HISTORY

traditional musical, literary and philosophical strongholds to include the visual arts, technology and the natural sciences. As Watson points out, this is a world we have lost, blanked out by an obsession with Hitler that ignores anything that happened before 1933. No wonder, he adds, that the German ambassador to Britain Thomas Matussek should have complained so bitterly in 2002 that history teaching in British schools focused excessively on the Third Reich.

It is Watson’s mission ‘to reinsert into both the nonGerman-speaking consciousness and the German-speaking consciousness’ the names and achievements of those left stranded by the portcullis that slammed down in 1933. In this he certainly succeeds. No one who reads his book can be left in any doubt as to the reality of ‘the German genius’ proclaimed by the title. He has an enviable gift of explaining lucidly and cogently ideas that are often complicated or profound (or both). The Germans may well ‘dive deeper but come up muddier’, as Wickham Steed famously observed, but Watson strips off the ordure with crisp common sense. ‘Why make it simple when it can also be made to seem complicated?’ is another unlovely German trait that he reverses. Watson is at his best when dealing with literature, philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences. In particular, the chapters on science, complete with equations and formulæ, are very impressive. Chapter Thirteen, for example, on ‘the heroic age of biology’, which begins with a vignette of the ‘Benzolfest’ held in Berlin in 1890, is a masterpiece. His touch is less sure with the visual arts and music. Ludwig Feuerbach the philosopher gets plenty of attention, but Anselm Feuerbach the painter is not mentioned. Richard Wagner receives much coverage (Watson acknowledges his debt to Bryan Magee), but elsewhere there is a sense of the autopilot being switched on when the music plays. There are too many tepid observations such as ‘Mendelssohn’s music was very popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, but his reputation today is divided.’

In a book of this size and scope there are bound to be problems with coherence. The title of Chapter Seven – ‘Cosmos, Cuneiform, Clausewitz’ – is certainly alliterative, but the contents are just as certainly disparate. There are also some odd jumps in chronology, with one great romantic poet – Hölderlin (born in 1770) – making his appearance 100 pages after his almost exact contemporary Novalis (born in 1772). A more serious shortcoming is the emphasis on narrative at the expense of analysis. The concluding chapter offers ‘five distinct yet interlocking aspects’ of modern German culture – the importance of the educated middle classes, inwardness, Bildung, institutionalised research and the longing for a redemptive community – but these are indeed ‘aspects’, not causes. The raw material for an explanation is there, notably in the constantly recurring theme of the beneficial effects of political and cultural fragmentation, but it is not worked out. The heavy and growing representation of intellectu-

als of Jewish origin also calls for explanation.

The last part of the book is sombre, as the triumphalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century ended abruptly with what was arguably the deepest self-inflicted wound ever perpetrated by a nation. By 1935 the Nazis had dismissed around a third of all university teachers on political or racial grounds. Einstein was only one of thousands to emigrate. When asked by an official whether his department at the University of Göttingen had suffered from the expulsion of its Jewish faculty members, the mathematician David Hilbert replied: ‘Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Minister. It doesn’t exist any more!’ Among those taking their intellectual capital to the USA were Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Max Horkheimer, Erich Korngold, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Otto Preminger, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Tillich, Kurt Weill and Billy Wilder. In all, around 130,000 Germans moved to the USA and 50,000 to Great Britain. Their impact was immense and enduring. As Watson concludes: ‘The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.’

This is a big book in every sense. Not every part works, but everyone interested in the sufferings and greatness of modern culture will be informed, entertained and provoked by it. To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 22

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LITERARY REVIEW November 2010