The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  43. Ibid., p. 81.

  CHAPTER 29: THE GREAT WAR BETWEEN HEROES AND TRADERS

  1. Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 2.

  2. Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 49. Elias, The Germans, p. 181.

  3. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 134.

  4. Stibbe, German Anglophobia, p. 50.

  5. Ibid., p. 51.

  6. Ibid., p. 52.

  7. Ibid., p. 54.

  8. Hans Heinz Krill, Die Rankerenaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks; Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken in Deutschland, 1880–1935 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962), pp. 6–12 and 67–69 for Lenz and 174–187 for his ideas of nationality; pp. 42ff. for Marcks; pp. 211ff. for the role of propaganda in World War I.

  9. For Meinecke, see Stefan Meinecke, Friedrich Meinecke: Persönlichkeit und politisches Denken bis zum Ende des ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995); also Stibbe, German Anglophobia, p. 63.

  10. Arden Bucholz, ed. and trans., Delbrück’s Modern Military History (Lincoln, Neb., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

  11. Anton Mirko Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich: Beck, 1968), p. 183. See also H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Scribners, 1952), p. 57.

  12. Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler: Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: Beck, 1988), pp. 68–76.

  13. Marchand, Down from Olympus, p. 240.

  14. Stibbe, German Anglophobia, p. 74.

  15. Ibid., p. 75.

  16. Ibid., p. 78.

  17. Volker Berghahn, Perspectives on History (the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, September 10, 2007): http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2000/0003/0003mem/cfm.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Fritz Stern, Failure of Illiberalism, p. 152. See Fritz Fischer, World Power or Decline: The Controversy over Germany’s Aims in the First World War, trans. Lancelot L. Farrar, Robert Kimber, and Rita Kimber (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), for a reconsideration of the issue a decade later. “Treason” is discussed on p. viii.

  20. Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 8.

  21. Hanna, Mobilization of Intellect, p. 12.

  22. Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), p. 7.

  23. Ibid., p. 38. Ariel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture and the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 44.

  24. Hanna, Mobilization of Intellect, p. 22.

  25. Marchand, Down from Olympus, pp. 245–246.

  26. Ibid., p. 258.

  27. John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics (New York: Henry Holt, 1915), p. 35.

  28. Ibid., p. 14.

  29. Ibid., p. 17.

  30. Ibid., pp. 30–31.

  31. Ibid., p. 45.

  32. Ibid., p. 37.

  33. Ibid., pp. 62–63.

  34. Ibid., p. 73.

  35. Ibid., p. 100.

  36. George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (London: J. M. Dent, 1916), p. xiii.

  37. Ibid., p. xviii.

  38. Ibid., p. 170.

  39. Ibid., p. 62.

  40. Ibid., p. 89.

  41. Ibid., p. 103.

  42. Ibid., p. 130.

  43. Ibid., p. 168.

  44. Trevor Dupuy, A Genius for War (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977), p. 5. David Stone, in Fighting for the Fatherland: The Story of the German Soldier from 1648 to the Present Day (London: Conway, 2006), says, however, that toward the end of the war the Germans could renew their units with fresh men, much more than—in this case—the French. “In mid-March 1918 almost 200 German divisions stood ready to inflict that final crushing blow that would at least enable Germans to achieve their historic destiny” (p. 284). Then came the “stab-in-the-back.”

  45. Dupuy, Genius for War, p. 177.

  46. Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 240.

  47. Dupuy, Genius for War, p. 7.

  48. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

  49. David Charles, Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp. 156–157.

  CHAPTER 30: PRAYERS FOR A FATHERLESS CHILD: THE CULTURE OF THE DEFEATED

  1. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, p. 152. (The title for this chapter is taken from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery (London: Granta, 2003).

  2. Patrick Bridgwater, The German Poets of the First World War (London: Croom, Helm, 1985), Foreword. Roshwald and Stites, eds., European Culture, p. 32.

  3. Karl Ludwig Schneider, Der bildhafte Ausdruck in den Dichtungen Georg Heyms, Georg Trakls und Ernst Stadlers: Studien zum lyrischen Sprachstil des deutschen Expressionismus (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1961); Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: O. Müller, 1954).

  4. Bridgwater, German Poets, p. 16.

  5. Ibid., p. 191.

  6. Ibid., p. 169.

  7. Jeremy Adler, ed., August Stramm: Alles ist Gedicht; Briefe, Gedichte, Bilder, Dokumente (Zurich: Arche, 1990), pp. 95ff. for the poems, 9ff. for his letters from the war. Photo frontispiece.

