Book Review: Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known

Fritz Stern’s book, Five Germanys I Have Known, is at once a reckoning of a long and distinguished career as a historian and a review of the last one hundred years of German history refracted through the lens of his own family history.  It should be required reading for anyone interested in modern German history and the American-German Alliance. For Stern was not just a objective scholar, observing from the sidelines, but an active participant in history, developing personal relationships with many of the key figures.  It is this personal account which makes the book so compelling.

For me, the first three chapters were the most fascinating.  Stern writes about the situation of Jews in Breslau in Wilhelmine Germany, about his father’s early career as a physician and his life a soldier in the Great War.  Fritz Stern was born midpoint in the Weimar Republic, and he juxtaposes his recollection his boyhood with a masterful discussion the Republic’s demise. His parent’s close friendship with Fritz Haber is discussed at length.  Then, after 1933, the narrative takes on a tone of dread, as the situation for the Stern family as Jews in Breslau deteriorates. By 1937 Fritz Stern was the only Jew in his school, and he describes in detail how he was tormented by teachers and fellow pupils. It is amazing that the Stern family was able to hang on until 1938, and made it out safely to New York. It was during that period that young Stern developed a strong hatred for Germany and anything German; it would take decades for Stern to reconcile with the country of his birth.

In New York the teen-aged Stern keeps his family together.  There is an encounter with Albert Einstein, who encourages Stern to study medicine instead of history.  But Stern thrives intellectually in his new country; he develops an unconditional admiration for Roosevelt, which reinforces a lifelong commitment to progressive liberalism (his father’s close ties to German Social Democrats was also decisive in this).  Later Fritz Stern would come to admire and build close friendships with Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt; his portraits of those two leaders alone is worth the price of the book.

In the postwar years, there is virtually no major event or development in Germany where Fritz Stern did not have a front-row seat.  His commitment to liberal democracy and a strong trans-Atlantic alliance was recognized in Bonn and in Washington and culminated in two key events. One was his speech to Bundestag on Unity Day in 1987, the first time a non-German (Stern became an American citizen) was so honored.  The other was his appointment during the Clinton administration as senior adviser to the US embassy when Richard Holbrooke was US Ambassador to Germany.  Historians will also appreciate Stern’s discussion of his role in the Historikerstreit (historian’s dispute) in the late 1980’s, when the German historian Ernst Nolte attempted to relativize the Holocaust (Stern sided with Habermas against Nolte), as well as Stern’s criticism of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

As a student I was greatly influenced by Fritz Stern’s first book The Politics of Cultural Despair, which traced Germany’s rejection of liberalism in thought from the 1870’s to the Weimar Republic.  Now with Five Germanys I Have Known Stern shows both the tragedy of that rejection, but also Germany’s rebirth and triumph as a leading exponent of liberal democracy.  The book is simultaneously a warning and a celebration from one who has seen with his own eyes both the worst and the best in the country of his birth.