The German Genius
Page 99
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (1769–1859)
Alexander von Humboldt was at one stage the most famous man of science in the world, with more than a dozen geographical features (and one on the moon) named after him. In 1859, his obituary occupied the whole of the front page of the New York Times. At the same time, as Stephen Jay Gould also said, he then became the “most forgotten” man of science. His expeditions, his identification of new scientific fields of inquiry, and his active encouragement of so many younger colleagues mark him out as one of the great figures from the heroic age of nineteenth-century discovery. It is time that the reversal in his fortunes was itself reversed.
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774–1840)
While Friedrich perhaps had the German vice of being a very theoretical painter, he was technically brilliant, foreshadowing many modern movements, such as Surrealism and the great American landscapists. He deserves to be as well known as, say, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and Salvador Dalí.
CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS (1777–1859)
Of course, Gauss is well known to mathematicians and scientists, but his wide-ranging achievements, and his invention of mathematical imagination, which ensured he was the precursor of Einstein, really mean that he should join the exalted pantheon of mathematical geniuses, alongside Archimedes, Euclid, Copernicus, and Newton.
KARL SCHINKEL (1781–1841)
Every bit as distinguished as Christopher Wren, Paul Nash, James Barry, and Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a painter and designer as well as an architect, Schinkel is nevertheless often described as an “architects’ architect” who should be a publicly recognized architect as well. Berlin is unthinkable without him.
LUDWIG FEUERBACH (1804–72)
Feuerbach deserves to be better known if only for his seminal influence on such diverse figures as Karl Marx and Richard Wagner. But his work on Christianity, his realization that God is as much created by us as we are by Him, makes him as important to our intellectual history as, say, Baruch Spinoza or Giambattista Vico.
JAN EVANGELISTA PURKYNE
This constellation of names constitutes possibly the biggest black hole in the intellectual history of the West. Though they are well enough known to specialists, none of these names comes close to, say, Freud, Mendel, or Einstein as scientists whose name-recognition among the general public is near universal; on the contrary, the general public remains largely unaware of their achievements, either individually or collectively. Yet each had a profound effect either on our understanding of nature, or on our relationship with nature, or on the substances and structures and processes of life itself, or on our understanding of disease, its treatment, and its control. Without their achievements, modern life would be unthinkable and unbearable.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820–95)
In a sense, everyone who has heard of Karl Marx has heard of Engels. And yet, in typing out these sentences on a laptop, the Microsoft Word spell-checker recognizes Marx, who is not underlined in red, but not Engels, who is. There is no such thing as Engelism, as there is Marxism. As joint author of The Communist Manifesto and editor of volumes two and three of Das Kapital, Engels’s influence is great, but his own books deserve to be better known: they are more wide ranging, more learned, and more fun than Marx’s. Engels’s achievement as “the most educated man in Europe” is deserving of much wider appreciation, not least because he was amazingly prescient.
RUDOLF CLAUSIUS (1822–88), LUDWIG BOLTZMANN (1844–1906), HEINRICH HERTZ (1857–94), HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ (1821–94), WILHELM RÖNTGEN (1845–1923)
This constellation comprises another intellectual black hole, yet the tradition of theoretical physics, one of the great adventures of the twentieth century, had its origins in these figures in Germany in the nineteenth century. This was, as the main text shows, a very international field, though the Germans led the way.
These two nineteenth-century scientific “black holes”—in biology and in physics—had a more direct effect on our lives than did the earlier scientific breakthroughs of the much better known Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
WILHELM DILTHEY (1833–1911)
One of the common stereotypes of Germans, most particularly their philosophers, is that they are a theoretical, abstract people, who love overarching, all-embracing systems. Dilthey gives the lie to this; he is a man who showed how far it is possible to go with common sense.
HUGO WOLF (1860–1903)
Many of the cognoscenti regard Wolf, quite simply, as the greatest song composer of all time, who “carried the German art song to its highest point.” A rebel, a bohemian, and a malcontent whose productive life occupied an intense three years when he wrote more than 200 songs, set to the words of Goethe, Keller, and others, and who ended his life in an asylum, Wolf surely awaits discovery by a Hollywood film director who sees in his art and life a modern tragedy of epic dimensions.
GEORG SIMMEL (1858–1918)
Taught by several of the fetid nationalist historians of his day (Treitschke, Sybel, Droysen), but also by the more open-minded Helmholtz, Simmel became more highly regarded abroad (especially in Russia and the United States) than in his own country, certainly among anti-Semitic university authorities. But he was among the first to identify the new moral conditions brought about by modernity, the conundrum that we are both more free and more responsible. He was the first to forecast that modern life would be “more nervous” and that “the lower intellectual functions would be promoted.”
