‘A breath-taking panorama’ Sunday Times

‘A compelling, epic tale’ Financial Times

Peter Watson's magisterial sweep through modern German thought and culture confounds stereotypes that the world has of Germany, and Germany has of itself.

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force in the Western world. In the early decades of the 20th century German artists, writers, philosophers, scholars, scientists and engineers were leading their country to new heights, and by 1933 Germany had won more Nobel prizes than any other nation, including Britain and America put together.

How did the Germans transform their country so as to achieve such pre-eminence? In this absorbing cultural and intellectual history, Peter Watson explores the origins of the German genius, and convincingly demonstrates that it was German thinking – from Beethoven and Kant to Diesel and Nietzsche, from Goethe and Wagner to Mendel and Planck, from Hegel and Marx to Freud and Schonberg – that has done more than anything else to create the modern West.