  8. Francis Sharp says few poets “of any nationality or language have come to such serenely poetic terms with the holocaust of twentieth-century warfare.” Francis Sharp, The Poet’s Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 188.

  9. Bridgwater, German Poets, p. 171.

  10. Ibid., p. 44.

  11. Ibid., p. 172.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Roshwald and Stites, eds., European Culture, pp. 38–39 for film, p. 50 for Toller, pp. 150–151 for Kraus.

  14. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (London: Little, Brown, 2004), pp. 207, 257.

  15. Ibid., pp. 316–321. William McGuire, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (London: Hogarth Press: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

  16. Paul Lerner, “Rationalising the Therapeutic Arsenal: German Neuropsychiatry in World War I,” in Berg and Cocks, eds., Medicine and Modernity, pp. 121–128.

  17. David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 250.

  18. Roger M. McCoy, Ending in Ice: The Revolutionary Idea and Tragic Expedition of Alfred Wegener (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 31.

  19. Joachim Schulte, et al., eds., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen: Kritischgenetische Edition (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 2001). A good introduction.

  20. Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein, Frege and the Vienna Circle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 51ff. and 101ff.

  21. Pasquale Frascella, Understanding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Routledge, 2007), chapters 2, 4, and 6.

  22. Baker, Wittgenstein, pp. 101ff.

  23. Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 282ff.

  24. Herman, The Idea of Decline, p. 228.

  25. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, pp. 171–172.

  26. Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler: Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: Beck, 1988), pp. 58ff.

  27. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, p. 173.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Walter Lacquer, New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1983, p. 1.

  30. Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 289.

  31. Lacquer, New York Times Book Review, p. 2.


  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Eugen Egger, Hugo Ball: Ein Weg aus dem Chaos (Otten: Otto Walter, 1951), pp. 41ff.

  35. Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 90ff. See also Dominique Noguez, Lénine dada: Essai (Paris: Robert Laf-font, 1989).

  36. Peter Schifferli, ed., Dada: Die Geburt des Dada; Dichtung und Chronik der Gründer/Mit Photos und Dokumenten. [In Zusammenarbeit mit] Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck [und] Tristan Zara (Zurich: Im Verlag der Arche, 1957). Leah Dickerman, with essays by Brigid Doherty, et al., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in Association with Distributed Art Publishers, 2005).

  37. Eric Robertson, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor (London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 36ff.

  38. Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 37ff. See also Kate Traumann Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters: Erinnerungen aus den Jahen, 1918–30 (Zurich: Arche, 1963).

  39. Walter Mehring, Berlin Dada: Eine Chronik mit Photos und Dokumenten (Zurich: Arche, 1959).

  40. Uwe M. Schneede, George Grosz: His Life and Work, trans. Susanne Flatauer (London: Gordon Fraser, 1979), pp. 14–15.

  41. Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 1–21.

  42. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (London: Granta, 2003), p. 247.

  43. Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schröter, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 7.

  CHAPTER 31: WEIMAR: “UNPRECEDENTED MENTAL ALERTNESS”

  1. Otto Freundlich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (London: Harper, 1995), p. 175. For excellent photographs of Berlin in the 1920s, see Rainer Metzger, Berlin in the Twenties: Art and Culture 1918–1933 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), passim. Elias, The Germans, pp. 214ff.

  2. See, for example, Hans-Jürgen Buderer, Neue Sachlichkeit: Bilder auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit; Figurative Malerei der zwanziger Jahre (Munich: Prestel, 1994); and Bärbel Schrader, The Golden Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic, trans. Katherine Vanovitch (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1988).

  3. Ian Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (London: Wallflower, 2008), p. 25, gives new archival research on Wiene.

  4. S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 8ff.

  5. For Gropius, see Kathleen James-Chakraborty, eds., Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War (Minneapolis, Minn., and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 26ff.

  6. Lutz Schöbe and Wolfgang Thöner, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau: Die Sammlung (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1995), pp. 29f.

  7. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

  8. Lee Congden, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Exiles in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 181.

  9. Dick Geary, Karl Krautsky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 58.

  10. Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung (Munich: Hanser, 1986), pp. 36ff.

  11. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, contains portraits of the main characters between pp. 55 and 123.

  12. Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 688. See also Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George: die Entdeckung des Charisma; Biographie (Munich: Karl Blessing, 2007).

  13. Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 111.

  14. For Rilke’s debt to Freud, see Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner, eds., Rilke und die Moderne: Londoner Symposion (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), pp. 49ff.

  15. Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977), vol. 1, p. 4.

