The German Genius

Ed West writes:

Apparently there’s some sort of anniversary coming up to do with a war, you may have noticed. To commemorate this the British publishing industry has launched a ferocious selling offensive, no doubt aided by recent remarks from Michael Gove, Tristram Hunt and Boris Johnson.

Like with any historical incident, our views of this conflict are more about now than then, 2014 rather than 1914, perfectly illustrated by the German Foreign Minister’s hugely helpful comment that Ukip is a threat to European peace – helpful to Ukip, that is, since the intervention of continental politicians inevitably helps euroscepticism.

(Historically it makes no sense, because there are a number of reasons why 1914-1945 has not being repeated and won’t; as well as the US military and nuclear weapons, there is our demographic structure and the fact that we’ve sort of learned our lesson. Ukip, besides, come from the Little Englander tradition and is anti-intervention; to make my own ludicrous counter-factual historical comment, had Nigel Farage been in charge in 1914 we’d have stayed out of the war.)

Still, although Simon Jenkins has apologised to the Germans for our war-worship,  the good news for Anglo-German relations is that all this obsessing about the First World War means that we’re at least not obsessing about the Second, and our number one national fetish, the Nazis.

I’ve been reading a marvellous book called The German Genius by Peter Watson, which starts with an analysis of how little the British know or understand German culture. Few visit the country, only 1 per cent speaks the language, and most could hardly name more than a handful of famous Germans, except for you know who. 

Watson quotes several German thinkers who argue that the British obsession with Nazism is damaging to both our psychology and our relationship with one of our biggest trading partners.

But the really sad thing is that most of us remain so ignorant of Germany’s incredible contribution to, well everything. Some areas of culture, such as philosophy or music, were to all purposes German for a century, while Germany completely dominated fields such as archaeology and the study of Ancient Greece.

And this was despite the fact that from 1618-1648 the country had suffered devastating losses and at the start of the period the book covers, the mid-18^th century, German culture was considered backwards and ignorant in comparison to its neighbours to the west and south (Frederick the Great’s court spoke in French, and he never read a book in German).

The 20^th century should have been the German century, he quotes one author, were it not for Hitler; before 1933 Germany had won more Nobel Prizes than Britain and America combined, but with the loss of over 60,000 intellectuals who fled even before the war began (a war which cost 12 million German lives), that all changed.

Yet the German Genius – Europe’s third renaissance and second scientific revolution, as the book’s subtitle calls it – has been eradicated in the English-speaking mind.

Everything in that great country’s past has been rerouted as an inevitable step towards Nazism and the Holocaust, and it’s our loss. We deny ourselves access to this vastly rich culture.

Now that Michael Gove is discussing the history curriculum, isn’t it time we took the Nazis out?

The subject is otherwise hugely busy, and besides which the Third Reich will always fascinate people without the help of schools. The publishing industry doesn’t call it ‘the gift’ for nothing.

Instead we might teach our children less about Germany’s recent history and more about its language and contribution to music, philosophy and science.

Not as a political cause or entity, but as a shared culture and heritage, a common sense of Prussianness across all the areas forming part of that Kingdom during its 1871-1918 heyday would be no bad thing at all, but rather a significant force for peace and stability across Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland and Russia.

The best Prussian values were not only noble in themselves, but informed the first Welfare State, both they and it being significant forces for unity between Teutons and Slavs, and between Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe.

An insistent and concerted witness to that whole heritage, which notably spawned the attempt to assassinate Hitler, on the part of provinces, municipalities and communities could only be to the benefit of Europe, and of the world, as a whole.