The German Genius

two ways. On the one hand, it shows that the Austrians were assiduous in enforcing the statute. On the other, it could be held to show that, sixty years after the end of World War Two, such a law was still badly needed.
     
     

* The book was published in German in 1989, a year before Elias’s death.
     
     

* The stallmaster was held in such high regard that his place in academic processions came before that of the associate professors. 40
     
     

* In France, even pornography was published in Latin in the eighteenth century.
     
     

* In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II described himself as “the No. 1 German,” but in saying this, as Anderson points out, “he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself , that he could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans, something inconceivable in, say, Frederick the Great’s day.” 68
     
     

* Whereas English distinguished between freedom and liberty, in German there is only “ Freiheit.”
     
     

* Some of this is lost in translation. The phrase sounds better in German: edle Einfalt und stille Grösse.
     
     

* Klassik , to distinguish from the classicism of antiquity.
     
     

* Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht: es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.
     
     

* There were three Horae, goddesses of the (three) Greek seasons; they also guarded the gates of Olympus.
     
     

* Wissenschaft in German means both science and scholarship.
     
     

* Alexander Herzen (1812–70), writer and “father of Russian socialism.”
     
     

* Goethe himself didn’t agree. He later wrote, “Romanticism is disease, classicism is health.”
     
     

* He is even credited with knowing certain Irish dialects.
     
     

* This corresponds with Mephistopheles’ statement in Faust II : “For everyone knows that might is right. Not ‘how’ but ‘what’ is all one asks!” “Man hat Gewalt, so hat man Recht / Man fragt ums Was, und nicht ums Wie.”
     
     

* Ordinary homes would not be fitted with gas lighting until later in the century.
     
     

* The name is a corruption of the Arabic, Lubn Jwi , or “incense of java,” later corrupted by Portuguese merchants to benjawi , Benjamin , benzoin . Used in church incenses, it was isolated as early as 1557.
     
     

* It should also be remembered that the development of iron steamers made transatlantic travel much quicker, cheaper, and safer.
     
     

* Though the suspension chord ( Vorhaltsakkord ) could first be heard in the Call of the Sirens, Ruf der Sirenen , in Tannhaüser .
     
     

* About £28 billion at 2010 prices, though making historical comparisons of this kind is notoriously unreliable owing to the much greater liquidity available now than in the past.
     
     

* The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and was first reviewed in early January 1900.
     
     

* As this book goes to press, there is an ongoing (unpleasant) debate in a district of Berlin about renaming Treitschke Street.
     
     

* Britain at 1900 = 100
     
     

* This is also the basis of the television tube. The positive plate, the anode, was reconfigured with a glass cylinder attached, after which it was found that a beam of cathode rays passed through the vacuum toward the anode made the glass fluoresce.
     
     

* If you have difficulty visualizing something that is both a particle and a wave, you are in good company. We are dealing here with qualities that are essentially mathematical, and all visual analogies will be inadequate. Niels Bohr, a Dane who was arguably one of the twentieth century’s top two physicists, said that anyone who wasn’t made “dizzy” by the very idea of what later physicists called “quantum weirdness” had lost the plot.
     
     

* The Goldmark was introduced in 1873, replacing the varied currencies of the different German states, most of which were linked to the Vereinsthaler, a silver coin of 16.6 grams; one Goldmark = three Vereinsthaler.
     
     

* The Rembrandt was subsequently shown to have been produced, perhaps, by his assistants.
     
     

* In Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913).
     
     

* Later he planned to be buried in a crypt in “Germania” (Berlin) surrounded by his dead field marshals.
     
     

* “ Kaiserwetter ” is still used today, humorously.