he survived only a few months
His 90th birthday. The high round date in early February had led again in mind what the Germans had to Fritz Stern. His death on Wednesday now completed the image of the German-American historian who like no other has enriched his thinking, his questions and his opinions, the employment of Germans with their history. For many decades he has the Germans kept a critical, national quite educational, but benevolent basically mirror. In the debate about the right and wrong ways of modern German history Fritz Stern was an indispensable size.
This was certainly not prefigured him. Born in 1926 Breslauer Professor son of German-Jewish educated class, who had to flee to America in September 1938 with his family from Germany, the lost homeland was initially over a large distance. The young historian felt, as he later reported entirely as Americans. Only gradually he had acquired “a second German life”.
Fritz Stern came from the world of European citizenship
But that was immensely fruitful for his former compatriots, because it taught them to see themselves in a manner and to ask that they probably could convey only a scholar who came from the deepest layers of their civil history. Scion of a doctor and a doctorate in physics, godson of the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber, Fritz Stern was the world of the European bourgeoisie near life – Haber and Einstein he devoted haunting studies. Yet he was also by one’s own destiny, through the historical breakdown of “Third Reich” and emigration separated from his country of origin
Between America where he completed his scientific career -. Over half a century he was after completing his studies at Columbia University in New York professor there – and Germany, in which he repeatedly traveled since the fifties, his research and teaching unfolded. was focus and remained the criticism that unraveling and lightening those historical span that drove the Germans in the disaster and let them be the author of an unprecedented break with civilization. But this work on the problems of German history grew out of the contact with German colleagues and controversy, intensified by close friendships, especially with the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf and the “time” -Herausgeberin Marion Dönhoff.
Thus, Fritz Stern, a participant observer and watching party of intellectual and mental transformation of the Federal Republic since the sixties. His dissertation was himself a not insignificant contribution to this change. It was called “Kulturpessismismus and political risk”, dealt with the intellectual precursors of Nazi derailment of German thought and made when she appeared in 1963 in the Federal Republic of academic sensation. Maybe there the title of a session, the Star 1971 held, the motto for the orientation of his thinking: He was called “To a new German past” and proclaimed a renewal of German historical thinking – it was the first text he wrote again in German .
Since then, Fritz Stern was a regular guest on the German podium. His books reached safe conditions. This was true for his memoirs “Five Germany and a Life” (2007) as well as for his masterpiece “Gold and Iron”, the voluminous tracing a special German-Jewish relationship, namely that of Bismarck to his Jewish banker Gerson. Above all, there were many lectures and essays, with whom he interacted with the interested German public. Perhaps it was mainly the art of historical portraits and intellectual contour, on which was based his reputation. Sovereign in the distribution of light and dark, compelling in its judgment, unpretentious in presentation, they spread a compelling sound humanistic spirituality and unerring liberality.
Prime Minister Thatcher sought advice after the turn of Fritz Stern
This occurrence of the historian Fritz Stern has made him into a public authority. Ale the first foreign nationals held in 1987 in the Bundestag, the speech of June 17, without the advocate then common resistance readings to offend – he had interpreted the uprising especially as freedom of movement. Stern belonged to that illustrious historian circle, of which the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was advised after reunification; for the possible become so way Germany he found the beautiful formula of the “second chance”. 1993 made him the new American ambassador Richard Holbrooke as his advisor.
Fritz Stern was in all this a more encourager. He has never left any doubt as to the depth of the German break with civilization, with which Nazism has the past century left his mark. But he quoted again and again the word of Raymond Aron, that the 20th century the century of Germans could have been. And his studies on Einstein, Max Planck and Rathenau, the lighthouses this playful future, indicate that this time was his special affection.
His creaking German betrayed his American identity
But Fritz Stern also knew that he – as he said in his speech of June 17, 1987 – “came from a Germany that no longer existed and will never exist again.” However, while he was alive, this little man with the flashing eyes, whose creaking German foreshadowed his American identity, there was a lively touch of this great history. Died of Mahner, intermediaries and humanist Fritz Stern is now in New York, peacefully at home, like his German publisher C. H. Beck informed. With his death not only an important historian and a figure of intellectual life assumes. There even the last messenger of an entire era.
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