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

1189 Pages·2011·5.322 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