The German Genius

Germans do not need to remain chained to their past forever. All Germans, as Steve Crawshaw phrases it, are not “umbilically linked” to Hitler. The German past consists of much more than the events of the Third Reich and, as this book has tried to show, still has a lot to teach us.
    The German predicament is not easy and the arguments in this book will not please everyone. It is to those who find it difficult to move beyond Hitler that The German Genius is dedicated.

Thirty-five Underrated Germans
     
    I do not mean to suggest for a minute that the names mentioned below are unknown. They are not. Indeed, to many specialists they include some of the very finest minds of their—or any—day. The point of this appendix, rather, is to underline in a vivid way one of the main arguments of the book—namely, that because two world wars have interfered with our view of the past, these German names are generally less well known than they deserve to be, and that they are worthy of being appreciated by a much wider public.
    Many of the scientists, for example, are easily on a par with Freud, Mendel, and Einstein in regard to their influence on our lives. Several of the philosophers, though they cannot perhaps match Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, are the equal of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, William James, and John Dewey, whose names are virtually household words. Writers and mathematicians have also suffered.
     
     
    W ILHELM VON H UMBOLDT (1767–1835)
    As is made clear throughout the main text (but in Chapter 10 and the Conclusion in particular), Wilhelm von Humboldt was responsible for the concept of the modern university, for the institutionalization of research, for much of modern scholarship and, indirectly, for the rise of modern science. He should now be given full credit for being one of the most important creators of modernity.
     
     
    A LEXANDER VON H UMBOLDT (1769–1859)
    Alexander von Humboldt was at one stage the most famous man of science in the world, with more than a dozen geographical features (and one on the moon) named after him. In 1859, his obituary occupied the whole of the front page of the New York Times . At the same time, as Stephen Jay Gould also said, he then became the “most forgotten” man of science. His expeditions, his identification of new scientific fields of inquiry, and his active encouragement of so many younger colleagues mark him out as one of the great figures from the heroic age of nineteenth-century discovery. It is time that the reversal in his fortunes was itself reversed.
     
     
    C ASPAR D AVID F RIEDRICH (1774–1840)
    While Friedrich perhaps had the German vice of being a very theoretical painter, he was technically brilliant, foreshadowing many modern movements, such as Surrealism and the great American landscapists. He deserves to be as well known as, say, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and Salvador Dalí.
     
     
    C ARL F RIEDRICH G AUSS (1777–1859)
    Of course, Gauss is well known to mathematicians and scientists, but his wide-ranging achievements, and his invention of mathematical imagination , which ensured he was the precursor of Einstein, really mean that he should join the exalted pantheon of mathematical geniuses, alongside Archimedes, Euclid, Copernicus, and Newton.
     
     
    K ARL S CHINKEL (1781–1841)
    Every bit as distinguished as Christopher Wren, Paul Nash, James Barry, and Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a painter and designer as well as an architect, Schinkel is nevertheless often described as an “architects’ architect” who should be a publicly recognized architect as well. Berlin is unthinkable without him.
     
     
    L UDWIG F EUERBACH (1804–72)
    Feuerbach deserves to be better known if only for his seminal influence on such diverse figures as Karl Marx and Richard Wagner. But his work on Christianity, his realization that God is as much created by us as we are by Him, makes him as important to our intellectual history as, say, Baruch Spinoza or Giambattista Vico.
     
     
    J AN E VANGELISTA P URKYNE (1787–1869), K ARL E RNST VON B AER (1791–1876), F RIEDRICH W ÖHLER (1800–82), J USTUS VON L IEBIG (1803–73), M ATTHIAS J AKOB S CHLEIDEN (1804–81), T HEODOR S CHWANN (1810–82), R UDOLF V IRCHOW (1821–1902), A UGUST K EKULÉ (1829–96), R OBERT K OCH (1843–1910), P AUL E HRLICH (1845–1915)
    This constellation of names constitutes possibly the biggest black hole in the intellectual history of the