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The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson
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Review
“A 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... [including] compressed summaries of some exceedingly difficult ideas. The range of subjects is impressive, from painters to physicists.” (New York Times Book Review)“[The German Genius is] Watson’s eight-hundred-and-fifty-page love letter to the all-stars of the Teutonic intellect…his élan generates its own momentum… The book’s breadth is part of the point.” (The New Yorker)“Reveals several surprises. . . . A remarkable book on many levels. The research is first-rate and it is surprisingly accessible.” (Tucson Citizen)“A tour de force. . . . It is impossible not to be impressed by his range and versatility as he bounds across the disciplines. . . . This intelligent book presents a breathtaking panorama.” (Sunday Times (London))“[A] colossal encyclopaedia. . . . Heroic. . . . Watson derives the German genius from deep springs.” (The Guardian)“Watson’s book is intended to subvert the negative German stereotypes. Though it checks in at just short of 1,000 pages, it is a usefully concise introduction to the principal themes and personalities of German scientific, philosophical, social, literary and artistic culture since 1750.” (The Times (London))“Few wasted words—a welcome resource for students of modern history, literature and cultural studies.” (Kirkus Reviews)“Watson tells how the Nazis’ first artistic blacklist appeared just six weeks after Hitler assumed power in 1933 - and how his catastrophic handling of his intellectual inheritance has unfairly overshadowed the country ever since. This exhaustive and virtuoso sweep through history goes some way to restoring the balance.” (Press Association)“The German Genius present a huge corpus of scholarship in easily digestible form, and its range is astonishing. No professor, least of all a German one, would have dared to essay such a synthesis; so much the worse for the professors.” (Standpoint)“He has an enviable gift of explaining lucidly and cogently ideas that are complicated or profound (or both). . . . Everyone interested in the sufferings and greatness of modern culture will be informed, entertained and provoked by it.” (Literary Review)
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From the Back Cover
From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Adolf Hitler and his disastrous Third Reich—a brutal legacy that has overshadowed the nation’s achievements ever since.In this absorbing cultural and intellectual history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, explaining how and why it flourished, how it shaped our lives, and, most important, how it continues to influence our world. Watson’s virtuoso sweep through modern German thought and culture will challenge and confound both the stereotypes the world has of Germany and those that Germany has of itself.
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Product details
Paperback: 992 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (July 26, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060760230
ISBN-13: 978-0060760236
Product Dimensions:
6 x 2 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
59 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#343,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The principal idea behind this book is that we should not let the Holocaust completely dominate our perception of German culture. In his massive intellectual undertaking, Watson attempts to shift our attention to the flowering of the German mind from 1750 to 1933 as well as its transformation post-WWII. Though often a bit too encyclopaedic, Watson succeeds in putting it all into context without neglecting Hitler. As a read, it is thoroughly engrossing and enlightening, an inspiration regarding a subject that western historians have indeed neglected.The story begins with the father of Frederick the Great, who began to institute a more comprehensive educational system. He was a pietist, the Prussian version of the Puritans, with a great belief in education as a way to improve one's character and, by implication, the nation; this was called the Bildung, a grounding in general culture in the humanities with an emphasis on classical antiquity. Frederick the Great expanded his father's policies, but in the tradition of the Enlightenment, his were more secular and skeptical. This led to the emergence of an educated middle class, the largest in Europe, with rates of literacy far beyond all other nations. They were to be the employees in the bureaucracy as well as replace clerics and pastors as the intellectuals in the society. This also culminated in the establishment of the modern research university in the 19C, complete with PhDs, specialized publications, and research institutes that far surpassed those in other western countries in both quantity and quality.In addition to this, given the autocratic nature of the Prussian state, the Bildung was largely inward-oriented - encouraging introspection and self betterment rather than political reform or activism. This created a serious tension within the society, a kind of top-down imposition of policies by the state for which there was little alternative. Nonetheless, to fill the void that secularism was opening in German hearts and minds, Watson argues that philosophy rose to take Christianity's place with the idealist concepts of Kant and Hegel, to mention only two; this makes for some pretty turgid reading and cannot really serve as an introduction to the complex and often obscure contribution to western thought. Beyond philosophy, there was an extraordinary flowering in all the arts, from writers and painters to composers. That being said, the population apparently persisted in placing a significantly larger amount of unquestioning trust in the authorities, who "knew better" and had their "interests at heart"; this left the German political culture stunted and undemocratic until after WWII.During the 19C, the innovators themselves, though too numerous to cover in any depth, are sketched out in context, often showing their inter-relationships. For example, the great German symphonies were regarded as philosophical works, mirroring their counterparts in the academy; this astonished me. Innovators included Nietzsche, who opened the way to post-modernism, essentially denying that any meaning or truth can be taken as absolute or categorical, but is only relative and uncertain. (He summed this up as "God is dead.") In the economic realm, of course, there was Marx, whose