ROBERT MUSIL (1880–1942)
For some, The Man without Qualities eclipses anything that Thomas Mann or Hermann Hesse wrote and is the most remarkable response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century. If all we can know about ourselves is what scientists tell us, if ethics and values are meaningless, how are we to live? Musil brilliantly exposes the central dilemma of modern life.
MAX SCHELER (1874–1928), RUDOLF BULTMANN (1884–1976), KARL BARTH (1886–1968), DIETRICH BONHOEFFER (1906–45)
The theological renaissance in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century is the third intellectual black hole that should be better appreciated. In the wake of the “death of God,” identified by Nietzsche, and the “disenchantment” of the world, as described by Max Weber, these other German theologians/philosophers produced a more cogent and coherent response to the “crisis conditions” than anyone else. The fact that two late twentieth-century popes, Jean Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) and Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) have picked up on their ideas, shows how these (Protestant) thinkers have been readily assimilated within the Catholic Church, if not yet outside it.
LION FEUCHTWANGER (1884–1958)
A man who escaped as a prisoner of war twice is clearly out of the ordinary and very brave. Bravery runs through his masterpiece, Success, in which such “characters” as Hitler and IG Farben are identified and excoriated. Thankfully, Feuchtwanger escaped to America. Had he not escaped, and instead perished, he would probably be more well known now than he is.
KARL JASPERS (1883–1969)
Jaspers’s identification of the “axial age,” of the origins of modern spirituality right across the world at more or less the same time (Isaiah, Confucius, the Buddha, Plato), mark him as one of the great synthesizers in history, explaining our world in a way that is every bit as fundamental as, say, John Dewey or William James, and possibly more so.
HEINRICH DRESER (1860–1924), ARTHUR EICHENGRÜN (1867–1949), FELIX HOFFMANN (1868–1946)
More than 40,000 tons of aspirin are now produced every year, more than a century after the drug’s invention. This is certainly one measure of its impact. Having early on shown its efficacy in cases of pain control, migraine, rheumatoid arthritis, fever, and influ
enza, as well as in the control of various veterinary diseases, in the last decades of the twentieth century the drug was found helpful as an anti-blood-clotting agent, and effective in the prevention of angina, heart attack, and strokes. This is more than enough to suggest that the names of Dreser, Eichengrün, and Hoffmann are engraved on any role of honor. They have certainly helped mankind much more than, for example, the far better known Carl Jung, who would surely lead any list of the most overrated German-speakers.
Notes and References
When two dates are given for a publication, the first refers to the hardcover edition, the second to the paperback edition. Unless otherwise stated, pagination refers to the paperback edition. All translations are from the German unless otherwise indicated. Every attempt has been made to trace the names of translators; the author would be grateful to hear from readers who can fill in the gaps that, inevitably, remain. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, referred to throughout these notes and references, was originally published in 16 volumes between 1970 and 1980 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, with Charles Coulston Gillispie as editor in chief. The index may be found in volume 16. Several supplements were published up until 1990. In 2008 a New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 8 volumes, was published in Detroit, also by Charles Scribner’s Sons and also under the auspices of the ACLS, with Noretta Koertge as editor in chief. This later venture, however, is nowhere near as comprehensive as the original DSB. In the references that follow, volume numbers given in roman numerals refer to the original DSB, while volume numbers given in Indo-Arabic numbers refer to the NDSB. Readers will thus be able to see for themselves which scientists were not included in the latest compendium. Some of the omissions are surprising.
INTRODUCTION: BLINDED BY THE LIGHT: HITLER, THE HOLOCAUST, AND THE “PAST THAT WILL NOT PASS AWAY”
1. These matters were discussed repeatedly in British newspapers, but many were collected together in John Ramsden’s Don’t Mention the War (London: Little, Brown, 2006), p. 393.2. Ramsden, Don’t Mention, p. 392.3. Ibid., p. 413.4. Ibid., p. 394.5. Ibid., p. 411.6. Ibid., p. 412.7. Ibid., p. 364. 8. Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2, 2007, p. 6.
2. Ramsden, Don’t Mention, p. 392.
3. Ibid., p. 413.
4. Ibid., p. 394.
5. Ibid., p. 411.
6. Ibid., p. 412.
7. Ibid., p. 364.
8. Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2, 2007, p. 6.
