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. 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.
English now dominates the arts and sciences, but Watson writes an absorbing account of a time not so long ago when German ruled.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.
This led to trouble, but until Hitler wrecked everything after 1933, Germans won more Nobel prizes than Britain and America combined. An ominous byproduct, though, was a growing, pugnacious sense of national superiority. Kant, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and others dominated Western intellectual life. From Bach to Schoenberg, music became overwhelmingly German.
Modern medicine started as German medicine (bacteriology began with Robert Koch). Science flourished, stimulated by new university-based laboratories. There followed a cultural renaissance as important as Italy s earlier one. The same era in Germany produced the modern university in which professors are expected to discover, not just teach, knowledge, and students learn to reason, not just memorize and new forms of scholarship. Stirred by the French Revolution, German nationalism exploded.
We are shamefully ignorant of German culture, asserts veteran British historian Watson (The Modern Mind) in this engrossing, vast chronicle of ideas, humanists, scientists, and artists: Bach, Goethe, Hegel, Gauss, and many more.
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