Germany, let’s
face it, did not have a good
century. To start one war
and lose it might be misfortune: to do the same thing twice looks very
much like carelessness. And wars aside, there is the dreadful,
indelible blot
of the Holocaust. It needs some effort of imagination to
see how surprising all this would appear to a time traveler from 1900.
Germany came into the twentieth century very hopefully. She was, by
general agreement, the best-educated nation in Europe, and by no means
the most anti-Semitic
(I think
the 1900 ranking would have
been: Russia,
France, Austria-Hungary, Germany). Her philosophers
were read everywhere—Ger-
man philosophy was philosophy. German—
or, at any
rate, German-speaking~dashcomposers dominated the concert halls and
opera houses. Germany’s scientists and mathematicians filled the front
rank of those disciplines. (This reviewer took his first degree in
mathematics from a good English university. The ability to read German
was a prerequisite.) The growth of German industry after 1871 had been
remarkable—a “Teutonic tiger,” we should say nowadays.
A meritocratic
civil service administered a prototypical welfare state with quiet
efficiency.

There were some warning signs, to be sure, and a few very percipient
observers picked them up: the coarse philistinism of university student
associations and the uncritical worship of state power taught by too
many of the professors; the shallow militaristic bumptiousness of Kaiser
Wilhelm II; the odd disengagement of writers and artists from the
society that sustained them; the crude suppression of leftist social