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

Watson, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060760222 ISBN 13: 9780060760229

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2010

Synopsis

The German Genius is a virtuoso cultural history of German ideas and influence, from 1750 to the present day, by acclaimed historian Peter Watson (Making of the Modern Mind, Ideas). From Bach, Goethe, and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein, from the arts and humanities to science and philosophy, The German Genius is a lively and accessible review of over 250 years of German intellectual history. In the process, it explains the devastating effects of World War II, which transformed a vibrant and brilliantly artistic culture into a vehicle of warfare and destruction, and it shows how the German culture advanced in the war’s aftermath.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Watson has been a senior editor at the London Sunday Times, the New York correspondent of the daily Times, and a columnist for the Observer. He has also written regularly for the New York Times and the Spectator. He is the author of several books of cultural and intellectual history, most recently Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. From 1997 to 2007 he was a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He lives in London.

From the Back Cover

Peter Watson's virtuoso sweep through modern German thought and culture, from 1750 to the present day, will challenge and confound both the stereotypes the world has of Germany and those that Germany has of itself.

From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach 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 creative and influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland, and the United States. In the early decades of the twentieth century, German artists, writers, scholars, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were leading their freshly unified country to new and unimagined heights. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than any other nationals, and more than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Adolf Hitler and his disastrous Third Reich'a brutal legacy that has overshadowed the nation's achievements ever since.

How did the Germans transform their country so as to achieve such pre-eminence? In this absorbing cultural and intellectual history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the Germangenius, and he explains how and why it flourished, how it shaped our lives, and, most important, how it continues to influence our world. As he convincingly demonstrates, it was German thinking'from Beethoven and Kant to Diesel and Nietzsche, from Goethe and Wagner to Mendel and Planck, from Hegel and Marx to Freud and Schoenberg'that was paramount in the creation of the modern West. Moreover, despite World War II, figures such as Joseph Beuys, Jürgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger ensure that the German genius still resonates intellectually today.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060760222
• ISBN 13: 9780060760229
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 964