Stern, Fritz R. Five Germanys I Have Known.

• Author: Green, Harold M.
• Position: Book review

Stern, Fritz R. Five Germanys I Have Known. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 546 pages. Cloth, $30.

At the age of eighty-one, Fritz Stern, former provost of Columbia University and now professor emeritus of European history there, can look back on a distinguished and often controversial career which he recounts in this remarkable memoir set within the unfolding drama of recent German history. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), in 1926, Stern, whose Jewish paternal grandparents had embraced Christianity, grew up in the twilight years of the Weimar Republic and witnessed firsthand Germany's descent into tyranny. On September 24, 1938, only a few weeks before the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, Stern and his family left Germany on a bittersweet odyssey to the United States. In "The Triumph of a Double Life," his book-review essay on Stem's memoir, journalist Amos Elon poignantly recalls this mixture of emotions: "Stem's father cried bitterly when they finally left Breslau on their way to America, a spontaneous outbreak of feelings by a man mourning a destroyed past, concerned about an uncertain future. The twelve-year-old Fritz, however, felt nothing but joy. He would soon be a deeply committed American liberal." (1)

By the spring of 1944, Stern was a Columbia University pre-med undergraduate in the throes of indecision. Should he continue in medicine following in the footsteps of his four great-grandfathers, two grandfathers, and father, or break with the past and study history? Casting about for a resolution to his dilemma, Stem accompanied his mother on a visit to Albert Einstein's Mercer Street home in Princeton. When Stern asked the scientist's opinion, Einstein advised him to study medicine rather than history because, in Einstein's view, medicine was a science, history was not. Having already fallen under the spell of two charismatic Columbia mentors, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, Stem ignored Einstein's advice and resolved to pursue history, a decision which has immeasurably enriched our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Indeed, his doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural and intellectual roots of Nazism, completed in 1953, evolved into The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961). This analysis of the revolutionary conservatism of Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur...