Too many Germans and (for opposite reasons) plenty of foreigners readily agreed with Goebbels. It is, of course, the Nazis who have made it hard for us to appreciate what Peter Watson calls “the German genius.” Goebbels spoiled the brand when he marketed Hitler as the apotheosis of German culture.
Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.” And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. Thomas Mann, for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity. Many Germans were happy to agree.Īfter world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Richard Wagner’s English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Their soldiers were unmatched.ĭid this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers.
Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their philosophy was more profound - to a fault.
By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans.
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