Peter Watson’s massive (996 pages) study, The German Genius, is one of the most confounding books I’ve ever read, “impressive” for most of its great length, often “brilliant” in its discussion of 20th century Germany, but then lurching downhill drastically in places, descending to the level of Nazi apologetics at its worst—plus one whopping mathematical error (whopping even to my non-mathematical mind), which I’ll discuss in what will probably be one of several “afterwords”.
Peter Watson is a stunning polymath, whose acquaintance I first met back in 2001 when I stumbled—not literally, though it’s certainly feasible to do so—on another of his intellectual doorstops, The Modern Mind (850 pages), which I found brilliant all the way through. The German Genius, subtitled Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, came out in 2008, but I just got around to reading it now.
As I read The German Genius, I became convinced that Watson, though a Brit, had German ancestry, and wrote the book in large part to “prove” to his fellow Brits that there was more to Germany than Adolf Hitler, something that few Brits, it would seem, are willing to believe, because Watson discusses this very issue in great detail in his introduction to the book. But, from what I can glean online, my “theory” is false. As far as I know, Watson has no family connection with Das Vaterland, even though, at times, his sensibility can seem German as hell.
Watson begins his story in the middle of the 18th century, discussing “Pietism and Prussianism”—inward spiritual development and freedom versus outward conformity—which really is the “key” to the German character, in my opinion, and which he could have discussed/emphasized considerably more than he does, tracing it back, “of course”, to Martin Luther—something the Germans themselves have frequently done—including Max Weber, who then sadly exemplified all faults he analyzed, as acutely demonstrated by Wolfgang Mommsen in his excellent book, Max Weber and German Politics. The same man who said “in all countries, we find the highest measure of war thirst among those strata of literati who are farthest from the trenches and by nature least military” wanted Germany to launch an unprovoked invasion of France in 1905 (when its ally Russia was immobilized by domestic strife following the disastrous Russo-Japanese War) and, once she had made herself master of the continent, launch a “big” war—a Weltpolitik war—against England for mastery of the high seas.
Watson also discusses another important factor—the development in Germany of an educated bourgeoisie focused largely around religion, scholarship, and government service rather than trade—Germany, unlike “Atlantic” Europe, had no real connection with either the New World or Asia. But, again (again, in my opinion), he doesn’t stress the argument enough. I’ve read from some economic historians that the German middle class was very largely a result of war—both the disastrous Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the many less disastrous (for Prussia) wars of conquest in the 18th century, before the super-disastrous (at first) Napoleonic wars, which ultimately ended “gloriously”, followed by the repeated Prussian victories in the late 19th century, leading up to the founding of Imperial Germany in 1870. For much of “modern” Germany’s existence, it was the government that was the great customer and driver of trade, with a voracious appetite for both high end goods (e.g., weaponry) and commodities of all kinds, and willing and able (most of the time) to pay for them. As Watson does point out, the German bourgeoise in government employment often adopted a quasi-aristocratic pose of dedication to service, learning, selflessness, and “honor” and looked down on mere commerce and those who practiced it, particularly that “nation of shop keepers” England.1
Watson’s treatment of the arts for the 18th and early 19th centuries, though extensive, is not very impressive. Much of the text seems to be cribbed from an “advanced” high school textbook. His treatment of the late 19th and 20th centuries is much more assured and shows the confidence of someone writing from his own extensive personal knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject.
Considerably more impressive is his discussion, throughout the book, of the roots and development of Germany’s massive contribution to scholarship, in particular to the professionalizing of learning, moving away from the gentleman and the genius and towards the orderly and reliable processes of the Ph.D. program, linked to the proliferation of German universities, the result of Germany’s lack of unity, which provided a sort of half-way house for an endless stream of pastor’s sons seeking intellectual fulfillment apart from the confines of faith. In virtually every nation in Europe during the 19th century, a romantic nationalism became the preferred substitute for religious fervor, but in no country did it burn so furiously as Germany, the heat inflamed as the century wore on by Germany’s repeated success on the battlefield, in science and industry, and in the academy, where German scholars revolutionized studies—where they did not invent them—in one field after another.