revolutionary philosophy was one of the most consequential of the 20C. Freud introduced new concepts as well, leading to a therapeutic approach that attempted to make sense of one's life as a meaningful narrative, i.e. a new kind of introspection that quickly spread to the rest of the world and remains a mainstay of the modern mindset. While the thumbnail portraits are fascinating, they are of necessity rather superficial and vary in quality. (For example, Watson makes some pretty glib claims about Freud's accomplishments, dismissing them as "wrong" or arrived at under "faulty" methods without offering sufficient proof.) I often found this frustrating.According to Watson, it was at the dawn of the German industrial revolution that the balance of power began to change in Germany: manufacturers, managers, technologists, and financiers began to displace the cultured bourgeoisie, whose humanistic Bildung could no longer monopolize elite status outside of royalty and the aristocracy. Furthermore, scientists were also gaining in influence, again without the introspective underpinnings of the Bildung. With the lack of political reform, Watson argues, this left less and less space for the middle classes, who when the economy collapsed could offer little effective political opposition to the fascists.To his credit, Watson acknowledges that the rise of the Nazis and their apocalyptic excesses may never be fully understood. Nonetheless, he shows how they transmogrified many of the innovations credited to the great German intellectuals, such as Nietzsche's superman concept, social darwinist racism and eugenics, and the concept of a superior "Volksgeist" or "spirit" of the German people, which was always a nebulous notion to me. Watson also covers how the Nazis and those willing to unquestioningly follow them, including Heidegger and many other intellectuals, destroyed much of the educational and research systems that had grown over the previous 200 years. As everyone know, it is a sad chapter from which Germany is still recovering.Finally, Watson argues, once the western allies created the Federal Republic, the break with a past of political authoritarianism is at last accomplished. With the institutional groundwork imposed from outside, the protests of 1968 set off a transformation towards modern democracy, according to which the younger generation asks questions that the older one was unable to do, in particular when addressing the Nazi past. This was the least convincing to me, kind of thrown in at the end. Having lived in Germany near to this time, I still found students rather rigid in their ideologies and arrogant as to the superiority of the German culture over American capitalism ("Die Amerikaner sind alle kulturlos.") That being said, I completely agree with the author that Germany has created a decent society that has grown beyond the Nazi catastrophe.I cannot do justice to the breadth of Watson's coverage. For example, towards the end, he abruptly gets into Heidegger's warnings about technology, which (he argues) the age of genetic engineering has proven "relevant"; I was left unconvinced and feel that Heidegger is over-rated for nationalistic reasons. Nonetheless, in terms of content, this is an exquisite sketch of the basics. I am not sure if what he claims is true - that the intellectual movements actually meant what he says they did - but the connections often made sense to me and put things in a new light. This is a great intellectual adventure and it left me very hungry for more, a sure sign of the book's success.Warmly recommended.
This book is about culture, where it comes from, what it is, and how it evolves. The author takes pains to avoid discussing the sorts of historical, military, and political events found in other history books and instead focuses on the thinkers, writers, educators, and artists who were influential at the time. While the book is about Germany, the American system of education copied the one created in Prussia in the Nineteenth century, especially the university system, and many of the great thinkers in Germany crossed the Atlantic and influenced American intellectual culture as well, especially in the mid Twentieth century. Many, if not most, of the individuals discussed will already be familiar to the reader. Only now you will see them in their context, with many new insights revealed.I couldn't put this book down. Every chapter contains interesting new facts and insights. Whether you are interested in physics, philosophy, education, music, religion, art, literature or history this book has a treasure trove of information. Peter Watson has assembled a remarkable amount of research to put this book together.A story about Germany cannot help but be a story about Hitler and the Third Reich. To be anything else would be criticized as a white wash. While the author tries to show that Germany is much more than that, the book still largely focuses on a culture moving toward Hitler before 1940, and coming to terms with those terrible events afterwards. While the book describes what was, I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of what could have been. German culture took distinct turns with Napoleon's victory at Jena, the uprisings in 1848 and 1871, and of course the two world wars. Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismark, and Hitler all took specific measures to suppress certain ideals and ways of thinking. The book talks about how some ideas survived, for example when the government controlled museum shows and theatre performances. But not as much was said about what was lost. In particular, I was hoping to see more discussion of the role of government control over University appointments, for example by replacing the young Hegelians and their Idealist form of skepticism with Positivists (discussed in Marcuse's Reason and Revolution).
We are in 2010, Peter is betting that you probably know more about the “German stupidity†igniting WWII (1933 - 45) than about the “German genius†shaping modern civilization. So he wrote this book to balance things out. Super (I read part of it traveling by train from Bonn to Hamburg; very entertaining reading from within). Of course, he shows how much the “stupidity†slowed down the “genius†sharing striking facts like “the Allies won the war because they had better German scientists than the Axisâ€. But this book starts somewhere in the eighteenth century building the chain of ideas behind the sciences and the arts. Much of today’s music, universities and sciences were shaped by the German geniuses. So you probably “think German†and this book explains why.
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