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the central point: among the general public the ignorance of German affairs is widespread.
    We are used to being told that the twentieth century was the American century, but the truth is more complex and, as this book aims to show, more interesting than that. This book’s intent is to reinsert into both the non–German-speaking consciousness and the German-speaking consciousness the names and achievements of a people who, for historical reasons having to do with war and genocide, have been neglected—even shunned—over the past half-century.
    This then is a book about the German genius, how it was born and flourished and shaped our lives more than we know, or care to acknowledge, how it was devastated by Hitler but —another “but” that is crucial—how it has lived on, often unrecognized, not just in the two postwar Germanies, which have never received full credit for their achievements—cultural, scientific, industrial, commercial, academic—but in how German thinking shaped modern America and Britain and their culture. The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.
     
     
    A brief note on what I mean by “German.” I use it in the sense that Thomas Mann did when he spoke of “German spheres,” a cultural world where he felt at home, to include Germany itself plus other German-speaking lands—Austria, parts of Switzerland, parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. There was certainly, for a time, a Vienna-Budapest-Prague German-speaking and German-thinking sphere. At other times, parts of Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states came within the German sphere of influence too, when scientists or writers looked to Berlin, or Vienna or Munich or Göttingen as intellectual centers. Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and Gregor Mendel all came from Moravia, part of what is now the Czech Republic, but each spoke and thought and wrote in German and lived their lives as part of overwhelmingly German-speaking traditions. Evangelista Purkyne was also Czech and campaigned on behalf of the Czech language, yet in his science he wrote in German and contributed almost exclusively to German journals; the thrust of his intellectual work—the nature of the cell—was an intellectual area in which German scientists were preeminent. Karl Ernst von Baer was Estonian but wrote in German and held positions at the University of Göttingen; Timothy Lenoir, in his history of early nineteenth-century German biology, counts Baer as the central figure. Georg Cantor, the mathematician, was born in St. Petersburg of parents who had emigrated from Denmark, but he moved to Frankfurt when he was eleven, studied at the universities of Zurich, Berlin, and Göttingen and taught for most of his career at the University of Halle. Karl Mannheim, one of the founding fathers of classical sociology, was born in Budapest but was much influenced by Georg Simmel and wrote his most important books in Germany (and in German) at Heidelberg and Frankfurt. Hugo Wolf, who according to Harold Schonberg “carried the German art song to its highest point,” was born in Windischgraz, Styria, later Slovenjgrade in Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia. I adopt the same principle as Georg Lukács, who said of the Swiss novelist Gottfried Keller, that he was just as much a German writer as Rousseau, who came from Geneva, was a French author. 75
    I do not of course mean to suggest for a minute that books could not be written titled The French Genius or The British Genius or The American Genius : they could. Small nations like New Zealand, Denmark, and Trinidad have their geniuses too (Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, V. S. Naipaul). My point is that these contributions to the development of modern thought are well recognized. The French Enlightenment, the British Empiricist philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, and the American pragmatists, are important