Just today I began reading "The German Genius", the industrial-sized history of German Kultur recently published by Peter Watson. At 856 pages it's the second largest book I own behind only Victor Hugo's burning but only half-engulfed Les Miserablés.

My interest in the book is motivated by a simple question: What is Germany? 

Since my initial exposure to German and after having visited Germany on more than one occasion, I am left with the impression of a deep fracture between the Germany of my American imagination and the embodied Germany of today. Indeed, my repeated visits to book stores and libraries in search of a history of Germany are always frustrated by the narrow but over-sold window which opens up (muddily, I might add) upon the years between 1933 and 1945. The awkward amalgam of American fetishism for the technologies of war-making ("Fighter Planes of World War II") as well as an undying obsession with the gratuitous violence enacted upon minorities in other countries ("Auschwitz: a New History") produces a cartoonish understanding of Germany. (In fact, one of the most popular graphic novels today is "Maus", a history of Nazi Germany told through a comic book mice.) 

I often try to imagine if historians reduced U.S. history to its corresponding exterminations and institutional racisms for the kind of popular public consumption that drives World War II literature: "Tools and Technologies of Slavery", and "Native Americans: The Extermination of Those People". This is no apologetic for what should rightly be a thoroughly condemning examination of the atrocities of the past. But I suspect, first, that such a narrow view of Germany misses important historical events (if you'll excuse a momentary lapse into historical fundamentalism), and second that a focus on World War II in Germany creates a moral landscape which valorizes warfare and justifies American aggression in its purported incomparability to the Holocaust.

Watson's claim is to deal directly with both the history of Nazism and German history without compressing one under the teleology of the other. It's a book I expect to take the better part of this year to complete. But having launched effortlessly into the first 100 pages of rewarding and well-composed text this evening, I expect the time to be worth it.