etc – and shows how Germans dominated their development in the 19th and early 20th century.

He goes through intellectual area after intellectual area – philosophy, mathematics, sociology, psychology, physics, chemistry, etc.

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”. Watson shows this by focussing not on political history, but on cultural history, and it is here that the German contribution is astonishing. 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. Hitler was hard to look around, and “other” German history did not seem very relevant to Anglo American culture in which English speakers operate. This may have been largely unavoidable in the second half of the 20th century. 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. 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. Second, it is (perhaps in consequence) a very long, very ponderous read. 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. For that I’m very grateful, and I wanted to give the book five stars. 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.

The german genius by peter watson