A German who bridged the Atlantic: Fritz Stern.

• Author: Mosettig, Michael D.
• Position: Five Germanys I Have Known - Book review

Five Germanys I Have Known. By Fritz Stern. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 546 pages.

For decades, historian Fritz Stern moved between the worlds of American academia and the Transatlantic coterie of thinkers, think-tankers, journalists and policy-makers deeply involved in post-war Germany and German-American relations. But in 1981, he was thrust suddenly into a larger and more public universe with the publication of his biography of Bismarck's Jewish banker, Gerson Bleichroder.

As Stern admits, he was more surprised than anyone to see his book vault to the best-seller list and become the subject of considerable commentary. But as this memoir unfolds, one realizes he should not have been. Like the themes of that biography, Stern's life and work un-flinchingly confront the difficult and haunting questions stemming from the central points of modern Western history: Germany, its relationship to its Jewish citizenry; its role in what Stern early on labeled the Second Thirty Years War (1914-45); the Holocaust; the development of nuclear weapons. (Another of Stern's books to reach a non-academic audience was Einstein's German World, published in 1999, which focused on ambiguities of Germany's greatness and potential: what could have been Germany's century turned from creativity to destruction: it is a lesson about the fragility of democracy that should never be lost to successor generations everywhere.)

Technically, this autobiography divides modern German history between pre-World War I, Weimar, the gird Reich, the Federal Republic and a reunited Germany. Running thematically throughout the national history and the memoir are the author's fierce devotion to classical political liberalism (which he points out is under some threat in present-day fundamentalist America), the relentless questions of how Germany and Germans deal with the past, how it fell sway to the temptation of Nazism and a keen awareness of his Jewish identity stemming from his youth in the years of Hitler's ascension to power (even though he was born into a family of converts to Christianity).

Two aspects separate Stern's life, and hence this memoir, from the millions of others who shared his accident and place of birth. One is how he blended the personal, emotional and intellectual threads into a career of accomplishment and many honors (perhaps a few too many recited in detail here). The second is how he constantly has reminded audiences from thousands of Columbia University...