Watson emphasizes the link between scholarship and the cult of German nationalism, fed by historians who gloried in the notion of the “state” as the sole source of order and civilization, not just in Germany but throughout history. The “scientific” history of Leopold Ranke maintained a tone of objectivity because Ranke wrote of all the major nations of Europe with equal enthusiasm, but the whole focus of his scholarship was the development of the major nation state, “principally in the seventeenth century”. Future historians would not be so balanced.
Watson highlights an interesting quirk in German scholarship, a fascination with India as the “oldest civilization”, even though, clearly, it wasn’t, that somehow shared a special link with Germany, as though Germany followed a separate, “better” path to civilization than western Europe, descended as they were culturally from the Greeks and Romans—even though German scholars set new standards in the studies of the classics as well.
It is in his discussion of late 19th century German culture that Watson begins to sound, to my ears, at least, like a German crank. He gushes unreservedly over Wagner, soft pedals his anti-Semitism as well as the “fantastic immorality” (according to proper Bostonian Henry James) of both his circle and his personal life. After recounting an unattractive piece of gossip regarding Wagner and his sometime admirer Friedrich Nietzsche, Watson concludes “It is a story that diminishes two great men”. I would certainly call Wagner a great composer, but not a great man, and I don’t care for Nietzsche at all, even though his influence is immense.2
Watson’s discussion of 20th century Germany is easily the best part of the book, noting how, prior to World War I, German intellectuals increasingly—obsessively—emphasized the superiority of German “kultur” over French and British civilization. In part, this notion of German kultur as being deeper, more profound, and more intuitive (so no one else could steal it) than either British empiricism or French rationalism was mere snobbery, part of a “trend” across the western intelligentsia to separate itself from an increasingly bourgeois culture. When Bertrand Russell was at Cambridge around 1890, he said all the “Big Men” wanted to be prime minister. Ten years later, they all wanted to be poets or saints or philosophers, as “exquisite” and aristocratic and useless as possible. But in Britain and France this pose was characteristic of the “dropouts”—people who rejected the received values of society. In Germany, most leading intellectuals embraced an official culture of authoritarian nationalism that celebrated Germany’s difference from the West, looking down their noses at “bourgeoise” parliamentary politics, which they saw as common and vulgar and degrading to higher spirits. By turning their backs on grubby office seeking—which ultimately meant nothing more than groveling for approval before the ignorant masses while outwitting unscrupulous rivals—Germans kept themselves pure and fit for higher things. This attitude was summed up (at length) in Thomas Mann’s 600-page Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, published in 1918, recently discussed by Christopher Behe for the New York Times. (Wikipedia has some nice thoughts as well.) My only experience with Mann has been The Magic Mountain (1924), which I found generally fascinating—a 19th century three-decker somehow transported into the 20th—but overall unconvincing, particularly with regard to the character of Leo Naphta, a stand in for Nietzsche, whose introduction late in the novel generally brings it to a close. I found Leo contrived and didactic, and his “backstory” (a Jewish Jesuit, a combination guaranteed make a good German boy’s blood run cold) more than a little anti-Semitic.
Somewhere in his treatment of 20th century Germany, Watson gives a chapter that could have been entitled “How Germany Invented the World”, emphasizing the extent to which German thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Einstein have shaped modern reality, not to mention the unfortunate figure of Adolph Hitler. This is a bit much in the first place, but particularly irritating for an American, because, after all, the U.S. has been significantly less influenced by German thought—German philosophical idealism, in particular—than European nations.
