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

by Peter Watson

Book Overview

The German Genius is a virtuoso cultural history of German ideas and influence, from 1750 to the present day, by acclaimed historian Peter Watson (Making of the Modern Mind, Ideas). From Bach, Goethe, and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein, from the arts and humanities to science and philosophy, The German Genius is a lively and accessible review of over 250 years of German intellectual history. In the process, it explains the devastating...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060760230
• ISBN13: 9780060760236
• Release Date: July 2011
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 992 Pages
• Weight: 2.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The German contribution

This work is compendious and detailed, indeed may be too heavy for some readers. There is a wealth, not only of facts but also a comprehensive reporting of most aspects of society and the matrix in which modern German contributions and thinking across the spectrum of activities. Definitely the best I've read on this subject

A big book of short biographies

In spite of the book's intention to provide us with a coherent answer as to why there was a German genius,we do not get an answer.Instead,we have a very long catalogue of German thinkers,scientists and artists and this book is actually a small encyclopedia of the German achievements from 1750 to the present. I am not sure about the validity of Watson's argument that we live,think,feel and act German.On this point he is careful enough to explain that there were other original people in other countries as well. The main theory of the book is about the narrow angle through which we experience Germany and its past.No one sane enough will contest this point.However,it is a real pity that the author does not manage to explain how this phenomenon of German genius happened and why particularly in Germany.it is more than implied that it was the German tendency towards "inwardness" that was manly responsible for the development of so many rich and original ideas by the Germans.Another reason could be the tendency of the Germans to get a "Bildung"- a term which is not easy to translate exactly.Books were more popular in Germany and the German- speaking countries than elsewhere,which had influenced the German psyche. As Mr. Watson puts it:"Reading was a much more private-and therefore inward-activity than the most popular cultural activity that had preceded it". And later:"Romanticism and music were still other aspects of inwardness.Kant's instinct and intuition,Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's will,Freud and Jung's 'unconscious' are all "inner" entitites,inner concepts ,waiting to be released"(p.821) Add all these to the fact that there was a religious 17th and 18th century revival known as Pietism whose main purpose was to convince its adherents that they should devote themselves to improving life on earth,plus the fact that there were so many universities that were erected in Germany which emphasized originality and research in both fields of humanities and the various sciences and you get the main reason as to why there was such a genius-like phenomenon in Germany. Still,there is a dark cloud looming over the spectacular achivements of the German mind:the Nazi past.The legacy of Hitler and his regime has overshadowed the legacy of Germany and Watson hopes that one day this will change.Personally,I do not believe this can happen in the near future.

Don't mention the war!

Oh please, with peace to the previous reviewer. Here's my problem with the review. When one says that they are rather ignorant of German culture and history and then goes on to myopically focus in on the Nazi era and holocaust as if it were the sum of German history, I have to wonder if they had learned anything constructive from Watson's excellent survey at all. It is as if Anglos are perpetually in the grip of wartime propaganda some 70 years after the war. Actually, the propaganda really goes back to WWI in which the UK launched the first modern state propaganda campaign against another people, using race imagery btw. Watson's book is an attempt at a corrective to this distorted and one sided view of history, and it should be applauded in so far as it succeeds. Unfortunately, based on the previous review, I wonder if he has. Although I'm of Anglo ancestry, I have lived in Germany and speak German with intermediate ability. It is a wonderful country and people, and being a classical musician, I can say that their achievement in that sphere is unparalleled in the history of mankind. The most we Anglos can muster seems to the Beatles and other such low rent music (Elgar, who spent summers in Bavaria, excepted). What does that compare with Mozart or Bach? What galls me in such thinking is the presumptuous, arrogant and glib superiority complex that Anglos have about themselves. We view ourselves as the world's angels, forgetting the international slave trade (which Germans had nothing to do with), the creation of concentration camps (for Boers in S.A. during the Boer War), the wholesale extermination of various native tribes in North America, and host of other crimes against humanity. Yet, we continue to put on as if we are the greatest thing to happen to humanity while treating Germany as if she were still a rogue state (one only need think of Thatcher's reaction to German reunification). Bottom line is that we will go down as history's biggest hypocrites. Germans will fortunately be spared that epitaph. There's no need for Watson to grill a great culture once more over their 'crimes.' Enough (not for some of course) has been written on that to occupy one for a lifetime. Watson's goal is to remind English speaking readers that the world we live in today in so many ways is a creation of German speaking technology and culture. This is an incontrovertible fact. While, on a purely geopolitical level, they failed to become dominant since the UK could not and would not dare imagine themselves after 1815 as anything but number #1 rather like the USA today, yet they succeeded in virtually every other sphere. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an open mind about Germany's many sided contributions to European and global culture. If you're looking for yet another 'Hitler and the Germans' or 'Germany and the Nazis' book, you need to look somewhere else. It is a much needed breath of fresh air into the discourse surrounding a people li

reference book

I chose to read this book because I am an admirer of both Peter Watson's previous books on the history of ideas, "From Fire to Freud" and "The Modern Mind". I am NOT particularly knowledgeable about German history or culture, so I have very little to which I can compare this effort. Whereas Watson's previous technique of skimming over the surface and presenting only the stong points of Western culture gives added coherence to all he covers, I am not sure that it works as well here. Too much of "German Genius" reads like a library reference book. There are grand lists of important cultural figures but not enough about them (even in a 900) page book) to engage in the way I remember with Watson's previous work. This is a *cultural* history and sometimes it does not sufficiently connect with the political and economic events in the time. Two of the key issues in German history it seems to me are why the jews came to be so hated in a country where they seem to have been so deeply assimilated, and why Nazism arose almost unopposed in what was unarguably the most educated, most artistically and culturally sophisticated country in Europe. Watson does not touch the first question (then again nobody has !). And he has nothing original to the second question. I consider the long introduction and the summary to be worth the price of the book, however. At the beginning and the end he condenses the critical issues brilliantly. And for those looking for a guide to German cultural history this would serve as an excellent reference book, but it does not tell an engaging story with the obvious success as his earlier work. Is there a better introduction on the subject? I don't know. Few people are willing to give so much credit to the dominant influence of German culture upon all of western culture, I suspect, out of deep ambivalence to recent German history. Watson makes a strong case that we should get over it.