by Peter Watson
Copyright
THE GERMAN GENIUS. Copyright © 2010 by Peter Watson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201846-5
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* In Germany it is also punishable by law to tell “the Auschwitz lie.”
* David Irving’s imprisonment in 2006, under the Holocaust-denial law, was unusual. In 2004, the latest year for which figures are available, 724 people were prosecuted for denying the Holocaust in Austria, a figure which can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it shows that the Austrians were assiduous in enforcing the statute. On the other, it could be held to show that, sixty years after the end of World War Two, such a law was still badly needed.
* The book was published in German in 1989, a year before Elias’s death.
* The stallmaster was held in such high regard that his place in academic processions came before that of the associate professors.40
* In France, even pornography was published in Latin in the eighteenth century.
* In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II described himself as “the No. 1 German,” but in saying this, as Anderson points out, “he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans, something inconceivable in, say, Frederick the Great’s day.”68
* Whereas English distinguished between freedom and liberty, in German there is only “Freiheit.”
* Some of this is lost in translation. The phrase sounds better in German: edle Einfalt und stille Grösse.
* Klassik, to distinguish from the classicism of antiquity.
* Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht: es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.
* There were three Horae, goddesses of the (three) Greek seasons; they also guarded the gates of Olympus.
* Wissenschaft in German means both science and scholarship.
* Alexander Herzen (1812–70), writer and “father of Russian socialism.”
* Goethe himself didn’t agree. He later wrote, “Romanticism is disease, classicism is health.”
* He is even credited with knowing certain Irish dialects.
* This corresponds with Mephistopheles’ statement in Faust II: “For everyone knows that might is right. Not ‘how’ but ‘what’ is all one asks!” “Man hat Gewalt, so hat man Recht / Man fragt ums Was, und nicht ums Wie.”
* Ordinary homes would not be fitted with gas lighting until later in the century.
* The name is a corruption of the Arabic, Lubn Jwi, or “incense of java,” later corrupted by Portuguese merchants to benjawi, Benjamin, benzoin. Used in church incenses, it was isolated as early as 1557.
* It should also be remembered that the development of iron steamers made transatlantic travel much quicker, cheaper, and safer.
* Though the suspension chord (Vorhaltsakkord) could first be heard in the Call of the Sirens, Ruf der Sirenen, in Tannhaüser.
* About £28 billion at 2010 prices, though making historical comparisons of this kind is notoriously unreliable owing to the much greater liquidity available now than in the past.
* The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and was first reviewed in early January 1900.
* As this book goes to press, there is an ongoing (unpleasant) debate in a district of Berlin about renaming Treitschke Street.
* Britain at 1900 = 100
* This is also the basis of the television tube. The positive plate, the anode, was reconfigured with a glass cylinder attached, after which it was found that a beam of cathode rays passed through the vacuum toward the anode made the glass fluoresce.
* If you have difficulty visualizing something that is both a particle and a wave, you are in good company. We are dealing here with qualities that are essentially mathematical, and all visual analogies will be inadequate. Niels Bohr, a Dane who was arguably one of the twentieth century’s top two physicists, said that anyone who wasn’t made “dizzy” by the very idea of what later physicists called “quantum weirdness” had lost the plot.
* The Goldmark was introduced in 1873, replacing the varied currencies of the different German states, most of which were linked to the Vereinsthaler, a silver coin of 16.6 grams; one Goldmark = three Vereinsthaler.
* The Rembrandt was subsequently shown to have been produced, perhaps, by his assistants.
* In Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (1913).
* Later he planned to be buried in a crypt in “Germania” (Berlin) surrounded by his dead field marshals.
* “Kaiserwetter” is still used today, humorously.
* After the burning of the Reichstag, the premises of the Kroll Opera were used for the Parliament.
† Although jazz was banned inside Germany, swing was allowed in propaganda broadcasts to other nations, to attract listeners. There was also a “Propaganda Cabaret,” led by Lutz Templin. In addition Göring established a small number of dance orchestras to play late-night concerts on the radio, and to go on tours.
* Its library eventually contained half a million books, all looted.
* After Carl von Ossietsky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936, no German was allowed to accept any of the Nobel Prizes.
* Oberländer later was made a federal minister in one of Adenauer’s cabinets.
* His controversial career falls outside the scope of this book.
* A celebrated poem is attributed to Niemöller, though he himself always said he could not remember when he had first used the famous words, which read: “In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist/And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist/And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew/And then…they came for me…And by that time there was no one left to speak up.” Niemöller was in Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1937 to 1945 but survived. Following a meeting with Otto Hahn, he began campaigning for nuclear disarmament and in 1961 became president of the World Council of Churches.
* Which means, says John Cornwell, one in every 300 of the German medical community.
* Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artist
s and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (University of California Press, 1983 and 1997, with a new postcript) is by far the most enjoyable book about refugees in America, beautifully written and by turns funny and moving.
* Allegedly, he asked her out, to which she replied, “I don’t go out with Nazis.”
* The Hitler Emigrés, 2002, a book as enjoyable for its rich footnotes as for its text. I have relied heavily on Mr. Snowman’s account.
* Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
* The success of the American-led airlift means that, among Germans, West Berliners have generally been more supportive of the United States than have their countrymen elsewhere.
* The German phrase, “Gnade der späten Geburt,” was originally coined by Günter Gaus and had an easier reception.
* When Crawshaw visited the Georg Eckert Institute for Schoolbook Research in Braunschweig, he found the way the “vast bulk” of textbooks avoided confronting the truth “remarkable.” With these, he said, the tone changed earlier, after the Eichmann trial in 1961.
