Customer Reviews

Five Germanys I Have Known

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
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Fritz Stern, emeritus professor of European history at Columbia, has produced quite a distinctive book on German history: it is at once an autobiography as well as an examination of Germany during its five most recent identities: Wilhelmine; Weimar; Third Reich; Divided Germany; and finally unified Germany. This dual focus serves Stern rather well--since he was born in 1926, forced to flee Silesia (now part of Poland) for the United States in 1936, and has had extensive involvement with Germany and things German since at least the early 1950's, his personal perspective and activities are quite valuable. Particularly his discussion of the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) is full of insights, as is the book's discussion of the Federal Republic (West Germany) and the reunification process. I found it helpful to have a copy of Stern's "Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History", a collection of his essays, handy for reference. At over 500 pages, this is a long book, which has a large cast of characters (such as Haber, Kohl, Schmidt, and a whole slew of academics, diplomats, journalists, and others) about whom Stern offers some perceptive insights. To be sure, Stern on Stern sometimes resembles one of those Christmas letters, but after all it is his life he is recounting. An unusual way to learn a good deal about Germany from one who has sought over the last 50 years or so to explain it to the rest of us.

Occasionally an historian becomes famous -- usually posthumously. There are Thucydides, Herodotus, Edward Gibbon, a couple of American historians ending recently perhaps with Arthur Schlesinger. But for the most part historians are archival and campus moles who influence people in small and indirect ways. Here a Columbia historian, Fritz Stern, because of his trans-atlantic life, his brilliant insight into the mind and heart of the Germans who forced his emigration in the Third Reich, his ability to connect sympathetically with many people of influence and enlightenment --here is a man who is an historian and truly an intellectual celebrity. He has lived through a flight from the Nazis, campus upheaval over the Vietnam War, the reunification of a Germany unable to define itself or its history, and the probable end of American hegemony in the world. He has taken all this in and written about it with brilliance and insight. He is the model of an historian of European and world history on the American scene.

Just compare this book to the self-serving, arrogant and self-righteous autobiography published a few years ago by another American historian transplanted from Europe, Richard Pipes. Both are accomplished historians and very able in their fields, but Pipes is not the man you would go to in a personal or professional crisis. Stern would be a real mentor, something rare on American or European campuses.

This is the book for those interested in Germany, in academia, and in America's role in the world. It is also well written and elegant.

Fritz Stern is an impressive writer. This book takes one from 19th century Germany to about 2002, mostly in the context of his own family history. I had a particular interest in the book, because Stern comes from Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland). I've spent time there and have many relatives living in and around that city. In addition, a family friend escaped the Nazis out of Breslau in much the way Stern's family did. Anyone who is interested in German history should read this book, especially as a starting point. Stern gives many explanations and insights into events that are not commonly known and gives the reader plenty to think about. I have one of his other books, Gold and Iron, that I now can't wait to read.

One criticism I had was the chapter on German Themes in Foreign Lands. I can understand the author's wanting to put the lessons of 20th century in a global context, but to me this material seemed like a diversion, with too tenuous a connection to German history. If I want to study China, India, Argentina or other countries, I'd read a book exclusively on that subject. I thought the book started to drag at this point.

Otherwise, anyone interested in German history from a German/Jewish/American perspective shouldn't miss this.