9. Ibid.
10. . Daily Telegraph, May 8, 2005, p. 18.
11. Ibid.
12. Ramsden, Don’t Mention, p. 402.
13. Ibid., p. 417.
14. International Herald Tribune, April 22, 2005.
15. D. D. Gutenplan, The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case (London: Granta, 2001).
16. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 2.
17. Novick, Holocaust, p. 69.
18. Ibid., p. 105.
19. Ibid., p. 65.
20. Ibid., p. 144.
21. Ibid., p. 164.
22. Ibid., p. 202.
23. Ibid., p. 232.
24. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Versa, 2000), passim.
25. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 55.
26. Ibid., p. 56.
27. Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London: Tauris, 1989), p. 13.
28. Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1999), p. 36.
29. Maier, Unmasterable Past, p. 101.
30. Ibid., p. 54.
31. Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 54–56.
32. London Daily Mail, February 15, 2007, p. 43.
33. Steve Crawshaw, An Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 199.
34. Peter Watson, “Battle over Hitler’s Loot,” London Observer Magazine, July 21, 1996, pp. 28ff.
35. Pierre Péan, A French Youth: François Mitterrand, 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
36. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), passim.
37. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
38. See Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France, pp. 341 ff. for what Vichy knew about the Final Solution.
39. See, for example, Lee Yanowitch, “France to Boost Efforts to Restore Nazi-looted Property to Jews,” Jewish News Weekly, December 4, 1998.40. Times (London), October 13, 2007, p. 52.
41. Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History: From Unification to Re-unification, 1800–1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 149 ff.
42. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 77.
43. Ibid., p. 465.
44. Evans, Rereading German History, pp. 155ff.
45. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961/1974), p. 202. A comparison of anti-Semitic acts and attitudes toward Jews in the popular press of Germany and four European nations (France, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania) from 1899 through 1939 demonstrates that Germans, before 1933, were among the least anti-Semitic people. William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate:Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 6. Until that point, no census in Germany had gathered data on ethnicity. Quoted in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 9. Fritz Stern also tells us that Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book The Third Reich was a major work of cultural pessimism in the Weimar Republic, helping to create the mood in which the National Socialist Party could thrive, showed no sign of anti-Semitism in his many books published before World War I (see Chapter 33).
46. Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldenhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Holt), 1998.
47. Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 276–278.
48. Finkelstein and Birn, Nation on Trial, p. 139.
49. Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History, p. 164. Goldhagen also avoids saying just what anti-Semitism means. As Clive James points out in his essay on the Austrian Jewish dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, “If he encountered anti-Semitism in grand [Viennese] drawing rooms, there were few grand drawing-rooms he could not enter.” Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (London: Picador, 2007), pp. 684–705.
50. Stern, Einstein’s German World, p. 287.
51. Crawshaw, Easier Fatherland, p. 144.
52. Kansteiner, In Pursuit, pp. 104, 109, 116 and 210. A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially pp. 55–73. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhalterns (Munich: Piper, 1967). Ralf Blank et al., German Wartime Society 1939–1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). Max Hastings, “Germans Confront the Nazi Past,” New York Review of Books, February 26–March 11, 2009, pp. 16–18.
53. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow, p. 12. Leopold von Ranke, “Die grosse Mächte,” in the same author’s Preussische Geschichte, ed. Willy Andrews (Wiesbaden, 1833), vol. 1, p. 16. I thank Werner Pfennig for this reference.
54. Maier, Unmasterable Past, p. 103.
55. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow, p. 13.
56. David Blackbourn and Geoffrey Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), passim. Maier, Unmasterable Past, p. 107. In February 1871, three weeks before the Proclamation of the German Empire in Versailles, Benjamin Disraeli, at that time leader of Britain’s opposition, said in the House of Commons that German unification would be “a greater political event than even the French Revolution” and that the European balance of power “is completely destroyed with no new one in sight.” Walter Dussman, “Das Zeitalter Bismarcks,” in Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte. (Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1968), vol. 2, part 2, p. 129. Richard Münch also compared the development of the Enlightenment in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany and concluded that four elements are decisive for what is modern, despite many differences: rationalism, activism, individualism, universalism. See his Die Kultur der Moderne, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). I thank Werner Pfenning for this reference.
57. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow, p. 17.
58. Ibid., p. 141.
59. Maier, Unmasterable Past, p. 161.
60. Ibid., p. 168.
61. Crawshaw, Easier Fatherland, p. 202.
62. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 4.
63. Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 4.