The German Genius, Peter Watson

From the end of the Baroque age to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into the dominant intellectual and cultural force in the Western world. In the early decades of the twentieth century German artists, writers, scholars, philosophers, scientists and engineers were leading their country to new heights, and by 1933 Germany had won more Nobel prizes than any other nation, including Britain and America put together. How did the Germans transform their country so as to achieve such pre-eminence? In this absorbing cultural and intellectual history, Peter Watson explores the historical origins of the German genius and convincingly demonstrates that it was German thinking – from Beethoven to Kant to Diesel and Nietzsche, from Goethe and Wagner to Mendel and Planck, from Hegel and Marx to Freud and Schonberg – that has done more than anything else to create the modern West,