A dazzling intellectual history, within political and cultural context

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

The principal idea behind this book is that the Holocaust should not completely dominate our perception of German culture, which he sets out to explain and partially redeem. In this massive intellectual undertaking, Watson attempts to shift our attention to the flowering of the German mind from 1750 to 1933, including its transformation post-World War I…