Very few cultures have had such a wide-reaching influence on society that is also so hidden from plain view as that of Germany. From Academia, to our current world order, to military reserves and the draft, to worker's rights and the welfare state, to the concept of history, to psychology, to science and technology, German thinkers paved the way for the largely American-led 20th century and our current world order. What follows is my distillation of some of the main concepts from The German Genius alongside Kissinger's World Order and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This summary is by no means comprehensive—I don't even include Nietzsche or Humboldt, for example.
Germany developed, or at the very least refined and popularized to the point of spreading, the concepts of a research university and of pursuing education for the sake of self-betterment. German society emphasized bildung, or inward self-refinement to realize your best self, as a noble pursuit each individual should pursue. Their literature popularized a new novel type called the bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, that spread to other literary traditions (think Catcher in the Rye in the American tradition). More importantly, bildung drove a strong desire to learn for the sake of learning, and we saw the first research universities in Germany, and an exponential growth of those institutions in Germany. In the 1850s and a few decades thereafter, Harvard and Yale sought out scholars who had been trained in the German tradition, at one time 50% of their PhDs having received their doctorates in Germany. What remains today is the combination of liberal arts and research institutions, popular in America and also worldwide, where we send our children to university to "learn how to learn" and to find their true character, and where our academicians seek narrower and narrower hyperspecialization in all fields.
Kant, in addition to his massive contributions to philosophy generally, put forth the idea of Democratic Peace that gave us Wilsonianism and the current world order. Since democracies are elected by the people, and the people will not want to go to war for state-enriching purposes and only for self-defense, democracies will not go to war with each other. As more countries become democracies, there will be more peace. Woodrow Wilson advocated essentially the same in his international policies, with a bit of pro-capitalism included, and the American foreign policy establishment adopted his ideas, eschewing the realpolitik approach that preceded Wilson. What followed from this intellectual tradition was the "American Peace" after the 2nd World War, where the US sought out the promotion and protection of democracies, albeit imperfectly. Rather than balance powers against each other, the US policed the world to ensure that international cooperation occurred and that peace was achieved due to upheld ideals and economic self-interest. While this international affairs approach is changing more towards realpolitik under the Trump administration, the influence of Kant on our world order stands to this day.
Frederick William started the professionalization of the Prussian army in the mid-17th century, which tradition continued until becoming a draft and reserve system following the Napoleonic Wars. In the late 19th century, England looked to the Prussian-then-German model as the pre-eminent approach to military success but did not adopt the model because they were against the draft. We saw in the 20th century and till today, that maintaining reserves is now a norm and that many countries either require or reserve the right to call a draft.
Marxism did not succeed in its explicit political movements—but what elements of Marxism are not successfully implemented in today's society? Marx learned under Hegel and alongside the Young Hegelians, and the ideas he and Friederich Engels promoted are now everyday, accepted parts of our Democratic and Capitalist society—worker's rights, unions, the welfare state—firmly cemented in place during the New Deal. I'll refrain from mentioning the numerous revolutions and periods of social upheaval in the 19th and 20th centuries spurred by, and continuing to be spurred by in the 21st century, their ideas.
The very concept of history as we know it is a German invention—great German thinkers invented a causal, explanatory approach to history and the use of primary sources for rigorous analysis. Take Johann Joachim Winkelmann, an archaeologist who invented Art History with his takes on Greek history during his dig at Pompeii. What Winkelmann found was that there were seemingly different phases of Greek art, and that you could mark phases of Greek history, and the antiquities generally, by those phases of art. Before Winkelmann, there was no concept of a society's culture being reflected in its art. This same cause-and-effect approach to history is what led to Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis (dialectical) approach to history, which led to Marx's idea of societal progression and the capitalism-socialism dialectic leading to "inevitable" communism, and which led to Fukuyama's very recent End of History concept. While today we are finding some proponents of complexity theory, such as Nassim Nicolas Taleb, pointing out that this causal explanation for historical events fails us today because world events are fundamentally random, the German changes to our tradition of knowing the past through historical analysis has left an indelible impact on civilization and will continue to.
Freud and Jung, and especially Freud, have had a massive impact on our everyday understanding of who we are as human beings. You cannot go more than one day without thinking of the concept of your (or someone else's) ego, of the hidden parts of our character and consciousness that make us who we are. While much of what Freud claimed has been proven untrue, or in degrees untrue, we now raise our children, educate our youth, and seek counseling along the lines of his ideas. 1960s America especially embraced these ideas and turned them into self-help and educational movements, helped out by the emigration of some of these psychologists themselves.
Lastly, science and technology—this may be one of the largest impacts of German culture, and we owe that impact to their research institution and bildung focus as a culture. The automobile—Daimler, Mercedes, and others; the railroad and military-industrial complex—Krupp primarily; plastics, dyes, and more—Justus von Liebig and Friederich Wöhler with their invention of organic chemistry; mathematics and physics—the list is too long for this one. To a large extent, we owe even the computing revolution to these same mathematical and physics developments.
In addition to the above intellectual traditions influencing American society (and Western civilization broadly), this German culture quietly assimilated into American culture during and following the 2nd World War. The brilliant mathematician and physics genius of Germany led to the creation of the greatest war machine the world has arguably ever seen. They created some of the most advanced rocketry in the world, with the primary goal of the V2 bombing of London, and America took in those same scientists through Operation Paperclip. We took in many more scientists and technologists who fled religious persecution, as well. These Germans built rockets and the war-ending bomb for us instead of for Germany, and were ultimately the ones that helped us end the war and then get to the moon only a few years later. Alongside these scientific and military assimilations, we also have psychology (Freud and his ilk), business (Drucker), and countless other academicians.
These German scientists who built instruments of war, alongside many other German geniuses who fled the war due to persecution for their religion, made their way to America and filled the highest ranks of our society. They occupied top posts in NASA, in corporations, in our government, and in our universities—Dornberger ended up sitting on the board at Bell Helicopter and von Braun headed up NASA. The German tradition of genius from the 17th through the 20th centuries had an incredible impact on civilization, on American culture, and on America itself, crossing the Atlantic in the mid-20th—and yet, the impact and influence stays largely hidden, only available to those willing to look past the shadow cast by the 2nd World War.
Comentarios