The German Genius
Page 122
Wasserman, August von, 388, 390
Waves of Sea and Love, The (Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen) (Grillparzer), 294
Way of All Flesh, The (film), 592
Weavers, The (Die Weber) (Hauptmann), 524
Weber, Alfred, 532, 608, 649, 690, 770
Weber, Carl Maria von, 160, 173, 328
Weber, Karl, 95
Weber, Marianne, 690
Weber, Max, 455–458, 649
Breuer, Stefan, on, 455
on community, 836
contemporary world of ideas and, 819, 822–823, 825–826
Dahrendorf on, 764
influence of, 713
Pan-German League and, 421
on The Philosophy of Money, 447
Schumpeter’s opposition to, 704
on Sombart, 453
on World War I, 535
Weber, Wilhelm, 173, 350
Webern, Anton von, 585, 643
Wedekind, Frank, 511, 514–515, 563, 585
Weerth, Georg, 304
Wegener, Alfred, 557–558
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 25–28
Weidenfeld, George, 745, 747–748
Weidermann, Volker, 29, 798–799
Weierstrass, Karl, 486
Weill, Kurt, 568, 586, 590, 641
Weimar (city), 111, 114, 128, 312
Weimar Republic, 567–593
as betrayal of German political ideals, 34
cinema, 587–593
doctors in, 661
music, 583–587
Weingartner, Felix von, 533
Weininger, Otto, 495
Weinrich, Max, 759–760
Weiss, Peter, 780, 793, 803
Weisse Rose (White Rose) resistance group (Munich), 690
Weisskopf, Victor, 739
Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich von, 691
Welles, Orson, 593
Welt, Die (periodical), 843
Weltbühne, Die (magazine), 581, 582, 583
Wenders, Wim, 807–808
Werefkin, Marianne von, 515, 516
Werfel, Franz, 564, 701, 702, 735
Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 117, 167–170, 178
Werner, Anton von, 526–527
Wertheimer, Max, 716, 732
Weskott, Johann Friedrich, 362
Western Cannon, The (Bloom), 296
Westminster Review, 331
Westöstlicher Divan (Goethe), 192
Westphalia, Treaty of (1648), 44, 289
Weyl, Hermann, 487, 659
Weyrauch, Wolfgang, 799
What Does the German Worker Read? (Was liest der deutsche Arbeiter?) (Pfannkuche), 428
What I Have Heard about Adolf Hitler (survey, 1977), 780
“What Is Life” (lectures, Schrödinger), 708
What Remains (Was bleibt) (C. Wolf), 795
Wheen, Francis, 819
white generation (weisse Jahrgänge), 761
Whitney, William Dwight, 324
Whittle, Frank, 600
Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?) (Sombart), 452
Wickmann, Karl, 215
Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums, Die (Voigt), 92
Wiedermann, Gustav, 343
Wieland, Christoph, 112–113
Wienberg, Rudolf, 303
Wiene, Robert, 568
Wiener, Alfred, 749–750
Wiesenthal, Simon, 14
Wigman, Mary, 804
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 105, 533
Wilder, Billy, 587, 588, 589, 590–591, 593
Wilhelm I (emperor), 418, 519
Albert and, 321
Krupp and, 371
modern music and, 525–526
Reinhardt’s production and, 525
Wilhelm II (emperor), 321
dislike of Berlin, 522–523
Werner tutor of, 527
World War I and, 536
Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), 119–120, 197–198
Wilhelm Tell (Schiller), 131
Wilkins, Maurice, 709
Williams, Raymond, 619
Willis, Thomas, 68
Willkom, Ernst, 304
Willstätter, Richard, 533, 595–596
“Will zum Gluck, Der” (T. Mann), 511
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 30, 95–100, 207, 208–209, 210, 211
Wind, Edgar, 753
Wings of Desire (film), 807–808
Winkler, Heinrich, 843
Winter, Jay, 732
Wintergerst, Joseph, 216
Winterreise, Die (Schubert), 307
Wirth, Herman, 655, 656
Wissenschaft, 53. See also science
Berlin University and, 87
Bildung versus, 838
Britain and, 538
Schelling on, 229
“Wissenschaft als Berug” (Science as a Vocation) (Weber), 457
Wissenschaft des Judentums, 619
Wissenschaftlichkeit as part of Bildung, 110
Wissenschaftsideologie, 228, 229, 230, 237
Wissenschaftsleher (Fichte), 119, 148–149, 150
Wistar, Caspar, 326
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 494, 552, 558–560, 561, 601, 753
Wittkower, Rudolf, 734, 753
Wöhler, Friedrich, 272, 273, 274, 275, 853
Wojtyla, Karol (John Paul II), 604
Wolf, Christa, 795, 796, 833
Wolf, Friedrich August, 105–108, 124, 832
classical philology and, 230
critical approach of, 232
on role of professors, 226, 228
student of Heyne, 228
at University of Berlin, 227, 228
Wolf, Hugo, 37, 305, 459, 462–463, 854
