The German Genius Read online

  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

  In 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 Instit
ute, 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

  Blinded by the Light: Hitler, the Holocaust, and “the Past That Will Not Pass Away”

  By one of those profitable accidents of history, in 2004 two German brothers were living in London, each in a high-profile position of influence that enabled them, together, to make some very pointed observations about their temporary home. Being brothers but in very different occupations more than doubled their impact.

  Thomas Mattusek was the German ambassador in London. In that year he complained publicly that, almost sixty years after the end of World War II, English history teaching focused excessively on the Nazi period. He said he had found many British people who had an “obsession” with the Third Reich, “but there are very few people who actually know Germany.” He said Britain’s history curriculum was “unbalanced”—it had nothing to say about the successes of postwar Germany, ignored reunification, and glossed over other aspects of German history. He told the Guardian newspaper that he was “very much surprised when I learned that at A-level one of the three most chosen subjects was the Nazis.”1 His brother, Matthias Mattusek, was at the time the London correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel, and he went further. He said it was “ridiculous” to reduce Germany—the country of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Ludwig van Beethoven—to the twelve years of Nazi rule, and he joked sarcastically that one of the defining characteristics of Britishness was now “resistance to Nazi Germany.” His undiplomatic wording occasioned a “frost” between the brothers, but at much the same time even Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer accused British teachers of perpetuating a “goose stepping” image of Germany that was “three generations out of date.”

  Mattusek was not the first. In an interview in 1999 before his departure as Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Gebhardt von Moltke, Mattusek’s predecessor, said “one has the impression that the teaching of history in this country stops in 1945,” and he too regretted the reluctance of young Britons to learn German or visit Germany.2

  The German government does seem concerned about the country’s image, at least in Britain. In July 2003 a conference was held at the Goethe (cultural and language) Institute in London to explore how Germany might be “branded” better—i.e., sold as an attractive place to travel to, study in, do business in, learn the language of—much as Quebec and Australia have been successfully branded in recent years. A survey of the Radio Times, a television listings magazine, carried out in the week preceding the conference, showed that no fewer than thirteen programs had been broadcast over a period of six days, “all dealing with topics related to the Second World War.” A poll carried out ahead of the conference showed that while 81 percent of young Germans could name a living British celebrity, fully 60 percent of Britons could not name a living German.3 In October 2004 the German government paid for twenty British history teachers to visit Germany—putting them up at top hotels—to discuss the issues. One of the teachers on the visit said, “Kids find the Nazi period interesting. A lot of things happen. There is plenty of violence.” He thought that postwar German history was, by comparison, “a bit dry.” A colleague from Newcastle thought his pupils “bigoted and uninterested. The general impression is that Germans are all Nazis who steal sun loungers. This is all a cartoon-style view. The problem is that if you ask them seriously they have no view of Germany at all.”4

  There is some evidence that the German government is right to be concerned. A survey in July 2004 found that whereas 97 percent of Germans have a basic knowledge of the English language, and 25 percent are fluent, only 22 percent of British students have any knowledge of the German language and just 1 percent are fluent. Whereas 52 percent of young Germans had been to Britain, only 37 percent of young Britons had been to Germany. A 2003 Travel Trends survey showed that U.K. residents made 60 million foreign visits a year but only 3 percent were to Germany, the same figure as to Belgium and half the figure for the United States, one sixth the number for France, and a seventh of those going to Spain. Over the previous four years the figure for travel to Germany was static and had fallen behind visits to the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece.5

  Possibly, the situation was getting worse. In 1986, in opinion poll figures, 26 percent of people had seen Germany as Britain’s best friend in Europe, but by 1992 that had fallen to 12 percent. When Britons were asked, in 1977, if “Nazism or something like that” could again become powerful in Germany, 23 percent said yes, 61 percent said no. By 1992 the pattern had reversed, with 53 percent voting yes and 31 percent no.6 A Daily Telegraph editorial in May 2005 concluded sixty years after VE Day, “[W]e are a nation fixated with the Second World War and are becoming more so…”7

  In the short run, this is unlikely to change. Another survey, this time of 2,000 private and state schools in Britain and published in November 2005, showed that “thousands” of fourteen-year-olds had given up German in favor of “easier” subjects (such as media studies) since the British government made the study of foreign languages optional in the autumn of 2004. More than half the schools in the survey said they had dropped classes in German in the preceding year. Another survey, published in 2007, showed that the number of institutions in Britain providing courses in German had fallen by 25 percent since 1998 and the number of undergraduate degrees in German awarded in London had fallen by 58 percent.8

  Ambassador Mattusek, not unnaturally, didn’t like these results, but he didn’t think that xenophobia accounted for the change—more likely it was ignorance. He did point out that, since Germany is Britain’s biggest trading partner, it was a potentially “dangerous” development. “It’s risky to ask fourteen-year-olds whether they want to drop out of languages,” he warned, adding that teenagers think of Spanish as being “easy” and German as “difficult.” “Most pupils think of the beaches of Spain rather than the museums and castles of Germany.”

  But the ambassador’s concerns about “imbalance” in British education were borne out at Christmastime 2005, when the annual report of Britain’s Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) concluded that the teaching of history in secondary schools “continues to be dominated by Hitler…There has been a gradual narrowing and ‘Hitlerisation’ of post-14 history…post-14 history continues to be dominated by topics such as the Tudors and the twentieth-century dictatorships.” The QCA subsequently issued guidance on teaching postwar history to provide “a more balanced understanding of twentieth-century Germany.”9

  So Ambassador Mattusek was right in saying that the teaching of history in British schools is “unbalanced.” Was he right to link that with a British “obsession” with Nazi Germany? Speaking of his own country, he said, “People don’t take holidays there. Youth exchange is a one-way street…Our younger generations are slowly drifting apart and are listening less to each other. I can only speculate as to why this is. But I talk to a lot of British people and one answer that comes up repeatedly is that every country needs to go through an identity-building process. In 1940, Britain was practically confronted with an overpowering enemy and through the sheer mustering of British virtues, Britain finally managed to turn it round. That is very important in the collective psyche: to look back and think you really can do it.

  “Like the conquering of the West is part of the American myth, so it is the same with Britain and the defeat of Nazism. That coincided with Britain losing her Empire, which certainly rankled with some people and led to this obsession with Germany and not always in a very funny way. We have to
make a distinction between the clichéd stereotypes that are outright funny—like in Dad’s Army or Fawlty Towers [TV comedy shows]—and something that goes a little deeper. The humour stops when I hear that German children are regularly beaten up and abused by British youngsters who don’t know what Germany is about.”

  Here again the ambassador is supported by some independent research. A survey in Britain in 2004 found that when British ten- to sixteen-year-olds were asked what they associated with Germany, 78 percent said the Second World War and 50 percent mentioned Hitler. A study at Aberdeen University showed how, especially above the age of twelve, a sample of children would react much more negatively to a photograph of a person when told it was of a German than when shown the same photograph two weeks earlier without any mention of nationality.

  These reactions, says Mattusek, are a particularly British problem. “This attitude isn’t prevalent in other countries. A lot of our neighbours suffered much, much more than the British. But among young Russians, young Poles or young Czechs, you don’t get this. Perhaps a country with nine neighbours is constantly forced to make compromises and is much more in contact than a country that lives as an island.”10