The German Genius

Germany’s most distinguished postwar novelists, delivered a speech in 1998 in which he berated those who used Auschwitz as a “moral club” to continually remind Germany of its past, arguing that although he “would never leave the side of the victims,” he preferred to grieve and look back in private. Many who could sympathize with this must have been distressed subsequently to read that his next novel, Tod eines Kritikers ( Death of a Critic ), was denounced as anti-Semitic.
    Other episodes show that the Nazi past continually intrudes. The works of much younger modern novelists such as W. G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink are about the way the war, or the memory of the war, still colors people’s lives (see Chapter 42). In 2008 Volker Weidermann, literary editor and head of features of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , produced Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher , The Book of the Burned Books, a detailed examination of the authors whose books were burned by the Nazis at the celebrated auto-da-fé in Berlin on May 10, 1933. At almost exactly the same time, a plan to reintroduce the Iron Cross as a military award for bravery was withdrawn, the award being seen as too closely linked to the Nazis. In early 2008 also, plans to produce a definitive edition of Mein Kampf were discussed, as a way to prevent far-right groups from using the book for their own ends. Germany, as Focus magazine observed, is permanently on a tightrope walk between “the right to innocence and the duty of remembrance.” 61
    This is true and, conceivably, it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, and although it won’t please everyone, it is an argument of this book that it is high time we looked back, beyond Hitler and the Holocaust (or Shoah). There is more, much more, to modern Germany than the Third Reich, and there are important lessons to be learned from that history. From the splendors of Bach to the theology of the present pope, we are surrounded by German-born ideas.
    The above argument should be tempered by the observation that, so far as Britain is concerned, there are other reasons why Germany and its achievements have been underplayed and/or underrecognized. As Nicholas Boyle has pointed out, English-speaking readers are not helped in their assessment of German literature because of a lack of contemporaneous literature of their own with which they could make comparisons: “The period of Germany’s greatest cultural flowering—from about 1780 to about 1806—coincides with a relatively fallow time in their own literature and, understandably, that of France.” 62 A further factor is that the turbulence of the 1790s—the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—diverted attention from the achievements of many prominent Germans. The fact that in Germany the ancien régime passed away, its place taken by a society “as peculiarly German as it was clearly post-Revolution,” a middle-class variety of Victorianism without industrial capitalism (until the middle of the nineteenth century at any rate), created a gulf in understanding that, it will be argued here, has never been entirely bridged, and that the excesses of the Nazis traded on and exacerbated.
    Even without Hitler, even without the Holocaust, traditional German history has by and large told a one-sided story. History as it is now practiced was initially a German idea (see Chapter 12), and all the great German historians, from Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) to Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), argued that the creation and maintenance of the German nation-state was the “big story” of the “long” nineteenth century (1789–1914). Given the political changes that took place in Germany during those years, it is—to an extent—understandable why so many historians should take this view. In a more fundamental sense, however, and this needs to be said loud and clear, it was only ever half the picture. While the political narrative was unfolding, another no less dramatic, no less important, and equally impressive story was also emerging. Thomas Nipperdey, in his magisterial history of Germany, concluded that music, the universities, and science were the three great achievements that brought recognition to that country in the nineteenth century. Between the publication of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s groundbreaking Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums ( History of the Art of Antiquity ), in 1754, and the award of the