A new book demolishes the idea that Germany lacked a “world history” like those of England, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands
Hartlib, a Calvinist, settled in London in 1630 where his interests in “mathematics, physics, optics, chemistry, botany, natural history, landscape gardens, pearls, beehives, public health, the mechanical arts and communication” earned him the sobriquet “the Great Intelligencer of Europe”. His admirers included John Milton and, a diarist who called him the “Master of Innumerable Curiosities”. Some 400 correspondents helped spread his theories across the continent.
Later, Germans could take pride in their unique contributions to European culture through science, literature and, perhaps above all, philosophy and music in the 18th and 19th centuries. German ideas about education were hugely influential. The kindergarten, the gymnasium and the university in its modern form were all invented by Germans and copied abroad.
As the author says, in the 300 years after 1500 Germans helped shape those empires and connected Central Europe with that wider world. Germans were inclined to see their attitudes to colonised peoples as gentler than those of the traditional empire-building powers. But behind their enthusiasm for ethnography, exemplified byThe idea of racial differences was not new, but in the late 18th century Germans systematised thinking about race.
Like the bullish von Bülow, most Germans in 1900 looked forward to the new century with confidence and optimism, writes Professor Blackbourn. Yet “the German century became synonymous instead with military aggression and Nazi dictatorship, above all with the Holocaust.” Only from the ruins of the Third Reich and the creation ofand the European Union, then the reunification of the country, did a new form of nationhood emerge.
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