A liberal American historian, German by birth, from an eminent, converted Jewish family, writes a memoir and history book about his relationship with his birth country, respectively with the 5 permutations that occured during his life time. He is in his 80s now, so he experienced personally Weimar, the 3rd Reich, the Bundesrepublik, the DDR, and re-united Germany. Probably he will not be around to see a next version, the whole looks reasonably stable right now.
Stern begins with a chapter about the one Germany that he missed due to belated birth: the Kaiserreich, which one might call the 2nd Reich, if one wanted to follow the arithmetic appproach of the monsters who ran the 3rd. He tells not just the story of his family in Silesian Breslau, but also the story of Jews in Germany in the 19th and early 20th century, and of the German version of anti-semitism. Like the aside that the German army could not have a Dreyfus scandal, as no Dreyfus could have been an officer in Germany at that time.
Essential reading for anyone who tries to understand what happened. (Not that I find what happened understandable in a basic way. How can one.)Stern defines as one of the goals of his book to explore 'how the universal potential for evil became an actuality in Germany'. He thinks it was neither accidental nor inevitable. Has he answered his questions? Possibly not finally. He identifies cultural pessimism as one underlying tendency among Germans, which fostered and enabled the rise of violent nationalism: anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, anti-Westernism, anti-semitism. He also worries that these or similar attitudes are still virulent and cause danger still. Not so much in Germany though.
Apart from this heavy question he also gives us plenty of interesting episodes. Like: Fritz Haber, the nobel laureate and in a way Germany's version of a WWI Oppenheimer, the pioneer of the gas war, was Stern's godfather, his Uncle Fritz.
Welcome for me: a clear word for Nietzsche and against his vulgarizers who put him in the wrong camp.
Surprising for me: he dislikes Hannah Arendt, to some extent because of her relation with Heidegger, the villain. (I would have expected this to go the the other way, that Heidegger could derive some degree of redemption from this relationship.)
In the introduction he gives a smart little picture about the self and history: in the 70s he visited Breslau/Wroclaw, his formerly German home town, that he had had to leave as a refugee from the Nazis, and which had become Polish due to the consequences of WWII. He finds a Polish intellectual living in his grandmother's former house. The man has spent time in a concentration camp. Stern has lost relatives in Auschwitz, nearby. He is content about the way things developed with the city and the house, and finds no sympathy for the Germans who were 'ethnically cleansed' out of Silesia. Which is entirely understandable and summarizes the whole issue in a nutshell, although not comfortably.

Fritz Stern has lived a long and exceedingly full and productive life, both as a scholar and a participant, focusing very largely on Germany and on U.S. relations thereto. His title suggests his historian's perspective; I hoped to broaden my own understanding of Germany by absorbing what he has come to know. I found most of "Five Germanys...." fascinating but I also had some disappointments.
Anne Appelbaums' excellent review for the Washingon Post Book World, reproduced above, thoroughly summarizes the many strengths of Stern's history/memoir. I concur in her praise. My reservations are these:
The world of eminent scholars and political leaders in which Stern has traveled for the past 60 years has not brought him in much contact with the ordinary German's world. And it was this world that I was most curious about since my wife and I visit there quite often to see her Army son and his family who have been stationed there for much of the past 20 years. It is the life of ordinary Germans in shops and schools and hospitals and factories that especially interests me. That is virtually untreated here. Similarly, U.S. Army troops have occupied and/or been stationed in Germany for over 60 years. In great numbers. Surely that presence has had, and continues to have, a major impact on life in Germany, but Stern scarcely mentions their presence.
It is, of course, Stern's prerogative to discuss what he finds most interesting and significant. Potential readers should simply be apprised of what topics they will and won't see covered.
Finally let me offer a caveat to one of Stern's several times repeated historical judgments. He shares the consensus opinion that the Cold War originated primarily because of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after WWII. What puzzles me is that he never mentions the obvious problem with that argument; Any Russian/Soviet government, whether communist or fascist or democratic, would have done the same thing as Stalin did. Perhaps less brutally but no less assuredly. That country had been devastated twice in less than 30 years by the Germans and their allies. In WWII they had had more people killed every week for four years, on average, than the U.S. lost in the entire Viet Nam War. It is inconceivable that any responsible Soviet/Russian government would have taken a different view of future potential threats from the west.

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.

