The German Genius

you talk to Germans at length, many of them will admit, after a time, that they are not yet completely at ease with themselves. At the same time a recent biography of the last Kaiser has been well received. The Germans are changing more than the British are and more than the British think the Germans are. Of course, one might argue that in Germany there is more to change, and maybe more need of change. But Germany is not as static in its attitude to the Third Reich and World War II, as Britain thinks it is, or as Britain (or France, or America, to a lesser extent) is itself.
    T HE G ERMAN I DEOLOGY AND THE F UTURE OF H UMAN N ATURE
     
    The German genius is alive and well. It has been a curious journey in some ways, unreal at times—or it has felt that way. Despite the long night between 1933 and 1989, contemporary German artists can bear comparison with the best of other countries, its filmmakers are enjoying a resurgence, even in English-language countries ( Goodbye Lenin! , The Lives of Others , which won an Oscar), its novelists are coping with the dominance of the English language better than most (W. G. Sebald, Bernhard Schlink, Daniel Kehlmann, and Günter Grass, still), and its composers and choreographers continue to shine. More names could have been mentioned—such as Hans J. Nissen, whose team of archaeologists has done so much to illuminate the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, at least until the Gulf Wars, and the new Leipzig school of painters who kept alive the tradition of figurative art. Germany’s scientific community, though it has not yet returned to its position of pre-eminence of 1933, when it had won more Nobel Prizes than scientists from Britain and America put together, nonetheless has returned to prize-winning ways—with Nobels in 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, and two in 2008. In Europe, Germany leads the table for patent registration with almost three times the number of its next rival, France. In tables drawn up in 2008 of the leading nations in physics, Austria and Germany came fifth and sixth respectively, behind Switzerland (top), Denmark, and the United States, but ahead of England, France, and Russia. 50 In engineering the only non-American institutes in the top twenty worldwide in 2008 were number 15, the Max Planck Society, 16, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, and 20, the Technical University of Denmark (institutes in France and Britain did not feature). 51
    Despite this, in the spring of 2008 yet another historical controversy erupted in Germany, this time about the planned reintroduction of the Iron Cross medal for military bravery. Notwithstanding the long and colorful provenance of this award (see Chapter 9), with the well-to-do in the Napoleonic Wars wearing iron jewelry because they had donated their gold to the war effort, it was felt by the government in Berlin that the Iron Cross was still too closely linked to the Nazis, and the reintroduction was canceled.
    How long must this attitude persist? As this book has tried to show, we owe a great deal to the Germans and, as the Iron Cross incident highlights, there is much more to German history than 1933–45. Let us, therefore, end on an equally controversial note and consider what we might learn from one of the most contrary philosophers of the twentieth century—Martin Heidegger. Yes, he was a Nazi. Yes, he betrayed his Jewish lover Hannah Arendt, and in cowardly fashion. Yes, in a sense, as she herself said, Heidegger “murdered” his Jewish colleague, Edmund Husserl. But, as the twenty-first century gets into its stride, there are two important areas (at least) where the German philosophical tradition—the German ideology, as the French scholar Louis Dumont calls it—may come back into focus and have much to teach us. Many non-Germans find the Idealist cast of mind—if not Kant then certainly Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—obscure and vague, using a language (“Being,” “authenticity,” “releasement”) that is alien to, and uncomfortable in, the empirical tradition: they recall Wickham Sted’s crack about the Germans diving deeper but coming up muddier. At the same time, the German ideological antipathy to technology and its advances can seem (again, to the empirical Anglophone mind) altogether unreal, a plaintive, overtheoretical, and thinly abstract opposition to inevitable “progress.”
    And yet, as shown by Jürgen Habermas, who is surely the most interesting