I feel Watson comes a serious cropper in both his treatment of Kant and his attempt to portray Kant as the father of modern liberalism. The portrait Watson gives of Kant as a man is less than complete, ignoring the fact that he was anti-Semitic, racist, and (surprise, surprise) misogynistic as well, despite the many admirable qualities of his thought. Furthermore, western liberalism was already well developed before Kant started writing. The real father of western liberalism is John Locke, who preceded Kant by a century and was more “radical” to boot. Both Locke and Kant secularized Protestant ideals and argued for human equality, free speech, and free thought (within certain limits, of course), but Locke went further, thanks largely to the political circumstances in which he found himself. Late 17th century England was racked with religious turmoil in 1685 when the Catholic James II ascended the throne. Radical Protestant ministers like Samuel “Whig” Johnson (to distinguish him from the later Samuel “Dictionary” Johnson, an ardent Tory) argued that good Christians had a sacred duty to rebel against godless kings like the Papist James II, a veritable tool of the Anti-Christ, reversing the ancient doctrine that all kings, good or bad, are placed by God to rule over men and must be obeyed,
Locke secularized all of this, claiming that men instituted governments themselves, to assure their own freedom, that if and when those governments became tyrannical, they lost their moral basis for existence and those oppressed by them had the right and even the duty to overthrow them. Contrast this with Kant, writing a century later, who argued that there never could be a “right” of revolution, because “a man cannot have two masters”—much more of an evasion than an argument. Kant welcomed the first phase of the French Revolution precisely because, to his mind, it was not revolutionary. Louis XVI called the Estates General into existence; he “accepted” the expansion of the Third Estate’s role. So the newly constituted General Assembly had the right to act as it did, at first. But it did not, according to Kant, have the right to execute Louis and his wife—though, to my mind, it did, since the two did conspire with foreign powers to overturn the newly established constitutional order in France by military force, which clearly constituted treason. However, the sadistic mistreatment of Louis, Marie, and their children was entirely shameful and was a sad precursor to the Reign of Terror that was to follow.
England executed one king in 1649 and drove another from the throne in 1688. France executed one king in 1793 and drove two from the throne in the years to follow, before becoming a republic in 1870. Germany had no such record of revolt, Although many princes and princelings lost their thrones in the slow “rationalization” of the German political structure, this never occurred due to an uprising from below. Despite the similarities between the English Puritans and the German Pietists in their concern for the individual conscience, the Pietists never felt threatened as the Puritans did by the “prelates” (bishops) and never sought control of the secular power to ensure the sanctity of their spiritual lives. For Pietists, obedience was the cardinal virtue, unquestionable and inviolable, and they never dared a transgression.
Despite questions of emphasis, and a “German” tendency to treat ideas as the sole cause of history, Watson’s treatment of German culture throughout the 20th century is consistently stimulating, particularly, I think, in treating developments since World War II, treating the “pattern” of each generation reacting to, and “exposing” the crimes of the generation immediately prior to itself, before ultimately, to my eyes, falling short in his analysis by agreeing with (by failing to contradict) recent apologists for the Nazi regime—not those who deny that Germany committed terrible crimes but those whose treatment of the historical record insists that the Germans suffered terrible crimes as well, crimes that the triumphalist narratives of the victors fail to acknowledge. The accounts of these “crimes” are, however, frequently tendentious, which Watson too often repeats as “facts” rather than contradicting them, as he could and should.
In his discussion of Jörg Friedrich’s 2002 study of the allied bombing campaign against Germany, Der Brand (The Fire), for example, Watson tells us that the campaign killed 600,000 Germans and “the Allied mass killing brought no military gain.” This is, I would say, an egregiously false statement. First of all, the purpose of the bombing campaign was not simply to kill Germans, but to destroy its industrial and military capacity from the air prior to battle. It’s true that the British effort, under control of the Air Force Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who gets a good word from no one—and doesn’t deserve one, either—largely focused on death and destruction as an end in itself—to “break” enemy morale, which of course never happened—but the U.S. concern was always strategic, and the British did much “strategic” bombing as well—the famous “dam busters” campaign, for example. And the hard fact is that the most terrifying raids—the Hamburg and Dresden “fire storms”—did impede the German effort. Destroying a country’s premier port (Hamburg) and one of its major rail links (as Dresden was, like any major city) significantly interfered with the German war effort.
Phillips Payson O'Brien’s massive 2015 study How the War Was Won argues in convincing detail that the impact of the bombing raids was ultimately overwhelming, both in hampering Germany’s war production and in destroying planes and tanks and other weaponry before they could be deployed in battle, but the positive effects were discussed much earlier, in such works as Richard Overy’s 1997 study, Why the Allies Won. It’s true that other studies had argued that the bombing campaign had little effect, but no one has argued that the whole purpose was simply to kill German civilians, and all sources agree that the effort had a huge “side effect”—the ultimate obliteration of the Luftwaffe—necessary if strategic bombing was ever to be actually “strategic” (that is to say, accurate and sustainable)—which gave the Allies complete air superiority during the D-Day invasion and throughout the European campaign that followed and also aided the Soviets immensely, to the extent that they never developed a first-class air force, because they didn’t need one. Furthermore, the Allied bombing campaign goaded Hitler into the famous “Vengeance” weapons program, which produced the V-1 and V-2, at immense expense (the most expensive German weapons program of the war) and no benefit. Hitler was, most stupidly, trying to refight, and “win”, the Battle of Britain. The V-2 is, naturally, one of the most famous weapons of the war, but its fame obscures the fact that it had no effect on the war’s outcome. Its effect on British morale was not significant, and even if it had been, so what? It was American and Soviet power that was destroying Germany, not Britain, and the V-2 had no effect on them at all. Its likely effect was simply to increase the British government’s determination to be in on the kill when the war was over, so that they could extract “vengeance” of their own.
