Land of poets and thinkers

The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to the achievements of German culture. Watson describes the complaints of German commentators about the emphasis on Nazism even in British schooling, which were borne out by the 2005 report of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and “Hitlerisation” of post-1914 history.’

Watson also discusses the importance of Nazism to America, and his most intriguing point is that interest in the Holocaust is a comparatively recent phenomenon. A study in the 1950s found that the effect of the Holocaust on American Jews was ‘remarkably slight’. Attitudes began to change with the Eichmann trial in 1961 and, in particular, the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

So an introduction to other German history is welcome. Anglo-German relations seem to be experiencing something of a cultural moment. The popularity of Berlin is bringing far more British people to Germany than in previous decades and, during the last World Cup there was a marked absence of English goose-stepping (in contrast to Euro ’96, when the Mirror printed the infamous headline ‘Achtung Surrender!’ and the Sun ‘Let’s Blitz Fritz’.)

Watson focuses on the Germany perhaps now more accessible to Britons, the ‘land of poets and thinkers’. It would necessarily be a titanic undertaking to discuss, among others, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Planck, Einstein, Beethoven and Wagner. However, he has made the decision to base his book almost entirely on secondary sources. This results in such oddities as his trying to explain the eminence of Schiller by offering synopses of his plays, which is rather like explaining the importance of Shakespeare by saying that one of his plays is set in Denmark.