Watson’s enormous book is bracketed by an introduction where he defines the problem he wants to solve and a concluding chapter setting out his findings. The vast quantity of material in between is not conducive to a rational judgement. I would have preferred a much more selective and economic presentation, in order to pin down just what is being claimed and establish if the evidence supports the arguments.

The body of this book is filled with accounts of German culture from the end of the Thirty Years War to the end of the 20th Century. This is broadly defined to include theology and philosophy, history and archaeology, literature, music, the visual arts, science and technology, even aspects of economics and military science, as well as the institutions within which all these developments arose. It is easy enough to enjoy this compendium of so many great names, to have an explanation of their main contributions and to see a big picture in which they all relate each other in time, in place and in their ideas. That is, I think, the major attraction of all Watson’s big, heavy books. On the other hand, the accounts are so brief and sketchy that in most cases they are more helpful in placing different thinkers into a wider context than actually explaining their ideas in any useful detail. To be honest, when scrutinised, some of the descriptions seem pretty inadequate and unreliable. The more I know about the subject, the more likely I am to dislike Watson’s description and evaluation. He is most convincing where I know least, which to be fair gives him a lot of ground.

If Watson was indeed merely reviewing German culture in modern history then I would have no difficulty enjoying the book for what it does best and moving on to my next reading challenge. However, the book presents itself as an argument with a very specific theme. Watson’s problem is that Germany is defined by the brief history of Nazism but that seems to him unsatisfactory and unfair. As a result, the entire book really has to be read in relation to this over-riding question: can German culture be separated from its Nazi experience?

Watson accepts the claim that Germany was quite unlike its neighbours and that the achievements of individual Germans were made possible – even produced – by distinctive institutions in German life. He investigates what these were and runs through many examples of individual genius to justify the claim of German greatness. He notes that German nationalism and the move to German unity was at first a progressive force, emerging in opposition to the authoritarian regimes of the many petty German states. But as it happens, the 1848 revolutions failed across Germany, Germany was united in 1871 under the Prussian monarchy, and the cult of German nationalism was built on the destruction and eventual wreckage of everything that made Germany great. He points out repeatedly that Hitler’s rise to power resulted in the removal from German life of tens of thousands of excellent, sometimes exceptionally brilliant, scientists, artists, musicians and writers. Germany was a remarkable country in 1932 and the Nazis destroyed that achievement. The wreckage was not immediately obvious only because the removal of so many Jewish and other leading figures created openings and opportunities for compliant Germans to fill their places, some of whom were reasonably competent and even talented in their own right. Many such figures retained or recovered their positions after 1945. Only with the student movement of the late 1960s did West Germans demonstrate the will to engage positively with democratic politics, while for East Germans, the move away from autocratic government only began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Watson’s definition of cultural history seems to exclude political history. I agree that it is reasonable to expect readers to know European history in outline and it is not where he wants to make his contribution. I don’t agree that cultural history can be apolitical or free of ideological commitment. Watson makes no such claim, naturally, but my interest is that his decisions shape the material that he excludes from his review as much as what he includes. Where he is obliged to include a few people on the Left, like Marx and Engels, they are given rather weak presentations.
This defect becomes more clear when we notice that his definition of ‘German’ – in relation to German culture or German history or just defining who is German – is decidedly open to question. It does not suit him to discuss the contribution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to German cultural history, but it does suit him to claim for German cultural history many achievements of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The point about Germany which he does not ignore but somehow refuses to confront is that that before 1871, there was no Germany, and before the Anschluss Germany most certainly did not include Austria. As Gertrude Stein said about her birthplace, which was not in Germany but in Oaklands, California, “there is no there there.”