Watson also cites, with evident approval, a book by the famous German author Günter Grass, published in 1984, Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). “This again dealt with memory and the question of German suffering,” says, Watson, “through the sinking of the passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff, torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in January 1945, with the loss of 9,000 passengers. This made it the largest-ever maritime disaster, with losses six times those of the +Titanic.” Well, again, so what? War, as I understand it, is Hell. The Wilhelm Gustloff was a German ship. A Soviet submarine sank it. That’s what submarines are supposed to do. One can wonder if a gifted novelist like Grass, whom I don’t always admire, might have been better occupied by writing about his experiences in the Waffen SS, something he instead concealed as long as he could, and then tried to explain away once his “interesting” past was revealed.
The icing on the cake—a cake no one, I think, needed—is an absurd attempt contrived by Watson to find a way “forward” for the West to “forgive” Germany, finding an exemplar for such an occasion in the notorious relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In a repulsive passage he tries to repackage the old Nazi3 as a proto-hippie, warning of the dangers of capitalism and industrialization:
As global warming starts to lay waste our planet, as the rain forests and ice caps shrink together, as inland seas disappear, as terrorists threaten nuclear annihilation, as genocide and famine continue to ravage Africa, as India and China begin to run out of water, does it not ring ever more true that Heidegger had a profound point (and wasn’t being merely “priggish”) when he said we should stop trying to exploit and control the world with our technological brilliance?
Well, my response to that is “No”. Furthermore, praising the Jewish Arendt, who had a four-year affair with the married Heidegger when she was his student, because she ostentatiously “forgave” Heidegger for trying to have her murdered—along with six million other Jews—is deeply unattractive to me as well. As a young woman, Arendt wished that she were not Jewish and agreed with Heidegger when he told her that, as a Jew, she could never hope to participate fully in western civilization. Arendt fully imbibed the Nietzschean atmosphere of the time, admiring arrogance and insolence as the mark of the “truly great” and hated the image of the shy, retiring, gentle Jew. Arendt, a German citizen, had several run ins with the Gestapo and was lucky to escape from Europe with her life. Unsurprisingly, she felt deeply threatened by an uncaring Europe, remarking on the differences between the treatment of Jews in totalitarian counties and democracies: “In totalitarian countries they put you in a concentration camp. In a democracy they put in a relocation camp.”
In my decidedly sour opinion, Arendt “forgave” Heidegger for his Nazi past precisely because he didn’t apologize for it. The truly great never apologize; that is an infallible mark of their greatness. Their “errors”, if properly understood, are actually signs of their greatness—something the common herd, of course, is incapable of grasping.4 Arendt’s “forgiveness” of Heidegger is exactly the sort of noxious poison of German kultur that we should avoid rather than embrace.
Afterwords
I don’t know how Germans are supposed to “get past” Hitler—though the means suggested by Watson and the authors he cites are exactly the wrong thing to do—but I’m also not sure how Americans are supposed to “get past” slavery, when it is so obvious that millions of Americans still cling to, and indeed advocate, a deeply hypocritical view of our nation’s past. Slavery prevailed in the U.S. for well over 250 years, and for a hundred years following our Civil War the South created an absurd fantasy of the “Lost Cause” that was accepted as gospel by almost all southerners, and rarely contradicted with any energy by intellectuals in the north, except for a few outraged blacks. This myth is still alive today, and not merely in the minds of the ignorant. I was deeply disappointed to find all the clichés and myths of the Lost Cause alive and well in the mind of the usually estimable David French, who wrote this awful piece, Don’t Tear Down the Confederate Battle Flag for the National Review back in 2015. One hopes he’s grown up a little in the past seven years, because in this piece he betrays the sensibility of a twelve-year-old southern boy circa 1925. I gave some of my own thoughts about American racism in a (very) long piece, CRT and Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally, and discussed southern racism through the lens of the writings of William Faulkner in The Literary Offenses of William Faulkner.
