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BOOKSHELF

Five Germanys He Has Known

Fritz Stern ’46

PHOTO: JOHN SMOCK

Forty-one years after leaving Breslau, Germany, Fritz Stern ’46, ’53 GSAS set out for his former hometown, now Wroclaw, Poland. Upon his return to the United States, Stern began writing a private account about the visit for his children, Homecoming 1979, a kind of breakthrough for him. “I had gone to Wroclaw out of the deepest kind of curiosity,” Stern writes in his introduction to Five Germanys I Have Known (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30). “I don’t think I realized then that the journey had been a quest, that somehow I needed to see that my home had been destroyed and that the country into which I was born had ceased to exist. My sense of loss was overlain by an all-pervasive gratitude for having found a second, better home in the United States. But that little essay was, indeed, my first effort to write personally about going back to where I had begun.”

Part memoir and part historic record, Five Germanys is a moving reflection on Stern’s experiences in Germany during five political regimes: the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the postwar West and East Germanys and the reunified country after 1990. At the same time, Stern uses this account of his homeland as a lens to examine the haunting question: How could a country as civilized as Germany commit one of the greatest crimes against humanity in Western history?

It is Stern’s subtle application of his life experience to finding answers to the “German question” that gives the book a place in history and political theory. As he describes his ties with politicians and intellectuals, and the opinions they express while in the midst of creating an appropriate democracy for the nation, readers gain insight into how Stern formed his beliefs. Throughout the book, he reflects on the political lessons that Germany needs to teach, looking not only at that country’s issues but also at universal ones.

Five Germanys also is a memoir. “I am trying to fuse memory and history,” he writes, “those distant twins, supportive and destructive of each other.” Stern gives a profound account of his life in Germany and the United States and his progressing views on his homeland during World War II and afterward.

Born and raised in Breslau, Stern grew up in Germany during the Weimar period. Although the Sterns were now Christian, they also were, ethnically speaking, Jews and were afflicted by Nazi rule when the Third Reich came into power in 1938. The family escaped Germany only a month before Kristallnacht, emigrating to the United States when Stern was 12. He finished high school a year early and became a scholarship student at the College.

At the College, Stern befriended the likes of Allen Ginsberg ’48 (“Together we co-chaired a Roosevelt for President club in 1944,” he writes of the friendship), who served as his debate partner at least once when Stern was president of the College Debate Council. It was Ginsberg who suggested that Stern enroll in Lionel Trilling ’25’s English Romanticism course, which Stern found “humbling and life-transforming.”

Courses with Trilling and Jacques Barzun ’27 inspired Stern to wander from the premed track and pursue a history major. He wrote and spoke about current affairs (including on the College radio station, known before the end of WWII as CURC) and as a student received a Curtis Oratorical medal for his theorization of a future Europe. “I suppose,” Stern writes of his activities, “I somehow wanted to pass on the lessons of failed democracies to my American contemporaries, many of whom, I feared, either took freedom for granted or found it tainted in its American form.”

Stern stayed at Columbia for graduate studies, receiving an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history. He began teaching as a graduate student and became a full professor of European history in 1963. He is recognized as one of the eminent historians in his field in the United States and Germany and has received many accolades, including the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit from West Germany (1976), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1999), and the Leo Baeck Medal for his research on German history, Jewish Germans and the origins of national socialism (2005). Five Germanys is the latest of several books he has written about Germany, which include The Politics of Cultural Despair; Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroeder and the Building of the German Empire ; Dreams and Delusions: the Drama Of German History; and Einstein’s German World.

During more than 50 years of teaching at Columbia, Stern received a Great Teacher Award (1978), Lionel Trilling Book Award (1977) and Bancroft Award for Retiring Professor (1997); was named Seth Low Professor of History (1967); served as University provost (1980–83); and was appointed a University Professor (1992). He now is University Professor Emeritus.

Stern is married to Elisabeth Sifton and has two children from a previous marriage. He and his wife live in New York City.

Maryam Parhizkar ’09

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