Certainly he is right to emphasize Germany’s Protestant heritage (and the many preachers’ sons who populate his pages), but secularized Protestantism shaped other lands as well-- notably Britain, where Catholics and Jews played smaller roles than in Germany.

More helpful is his emphasis on the role of universities in creating new knowledge and a new class defined by education. At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science--at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research “a rival form of authority in the world.” The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is “Bildung”). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this “secular form of Pietism,” turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation--and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics.

This is modern subjective individuality, as expounded by philosophers like Martin Heidegger (right). Even if Heidegger hadn’t been a Nazi, we would still face the question of whether Hitler was the nemesis or the culmination of German genius. Just as Mann had to acknowledge Goebbels as his bastard child, Watson knows that Germany cannot disown the Nazis. He borrows many different and contradictory theories of the German catastrophe, variously suggesting that the educated middle class was too weak to stop Hitler, that it abdicated its responsibility to do so and that its antipolitical ideals taught a nation to welcome a charlatan’s promises of a redemptive community.

Yet no history of ideas can explain the tragedy of German genius. Hitler may have fancied himself a great thinker, but his success came from his brilliance as a political tactician in a troubled time. Intellectuals admired (or feared) him for his ability to seduce millions of voters who knew nothing of Kant or Heidegger. Watson gives us a compilation of German ideas; a history of the German genius would be a different and dicier matter.

Watson’s chapters on the anguish of postwar German intellectuals remind us that he is a world away from the ­mystical nonsense of his countryman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Nonetheless, his attempt to exalt a national character suggests that he is offering something not altogether different for our chastened time.

James Buchan's account published in the Guardian some three months later is more forgiving.

For a while in the 1980s, I used to spend my Sundays in the Old Cemetery in the town of Bonn in the Rhineland. Wandering amid the provincial tombs, I was forever coming across some stupendous intellectual celebrity. Here were Beethoven's mother and Schiller's wife; Clara and Robert Schumann; August Wilhelm Schlegel; Mathilde Wesendonck, for whom Wagner wrote his most beautiful music; FWA Argelander, who mapped three hundred thousand stars. These Sunday excursions were for me an exercise in mental recuperation. Bored by the Third Reich and its uptight little successor republics in West and East Germany, I sought an afternoon's peace in an older and, as I thought, more German Germany.

Peter Watson's colossal encyclopaedia, The German Genius, might have been written for me, but not only for me. A journalist of heroic industry, Watson is frustrated by the British ignorance of Germany, or rather by an expertise devoted exclusively to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. Watson wonders not just why the nation of thinkers and poets came to grief between 1933 and 1945 but also how it put itself together again and, in 1989, recreated most of the Wilhelmine state without plunging Europe into war or even breaking sweat.

Watson has not simply written a survey of the German intellect from Goethe to Botho Strauss – nothing so dilettantist. In the course of nearly 1,000 pages, he covers German idealism, porcelain, the symphony, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, telegraphy, homeopathy, strategy, Sanskrit, colour theory, the Nazarenes, universities, Hegel, jurisprudence, the conservation of energy, the Biedermayer, entropy, fractals, dyestuffs, the PhD, heroin, automobiles, the unconscious, the cannon, the Altar of Pergamon, sociology, militarism, the waltz, anti-semitism, continental drift, quantum theory and serial music.

His approach is purely biographical, which may sacrifice depth but makes for clarity. Watson is better at the end than at the beginning, more at home with Georg Simmel than Immanuel Kant. He is never not good company, and two mannerisms irritate because there might have been none. The first is a phrase to describe the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung as coming "between doubt and Darwin", which doesn't mean enough for one use let alone 20. The other is the word "raft" as a noun of multitude (50 uses). Umlauts are sometimes accorded and sometimes withheld, without system, like honours in some petty German dukedom.

So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's "Die Lieden des jungen Werthers" could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Electrodynamik bewegter Korper." in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German. The efficiency is for all to see. When I lived in West Germany, the Bundeswehr or federal army used to pretend to be a slovenly rabble, but nobody was taken in. When the Greens came into parliament in 1983, their wild costumes and warring ideologies could not disguise the most punctilious office habits. As for German self-consciousness, a British brigadier in Bielefeld once put it to me, in his staff-college drawl: "Vey do make wather a meal of being German, don't vey?"

Watson derives the German genius from deep springs. Germanness as a notion long predated an all-German state. German protestantism, high literacy, well organised universities and a Jewish citizenry devoted to German high culture all played their role. How all that ended in Hitler is one of the questions of historiography. Watson devotes many pages to German soul-searching over the Third Reich, and the "treason" of a cultured middle class in voting him in and turning against the Jews and the west. When the German state finally arrived in the late 19th century, it was late and military and profoundly demoralising to that class. For what it is worth, I never thought the Third Reich either inevitable or particularly surprising.

For Germany's postwar success, Watson rounds up the usual philosophical suspects, including the famous Unfähigkeit zu trauern, or "inability to mourn". He argues (rightly, I am sure) that in western Germany the student revolt of 1968 was a sort of re-Germanisation of the state created by the western allies and the beginning of a reckoning with Hitler and the Holocaust.

The long detour of the '68ers from street demonstration to terror or its fringes and finally, after 1983, constitutional government is given its due. Here the biographical treatment works well: the life of a man such as Joschka Fischer is exemplary. What Watson ignores is the unrelenting Soviet campaign to destablise West Germany and, in 1983, to provoke a civil war over American nuclear weapons in the country. To make up, there are admirable chapters on how German refugees from Hitler revolutionised intellectual life in the US and Britain.

For Watson, it appears that the "fourth generation" of postwar Germans is coming out from the shadow of the Third Reich. Though he does not say so, a haunted country grown prosperous from the export of precision machine tools may have a brighter future than Britain, for all its clear conscience and financial wizardry.