The German Genius

Nobel Prize for Physics to Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, Germany went from being the poor relation among Western countries, intellectually speaking, to the dominant force—more influential in the realm of ideas than France or Britain or Italy or the Netherlands, more so even than the United States. This remarkable transformation is the subject of The German Genius.
    Here too, however, a word of caution is necessary, because the situation is more complicated than it at first appears, certainly to non-Germans. This book is a cultural history—it examines Germany’s achievements in what ordinary British, French, Italian, Dutch, or American readers understand as “culture.” It is important to say at the outset that, among Germans, the concept of “culture” has traditionally been very different from what other nationalities mean by that word. In fact, there are those who argue that this very difference in the historical understanding of “culture” actually comprises Germany’s real “Sonderweg.” It makes sense, therefore, to consider this difference before proceeding.
    This difference has been most recently and thoroughly explored by Wolf Lepenies, professor of sociology at the Freie Universität of Berlin but someone who has also spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and therefore has had, so to speak, a foot in both camps. In his book, The Seduction of Culture in German History (2006), Lepenies begins by quoting Norbert Elias who, in The Germans , published in English in 1996, wrote this: “[E]mbedded in the meaning of the German term ‘culture’ was a non-political and perhaps even anti-political bias symptomatic of the recurrent feeling among the German middle-class elites that politics and the affairs of the state represented the area of their humiliation and lack of freedom, while culture represented the sphere of their freedom and their pride. During the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries, the anti-political bias of the middle-class concept of ‘culture’ was directed against the politics of autocratic princes…At a later stage, this anti-political bias was turned against the parliamentary politics of a democratic state.” * 63 And this showed itself in a German obsession for distinguishing between “civilization” and “culture.” “In German usage, Zivilisation means something which is indeed useful, but nevertheless only a value of the second rank [italics added], comprising only the outer appearance of human beings, the surface of human existence. The word through which Germans interpret themselves, which more than any other expresses their pride in their own achievement and their own being, is Kultur .” Lepenies adds: “Whereas the French as well as the English concept of culture can also refer to politics and to economics, to technology and to sports, to moral and to social facts, the German concept of Kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic and social facts, on the other.” 64
    In the nineteenth century in particular, the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce, and industry. At the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists, philosophers, and theologians. Whereas in a country like England or America the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany.
    This division, between Kultur and Zivilisation , was underlined by a second opposition, that between Geist and Macht , the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavor and the realm of power and political control.
    In other words, Germany has traditionally been afflicted by what C. P. Snow, speaking about Britain in the 1950s, characterized as a “two-cultures” mentality, only much more so. The two cultures Snow identified were those of “the literary intellectuals” and of the natural scientists, between whom he claimed to find “a profound mutual suspicion and incomprehension.” Literary intellectuals, said Snow, controlled the reins of power both in government and in the higher social circles, which meant that only people with, say, a knowledge of the classics, history, and English literature were