This is not a trivial disagreement. German nationalism sought to embrace all German speaking people, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to embrace a great diversity of people with various ethnic, religious and cultural affiliations. The two value systems are incompatible and it is shamefully dishonest to place all the achievements in the nationalist basket, long before the relevant nations came into being, while tipping into the imperial basket the evils [specifically, racism and communal violence] which broke out across all empires but were caused by nationalism. Nationalism excludes people who could belong under imperialism, and from Turkey to Finland, all across Europe, nationalism produced the forced migrations of millions of people during the 20th century, and the Germans had no monopoly of nationalist ideology. Nationalism and ethnic pride not only brings people together but also creates outsiders and excludes significant parts of the population who were previously included. That was never a specifically German phenomenon. In other words, the problem is not Germans, but nationalists.

Generally, a focus on cultural history and not politics sometimes leaves the discussion hanging in mid-air. Indeed, it brings into focus the surprising reality that this seemingly comprehensive review is nevertheless selective both in its choices and its emphasis. Even though there is an awful lot of material in this book, the book quietly omits a lot more information that is essential if we are to seriously investigate the questions presented in the introduction. If the argument is a comparative one – that Germans were different to other Europeans – then it is not valid to rely exclusively on information about Germans. I don’t see anything uniquely or specifically German about racism, nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism or a compliant, supposedly apolitical middle class or bourgeoisie. I appreciate how important German influence has been for other cultures, but I would like more recognition of external influences shaping German culture, both negatively and positively.

But the most useful comparison to my mind would be between German nationalism and the values of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a key event, in my opinion, could be the date when the language of administration in the empire was switched from Latin to German. I can see no serious way for example to identify Wittgenstein or Freud as German. They were Austrian, products of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic empire in which nationalism was anathema. I completely agree that we cannot allow the Nazi experience to blind us to the positive legacies of German cultural history. One step towards separating the one from the other must be to set aside the entire concept of German culture as our organising principle. I don’t accept that many of the German achievements in this book were German at all and I don’t find it helpful to label them that way.

If the Nazis were the product of a uniquely German cultural history, then we can conveniently disregard the evidence of Nazi borrowings from the policies of the USA or Great Britain, from racism, eugenics and even genocide to techniques of totalitarianism based on persuasion, manipulation, militarism and fear. The Germans were treating Slavs and fellow Europeans, after all, in ways not unlike the vicious ways the British, French or Belgians treated Africans or the USA had treated native Americans and imported Black Africans. Every single one of the European nations has been able to behave in that way to the tune of the most beautiful music and the most touching poetry.

This book explores suggestions for diverse ways to live in the absence of God. It is far better than my review and I recommend it.

The book starts with Nietzsche's Death of God, and that identifies from the outset that the atheism of this book does have its origin in the rejection of a monotheistic faith. The book’s final conclusion, also, makes some pointed competitive remarks about the relative superiority of atheism to religion as a way of living. So we cannot get away from the principle that atheism is not simply a value system without God, but also one in which the rejection of God is a central value. I don’t know if this concept of atheism is only really applicable to those of us having the appropriate God shaped hole, or if a continuing rebellion against monotheism is in itself evidence that we have not yet broken free of its embrace. Those systems that function without reference to God may not fit the definition of atheism, they may even be accepted by religious people but they may exist in
competition with or as a substitute for religion; an example is psychotherapy. For that reason, the book is able to take a pretty generous and sweeping view of its subject.

An important aspect of Watson’s account is to appreciate two things about atheism. One is its diversity – there are many atheisms. Another is the way it has evolved over time, with good reason to hope that the really terrible ideas are among those that have vanished into history.

A significant thread in the history is the realization of GK Chesterton’s prediction, that when people stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. From Spiritualism at the start of the 20th Century to New Age fringe beliefs at the end, with special attention to the huge role of the “counter culture” in and around the Sixties, this history incorporates a whole variety of “alternative” belief systems which had an impact in their day and left at least some traces.

