Enjoying lunch with the artist Heide Hatry, I am reminded of the so-called German genius; that gewisse Etwas which makes German art, music, literature and philosophy not only so powerful and seductive, but also so queer.
But what is the deutsche Genie?
A few years ago, the intellectual historian Peter Watson published a huge book on this topic - almost a 1000 pages in length - and yet he never quite managed to put his finger on what's so unique about the German spirit.
It seems a little silly, therefore, for me to try and say what it is in a short post like this (written in between courses and whilst Heide has gone to powder her nose). But I think the answer has something to do with the fact that the German word for slug is Nacktschnecke.
There's a beautiful but slightly mad and misleading logic to this compound noun that seems essentially German ...
See: Peter Watson, The German Genius (Simon and Schuster, 2010).
