"Our Modern World—at Least the World of Ideas—Is Largely a German Creation"

"More helpful is his emphasis on the role of universities in creating new knowledge and a new class defined by education. At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science—at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research 'a rival form of authority in the world.' The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is 'Bildung'). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this 'secular form of Pietism,' turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation—and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics."

Brian Ladd in The New York Times reviews Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.