The German Genius

will be of crucial significance not just for Germany but for all of Europe as well.
    —H EINRICH A UGUST W INKLER
    Don’t you guys know you are in Hollywood? Speak German.
    —O TTO P REMINGER, TO A GROUP OF H UNGARIAN ÉMIGRÉS
    All of German literature [has] settled in America.
    —T HOMAS M ANN
    We poor Germans! We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are “famous”! No one really likes us.
    —T HOMAS M ANN
    So long as the Germans speak German and I speak English, a genuine dialogue between us is possible; we shall not simply be addressing our mirror images.
    —W. H. A UDEN
    Hitler was “the mirror of every German’s unconscious…the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul.”
    —C ARL J UNG
    I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
    —M ARK T WAIN
    To this day we hardly recognise that a phenomenon occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was as remarkable as that outburst of creativity we call the Renaissance in Italy. It was the German Renaissance—the renaissance of a culture mutilated by the Thirty Years War.
    —N OEL A NNAN
    No one is a Nazi, no one ever was…It should be set to music.
    —M ARTHA G ELLHORN
    Germany is not part of the West. But Germany will never be able to do without it.
    —G REGOR S CHÖLLGEN
    [Germany] is probably the most grown-up country in the world today.
    —M ARK M ARDELL
    The memory of the Third Reich has intensified with increasing temporal distance to the Nazi past.
    —H ERMANN L ÜBBE
    It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “What is German?” never dies out among them.
    —F RIEDRICH N IETZSCHE
    Defeated in two world wars, Germany appeared to have invaded vast territories of the World’s mind.
    —E RICH H ELLER
    Can one be a musician without being German?
    —T HOMAS M ANN
    The United States and Great Britain may speak English but, more than they know, they think German.
    —P ETER W ATSON
    1989 was the brightest moment in Europe’s darkest century.
    —F RITZ S TERN

ALSO BY PETER WATSON
     
    Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
    The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
    The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums
    Sotheby’s: The Inside Story
    The Death of Hitler
    From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market
    Wisdom and Strength: The Biography of a Renaissance Masterpiece
    The Caravaggio Conspiracy
     

Credits
     
    Jacket design by Christopher Sergio

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
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
    EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201846-5
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



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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