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Fall/Winter 2006
Five Germanys I Have Known.
By Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 546 pages.
Reviewed by Michael D. Mosettig
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For decades, historian Fritz Stern
moved between the worlds of American
academia and the Transatlantic coterie
of thinkers, think-tankers, journalists
and policy-makers deeply involved in
post-war Germany and German-American
relations. But in 1981, he was thrust
suddenly into a larger and more public
universe with the publication of his biography
of Bismarck’s Jewish banker, Gerson
Bleichroder.
As Stern admits, he was more surprised
than anyone to see his book vault
to the best-seller list and become the subject
of considerable commentary. But as
this memoir unfolds, one realizes he
should not have been. Like the themes of
that biography, Stern’s life and work unflinchingly confront the difficult and
haunting questions stemming from the
central points of modern Western history:
Germany, its relationship to its Jewish
citizenry; its role in what Stern early
on labeled the Second Thirty Years War
(1914-45); the Holocaust; the development
of nuclear weapons. (Another of
Stern’s books to reach a non-academic
audience was Einstein’s German World,
published in 1999, which focused on ambiguities
of Germany’s greatness and potential:
what could have been Germany’s
century turned from creativity to destruction:
it is a lesson about the fragility
of democracy that should never be lost to
successor generations everywhere.)
Technically, this autobiography divides
modern German history between
pre-World War I, Weimar, the Third
Reich, the Federal Republic and a reunited
Germany. Running thematically
throughout the national history and the
memoir are the author’s fierce devotion
to classical political liberalism (which he
points out is under some threat in present-
day fundamentalist America), the
relentless questions of how Germany
and Germans deal with the past, how it
fell sway to the temptation of Nazism
and a keen awareness of his Jewish identity
stemming from his youth in the
years of Hitler’s ascension to power
(even though he was born into a family
of converts to Christianity).
Two aspects separate Stern’s life, and
hence this memoir, from the millions of
others who shared his accident and place
of birth. One is how he blended the personal,
emotional and intellectual threads
into a career of accomplishment and
many honors (perhaps a few too many recited
in detail here). The second is how he
constantly has reminded audiences from
thousands of Columbia University students
to readers of his books to the public
and political audiences he has often addressed
of the relentless lesson that history
is very much a matter of the present
and not dusty musings on the past.
His personal story begins with the
world of his distinguished medical and
scientific family in pre-World War I
Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw in
Poland). The author was born in 1926 in
the Weimar years marked by hyper-inflation and political turmoil. His immediate
family departed for the United
States weeks before Kristallnacht (their
Jewish ancestry superseding their officially Protestant affiliation in Hitler’s
Germany), and every one of these sagas
of escape, at once the same and different,
never fails to fascinate. Their adaptation
and transformation as Americans
seemed remarkably smooth as was the
author’s ascent in academia.
And the author’s personal and psychological
evolution as an American but
rooted in Europe is similarly intriguing.
To deal with a country that has cast you
out and murdered your family is difficult
in itself, to put it mildly. The easiest
course is total rejection but that was a
route very few of that generation of intellectuals
took. Stern’s tale is one of finding
a growing measure of comfort in the European
past and present.
“As the ship sailed, I felt nothing but
joyous relief and wondrous excitement
at being on an ocean liner, though I
sensed my parents’ apprehension
about an uncertain future. I knew no
English. My Latin and Greek seemed
like poor preparation for a new life in
America. I left with a loathing for that
jubilant, Hitler-enthralled Germany.
Only in retrospect did I come to understand
that growing up in the Third
Reich had given me my first and deepest
lesson in political education. Only
much later did I find in Heine the perfect
epitaph for what I had gained.
‘The love of freedom,’ he wrote, ‘was a
prison’s flower.’ Also, I came to realize,
in this formative – and no doubt, also
deforming – part of my life, that the
happiest moments had been in Europe
– in France, Switzerland, Denmark,
Holland, Czechoslovakia, and England;
so I had grown up a European
avant la lettre. I gained much if at the
price of anything resembling a real
sentimental education. I rejoiced at escaping
the pains of that deadening
regime. I had felt the pinpricks of terror;
its full and unimaginable horror
began to descend within weeks of our
escape. I am left wondering at the accident
of survival, the kindness of fate.”
That comfort in Europe seemingly
had the effect of steeling Stern’s resolve
as his growing stature put him in a position
to wade into debates and discussions
at the highest levels about how
Germany and Europe should treat the
immediate past. On the one hand, he
was the most scorching critic of Harvard
professor Daniel Goldhagen’s explosive
assertion that Germans were all but genetically
programmed for genocide. Yet
Stern’s own 1987 address to the West
German parliament, with warnings that
the yearnings for reunification had to be
weighed against a Germany past that
sacrificed liberty to unity, drew a harsh
reaction in the conservative German
press, all too often laced with references
to his Jewish origins.
Among the most interesting and rewarding
passages are those dealing with
the rest of Mittleuropa, especially
Poland. His encounters with the heroic
Polish statesman/historian Bronislaw
Geremek are alone almost worth the
price of the book. Here is how he describes
his first encounter with the man
who would come to personify to the outside
world Poland’s suffering and opportunity.
They met in 1979, a year after the
election of the Polish Pope, a decade before
the revolution that began in Poland
and that would sweep the communists
from power across Central and Eastern
Europe.
“...He had left the party in 1968 to
protest the crushing of the Prague
Spring. (I didn’t know then that his
father had been a rabbi and that he
and his mother had been saved by a
Gentile family). I met him in his office
on the main square of the old city,
and found him instantly appealing,
wise, sharp, generous and witty,
marked by an unpretentious gravitas,
his pipe somehow added to the amiable
atmosphere. Our common language
was French, his being perfect –
no surprise, since he had lived and
worked in Paris for many years and
knew the French scene exquisitely
well....the way he saw it, the Polish
economic situation was so bad, and
the party itself so divided, that the
government didn’t dare move, either
on the economic front or with regard
to the opposition, at any moment a
spark could set off a great conflagration,
so the government dithered....”
Reconciliation is a word too loosely
used, especially in the context of Central
European history. But this memoir offers
the parallels rewards of an author still
fortunately with full health and mental
powers to chronicle a central Europe
emerging from its 20th century nightmare
on the path to a democratic and
hopeful future.
As rich as this book is, 500 plus pages
is reaching the length of those door stops
produced by out-of-office politicians.
One full chapter of some 150 pages, devoted
mainly to foundation-sponsored
junkets to lands beyond Europe, happily
could have been cut. And amid all those
pages, there is barely a two-paragraph
mention of his divorce from the mother
of his children and his re-marriage to the
New York-based literary editor Elisabeth
Sifton, the daughter of German-born
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Yet, as this work constantly demonstrates,
Stern is among the rare academics
who can weave and write an interesting
tale. He choicely recounts a fellow
academic’s spiteful take on the success of
his Bleichroder book – “It is too well
written for me to trust it” – as a reminder
that good writing is hardly a ticket to
campus advancement. Here is a life
begun amid some of the worst horrors of
recorded history, and those lessons must
be examined again and again. One can
only hope they will be recounted so well
as to absorb the attention of future generations
and help safeguard them against
similar fates.
Michael D. Mosettig is senior
producer for foreign affairs and defense at
the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
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