The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.

The French Mind: 400 Years of Romance, Revolution and Renewal by Peter Watson

A feminine emphasis on France’s intellectual history

British historian Peter Watson has been my favorite nonfiction author since I discovered his books a couple years ago. Though he also writes fiction, Watson is better known for his sweeping intellectual histories, or histories of ideas. Watson’s book The French Mind was published in 2022. In this book, Watson tries to answer the question: What’s so special about the French? To do that, as the subtitle indicates, he examines 400 years of French history, from the early 17th century to the present. Watson’s histories are generally not about kings, queens, and wars (although the Bourbons, Orléans, and Napoleons do make prominent appearances here) but rather about important developments in literature, philosophy, the arts, and culture. In The French Mind, Watson also looks beyond such highbrow disciplines and discusses how the French came to be renowned for perfecting some enjoyable aspects of life and leisure, such as fashion, food, furniture, and sex. Unlike some of Watson’s other intellectual histories, science is not part of the discussion here (Marie Curie isn’t even mentioned), except the social sciences.

Though the USA has always had its anti-intellectual tendencies (some might say now more than ever), France has always presented a decidedly pro-intellectual attitude. High culture is fashionable among the French, and one is expected to be well-read. When I visited France, I recall being amazed at how many streets they named after philosophers, scientists, and men of letters. France has always seen it as their duty to civilize the world through its refined culture, even if that means showing a disdain for capitalism, hard science, and technological progress. A crucial aspect of French intellectual life, Watson asserts, is “sociability,” which is manifested in the long tradition of the French salon and the café culture that followed. Watson also pursues a thesis (borrowed from historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch) of France’s “culture of defeat.” Even after losing the Franco-Prussian War and undergoing Nazi occupation, the French zeitgeist still managed to turn those losses into morally righteous victories.

Another element Watson really wants to emphasize is the role that women played in the development of French culture. I knew that salons would be an important part of this story, but I didn’t expect they would be the focus of the bulk of the book. Salons, in this case, were weekly gatherings, usually hosted by aristocrats in their homes, at which intellectuals and artists would gather and exchange ideas. Watson makes much of the women who hosted these salons and the influence they wielded. Many, probably most, of the chapters in the book focus on one of these salonnières—her life story, who she married, with whom she had affairs, and which luminaries she included among the regulars at her salon. France may have been less chauvinistic and misogynistic than the rest of Western Civilization, but it was still an unfairly male-dominated world. Despite his efforts to praise these unsung women, Watson’s feminist assertions feel forced. If the best thing he can say about many of these women is that they hosted a bunch of important men in their home, that’s not much of a feminist revelation. When these salonnières wrote published literature or wielded real political power, however, Watson does give credit where it’s due. At the point when the salons fade away, so does Watson’s feminist focus. Surprisingly, once this book moves past World War I, there’s barely a female mentioned other than Simone de Beauvoir.

Watson is a master of summary and synthesis, showing how ideas and movements spawn, influence, and interconnect one another. A master generalist, he draws the big picture in a sufficiently detailed and lively narrative that inspires the reader to want to learn more. If you really want to know what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault were all about, you’re going to have to read their books, but with the help of an erudite survey such as Watson provides here, maybe you won’t have to read everything that came before and after those thinkers in order to understand their work. Similar to The French Mind, Watson has written other books in which he strives to encapsulate a nation’s intellectual and cultural spirit: The German Genius and The British Imagination. What’s next? The Dutch Mystique? The Scandinavian Psyche? The Polish Persuasion? Whatever Watson comes up with, I’m looking forward to it.   

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings

When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.  

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson

An invigorating whirlwind tour through the arts, science, and humanities

Peter Watson’s 2000 book The Modern Mind is essentially a history textbook, but instead of focusing on political events, wars, or world leaders, Watson concentrates instead on developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. The result is a very ambitious, panoramically erudite, and thoroughly engaging intellectual history of the twentieth century. Watson is a Brit, as evident from some of his spellings and turns of phrase. This is not merely a history of English-language culture, however. Watson has written a true world history, although by his own admission much of that history takes place in Europe and America. Watson follows the epicenter of ideas as it changes throughout the century, from Vienna to Berlin, Paris to London, then on to New York and the universities of the United States.

Not all of the intellectual movements Watson discusses are positive, progressive, or even morally acceptable. Social Darwinism, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism are discussed, not because they were good or intelligent, but because they happened, and they affected human lives. Over the course of the hundred years covered here, the modern mind was often mistaken, sometimes horribly so. Watson’s flowing narrative shows how ideas sprout from, counteract, and refute previous ideas as ideological movements come and go. For example, Watson acknowledges Sigmund Freud as one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century—an inspiration to many artistic movements, scientific theories, and the entire field of psychology—but he also points out that by the end of that century most of what Freud had to say was generally considered wrong.

Watson does a superb job of explaining some of the most complicated scientific and philosophical concepts in a manner accessible to any reasonably educated reader, without dumbing down the content. He summarizes countless published books by the greatest thinkers of the century and compares and contrasts them articulately. In terms of disciplines, Watson leaves no stone unturned. No matter how well-read you think you are, Watson covers a diverse enough array of fields of knowledge that you’re bound to learn something outside your comfort zone, and his writing is interesting enough to make you care about topics that didn’t interest you before. You never know where his encyclopedic mind will lead you next, and it is a pleasure to follow his lead through philosophy, physics, mathematics, psychology, economics, archaeology, art, music, literature, and many more areas of interest. I’m sure some could quibble about what’s included or what’s left out, or Watson’s particular take on some thinkers, but overall this is really an impressive work of staggering scope. If nothing else, I came away from The Modern Mind with a reading list of at least a hundred books for further consideration, in all fields of study.

While Watson’s text deserves praise, the publishers of this book (the Kindle edition, to be specific) should be ashamed of themselves. In 15 years of reading ebooks, I’ve never seen a worse collection of typographical errors. There are multiple problems with letter substitutions. In particular, double l’s came out as d’s and vice versa, so objects “cast a shallow,” “all” becomes “ad,” scientists don’t work at “Bell Labs” but at “Bed Labs,” not just in one instance but constantly throughout the text. The word “titles” always shows up as “tides.” Prehistoric man used “dint tools “ instead of flint. I work in book publishing, and I don’t even understand how such a screw-up is technologically possible. The bigger question is, how did HarperCollins release this ebook to the public without even noticing this pervasive problem? Maybe by the time you read this review they will have corrected the errors and uploaded a new file.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RDEIA9VAEMZY8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm