WHAT made Germany go mad? Having fled the Nazis as a boy, Fritz Stern spent the rest of his life trying to understand and explain the murderous frenzy which beset his homeland.
His life spanned five states of Germany: the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s Nazi Reich, the prosperous, guilt-ridden Federal Republic, the harshly run communist East, and finally the reunified country, which bestowed on him its highest honours. His impeccable credentials—American, Jewish, a refugee from Hitler—meant he could praise something that modern Germans could not. He termed it anderes Deutschland (“another Germany”): not a state, but a place of noble ideas and brave behaviour, a cultural powerhouse and a force for European unity. After the Stern family’s flight from Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, Germany could no longer be his fatherland, but German, precise and expressive, was still his mother-tongue—and there was nowhere else, he said fondly, where he could use it in the same way.
Fritz was seven when Hitler came to power: bad news, the boy could tell, from his father’s reaction when he brought up the morning newspaper. But it was nothing that affected the family personally. In the early Nazi years left-wingers, not Jews, bore the brunt of persecution. The prosperous, professional Sterns were surely neither; the family had long ago converted to Lutheranism. Only when rebuked for making an anti-Semitic remark to his (piously Christian) sister did he even become aware of his family’s roots.
The Sterns were spared any personal humiliation: they emigrated unhurriedly and reluctantly, with their furniture and other possessions, in 1938, a fortunate six weeks before the furies of Kristallnacht. The young man initially wanted to follow his father into medicine, but found the humanities beguiling. Albert Einstein, a family friend, advised him to stick with medicine: it was a science; history wasn’t. He ignored that, and a career in American academia, chiefly at Columbia University, quickly blossomed.
He made his name with a book on cultural despair, published in 1961, which traced the Nazis’ roots to a 19th-century German revulsion against modernity and liberalism. The trauma of defeat in the first world war turned fashionable cultural malcontents into a political force that ultimately became a murderous ideology. Hitler’s rise, he argued, owed less to the Austrian corporal’s personality, his thuggish supporters and brutish ideas, than to his opponents’ cowardice and the weakness of Germany’s “gatekeepers”—the guardians of its cultural and moral standards.
Another big book looked at money and power in imperial Germany, focusing on the previously unexplored relationship between Bismarck and his banker, a Prussian Jew called Gerson von Bleichröder. The picture painted was unflattering to both: the Iron Chancellor’s brutal opportunism matched by the financier’s fawning subservience. But the moral dilemmas of the Hitler era were the most fascinating. He wrote an insightful study of two anti-Nazi notables: the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his friend, the intelligence officer Hans von Dohnanyi.
Distinguished in the English-speaking world, the silver-tongued professor was revered in Germany. Die Welt called him the country’s “Guardian Angel”: combining an insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s clout. Though originally lukewarm about reunification, in 1990, at a—literally—historic seminar, he helped persuade Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, that it posed no threat to Europe.
The Stern professorial wrath descended on Daniel Goldhagen, an American author whose book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” sweepingly blamed the Holocaust on Germans’ “eliminationist mindset”. His blistering review in Foreign Affairs called it “astoundingly repetitive”, “simplistic” and a “potpourri of half-truths and assertions” (and full of “vaporous, dreary jargon”, to boot). Anti-Semitism was inexcusable, but—historically—Germany was far from unique. Its misdeeds must be criticised, but always with scrupulous facts and logic.
Some judgments would have been hard for a non-Jewish, non-refugee to make: for example that Hitler would today be hailed as a German national hero had he died in 1936. His expertise was mostly from on high, and from afar, with little time actually living in Germany (a five-month stint in 1992 as the American ambassador’s adviser was the longest stay of his adult life). Some thought his delight in prizes and lectures excessive. Yet a self-questioning German soul permits no complacency: after receiving a particularly grand prize, he was asked by his wife “are you happy?” He replied sombrely: “if not now, when?”
He ended his life worrying that democracy was disintegrating, just as it had in his youth. Authoritarian tendencies in Poland were distressing. So too were developments closer to home. When the Sterns arrived in America FDR was president. Now Donald Trump—a “nobody” but for his wealth and ambition—exemplified “stultification” and an ominously “dysfunctional, destructive” politics. A life spent studying how quickly and terribly things can go wrong, and the cost of righting them, sharpens the senses for such things.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Another German"