important “but,” this need not be taken as a criticism of Germany. It may well be that this different understanding of the way our intellectual activities should be organized is a crucial point, an instructive difference. At the very least, lessons are to be learned from difference. Consider, for example, these statements.
“The twentieth century should have been the German century.” The words were written by the American academic Norman Cantor; he was speaking at the time about the devastating effect the Nazi regime had on Germany’s leading historians, such as Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz. Next, there is this sentence, in Fritz Stern’s Einstein’s German World : “It could have been Germany’s century.” This time it was Raymond Aron speaking, the French philosopher talking to Stern when they were in Berlin in 1979 to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. What Cantor and Aron meant, in asserting that the twentieth century should/could have been Germany’s, was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers, who were the best in the world, would have taken the freshly unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when 1933 came along. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Germany was—without question—the leading force in the world intellectually. It could not perhaps match the United States in sheer economic numbers—America was, even then, a far more populous entity. But in all other aspects of life, Germany led the way. Had a historian of any nationality published an intellectual history of modern Germany at the end of 1932, it would have been very largely a history of triumph. By 1933 Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together. Germany’s way of organizing herself intellectually was a great success. 74
But the German genius was cut off in its prime. All the world knows why this happened. Much less well known is why and how the Germans achieved the pre-eminence they did. Yes, people know that Germany lost a lot of talent under the Nazis (according to one account, 60,000 writers, artists, musicians, and scientists were sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939). But even many Germans appear to have forgotten that their country was such a dominant power intellectually until 1933. The Holocaust and Hitler get in the way, as the work of A. Dirk Moses, referred to earlier, shows and as Keith Bullivant said explicitly: “For those 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.”
I don’t think many people alive today grasp this fundamental point about German pre-eminence in the pre-1933 period. I exclude, of course, specialists. Among them, the situation is, if anything, reversed: the enormities of the Nazi atrocities mean that—in particular—post–World War II English-language scholarship about Germany is deep and detailed. As part of the research for this book, I visited the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. These institutions exist in London, Paris, Washington, and elsewhere. The Washington institute, besides its splendid library of German- and English-language books and periodicals, also has its own publishing program, which includes a massive work, German Studies in North America: A Directory of Scholars . This volume, 1,165 pages long, lists the projects of—roughly speaking—1,000 academics. Subjects range from German war novels to an atlas of Kansas German dialects to a study of precision in German society to a comparison of Berlin and Washington as capital cities between 1800 and 2000. There is no shortage of research interest in German topics, at least among scholars in America. But this only reinforces
“The twentieth century should have been the German century.” The words were written by the American academic Norman Cantor; he was speaking at the time about the devastating effect the Nazi regime had on Germany’s leading historians, such as Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz. Next, there is this sentence, in Fritz Stern’s Einstein’s German World : “It could have been Germany’s century.” This time it was Raymond Aron speaking, the French philosopher talking to Stern when they were in Berlin in 1979 to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. What Cantor and Aron meant, in asserting that the twentieth century should/could have been Germany’s, was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers, who were the best in the world, would have taken the freshly unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when 1933 came along. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Germany was—without question—the leading force in the world intellectually. It could not perhaps match the United States in sheer economic numbers—America was, even then, a far more populous entity. But in all other aspects of life, Germany led the way. Had a historian of any nationality published an intellectual history of modern Germany at the end of 1932, it would have been very largely a history of triumph. By 1933 Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans put together. Germany’s way of organizing herself intellectually was a great success. 74
But the German genius was cut off in its prime. All the world knows why this happened. Much less well known is why and how the Germans achieved the pre-eminence they did. Yes, people know that Germany lost a lot of talent under the Nazis (according to one account, 60,000 writers, artists, musicians, and scientists were sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939). But even many Germans appear to have forgotten that their country was such a dominant power intellectually until 1933. The Holocaust and Hitler get in the way, as the work of A. Dirk Moses, referred to earlier, shows and as Keith Bullivant said explicitly: “For those 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.”
I don’t think many people alive today grasp this fundamental point about German pre-eminence in the pre-1933 period. I exclude, of course, specialists. Among them, the situation is, if anything, reversed: the enormities of the Nazi atrocities mean that—in particular—post–World War II English-language scholarship about Germany is deep and detailed. As part of the research for this book, I visited the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. These institutions exist in London, Paris, Washington, and elsewhere. The Washington institute, besides its splendid library of German- and English-language books and periodicals, also has its own publishing program, which includes a massive work, German Studies in North America: A Directory of Scholars . This volume, 1,165 pages long, lists the projects of—roughly speaking—1,000 academics. Subjects range from German war novels to an atlas of Kansas German dialects to a study of precision in German society to a comparison of Berlin and Washington as capital cities between 1800 and 2000. There is no shortage of research interest in German topics, at least among scholars in America. But this only reinforces
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