“The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century”, by Peter Watson

992 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-0060760229

My, my, my, what a difference several decades can make. On November 28th, 2011, the Financial Times ran the headline "Germany told to act to save Europe". It wasn't so long ago that the Germans were the go-to bugaboos of the world, with Nazis goosestepping over all and sundry and sneering that ve haf vays of making you talk! No longer, it would seem. We moderns must now put away our historical blinders that showed us a Germany always stuck in World War Two with all of its accompanying atrocities and the dissatisfying aftermath and open our eyes to the German's many contributions to science, philosophy, music and modern thought and their effects on our 21^st Century’s sensibilities. Which is just what Peter Watson does in The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, his massive survey of this most perplexing of nations and reacquaints the reader (if reacquaint is the right word) to the German phenomenon, with his in-depth research and cultural sensitivity, all without leaving unaddressed the mere dozen years of Nazi rule. Reading The German Genius is a sumptuous feast on Germanic erudition, philosophical thought and achievement by an author with a keen eye for detail and a gift for synthesis.

And there is a lot to talk about; Germany's complexities and intricacies are many and invite the reader to carefully ponder many a subject, from the roots of Western philosophical thought, to the wellsprings of 19th Century symphonic music (mostly Germanic, of course), to the scope of Western artistic achievement, to the nature of politics and political dialogue in our modern societies and to the engines of science over the past 200 years. Watson plies his deep knowledge of the German character in his concluding chapter with five traits of German culture worthy of thoughtful consideration; an educated middle class inhabiting the world of scholarship (and by scholarship, he includes research), the arts (music, film, stage and literature), science, the legal, medical, and religious professions based not on the acquisition of knowledge but "as a process of character development"; a personal reflective character "inwardness" leading one to observe "new structures of our minds"; the German concept of Bildung, the German tradition of self-cultivation, resulting in a harmonization of research with scholarship leading as "a defining phenomenon of modernity"; and a redemptive community "sustaining a moral community in the face of rampant individualism". These are thought-provoking concepts for a people as controversial – and consequential – as the Germans have been for the last century.

The introduction alone was worth the purchase price and is what pulled me into purchasing the book to begin with. Given that The German Genius was written by a British intellectual historian and former journalist who discusses England's relationship to Germany and some of his motivations for writing the book is also a plus. The German Genius is not a fast read and, at times, I wished for more of a synthesis of information that Watson displayed in his Introduction, but one soon realizes the problem as he appears to really be trying to bring in every German of significant contribution. And as an author he appears to be able to stand in the background. I'd have liked to have read this book faster, but it doesn't lend itself to that because of the level of detail, but I found out things about Germany I have never seen in other contexts.