Germany without the stereotypes

HISTORY: The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth CenturyBy Peter Watson Simon&Schuster, 964pp. £30

WHEN, IN THE 1980s, I first designed an English-language course on German cultural history for first-year students of German at University College Galway, as it was then called, I could find no suitable accompanying text – or sourcebook. Peter Watson’s tome would have been ideal if it had existed then. A huge undertaking, it goes much farther than I did, in that it conceives of cultural history in the broadest possible sense, to include not only literature, history of philosophical thought and the arts but also scientific and technological accomplishments, which he describes in an admirably accessible and flowingly legible way, starting in the mid 18th century and continuing until the present day.

The book’s declared objective is to present a history of German ideas and achievements in all fields of endeavour (including film and choreography) over the past 250 years and, in so doing, to counteract stereotypes that are still very prevalent among the author’s fellow Britons, who, he says, are so preoccupied with the Hitler regime and the second World War “that we are denying ourselves important aspects elsewhere in German history. We must not forget the Holocaust – this surely does not need underlining – but at the same time we must learn to look past it”. “The German past consists of much more than the events of the Third Reich . . . and still has a lot to teach us.” For instance: the fact that by 1933, when Hitler came to power, “Germans had more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together”.

Watson traces the phenomenal flowering of German intellectual life in the 18th and 19th centuries to various factors: first and foremost to the concentration of the rising German middle class, in the absence of political power, on what became summarised in the concept of Bildung– that is, a character-forming education for education's sake, "the development of the individual as a cultural-ethical personality" (Karl Mannheim). Watson ascribes the ethical component to the fact that a considerable number of famous German intellectuals were the offspring of Lutheran parsons (at one point he gives a list of 32 examples). Germany as a whole was a nation of avid readers, and parsonages, though impecunious, typically had good private libraries and cultivated conversancy in ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew languages as well as the reception and performance of classical music in the home.

Another factor was the huge number of universities (in the early 18th century, Watson points out, Germany had about 50 universities compared with England's two, Oxford and Cambridge) and their interlinked system of teaching and research. The development of the seminar to complement the students' purely passive reception of tuition in lectures was crucial: seminars "embodied a more intimate form of teaching, where the exchange of ideas and knowledge was more valued, where students were expected to have more input". The form was discursive: "Criticism was encouraged, knowledge was regarded as mutable, less fixed, and new knowledge was there to be discovered." Unfortunately, this exciting system of creative, disputational and collaborative learning is now being watered down by the Bologna Agreement and the subsequent changeover to conveyor-belt BAs and MAs to get the students out into the job market faster. The great achievement of German universities, according to Watson, was to institutionalisethe principle of research and to initiate the concept of the modern PhD, "and this is, conceivably, after Idealism, Marxism, and Freudianism, the most influential German innovation of modern times but much less appreciated".

Although the book's focus is purposely not on the Third Reich, Watson does address the question of how the intellectuals of such a remarkable Kulturnationallowed Nazism's complete reversal and negation of the Aufklärung(German 18th-century Enlightenment) to happen, and ascribes this failure in part to the philosophers' yearning for Gemeinschaft ("community", as against what they perceived as the fragmented, individualistic nature of modern urban life), which made them susceptible to Hitlers blandishments about Volksgemeinschaft("ethnic community").

Some, of course, succumbed to venality by the freeing up of academic posts as a result of the widespread sacking of Jewish colleagues. Many, however, Watson reminds us, took the path into exile along with the Jewish emigres. The huge exodus of intellectuals of all walks of life – psychologists, sociologists, theologians, nuclear physicists, writers, composers, artists, architects – had lasting effects on the intellectual climate in both the United States and Great Britain. These countries, says Watson, "may speak English but, more than they know, they thinkGerman".

AS REGARDS THE Germany of today, surely the most self-critical of all European nations, Watson is absolutely right in saying that it is a very different place from what it once was, that it "has fashioned its own democratic revolution, albeit one that – surprising as it may seem – has gone very largely underappreciated by the world outside". He is referring here to the student rebellion of 1968, "which", he emphasises, " was a much bigger set of events there than anywhere else. . .. . . and for their inability to face their guilt". This is very true, but it is all the more surprising that Watson does not mention the profound changes in attitudes to child-rearing that followed upon the analysis in widely read studies by Alice Miller and Katharina Rutschky of what has become known as Black Pedagogy – that is, the severely authoritarian and disciplinarian methods by which the previous generations had been brought up. Hitler himself was a victim of them, which partially explains his neuroses without excusing them, but so was the average middle-class child, which goes a long way towards explaining their political submissiveness as adults.

Eoin Bourke is professor emeritus, former head of the German department, NUI Galway. Among his publications are Stilbruch als Stilmittel(1980), The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature(2000) and the forthcoming ' Poor Green Erin': German and Austrian Travel Writers in Ireland from before the 1798 Rebellion to after the Great Famine