"By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans."
The book he describes was written by Peter Watson, and the full title is The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, Harper/Harper Collins Publishers - $35. Yes, it's a weighty subject, and probably not a book you'll want to take with you to read at the beach (in your Strandkörbe, naturally).
By the second paragraph, Ladd informs us that many took the above thesis to such a degree that Richard Wagner's English son-in-law argued "that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome." Which made me laugh, because it was my understanding that Berlin's Museum Island came into existence precisely because Germans in the mid-19th century felt that their capitol was perhaps inferior to Paris, Vienna or London and needed to be put in the same league.
I should also warn you that this reviewer calls the author's work "a great baggy monster of a book [964 pages!], mixing passionate advocacy with biographical trivia amid compressed summaries of some exceedingly difficult ideas." On second thought, maybe a nice, quiet, deserted beach near Pensacola is the perfect place to read such a book -- somewhere where you're unlikely to be disturbed by the summer crowds.…
See the review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Ladd-t.html