In reality, direct opposition to God or to religion does not dominate this history and does not even play a starring role. It certainly does give proper weight to the evidence that atheists did indeed attack religion throughout the 20th Century, sometimes with extreme violence. The scientific atheism of Soviet Russia, and the Nazi project to contain and stifle Christianity as a platform opposed to Nazi ideology, both fairly described here, attained levels of stupidity that ensured they would not survive their temporary political functions. However, in each case the driving force was not atheism per se but the fear of religion as a potential platform for political opposition, something that did not seriously materialise. Out of its 26 chapters, in addition to a conclusion and an introduction, it seems to me that only one (Chapter 24) addresses the so called "New Atheism" and the currently still fashionable wars of science and religion, and this chapter does not make any contribution to the key arguments of the book’s conclusion. So very little of the book is particularly interested in attacking either God or religion. That is simply not the tone of the book.

The book does describe some major historical events that induced widespread dismay with traditional religion, in order to discuss the way people responded. The barbarity of the First World War shook the confidence of many in the concept of a just God; the outrageous abomination of the Holocaust was even more radically shocking; the prospect of nuclear war was again too stark for trite answers to suffice. Scientific developments also provoked discomfort, since the monotheistic religions make assertions about the material world that are incompatible with Science. For many thinkers, the search for a new value system was motivated by the need to properly engage with these problems, when traditional religion was simply no longer equal to the task.

In practice, the most satisfactory answers arrived at have not, in Watson’s opinion, taken the form of new, all embracing or unifying grand theories. Whether in Science, the arts or in philosophy, the trend has been towards more intimate and more fragmentary solutions. On the one hand, Watson does see Science offering a much more satisfactory way to comprehend our world than religion. On the other, he does not suggest that this results in a reduction of experience to a few deterministic laws – rather, it has enabled us to put names and reasons to a growing multiplicity of things which simply had no place in any religious account of “Creation.” In other words, we are able to see and to appreciate and wonder at more of our world in more complex ways than were ever possible in the past.

In a similar way, he credits artists, poets and also therapists with enabling to us give new names to our inner feelings and our subjective experiences, again not reducing our private nor our social lives to mechanistic formulae, but opening up an expanded field of possibilities both to appreciate and to accommodate. An example that struck me was Dr Benjamin Spock, whose 1946 book Baby and Childcare advocated treating children as basically good at heart, flatly contradicting the conventional Christian (Calvinist?) attitude that saw Children as intrinsically sinful and in need of correction. The point is that such transformations were not superficial but very profound, very tangible in their effects and often unquestionably desirable.

This history has space not only for cognitive models, but also for the non verbal procedures of dance, music and the visual arts. It also discusses the expanding awareness and acceptance of human desires, and the prospects of greater freedom for women, for homosexuals and for others, while noting areas of failure such as the continuing prevalence of genital mutilation.

It is rather futile, however, to try and convey the contents, the arguments or even the conclusions of this book to anyone who has not taken the time to explore its detail. The book is as much an experience as an argument. The accumulation of evidence and examples is its point. The book accumulates one example after another of proposals, observations and points of view to produce a convincing and detailed mosaic of the way ideas about life without God have evolved over the past 150 years.

It is not an encyclopaedia. It rarely gives enough information about any source to enable anyone unfamiliar with it to get by without Google, Wikipedia or something similar but frankly there is nothing difficult today in reading with a smart phone or tablet in hand. I made liberal use of those facilities in my reading, as well as adding a number of new titles to my wish list for future reading.

It is encyclopaedic. Much of the pleasure in the book is to spend time with the many illuminating and thought provoking voices within. Watson presents each source's point of view in its own terms, usually in a fair way, and only occasionally enters into a direct debate with the source by citing objections and criticisms. This cannot possibly mean he agrees with everyone mentioned - the sources do not agree with each other. Many of them self destruct anyway without Watson’s intervention. In some cases I certainly wanted to dispute Watson’s commentary, but that is part of the experience of active reading.

