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    The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
    Unavailable
    The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
    Unavailable
    The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
    Ebook1,472 pages28 hours

    The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century

    By Peter Watson

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    About this ebook

    From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland, and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were leading their freshly-unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined. But this genius was cut down in its prime with the rise and subsequent fall of Adolf Hitler and his fascist Third Reich-a legacy of evil that has overshadowed the nation's contributions ever since.

    Yet how did the Germans achieve their pre-eminence beginning in the mid-18th century? In this fascinating cultural history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, how it flourished and shaped our lives, and, most importantly, to reveal how it continues to shape our world. As he convincingly demonstarates, while we may hold other European cultures in higher esteem, it was German thinking-from Bach to Nietzsche to Freud-that actually shaped modern America and Britain in ways that resonate today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateSep 16, 2010
    ISBN9780857203243
    Unavailable
    The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
    Author

    Peter Watson

    <p>Peter Watson has been a senioreditor at the London <em>Sunday Times</em>, a New York correspondentof the <em>London Times</em>, a columnist for theLondon <em>Observer</em>, and a contributor to the <em>New YorkTimes</em>. He has published three exposés on the world ofart and antiquities, and is the author of several booksof cultural and intellectual history. From 1997 to 2007he was a research associate at the McDonald Institutefor Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.He lives in London.</p>

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    • 5/5
      Amazingly detailed German History of the 19th century, plus going on to the causes of the WWI and WWII and their consequences , not only for Germany but also for the rest of the world... I enjoyed this book thoroughly.
    • 5/5
      This is an extraordinary book, from which I learned a lot in an area where I knew very little -- the German contribution to the cultural and intellectual patterns of our own society. It leaves me wanting to learn more. For that I’m very grateful, and I wanted to give the book five stars. So why four and a half stars? First, “The German Genius” is more encyclopedic, and less analytic, than I would have liked – it’s long on lists, but short on connections. Second, it is (perhaps in consequence) a very long, very ponderous read. It’s well worth reading, but in recommending to friends I shall warn them that they are undertaking a Project Watson, as he notes, wrote the book because of the profound ignorance among most Brits about German history, except for the German history of the Hitler era – an ignorance certainly shared by most Americans. If that ignorance was occasionally reduced – perhaps by a lecture on the German inflation, or on the late emergence of the German state -- the reason for doing so was basically to find out what caused Hitler. This may have been largely unavoidable in the second half of the 20th century. Hitler was hard to look around, and “other” German history did not seem very relevant to Anglo American culture in which English speakers operate. Since English speakers tend to assume that Anglo American culture has now become world culture, this implied that German history really didn’t matter – except, of course, for the question of Hitler.But German history – German history for hundreds of years, not just from 1933 to 1945 -- is highly relevant to today’s culture. Watson shows this by focussing not on political history, but on cultural history, and it is here that the German contribution is astonishing. Germany did not have one political history until 1870, but it had a cultural history that, Watson would argue, is in many ways the basis of “modernity”. He goes through intellectual area after intellectual area – philosophy, mathematics, sociology, psychology, physics, chemistry, etc. etc. etc – and shows how Germans dominated their development in the 19th and early 20th century. He also looks at the arts; Germans dominated music, of course, but had a much wider impact on literature and the visual arts than I had realized. The German influence goes beyond what we think, to weigh on how we think. Philosophy is of course an example, but there is a much less obvious and more concrete one. Watson shows how the research-based university developed in Germany, forming a model for the American academic system. This approach required young scholars to develop new knowledge, rather than simply passing on what was already known. It has, Watson argues, a great deal to do with the explosion of knowledge in the past 150 years. At the end of the book, Watson does look at the question of what caused Hitler: he presents some compelling suggestions, though not a definitive answer – as he is the first to emphasize. But , the importance of this book isn’t in what it tells us about Hitler, but in what it tells us about the rest of Germany’s impact on our world.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A wonderfully erudite survey of German contributions to the culture and learning of the Western World from the mid-eighteenth century until the present. Without whitewashing the horrors of the Nazi period, Watson is nonetheless able to fully appreciate and to sensibly explain and interprete Germany's cultural importance up to 1933 as well as Germany's efforts to rebuild its cultural importance since 1945.