German History, Historiography

Five Germanys I Have Known

Name: Five Germanys I Have Known
Author: Fritz Stern
ISBN: 9780374530860

by Fritz Stern

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Overview

The "German question" haunts the modern world: How could so civilized a nation be responsible for the greatest horror in Western history? In this unusual fusion of personal memoir and history, the celebrated scholar Fritz Stern refracts the question through the prism of his own life. Born in the Weimar Republic, exposed to five years of National Socialism before being forced into exile in 1938 in America, he became a world-renowned historian whose work opened new perspectives on the German past.

Stern brings to life the five Germanys he has experienced: Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germanys, and the unified country after 1990. Through his engagement with the nation from which he and his family fled, he shows that the tumultuous history of Germany, alternately the strength and the scourge of Europe, offers political lessons for citizens everywhere—especially those facing or escaping from tyranny. In this wise, tough-minded, and subtle book, Stern, himself a passionately engaged citizen, looks beyond Germany to issues of political responsibility that concern everyone. Five Germanys I Have Known vindicates his belief that, at its best, history is our most dramatic introduction to a moral civic life.

Synopsis

The New York Sun

Five Germanys I Have Known offers a historically valuable document of a happy life in difficult times.

About the Author, Fritz Stern

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus and former provost at Columbia University, is the author of many works of European history, including Gold and Iron:Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire and Einstein's German World.

Reviews

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Editorials

Foreign Affairs

“…Both a rich memoir and a penetrating history…an important contribution to our understanding of the many transformations of modern Germany history and of postwar U.S.—European relations.”

The Baltimore Sun

“Fritz has written what might be called a “scholarly memoir,” combining the objectivity and intellectual rigor of the academic with the warmth and intimacy of the memoirist…Anyone having an interest in 20th-century European history will find the book engrossing.”

The Christian Science Monitor

“The personal and historical hum along like a well-tuned Mercedes…students of Stern at Columbia have doubtless absorbed these lessons, and more, over the decades. Now others will have a chance as well.”

The New York Sun

“Five Germanys I Have Known…offers a historically valuable document of a happy life in difficult times.”

Tom Reiss

By probing history for answers to how Germany progressed from radical illiberalism to Nazism, Stern has created a cumulative canon of warning signs for the degeneration of any great nation's politics. The more personal history in this book adds power to an argument that has been a lifetime in the making.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In 1944, upon visiting the desolate ruins of Stalingrad, Gen. Charles de Gaulle reportedly said, with a touch of awe, "Quel peuple!" He was referring not to the Russians but to France and Russia's mutual enemy, the Germans. According to Stern (Einstein's German World), former provost of Columbia University and among the most venerable of America's German historians, de Gaulle grasped the "deep ambiguity that hovers around German greatness": Germans were not only the destroyers of historic Europe but also its creators. In this fascinating memoir, Stern looks back over the "five Germanys" his generation has seen-the Weimar Republic, Nazi tyranny, the post-1945 Federal Republic, the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic and, lastly, the reunited Germany of the present-and explains how he came to reconcile himself with his birth country (which his Jewish family fled in 1938) as it has come to terms with its new place in today's more cohesive and peaceful Europe. His history, says Stern, can be read as "a text for political and moral lessons, as a drama in dread and hope." The book's intriguing structure makes it a wonderful combination of history, memoir, analysis and even poetry. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This book is a summation and memoir by master historian Stern (University Professor Emeritus, Columbia Univ.; Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History), one of the foremost historians of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, whose writings have influenced generations of students and scholars as they have wrestled with the great questions of European history during this period. Beginning with a poignant recollection of the vanished world of his boyhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), after World War I, Stern goes on to describe his forced emigration to New York (with his physician father and educator mother) when the Nazis came to power. He goes on to trace his development as a student and then as a committed and engaged scholar as his homeland moved from World War II to occupation, division between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and, finally, today's unified country. Stern's explicitly liberal approach to history and politics runs throughout his reflections on his own wide-ranging scholarly and civic involvement in Germany and on the issues of Germany's role in the world today. Not a conventional history, this work provides insight into the development not only of Germany but also of a morally committed scholarly life. Academic libraries with other books by Stern should consider this one as well.-Barbara Walden, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Stern (Professor Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Einstein's German World, 1999, etc.) traces 100 years of his homeland's history, at the same time telling the story of his coming-of-age as an intellectual and a citizen. Despite its title, the book really describes six Germanys: the pre-World War I "ancestral" country of the author's parents; the Weimar Republic, in which he was born, in 1926; Hitler's Third Reich; the West and East Germanys of the Cold War; and the unified, post-Communist nation. The obvious dividing line in Stern's life is 1938, when his Jewish family narrowly escaped the country. Transplanted to New York, he grew up as Germany provoked and then lost World War II. In 1946, he embarked on an academic career that focused on German history just as his native country was beginning decades of change. As a historian, he writes, his professional life has been dedicated to investigating how "the human potential for evil became an actuality" in the Germany of his youth. The author engagingly mixes personal experiences, including friendships with poet Allen Ginsberg and historian Richard Hofstadter, with the politics of the times, ranging from Konrad Adenauer's leadership of West Germany to the ideological turmoil that raged on Columbia's campus in 1968. His underlying concern is the individual's responsibility within society. For Stern, the only choice is an engaged citizenship, standing up for liberal values when they are threatened by autocrats and radicals from the left or the right. He faults Germans who went along with Hitler's hatred of Jews as well as young American dropouts of the 1960s who chose to detach from society rather than work to change it. Those who do notdefend for their freedoms, he writes, endanger them. An expansive, eloquent fusion of "memory and history" that examines the moral questions posed by the political and social upheavals of the last century.