I actually agree with Watson's argument that we have underrated the German achievement before 1933, though I would not go as far as Norman Cantor, the eccentric American historian he quotes approvingly to the effect that "the 20th century should have been the German century". Between 1688 and 1914, the emergence of the Anglosphere was a truly global phenomenon that dwarfed the simultaneous flowering of German intellectual life, and even without the two world wars the rise of the United States would have been irresistible. Moreover, if one is to play the counterfactual game by writing Hitler out of the script, why not also postulate a world without Lenin, Stalin and Mao, in which Russia and China had been able to develop into democracies and the rest of the world had not been blighted by communism? It was the two world wars that undermined Europe's pre-eminence, denying many of their colonies the institutions that might have anchored them in the Western world. And which nation bears the heaviest responsibility for both wars? You cannot answer the German Question by pronouncing the Nazis "un-German". That, my dear Watson, is too elementary.

"The German genius is alive and well," he declares. But is it? Three new works of fiction by major German writers have just appeared, and two of the three go some way to justify Watson's confidence. Fame by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus, £12.99) is a virtuoso performance by the enfant terrible of German letters. After making his mark with a first novel while still a student, the prodigious Kehlmann had written another five books by the age of 30 when he hit the jackpot five years ago with Measuring the World, which has a fair claim to be the most important and successful German novel since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum appeared half a century ago. It stars two of Watson's prime exhibits in The German Genius: the mathematician Christian Gauss and the explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Kehlmann, however, has his own take on German genius and portrays his titans as all too human. In Fame, he returns to the theme of celebrity but in a contemporary setting, with nine "episodes" in which the fates of seemingly unrelated individuals become entangled. Some of them protest against the author's arbitrary edicts, but all are at the mercy of this "second-class God". This is a sophisticated, quietly subversive work, which cruelly mocks the self-satisfied "culture" of the Bildungsbürgertum whom Watson so admires. It is to his credit that Kehlmann has upset the German and Austrian literary establishments sufficiently to be sneered at as "cosmopolitan". Appropriately, his books are translated (excellently) by his US publisher, Carol Brown Janeway, and he feels at least as comfortable in New York or London as he does in Berlin or Vienna.

So much for the enfant terrible; what of the grand old man? Günter Grass has just celebrated his 83rd birthday and the sequel to his 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion is hot off the press. Alas, The Box (Harvill Secker, £16.99) will do little to revive a reputation severely tarnished, at least in the English-speaking world, by Grass's belated admission that he had been a member of the Waffen SS during the last year of the war. It was not only the fact that he had served in a criminal organisation that caused dismay, but the manner in which he glossed over an entire career spent denouncing other former cogs in the Nazi machine for their hypocrisies and evasions. Grass, however, chose to brazen it out and even to pose as a victim of the anti-German prejudice of which Watson makes so much. The Box is a transparent and somewhat clumsy attempt to change the subject by focusing on Grass's later career, through the narrative device of an old Agfa box camera, which records the writer's life, while the story of each photograph is told in the imaginary voices of his eight children by various wives and mistresses. The camera is wielded by Marie, yet another of the women in Grass's life, whom the children think of as a kind of family retainer and their father as a devoted "assistant" and occasional lover.