Indeed, Watson at times echoes the bombastic nationalism of the past, asserting that the Germans have not only produced "the First XI of modern history" but are still ahead, thanks to their bigger brains and higher IQs (apparently Germans score an average of 107, the British 100 and the French only 94). He falls for the bogus notion that Germans are more "inward" and "unpolitical" than others. This was a theme of German propaganda in the First World War, most notably in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man by the novelist Thomas Mann and The Genius of War by the philosopher Max Scheler, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a major influence on Pope John Paul II (he is incorrectly described here as the son of a Lutheran pastor). In his self-righteous denunciation of the obsession of the British press with Nazis (Watson has been a senior editor for the Sunday Times, notorious for the "Hitler Diaries") and his approving citation of dubious American critics of the "Holocaust industry" (such as Norman Finkelstein, who calls Israel "a satanic state"), Watson occasionally crosses the line between apologetics and propaganda.

However, Watson's enthusiasm for German intellectual history is infectious: from the rediscovery of antiquity in the 18th century, prompted by German classical scholarship (which he elevates to the status of a "third renaissance") to the "second scientific revolution" in 19th-century Germany (after the first one of the 17th century) and the multifarious German critique of modernity in the 20th century. Watson assembles some impressive statistics to back up his claims, such as the fact that Germany produced more Nobel laureates up to 1933 than any other country, indeed more than America and Britain combined. 

What Watson does not tell us is the proportion of those Nobel laureates who were Jewish. In fact, a great deal of the credit for the "German genius" must go to the tiny Jewish minority, which never made up more than one per cent of the population of the German-speaking lands, but contributed a huge percentage of the talent in almost every field of endeavour. Watson is so eager to be fair to the Germans that he underplays the decisive role of the German Jews in assimilating and thereby transforming Germany from a provincial backwater in the late-18th century to become the cultural powerhouse of Europe. In philosophy, for example, Watson ignores such major Jewish thinkers as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig; likewise, Jewish converts to Christianity: he mentions Karl Marx, of course, but not his contemporary Friedrich Julius Stahl, the ideologist of German conservatism, or Edith Stein, who died in Auschwitz but was canonised by John Paul II. Jews are not the only category to get short shrift in this book: women are virtually invisible. Female emancipation came late to Germany, and again it was led by Jewish bluestockings such as Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Schlegel. The Catholic contribution, too, is as usual underplayed compared to the Protestant one, reflecting the Lutheran bias of the German historical profession. To take just one example: what would German music be minus the Catholics, from Mozart and Beethoven to Bruckner and Berg?

But the most serious flaw in Watson's book is his underrating of the Jewish factor. That Germans benefited so hugely from Jewish  genius right up to 1933 and beyond makes their anti-Semitism all the more perverse, indeed masochistic. Watson tells us that by 1938 Germany (including Austria) had lost 39 per cent of its academic elite. He shows how the mainly Jewish exiles transformed Britain and America, just as they had Germany. But he does not really tell us why the most educated, cultured and sophisticated middle class in the world, the German Bildungsbürgertum, threw its moral and intellectual virtues to the winds in order to embrace Hitler. Why did the German genius commit suicide?