The German Genius

West. Though they are well enough known to specialists, none of these names comes close to, say, Freud, Mendel, or Einstein as scientists whose name-recognition among the general public is near universal; on the contrary, the general public remains largely unaware of their achievements, either individually or collectively. Yet each had a profound effect either on our understanding of nature, or on our relationship with nature, or on the substances and structures and processes of life itself, or on our understanding of disease, its treatment, and its control. Without their achievements, modern life would be unthinkable and unbearable.
     
     
    F RIEDRICH E NGELS (1820–95)
    In a sense, everyone who has heard of Karl Marx has heard of Engels. And yet, in typing out these sentences on a laptop, the Microsoft Word spell-checker recognizes Marx, who is not underlined in red, but not Engels, who is. There is no such thing as Engelism, as there is Marxism. As joint author of The Communist Manifesto and editor of volumes two and three of Das Kapital , Engels’s influence is great, but his own books deserve to be better known: they are more wide ranging, more learned, and more fun than Marx’s. Engels’s achievement as “the most educated man in Europe” is deserving of much wider appreciation, not least because he was amazingly prescient.
     
     
    R UDOLF C LAUSIUS (1822–88), L UDWIG B OLTZMANN (1844–1906), H EINRICH H ERTZ (1857–94), H ERMANN VON H ELMHOLTZ (1821–94), W ILHELM R ÖNTGEN (1845–1923)
    This constellation comprises another intellectual black hole, yet the tradition of theoretical physics, one of the great adventures of the twentieth century, had its origins in these figures in Germany in the nineteenth century. This was, as the main text shows, a very international field, though the Germans led the way.
    These two nineteenth-century scientific “black holes”—in biology and in physics—had a more direct effect on our lives than did the earlier scientific breakthroughs of the much better known Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
     
     
    W ILHELM D ILTHEY (1833–1911)
    One of the common stereotypes of Germans, most particularly their philosophers, is that they are a theoretical, abstract people, who love overarching, all-embracing systems. Dilthey gives the lie to this; he is a man who showed how far it is possible to go with common sense.
     
     
    H UGO W OLF (1860–1903)
    Many of the cognoscenti regard Wolf, quite simply, as the greatest song composer of all time, who “carried the German art song to its highest point.” A rebel, a bohemian, and a malcontent whose productive life occupied an intense three years when he wrote more than 200 songs, set to the words of Goethe, Keller, and others, and who ended his life in an asylum, Wolf surely awaits discovery by a Hollywood film director who sees in his art and life a modern tragedy of epic dimensions.
     
     
    G EORG S IMMEL (1858–1918)
    Taught by several of the fetid nationalist historians of his day (Treitschke, Sybel, Droysen), but also by the more open-minded Helmholtz, Simmel became more highly regarded abroad (especially in Russia and the United States) than in his own country, certainly among anti-Semitic university authorities. But he was among the first to identify the new moral conditions brought about by modernity, the conundrum that we are both more free and more responsible. He was the first to forecast that modern life would be “more nervous” and that “the lower intellectual functions would be promoted.”
     
     
    R OBERT M USIL (1880–1942)
    For some, The Man without Qualities eclipses anything that Thomas Mann or Hermann Hesse wrote and is the most remarkable response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century. If all we can know about ourselves is what scientists tell us, if ethics and values are meaningless, how are we to live? Musil brilliantly exposes the central dilemma of modern life.
     
     
    M AX S CHELER (1874–1928), R UDOLF B ULTMANN (1884–1976), K ARL B ARTH (1886–1968), D IETRICH B ONHOEFFER (1906–45)
    The theological renaissance in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century is the third intellectual black hole that should be better appreciated. In the wake of the “death of God,” identified by Nietzsche, and the “disenchantment” of the world, as described by Max Weber, these other German theologians/philosophers produced a more cogent and coherent