The German Genius

rebuild central Berlin, which had been in the East. Among the early completed or renovated buildings are the Reichstag, with Norman Foster’s glass cupola, the Federal Archive, the DG Bank (Frank Gehry), the library of the Freie Universität (Norman Foster), the Holocaust Memorial (Peter Eisenmann), and the Potsdamer Platz, an entire area that has been rebuilt since 1995.
    In some ways the most effective—and most beautiful—architectural project (or is it sculpture?), which also presents the face of a Germany we haven’t seen before, are the Stolpersteine , the “stumbling stones” of Gunter Demnig. These stones, set into the pavement, in Cologne to begin with, are slightly raised cobblestones located outside houses where murdered Jews once lived. A brass plate is nailed to each stone containing basic details: “Here lived Moritz Rosenthal. b. 1883. Deported 1941. Lodz. Died 28.2.1942.” The first stones Demnig installed were illegal, but the idea caught on and in 1999 he was officially approved. More than a thousand stones are now in place in Cologne and in several other cities. 78
    In 1999, Dietrich Schwanitz, a historian and philosopher, who had studied in London and Philadelphia as well as Freiburg, and was then a professor of English literature at the University of Hamburg, published Bildung , “a handbook” that was essentially a device to address what he saw as a crisis in German education, by reintroducing a “canon” of works that would teach students to be at home in culture, to understand why they should know “Shakespeare, Goethe, and van Gogh,” to have a conversation with history, to grasp the “great European narratives” that have brought us to this point. He thought that, in Germany at least, there had developed a disruption between school life and university life and that Bildung was the best way to bridge it. He somewhat spoiled his argument by asserting that Bildung was also a game, with snobbish elements, but perhaps he felt that such glosses were necessary in the contemporary world so as to “sell” the idea. But he discussed Humboldt, Hardenberg, Herder, and Hegel in a spirited attempt to turn the clock back that, to an extent, succeeded in the sense that as this book went to press his Bildung was in its twenty-second printing. 79
     
     
    When we look at the way German culture has “come back” since the years of National Socialism, at the very great depth and variety of German postwar poetry, at the country’s serious theater, at the high ambition of its dancers, at its continued dominance in musical composition, performance, and scholarship, at its second film renaissance, at its preference for art over entertainment, at the bitter debate about the deleterious effects of popular culture in general and television in particular, we realize that High Culture is the culture of the educated middle class and that that whole constellation of ideas and concepts is more deeply rooted in Germany than elsewhere, even now, and after all that has happened.

German Genius: The Dazzle, Deification, and Dangers of Inwardness
     
    “The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness.”
     
    —T HOMAS M ANN
     
    I n January 1939, W. H. Auden, the English poet, arrived in America. He had emigrated, he said, because it was easier there to “live on one’s wits.” One of the most famous homosexuals of the twentieth century, Auden was married at the time: in 1936 he had wed Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to provide her with a British passport and escape from Nazi persecution (“What are buggers for?” he asked). In the United States he saw a lot of the Manns—he was an editorial adviser to Klaus Mann’s magazine, Decision , he visited Thomas and Katja in California, and at the house they rented on Rhode Island from Caroline Newton, a rich East Coaster who had been psychoanalyzed by both Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney. He met Wolfgang Köhler, one of the originators of Gestalt psychology, who he described as “a great man with quite a lot of neuroses.” He moved in a German/German-friendly world. But then Auden, so unusual in so many ways, was unusual in the sense that, unlike many other educated English people and Americans, of his and other times, he had long been fascinated by German culture. He had spent several months in Germany in 1929, some of them with his friend Christopher