The German Genius

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    But the German genius was cut off in its prime. All the world knows why this happened. Much less well known is why and how the Germans achieved the pre-eminence they did. Yes, people know that Germany lost a lot of talent under the Nazis (according to one account, 60,000 writers, artists, musicians, and scientists were sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939). But even many Germans appear to have forgotten that their country was such a dominant power intellectually until 1933. The Holocaust and Hitler get in the way, as the work of A. Dirk Moses, referred to earlier, shows and as Keith Bullivant said explicitly: “For those born during and after the Second World War the cultural history of Germany before 1933 is that of a lost country, one that they never knew.”
    I don’t think many people alive today grasp this fundamental point about German pre-eminence in the pre-1933 period. I exclude, of course, specialists. Among them, the situation is, if anything, reversed: the enormities of the Nazi atrocities mean that—in particular—post–World War II English-language scholarship about Germany is deep and detailed. As part of the research for this book, I visited the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. These institutions exist in London, Paris, Washington, and elsewhere. The Washington institute, besides its splendid library of German- and English-language books and periodicals, also has its own publishing program, which includes a massive work, German Studies in North America: A Directory of Scholars . This volume, 1,165 pages long, lists the projects of—roughly speaking—1,000 academics. Subjects range from German war novels to an atlas of Kansas German dialects to a study of precision in German society to a comparison of Berlin and Washington as capital cities between 1800 and 2000. There is no shortage of research interest in German topics, at least among scholars in America. But this only reinforces the central point: among the general public the ignorance of German affairs is widespread.
    We are used to being told that the twentieth century was the American century, but the truth is more complex and, as this book aims to show, more interesting than that. This book’s intent is to reinsert into both the non–German-speaking consciousness and the German-speaking consciousness the names and achievements of a people who, for historical reasons having to do with war and genocide, have been neglected—even shunned—over the past half-century.
    This then is a book about the German genius, how it was born and flourished and shaped our lives more than we know, or care to acknowledge, how it was devastated by Hitler but —another “but” that is crucial—how it has lived on, often unrecognized, not just in the two postwar Germanies, which have never received full credit for their achievements—cultural, scientific, industrial, commercial, academic—but in how German thinking shaped modern America and Britain and their culture. The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.
     
     
    A brief note on what I mean by “German.” I use it in the sense that Thomas Mann did when he spoke of “German spheres,” a cultural world where he felt at home, to include Germany itself plus other German-speaking lands—Austria, parts of Switzerland, parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. There was certainly, for a time, a Vienna-Budapest-Prague German-speaking and German-thinking sphere. At other times, parts of Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states came within the German sphere of influence too, when scientists or writers looked to Berlin, or Vienna or Munich or Göttingen as intellectual centers. Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and Gregor Mendel all came from Moravia, part of what is now the Czech Republic, but each spoke and thought and wrote in German and lived their lives as part of overwhelmingly German-speaking traditions. Evangelista Purkyne was also Czech and campaigned on behalf of the Czech language, yet in his science he wrote in German and contributed almost exclusively to German journals; the thrust of his intellectual work—the nature of the cell—was an intellectual area in which German scientists were preeminent. Karl Ernst von Baer was Estonian but wrote in German and held positions at the University of Göttingen; Timothy Lenoir, in his history of early nineteenth-century German biology, counts