Wolf, Konrad, 806
Wolff, Abraham, 48
Wolff, Albert, 215
Wolff, Christian, 88, 136, 137
Wolff, Kaspar Friedrich, 281
Wolff, Kurt and Helen, 735
Wolin, Richard, 720, 772
Wollheim, Gert, 699
Wollheim, Richard, 753
Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 810–811
Woltmann, Ludwig, 431, 614
women’s movement, 425, 794
women writers in East Germany, 795
Woodward, Josiah, 316
Woolsey, Thomas Dwight, 324
“Word for the Germans, A” (Eliot), 316
Words and Things (Gellner), 755
Worker, The (Der Arbeiter) (Jünger), 709
Works of Art of the Future, The (Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) (Wagner), 328
World as Will and Representation, The (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) (Schopenhauer), 327, 331, 394
World War I, 531–545
artists in Zurich during, 563–564
novels about, 579
poetry of, 547, 548–549
World War II
birthdate and, 761
Dietrich, Marlene, during, 593
music during, 809
Woyzeck (Büchner), 301–303
Woyzeck (opera, Berg), 302, 585
Wundt, Wilhelm, 33, 493, 533, 554, 682
Wyler, William, 736
X
x-rays, 480
Y
Yale University, German-trained professors at, 324
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (Vilna), 759
You and Me (film), 590
Youth Movement, 429
Z
Zadkine, Ossip, 702
Zander, Michael, 746
Zeiss, Carl Fridrich, 365–366
Zeit, Die (newspaper), 490
Zeitgeist, 125, 497
Zeitgenossen, Die (Moeller van den Bruck), 617
Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft (journal), 726
Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 591
Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzbebiete (journal), 663
Zero (art group), 811
Ziegler, Adolf, 632, 643
Ziegler, Wilhelm, 656
Zimbalist, Efrem, 702
/> Zimmer, Ernst, 292
Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 810
Zinnemann, Fred, 587, 588, 590
Zionism, 499, 608, 609, 682
Zivilisation versus Kultur, 31, 532, 535–536, 838
Zmarzlik, Hans-Günter, 428
Zollverein, 370, 424
Zsigmondy, Richard, 390
Zuckmayer, Carl, 513, 586, 592, 738
“Zum ewigen Frieden” (Of Eternal peace) (Kant), 199
Zur Geschichte und Literatur (periodical), 103
“Zur Kritik neuerer Gechichtschreiber” (Ranke), 267
Zuse, Konrad, 693
Zwanzigst Jahrhundert, Das (magazine), 510–511
Zweig, Stefan, 49, 490, 641, 700, 746
Zwischen den Zeiten (journal), 677
About the Author
PETER WATSON has been a senior editor at the London Sunday Times, the New York correspondent of the daily Times, and a columnist for the Observer. He has also written regularly for the New York Times and the Spectator. He is the author of several books of cultural and intellectual history, most recently Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. From 1997 to 2007 he was a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He lives in London.
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Praise
The split between Germany and the West will of necessity always be an important theme for historians.
—HAJO HOLBORN
The word “genius” in German has a special overtone, even a tinge of the demonic, a mysterious power and energy; a genius—whether artist or scientist—is considered to have a special vulnerability, a precariousness, a life of constant risk and often close to troubled turmoil.
—FRITZ STERN
Geographically, America is for us among civilised countries the most distant; intellectually and spiritually, however, the closest and most like us.
—ADOLF VON HARNACK
Asked in 1898 to choose a single defining event in recent history, the German Chancellor Bismarck replied, “North America speaks English.”
—NICHOLAS OSTLER
Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.
—ALLAN BLOOM
The Germans dive deeper—but they come up muddier.
—WICKHAM STEED
For those [Germans] born during and after the Second World War the cultural history of Germany before 1933 is that of a lost country, one that they never knew.
—KEITH BULLIVANT
For countless Americans, Germany remains the ultimate metaphor of evil, the frightening reminder of the fragility of civilisation.
—DEIDRE BERGER
The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth…. In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men.
—ADOLF HITLER
The Nazis are un-German.
