![]() ![]() Watson has not simply written a survey of the German intellect from Goethe to Botho Strauss – nothing so dilettantist. Watson wonders not just why the nation of thinkers and poets came to grief between 19 but also how it put itself together again and, in 1989, recreated most of the Wilhelmine state without plunging Europe into war or even breaking sweat. A journalist of heroic industry, Watson is frustrated by the British ignorance of Germany, or rather by an expertise devoted exclusively to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. Peter Watson's colossal encyclopaedia, The German Genius, might have been written for me, but not only for me. Bored by the Third Reich and its uptight little successor republics in West and East Germany, I sought an afternoon's peace in an older and, as I thought, more German Germany. These Sunday excursions were for me an exercise in mental recuperation. ![]() Here were Beethoven's mother and Schiller's wife Clara and Robert Schumann August Wilhelm Schlegel Mathilde Wesendonck, for whom Wagner wrote his most beautiful music FWA Argelander, who mapped three hundred thousand stars. ![]() Wandering amid the provincial tombs, I was forever coming across some stupendous intellectual celebrity. F or a while in the 1980s, I used to spend my Sundays in the Old Cemetery in the town of Bonn in the Rhineland. ![]()
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