Five Germanys I Have Known
by Fritz Stern
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Book Summary Information
Author: Fritz SternEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-24
ISBN: 0374530866
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Five Germanys I Have Known
Book Review: The refugee returns as guru
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a fusion of the personal life of Stern and his family and of the history of the country in which he was born and from which they emigrated to the United States in 1938. The history of Germany up to 1945 is told in a workmanlike and rather dry manner. Soaked as we are in this history already, we can read that elsewhere. We hear of the personal experiences during the Nazi period of acculturated and patriotic German Jews (both Stern's parents, though of Jewish origin, had been baptized as children at the end of the 19th century); but these, too, have been the subject of countless books. Although Stern's father, grandfathers and the circle of friends were distinguished medical men and scientists, they may not be of the same absorbing interest to the reader as they are to the author, especially if, as here, the author does not really bring them to life, so that they remain mere names. The book becomes more interesting after the first 130 pages which cover the period from 1871 to 1938 and are concerned mostly with the older generations; for the author himself was just seven years old when the Nazis came to power, and just 12 when the family emigrated.
But the child's experience of life in Nazi Germany had been unpleasant enough, and they made Stern aware of politics at an age when children in more fortunate lands are unlikely to concern themselves with such matters. In the United States, from his schooldays onwards, Stern began to speak and write on politics. He attributes his liberalism (his opposition to communism and also to McCarthyism) to what he had learnt from the deprivation of liberty in Nazi Germany. In due course he became a prolific organizer of petitions and resolutions against authoritarianism wherever he found it, determined not to be like those intellectuals who had kept silent during the Nazi period. And he was a severe critic of American foreign policy, of its reliance on military force, and of the neo-conservatives.
On graduating, Stern had become a historian at Columbia University, and had focussed increasingly on German history. Immediately after the war, while detesting the Nazis, he knew that there had been a democratic Germany which the Nazis had overwhelmed but whose roots could surely be nourished. I recognize, as someone who has had similar experiences, the mixed feelings with which he first went back to Germany on a lecture tour in 1954, aware that many Germans had lived in an inner emigration during the Nazi period, but wondering about the past of so many Germans who claimed never to have been Nazis; feeling a sense of virtue as a representative of democracy, and relishing that he was returning as an American and under American auspices and protection. He continues, of course, with his narrative history of Germany, and this becomes more interesting after 1945 - in part because our schools and universities pay so little attention to it (compared with the emphasis on Nazi and pre-Nazi Germany) and also because the adult Stern has more first-hand and detailed experience of it than he had of the earlier period.
The varying views of German academics he reports in a series of anecdotes reveal the many-faceted nature of German reactions to their past, ranging from the aggrieved and insensitive to a full-hearted acceptance of the indelible stain of Nazism. He is good at discussing the several debates between Germans about their own past: in the 1960s about Germany's responsibility for the First World War (the Fischer controversy), in which Stern himself took part, essentially on Fischer's side; in the 1980s about the so-called Historikerstreit, triggered by Nolte's attempts to relativize Nazi atrocities by presenting them as reactions to earlier Soviet atrocities; and in the 1990s about Goldhagen's unscholarly attack on the entire German nation as having been `Hitler's Willing Executioners', which Stern vehemently critiqued.
The five Germanies of the title are pre-Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany, the GDR, the DDR (where Stern was allowed to consult historical archives), and Reunited Germany; but stretches of the book have nothing to do with any of these: there is, for example, a long passage on the 1968 student revolt at Columbia University and Stern's attitude towards it: sympathetic towards the students' grievances, strongly critical of their bullying methods. And there is a chapter of 58 pages which, though not without interest, is attached to the German question by the thinnest of threads or no threads at all; but they give Stern the excuse for including accounts of his travels, often financed by the Ford Foundation, to study the political climate and/or to lecture in Northern Africa, the Middle East, India, Latin America, France, the Soviet Union under Brezhnev (interesting analysis), Poland on the eve of Solidarity, and post-Maoist China (after the Cultural Revolution but before Tienanmen Square). Everywhere Stern had received introductions to prominent people (especially to dissidents).
Stern was much in demand as a speaker on the international stage. The high point of this was the invitation in 1987 to address the Bundestag on the anniversary of the East Berlin uprising of June 17 1953. I found the pages dealing with this speech and its reception (pp.443 to 450) among the most gripping in the book.
Stern is critical, not of German reunification, but of the way Kohl handled the issue and of the insensitive way in which West Germans have treated the East Germans.
Stern's judgments on historical and political issues strike me as being wise and sane. His book, however, is sadly marred for me by a narcissistic flavour (despite frequent protestations of feeling humble and surprised at the honours bestowed on him), and not least by his frequent quotations of laudatory reviews and congratulatory remarks in letters he received from famous people.
Summary of Five Germanys I Have Known
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.
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.
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