The great turn in German life. Germanness emerging ; Bildung and the inborn drive toward perfection
A third Renaissance, between doubt and Darwin. Winckelmann, Wolf, and Lessing : the third Greek Revival and the origins of modern scholarship ; The supreme products of the age of paper ; New light on the structure of the mind ; The high Renaissance in music : the symphony as philosophy ; Cosmos, cuneiform, Clausewitz ; The mother tongue, the inner voice, and the romantic song ; The Brandenburg Gate, the Iron Cross, and the German Raphaels
The rise of the educated middle class : the engines and engineers of modern prosperity. Humboldt's gift : the invention of research and the Prussian (Protestant) concept of learning ; The evolution of alienation ; German historicism : "a unique event in the history of ideas" ; The heroic age of biology ; Out from "the wretchedness of German backwardness" ; "German fever" in France, Britain, and the United States ; Wagner's other ring : Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche ; Physics becomes king : Helmholtz, Clausius , Boltzmann, Riemann ; The rise of the laboratory : Siemens, Hofmann, Bayer, Zeiss ; Masters of metal : Krupp, Benz, Diesel, Rathenau ; The dynamics of disease : Virchow, Koch, Mendel, Freud
The miseries and miracles of modernity. The abuses of history ; The pathologies of nationalism ; Money, the masses, the metropolis : The "first coherent school of sociology" ; Dissonance and the most-discussed man in music ; The discovery of radio, relativity, and the quantum ; Sensibility and sensuality in Vienna ; Munich/Schwabing : German's "Montmartre" ; Berlin busybody ; The great war between heroes and traders ; Prayers for a fatherless child : the culture of the defeated ; Weimar : "unprecedented mental alertness" ; Weimar : the golden age of twentieth-century physics, philosophy, and history ; Weimar : "a problem in need of a solution"
Songs of the Reich : Hitler and the "spiritualization of the struggle". Nazi aesthetics : the "brown shift" ; Scholarship in the Third Reich : "no such thing as objectivity" ; The twilight of the theologians ; The fruits, failures, and infamy of German wartime science ; Exile, and the road into the open
Beyond Hitler : continuity of the German tradition under adverse conditions. The "Fourth Reich" : the effect of German thought on America ; "His majesty's most loyal enemy aliens" ; "Divided heaven" : from Heidegger to Habermas to Ratzinger ; Café Deutschland : "a Germany not seen before"
German genius : the dazzle, deification, and dangers of inwardness
Appendix. Thirty-five underrated Germans.