Special Mathematical Afterwords: Counting the Infinite
Mr. Watson makes a huge error in discussing mathematician Georg Cantor, famous for demonstrating the difference between “denumerable” and “non-denumerable” infinities, identifying which infinities were which, and going on to prove that there was an infinite series of non-denumerable infinities, each “larger” than the last, which he defined in terms of what he called “cardinality,” using the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “aleph”, which Word won’t let me write, as the symbol. Cantor attached a subscript “0” to the aleph symbol to indicate “aleph null”, which included all denumerable infinities (there are an infinite number of them, of course) and used aleph with the succeeding natural numbers in subscript to identify infinities of higher cardinality. Poor Mr. Watson gets all this spectacularly wrong. Here is what he says, after first discussing Cantor’s development of set theory:
But it was his next step that took mathematicians by surprise (though in truth it was also a surprise that no one had noticed this before). The series, 1, 2, 3…n, was an infinite set and so was 2, 4, 6…n. But it followed from this that some infinite sets were larger than others—there are more integers in the infinite series, 1, 2, 3…n than in 2, 4, 6…n.
The thing is, this is entirely wrong. The set of the even numbers has the same cardinality as that of the natural numbers, aleph null. They are both denumerable—can be paired off in a simple algorithm that will identify and match each even number with one natural number according to the “natural” order of the natural numbers. This had been pointed out certainly by Galileo and most likely had been known long before. Cantor’s first great triumph was to prove, using his famous “diagonal proof”, that the set of rational numbers—those numbers expressible by a ratio between two natural numbers—is denumerable as well, “surprising”, to say the least, since there are, between any two rational numbers, an infinite number of rational numbers. He then topped that by proving that the set of irrational numbers is not denumerable, and thus has a higher cardinality than aleph null.
1. Though Max Weber deeply disliked the privileges extended to the German aristocracy and frequently complained of the tendency of upper middle-class Germans to ape the aristocracy, the longing for imperial “glory” is palpable in his political writings.
2. According to the story, which I never heard before, poor Friedrich was suffering from “excessive masturbation,” which I would think should lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, and had consulted a doctor about it, who advised him that, as a bachelor, he should find relief from prostitutes rather than his own hands. The doctor, who unfortunately was a passionate Wagnerian, had written an essay on Wagner, which he gave to Nietzsche to pass on to the master, Nietzsche’s friendship apparently having somehow come up in the course of the examination. Wagner contacted the doctor to thank him for the essay and also inquired about Nietzsche’s health. For some reason (according to the story), the doctor volunteered the information about Nietzsche’s amorous adventures, which the considerably more worldly Wagner tastelessly passed on to his circle, who all, it seems, had a good laugh at poor Friedrich’s expense. Nietzsche, who was more than a little obsessed with Wagner, was devastated, and thereafter struggled to work out his emotions by writing two short books on Wagner, The Wagner Case and Nietzsche contra Wagner, contrasting his own “healthy” embrace of life with all its horrors and Wagner’s “sick” rejection of it, exemplified by the theme of renunciation in Wagner’s last opera Parsifal. Parsifal’s theme of renunciation does reflect Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism (according to what I’ve read, since I’ve never heard it), while Nietzsche’s own doctrine of the unrestrained Übermensch supposedly turned Schopenhauer on his head (Schopenhauer was Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher, as Hegel was Marx’s), but (unsurprisingly) Wagner’s own life was as full of sensual self-indulgence and gratification as Nietzsche’s was empty of it.
3. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained a member until 1945, though his enthusiasm dimmed significantly when he learned that he was supposed to follow orders rather than give them. I have never read any Heidegger and have no intention of ever doing so. I have read almost all of the writings Arendt produced after World War II.
4. In many of her essays, written in America, Arendt returns repeatedly to the “argument” that, at some time, the right to vote must be taken away from what she thought of as “the working class”. Because the common people have no greater goal than material comfort, they should not have a voice in affairs of state.
