Fritz Stern

Fritz R. Stern
Born	(1926-02-02)February 2, 1926 Breslau, Silesia, Weimar Republic
Died	May 18, 2016(2016-05-18) (aged 90) New York, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Historiography
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Columbia University
Influences	Lionel Trilling

Fritz Richard Stern (February 2, 1926 – May 18, 2016) was a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history and historiography. He was a University Professor Emeritus and a provost at New York's Columbia University. His work focused on the complex relationships between Germans and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the first half of the 20th century.

Biography

Fritz Richard Stern was born on February 2, 1926, in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), to a locally prominent medical family of Jewish heritage.^[1] His father, Rudolf Stern, was a physician, medical researcher and a veteran of the First World War. His mother, Käthe Brieger Stern, was a noted theorist, practitioner and reformer in the field of education for young children. Through family, friends, and colleagues, they were connected with a number of leading scientific and cultural figures in Europe and later in the U.S. For example, when trying to decide on his career objective while in college, Stern discussed choosing between history and medicine with Albert Einstein.^[2]

The family had converted from Judaism to Lutheran Protestant Christianity at the end of the 19th century, while sharing the increasingly secular worldview frequently found among Germany's educated classes.^[1] Stern was baptized shortly after his birth and named after his godfather, another member of the city's intellectual élite, the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber^[3] (also a Christian convert from Judaism). The Sterns emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape the virulently anti-Jewish policies of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government and the increasing violence against all Germans of Jewish ancestry.^[1]

The family settled in New York City, more specifically in Jackson Heights, Queens. There, Stern spent the remainder of his childhood, attended public school and quickly learned English while his parents reestablished their respective careers. He then attended Columbia University where he received his bachelors, masters and PhD. His professors included Lionel Trilling.^[4]

From 1953 to 1997, he served as a professor at Columbia, obtaining the eminent Seth Low chair before attaining the rank of University Professor. Stern also briefly served as provost of the university.^[1]

Beginning in 1954, Stern taught frequently as a guest lecturer at the Free University in West Berlin.

In 1990, he helped persuade British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that a reunited Germany, firmly anchored in the West, would pose no threat to Europe. Thereafter, in 1993-94, Stern served as an adviser to the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke. In 2010, Stern spoke at the former German military headquarters building, the Bendlerblock, on the 66th anniversary of attempted assassination of Hitler.^[5] Looking back in January 2016, he told an interviewer, "Sometimes I bemoaned the fact that I had to grow up amid the disintegration of a democracy; now, at the end of life, I am having to experience again the struggles of democracy."^[6]

Fritz Stern died on May 18, 2016, in New York, aged 90.^[7]

Scholarship

The focus of much of Stern's work an attempti to track the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its characteristics. Stern traced the origins of Nazism back to the 19th-century völkische movement. In Stern's opinion, the virulently anti-Semitic völkische movement was the result of the "politics of cultural despair" experienced by German intellectuals who were unable to come to grips with modernity. However, Stern rejected the Sonderweg interpretation of German history. In his view, the ideas of the völkische movement were merely a "dark undercurrent" in 19th-century German society. In the 1990s, Stern was a leading critic of the controversial American author Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners Stern denounced as unscholarly and full of Germanophobia.

Another major area of research for Stern was the history of the Jewish community in Germany and how the Jewish culture influenced German culture and vice versa. In Stern's view, this interaction produced what Stern often called the "Jewish-German symbiosis". In Stern’s view, the best example of the "Jewish-German symbiosis" was Albert Einstein.

Select works

Author

• The Politics Of Cultural Despair; A Study In The Rise Of The Germanic Ideology, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1961, 1963. Adapted from Stern's dissertation; essays on Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.
• The Failure Of Illiberalism, London, George Allen & Unwin 1972, ISBN 0-04-943019-X. A collection of essays.
• Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire, New York : Knopf, 1977 ISBN 0-394-49545-4. A dual biography of banker Gerson Bleichröder and Otto von Bismarck.
• Dreams and Delusions: The Drama Of German History, New York: Knopf, 1987 ISBN 0-394-55995-9. A collection of essays.
• Germany 1933: Fifty Years Later, New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1984. Leo Baeck memorial lecture.
• Einstein's German World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-691-05939-X.
• (in German)Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung, Frankfurt am Main: Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V. im Verlag der Buchhändler-Vereinigung GmbH, 1999.
• Five Germanies I Have Known, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 ISBN 0-374-15540-2. Autobiography.
• "Imperial Hubris: A German Tale, War, Wilhelm II, and the consequences of leadership", Lapham's Quarterly, Winter 2008.

Co-author

• with Elizabeth Sifton, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State, (New York Review Books Collections: 2013, ISBN 978-1590176818.
• (in German)with Helmut Schmidt, Unser Jahrhundert: Ein Gespräch. C.H. Beck, München, 2010. A conversation between the historian and the politician.

Editor

• The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, New York: Meridian Books, 1956, 1960, 1972, 1973, ISBN 0-394-71962-X.
• co-edited with Leonard Krieger The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays In Honor Of Hajo Holborn, London: Macmillan, 1968, 1967. A survey of historiography from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

Honors

• 1984: Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize (jointly with Hans Jonas) of the University of Tübingen^[8]
• 1994: Pour le mérite für Wissenschaft und Künste
• 1999: Peace Prize of the German Book Trade^[9]
• 2002: Honorary doctor of the University of Wrocław
• 2004: Leo-Baeck-Medaille, Leo Baeck Institute^[10]
• 2005: The German National Prize^[11]
• 2006: Großes Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit Stern und Schulterband^[12]
• 2007: Preis für Verständigung und Toleranz, Jewish Museum Berlin
• 2008: Internationaler Brückepreis

The Fritz Stern Professorship at the University of Wrocław was established in his honor in 2009. The first person appointed to hold that chair was former German President Richard von Weizsäcker.^[13]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fritz Stern.

• "A Fundamental History Lesson", In These Times, October 10, 2005, by Fritz Stern