In short, the material in this history supports an optimistic, upbeat understanding of new possibilities opening up for human well being as a result of the Death of God. A question he attributes to the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, is one that I suspect fits with Watson’s own conclusions: ”Is the disappearance of religion in our lives any different from the disappearance of some of those other nineteenth-century myths, embodied in imperialism, racial superiority and colonialism? .. No one mourns their passing and no one foresees their return.” [p452] The point is excellent, though unfortunately I do not agree that any of those myths ever did disappear, which is a great pity.

Murder on Safari - Peter Riva,R. D. Wats... This story takes place in the East Africa region. Pero Baltazar a television producer and his crew come to film the wild life but instead end up twisted and tied up in a al-Shabaab terrorist attack. There are quite a few twists and turns int he book and tons of suspense. The story for me started out a little slow but once it started moving it ran the rest of the way through the book. I did enjoy the descriptions of East Africa though I could picture it in my mind. As a place I have never been, Reter Riva brought it to life for me.
I did listen to the audio version which is read by R. D. Watson. His voice is great for a suspense filled novel like this. I loved his slight accent. R. D. Watson was great at expressing the situation with just his voice. You knew when people were happy and laughing, when they were scared, and more. You also learned the different characters voices very quickly, each was unique in its own way.

I was given my copy of the audible book in exchange for my honest review.

Author Peter Watson bases his story on the real-life young men and women recruited by Churchill’s Special Operations Executive to be parachute-dropped behind enemy lines.  Their orders were to “set Europe ablaze” by helping the Resistance and sending intelligence back to England.  The likelihood of an SOE agent living through the war was only 50/50, so it’s all the more impressive how many young people volunteered eagerly, knowing the chances of being captured, tortured and killed.

 

Watson fictionalizes the SOE as SC2, and uses other fictional stand-ins for real-life SOE personalities.  But his descriptions of training methods and the details of SOE espionage techniques are based on reality.

 

Matt Hammond is an SC2 operative who was injured in France and smuggled home.  Now missing a lung, he can’t go back into the field, so he’s now a trainer for new agents.  Madeleine is the recruit he falls in love with, and they have an idyllic few weeks together before she is sent to France, very shortly before D-Day.

 

When Madeleine’s contacts with SC2 stop, Matthew is filled with fear that she has been captured by the Nazis.  As France is in the process of liberation, he has the chance to go there on a mission and to combine that with his search for her.

 

The story plods for its first half, until Matt heads off to France.  After that, it’s far more engaging, and sometimes even exciting.  Watson is a historian, and it’s understandable that he wants to incorporate his knowledge in the plot.  Sometimes he does it seamlessly, as when Matt explains coding techniques to the recruits.  Other times, though, it’s way too didactic and drags the story’s pace down to a crawl.

 

It was particularly odd when Watson had Matt tell Madeleine in 1943 that after the war, “TV” would likely replace newspapers, and that people would get rid of private medicine because they wouldn’t stand for the social divisions that existed before the war.  Well, it’s true that Britain went Labor in a big way after the war and socialized medicine, but what does that little history lesson have to do with this story?  And did the British ever refer to television as TV?  Bits like this were distracting and they made me feel like Matt was a bit of a “mansplainer” as they’re called these days. 

 

I wasn’t ever able to warm up to Matt as a character, which is too bad, considering the story is told entirely from his point of view.  It also annoyed me no end that Matt remarks on Madeleine’s whisky-brown eyes at least a dozen times, and probably more.

 

To be fair, I’m pretty hard on novels based on the SOE.  It’s one of my favorite reading subjects and I’ve read so many fiction and non-fiction books about SOE agents and operations that I am probably overly critical.  At this point, maybe I should stick to reading non-fiction, but it’s hard for me to resist anything about the subject.

I'm a huge fan of stories that take place during WWII and Madeleine's War by Peter Watson was the perfect blend of romance and history! It was definitely a unique perspective on a very well know topic. One of the best war novels I have ever read and I couldn't put it down. The book takes you on a ride and gives some insight into the life of a spy during WWII.
-Sara K. marketing intern at Doubleday