  16. Karl Corino, Robert Musil: Eine Biographie (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003), pp. 993ff. See David S. Luft, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 115–125 for general background.

  17. For the links between Kafka and Musil, see Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Harcourt, 2005), pp. 401–412.

  18. Wolfgang Jeske, Lion Feuchtwanger, oder, Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), pp. 238ff.

  19. Christine Barker and R. W. Last, Erich Maria Remarque (London: Oswald Wolff, 1979), p. 13.

  20. Hilton Tims, Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic (London: Constable, 2003), p. 53.

  21. Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, p. 60.

  22. John Willett, The New Sobriety: 1917–1933; Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), p. 193.

  23. Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, pp. 151–152. James, Cultural Amnesia, pp. 55 and 400.

  24. Andreas Jacob, Grundbegriffe der Musiktheorie Arnold Schönbergs (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), vol. 1, p. 374. For Kessler, see Harry Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Harry Kessler (New York: Grove, 2000).

  25. Freundlich, Before the Deluge, p. 180.

  26. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, pp. 206–207.

  27. John Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (London and Boston: Faber, 1979), pp. 15ff. and 80ff. See Kathryn Bailey, The Life of Webern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 116ff., for more details about the musical culture of the time in Germany.

  28. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, p. 207.

  29. For other American influences at that time, see Elizabeth Harvey, “Culture and Society in Weimar Gremany: The Impact of Modernism and Mass Culture,” in Mary Fulbrook, ed., Twentieth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society 1918–1990 (London: Arnold, 2001), p. 62.

  30. Hans Mayer, Brecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 323ff.

  31. Walter Lacquer, Weimar, A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), p. 153.

  32. John Fuegi, Brecht & Co.: Biographie (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1997), pp. 271ff.

  33. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, p. 192.

  34. Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 12. See also Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill 1900–1950: Eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz: Schott, 1990), pp. 77ff.

  35. Keith Bullivant, ed., Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 50ff., for the differences between Brecht and Alfred Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

  36. See Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), where the author argues that, in the 1920s, Germany was poised to overtake America in film production.

  37. Dietrich Scheunemann, ed., Expressionist Film: New Perspectives (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2003), p. 25.

  38. Ibid., p. 38.

  39. Harvey, “Culture and Society,” pp. 68ff.

  40. Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (London: Faber, 1997), p. 148.

  41. Charlotte Chandler, Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder; A Personal Biography (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 60.

  42. Luzi Korngold, Erich Wolfgang Korngold: ein Lebensbild (Vienna: Elisabeth Lafite, 1967), pp. 62ff.

  43. Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), p. 32.

  44. Marlene Dietrich, ABC meines Lebens (Berlin: Blanvalet, 1963). See in particular the entries under Hollywood and Billy Wilder,.

  45. G
uido Knopp, Hitler’s Women—and Marlene, trans. Angus McGeoch (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), p. 266.

  CHAPTER 32: WEIMAR: THE GOLDEN AGE OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND HISTORY

  1. John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists (London: Viking, 2003; Penguin, 2004), p. 111.

  2. Ibid., p. 114.

  3. Charles P. Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 84ff.

  4. David C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), pp. 127f.

  5. Leo Corry, David Hilbert and the Axiomatisation of Physics (1898–1918): From Grundlagen der Geometrie to Grundlagen der Physik (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004).

  6. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, The End of the Certain World (New York: Wiley, 2005).

  7. Einstein thought there were two kinds of scientific theory—“principled” theories, like the equivalence between gravity and acceleration, where reality “unfurls” from basic principles, and “constructive” theories, like quantum theory, where the underlying principle has yet to be found. Interest in Einstein’s more philosophical views has been growing recently. See Amanda Gefter, “Power of the Mind,” New Scientist 2529 (December 10, 2005): 54–55.

  8. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 104.

  9. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  10. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 110.

  11. Glyn Jones, The Jet Pioneers: The Birth of Jet-Powered Flight (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 41–49.

  12. Ibid., pp. 142ff.

  13. Corry, David Hilbert.

  14. John W. Dawson Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 1997), p. 55.

  15. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, p. 271. Furthermore, as Roger Penrose has pointed out, Gödel’s “open-ended mathematical intuition is fundamentally incompatible with the existing structure of physics.”

  16. Michael Stöltzner and Thomas Uebel, eds., Wiener Kreis: Texte zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung von Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, Edgar Zilsel und Gustav Bergmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 2006). See the introduction, pp. ix–civ, 315ff. and 362ff. for Carnap, 503f. for Gödel.

  17. Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), p. 86.