—VICTOR KLEMPERER
Patriotism for the Frenchman is such that it warms his heart dilating it and expanding it, so he embraces in his love not only those closest to him but the whole of France, the entire country of his civilisation. The patriotism of the German on the contrary is such that his heart becomes narrower and shrinks like leather in the cold. He hates foreigners and no longer wishes to be a citizen of the world, but a mere German.
—HEINRICH HEINE
People in England want something to read, the French something to taste, the Germans something to think about.
—KURT TUCHOLSKY
The Germans are not bastardised by alien people, they have not become mongrels. They have preserved their original purity more than many other peoples and have been able to develop slowly and quietly from this purity according to the lasting laws of time; the fortunate Germans are an original people.
—ERNST MORITZ ARNDT
It was [Hippolyte] Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830.
—JOHN DEWEY
The Planet is in flames…Only from the Germans can come the world-historical reflection, provided that they find and preserve their German element.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER
We see in Germany, even more than elsewhere, a division of labour between genius and tradition; nowhere are the types of the young rebel and the tireless pedant so common and so extreme.
—GEORGE SANTAYANA
I cannot think of a nation that is more torn than the Germans, you see workmen but no human beings, masters and servants, young people and sedate, but no human beings…
—FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN
Anyone who still said that they liked Caspar David Friedrich stood accused for decades of not being sufficiently critical with regard to German history.
—FLORIAN ILLIES
Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian…
—HANNAH ARENDT
German suffering and Jewish suffering are not equal…They are, however, both real.
—STEVE CRAWSHAW
In several respects, American intellectual life is today closer to the German than the British.
—HENRI PEYRE
The German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to de-claim from behind a woollen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term.
—ERWIN PANOFKSY
Freud is better in German.
—FRANK KERMODE
Death is a master from Germany.
—PAUL CELAN
Whoever begins to question this society [Germany], eventually questions himself out of it.
—RALF DAHRENDORF
German problems are rarely German problems alone.
—RALF DAHRENDORF
It has always struck me as particularly interesting that so many of the great debunking analysts of modern culture have been German or Austrian, not English or French.
—FRITZ RINGER
The Allies won [the Second World War] because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.
—SIR IAN JACOBS, MILITARY SECRETARY TO WINSTON CHURCHILL
As a result of the Second World War, being German became an international stigma that had to be borne stoically and, at best, could be attenuated through good behaviour.
—KONRAD JARAUSCH
The cultural legacy of German Jewry is German.
—BARBARA JOHN, BERLIN FOREIGNERS COMMISSIONER
But under what suspicion one comes, if one says, the Germans are now a completely normal people, a regular society.
—MARTIN WALSER
There is too much music in Germany.
—ROMAIN ROLLAND
And the world may finally be healed by Germanism.
—EMANUEL GEIBEL
The way Germans confront their history will be of crucial significance not just for Germany but for all of Europe as well.
—HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER
Don’t you guys know you are in Hollywood? Speak German.
—OTTO PREMINGER, TO A GROUP OF HUNGARIAN ÉMIGRÉS
All of German literature [has] settled in America.
—THOMAS MANN
We poor Germans! We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are “famous”! No one really likes us.
—THOMAS MANN
So long as the Germans speak German and I speak English, a genuine dialogue between us is possible; we shall not simply be addressing our mirror images.
—W. H. AUDEN
Hitler was “the mirror of every German’s unconscious…the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul.”
—CARL JUNG
—MARK TWAIN
To this day we hardly recognise that a phenomenon occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was as remarkable as that outburst of creativity we call the Renaissance in Italy. It was the German Renaissance—the renaissance of a culture mutilated by the Thirty Years War.
—NOEL ANNAN
No one is a Nazi, no one ever was…It should be set to music.
—MARTHA GELLHORN
Germany is not part of the West. But Germany will never be able to do without it.
—GREGOR SCHÖLLGEN
[Germany] is probably the most grown-up country in the world today.
—MARK MARDELL
The memory of the Third Reich has intensified with increasing temporal distance to the Nazi past.
—HERMANN LÜBBE
It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “What is German?” never dies out among them.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Defeated in two world wars, Germany appeared to have invaded vast territories of the World’s mind.
—ERICH HELLER
Can one be a musician without being German?
—THOMAS MANN
The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.
—PETER WATSON
1989 was the brightest moment in Europe’s darkest century.
—FRITZ STERN
ALSO BY PETER WATSON
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums
Sotheby’s: The Inside Story
The Death of Hitler
From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market
Wisdom and Strength: The Biography of a Renaissance Masterpiece
The Caravaggio Conspiracy
Credits
Jacket design by Christopher Sergio