German Genius

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson, 856 pages

The whole history of Germany has been overshadowed by the Holocaust.  It is hard to argue with that statement.  For many, the words "German" and "Germany" immediately evoke images of Hitler and the swastika, and for many English speakers they do not represent much else.  Yet in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany was a center - very nearly the center - of science and culture, making considerable contributions to human knowledge and achievement, indeed, the very terms "culture" and "genius" derive much of their power from how they were defined in German society.  It is these too often forgotten German roots of modernity that are the focus of the first part of Peter Watson's book.  The second part deals with Nazism itself, and how it grew within and interacted with German thinking, and how German thought has attempted to come to terms with the Nazi legacy.

 This is a very ambitious work, but Watson's talent is not quite a match for that ambition.  Perhaps it's because I just read The Long Nineteenth Century, which was largely concerned with providing context and nuance for this era, but The German Genius seems tremendously oversimplified.  Watson's shallow understanding of some of the figures is underlined by his tendency to quote what others have said about them rather than what they themselves said, and to define deep bodies of work by those quotations.  This sometimes results in the figures surveyed seeming isolated, so that while at its best (usually in sections dealing with science or art), The German Genius approaches works like Voltaire's Bastards and Rites of Spring, it more often reads like a biographical encyclopedia.  This is exacerbated by the tight focus on German thinkers, which leads to absurdities such as Marx and Engels being discussed without any mention of Proudhon or Bakunin.  Furthermore, this narrowness of scope makes the book's idolatry of Darwin even more odd.  Watson sometimes acknowledges that nineteenth century German politics did not follow the contours we might expect (progressives, for example, were aggressively nationalistic), but at other times he writes as if they do.  He presents honestly the many differing perspectives on German history advanced by German scholars, but doggedly follows a Lukacs-inspired narrative throughout.

With all of my criticisms and disagreements this is, nonetheless, the kind of work I would like to see more of, in that it actually treats ideas seriously and not as mere appendages of power politics.  The breadth of its ambition is laudable, but marred by the narrowness of its execution.