This is a quite long but eminently readable book that does cover a long period of time in the recent history of Germany. It is both a memoir and a history book at the same time. I think it is most helpful to the reader in the way his personal recollections and the experiences of his extended family add meaning and perspective to the better known but probably not completely understood historical events described in the book. The early chapters remind me of Stefan Zweig's wonderful book The World of Yesterday. Also the fact that it was written by someone from the former German lands that were given to Poland after WWII also adds an additional somewhat unfamiliar perspective to the events described. Where are the East Prussian, Silesian, and Sudeten refugee camps after all these years? It is probably lucky that such things were never established after WWII except for the fairly shortlived displaced persons camps. Overall a very good book and somewhat difficult to put down once you get started and I really appreciate all of the new ideas and outlooks that the author has provided to me in this book which must have required both a prodigious amount of work and a prodigious memory. I would have given 5 stars except for the fact that the whole book shows a fairly unbalanced socialist world view that in light of all the history covered in this book (it was called National Socialism after all) was sometimes rather surprising and rarely even somewhat jarring. I would have thought that after all his experiences he would have been less of a socialist and more of a believer in the primacy of individual liberty and freedom, possibly even a libertarian rather than a socialist. However I concede that the author is much more knowledgeable about all these topics than this reviewer and overall it is a very good read for anyone looking for a book to flesh out the outline of German history that most people get in school.

whose family lived through it. Actually this remarkable book is more like a biography of the Stern family which is quite fascinating. Stern uses his personal experiences, and those of his family, friends, and colleagues, to provide a unique perspective on Germany history during those turbulent times. A very interesting read and one that speaks well for humanity, forgiveness, and self-assessment as well as analysis of the political and historical events in Germany.

This is a fascinating and highly readable history, not only of post World War II Germany, but of the story of our times as seen through the eyes of a deeply involved scholar who participated in many of the processes that shaped our lives.

It has more splashes of personal color than any real history has a right to. One should not take the history here *too* seriously. Before I go further, Geoff Pietsch's review is the best one here. While I enjoyed the language and prose, especially in the first 2/3rds of the book, the author is somewhat sloppy about noting people without explaining the context of their personalities. There was alot to find out about how people like his family operated in the period before the 1930s. And much of what he wrote about moving to America and getting established as a historian was pretty cool. The flaws were pretty big, though. The last third of the book took me three weeks to read, when the first 2/3rds took me about two weeks. The author starts name-dropping like heck and the book begins to ramble from minutia to minutia. Although the self-portrait is a liberal, when I read and conceptualized the book as a whole, I got the strong sense that Stern was like some Jewish people who's conceptualization of the holocaust was that, well, "We're White Too". I don't think he's particularly racist, but there was not a little conveyed discomfort in his chapter on china, or about his involvement in dealing with student radicalism (which sometimes involved african american issues). Moreover his visits to the global south was conspicuous in the absence of dusky latinos in most places or blacks in Brasil. Lastly, he seems to have had relations with very few people who weren't of the tippy top social crust, and he apparently took pride in that as well. By the end, I was wondering what his reaction would be if I (black man) showed up in his garden. I concluded that he was something like a more liberal analogue of Kissinger, who didn't really believe in much of the world besides the US and Europe. I was left with the feeling that I would enjoy the company of Robert Rubin, Neidermayer, Oppenheimer, or George Soros (biographies of succesfull jewish people I've read) more than I would Fritz Stern. One really should stop when one gets to the China chapter, and you'll have gotten what is best about this book. Finally, the context. It is my belief that Fritz Stern wrote this book to help bring together the US and Germany and repair much of the damage done by the Bush Administration. He also seems to want to encourage Germany to adopt a more american neoliberal stance. He definitly wanted to have Germany and rest of Europe together under the same Atlanticist umbrella. In those lights, it is not a surprise that there is a lot of russo-phobia in the book. Subtle, but there. I began to wonder if he doesn't realize that Germany has to have a Russia policy independent of the US's aegis due to strong economic ties and geopolitical realities. It would contradict his Bismark expertise (Bismark's Russia policy was aimed at drawing it out of France's orbit and securing his rear for all of his quick victories). It is certainly not a worthless book for all of it's faults. Just know that it does have serious contextual faults for all of the Babbits (bourgousie philistines) out there.