Fritz Stern

Biography

Fritz Richard Stern was born on February 2, 1926, in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), to a locally prominent medical family of Jewish heritage. His father, Rudolf Stern, was a physician, medical researcher and a veteran of the First World War. His mother, Käthe Brieger Stern, was a noted theorist, practitioner and reformer in the field of education for young children. Through family, friends, and colleagues, they were connected with a number of leading scientific and cultural figures in Europe and later in the U.S. For example, when trying to decide on his career objective while in college, Stern discussed choosing between history and medicine with Albert Einstein.

The family had converted from Judaism to Lutheran Protestant Christianity at the end of the 19th century, while sharing the increasingly secular worldview frequently found among Germany's educated classes. Stern was baptized shortly after his birth and named after his godfather, another member of the city's intellectual élite, the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber (also a Christian convert from Judaism). The Sterns emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape the virulently anti-Jewish policies of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government and the increasing violence against all Germans of Jewish ancestry.

The family settled in New York City, more specifically in Jackson Heights, Queens. There, Stern spent the remainder of his childhood, attended public school and quickly learned English while his parents reestablished their respective careers. He then attended Columbia University where he received his bachelors, masters and PhD. His professors included Lionel Trilling.

From 1953 to 1997, he served as a professor at Columbia, obtaining the eminent Seth Low chair before attaining the rank of University Professor. Stern also briefly served as provost of the university.

Beginning in 1954, Stern taught frequently as a guest lecturer at the Free University in West Berlin.

In 1990, he helped persuade British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that a reunited Germany, firmly anchored in the West, would pose no threat to Europe. Thereafter, in 1993-94, Stern served as an adviser to the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke. In 2010, Stern spoke at the former German military headquarters building, the Bendlerblock, on the 66th anniversary of attempted assassination of Hitler. Looking back in January 2016, he told an interviewer, "Sometimes I bemoaned the fact that I had to grow up amid the disintegration of a democracy; now, at the end of life, I am having to experience again the struggles of democracy."

Fritz Stern died on May 18, 2016, in New York, aged 90.

Scholarship

The focus of much of Stern's work an attempti to track the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its characteristics. Stern traced the origins of Nazism back to the 19th-century völkische movement. In Stern's opinion, the virulently anti-Semitic völkische movement was the result of the "politics of cultural despair" experienced by German intellectuals who were unable to come to grips with modernity. However, Stern rejected the Sonderweg interpretation of German history. In his view, the ideas of the völkische movement were merely a "dark undercurrent" in 19th-century German society. In the 1990s, Stern was a leading critic of the controversial American author Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners Stern denounced as unscholarly and full of Germanophobia.

Another major area of research for Stern was the history of the Jewish community in Germany and how the Jewish culture influenced German culture and vice versa. In Stern's view, this interaction produced what Stern often called the "Jewish-German symbiosis". In Stern’s view, the best example of the "Jewish-German symbiosis" was Albert Einstein.

Select works

Honors

The Fritz Stern Professorship at the University of Wrocław was established in his honor in 2009. The first person appointed to hold that chair was former German President Richard von Weizsäcker.