Reddit reviews The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

Honestly, I think that's because we have a massive blind spot to everything that happened before WW1 where Germany is concerned. Germany had a high population (twice that of France), had made huge leaps in technology, philosophy and science and their industrialization matured quickly in the modern era. It was said at one point, English was the language of commerce, French was that of diplomacy and German was the language of science. We're used to thinking of Germany as a backwater but that stops being the case in early modern period. The other thing that helped ironically is Germany didn't unify until 1871. So scientific inquiry had less impediments from a centralized government.

If you want, there's a great book on the advance of the sciences in Germany, The German Genius

There are multiple layers to this.

Firstly, this is a society of predominantly Catholics and Lutherans who were taught for hundreds of years that the Jews were pariahs of society for many reasons, particularly their supposed role in the death of Jesus and also many "un-Christian" practices such as charging interest on loans and so forth. By the time Hitler and the Nazis came around they have a very rich field to sow in that regard. This of course wasn't unique to Germany as all of Europe held similar views towards outsiders in general, including gypsies. The interesting thing is that in Western Europe (including Germany) Jews were treated reasonably better than in Eastern Europe, especially at that time. After all, it was Russia's treatment of their Jewish population that gave rise to the Zionist movement and eventually the birth of Israel as a safe home for their people.

Anyway, most of those feelings in Germany were latent and it takes a lot to motivate an educated society to act on them, or at least be inactive when others are. Remember Germany at this time was a premier intellectual, along with economic and military, power. There's a great book on that written by Peter Watson called called The German Genius.

The way you motivate people in this way is claim to be pursuing a higher ideal, and asking those who see the same as you to rally around the same flag. This was very appealing to the German people because their dire economic conditions and humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles didn't match their idea of German exceptionalism. This is where Jewish discrimination comes in. In the revival of the German sense of self, there had to be perceived antagonists in the equation. Externally, it was Germany's European rivals. Internally, it was the Jews, Gypsies, communists, and whoever else were considered to be on the periphery of society.

Otherwise intelligent Germans allowed this to happen for many reasons. Some were truly biased. Others feared being viewed as resistant to Germany's revival. Still others truly tried to do something for it, and as time went on they suffered the consequences. But overall, the main focus of the day was the revival of Germany and the restoration of it's prestige and power. That's not a hard thing to gather a lot of momentum on, and when it's there, other things are just a distraction and a hindrance to the cause. The modern parallels to this are countless, and aren't only limited to racial discrimination.

This isn't unique in history and still happens all the time today. In a nutshell, the seeds are sown with the sense of exceptionalism. This unfortunately is part and parcel of being part of any race and nationality - it's a natural human tendency. Slobodan Milosevich did something really similar in the 1990's when he invoked the national trauma of the invasion of the Turks hundreds of years earlier to embitter the Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims.

If you want a very interesting parallel that occured in the United States, check out The Third Wave experiment that occurred Palo Alto California in 1969. This is about the least likely place you'd see a replication of the rise of the Nazis but this schoolteacher unintentionally sparked a movement with similar characteristics as a way to teach his class how this happened in a highly educated country. There was also [a book](http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Todd-Strasser-ebook/dp/B008LMD20O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394658999&sr=8-1&keywords=the+wave_, an afterschool special movie, and a feature length German movie based on this story. Really worth checking out.

The British invented the term at the end of the 19th century to classify German goods that were seen as inferior.

Germany was industrialized later than Britain. Therefore Brits viewed the Germans as laymen when it came to industrialized production. But in fact Germany could use the already optimized industrial methods without having to make errors that would only cost money. Thus German factories became more efficient than British.

One of the main goals for the German economy was to replace the imported British products with German ones and export their products into the world. Around this time the British invented the "Made in Germany" label, which later became a guarantor for quality.

Therefore Germany invested much more in Research and Devolopment than Britain for example, in order to increase quality and efficiency of producing.

And by the turn of the century Germany was already an industrial powerhouse and a world leader in science.

If you want to know more about this topic I can recomend you the book "The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century" by Peter Watson

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson.

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060760230/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_APLkDbRHM98VW

The Myth of German Villainy by Benton L. Bradberry (2012-07-03) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FEK8ZKM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_6PLkDbMHHQVZJ

Check out this book about the development of the modern German intellectual community.

I like recommending the book The German Genius by Peter Watson to people. It is easy nowadays to forget how absolutely overwhelming Germany's cultural dominance used to be.

To put it in Civ5 terms, Germany was on top of the culture victory race until the World Wars happened.