 Don't Miss
More at Powell's
Interviews | December 15, 2009
By Jill Owens
 Eoin Colfer is best known for his bestselling Artemis Fowl series, which inspires fanatical devotion in its fans. Entertainment Weekly raved: "The...
Continue »
-
 |
$16.95 List price: $30.00
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
| Qty |
Store |
Section |
| 1 |
Burnside |
Germany- General |
More copies of this ISBN:
This title in other formats:
Five Germanys I Have Known
by Fritz Stern
|
|
|
|
Synopses & Reviews The “German question” haunts the modern world: How could so civilized a nation be responsible for the greatest horror in Western history? In this unusual fusion of personal memoir and history, the celebrated scholar Fritz Stern refracts the question through the prism of his own life. Born in the Weimar Republic, exposed to five years of National Socialism before being forced into exile in 1938 in America, he became a world-renowned historian whose work opened new perspectives on the German past. Stern brings to life the five Germanys he has experienced: Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germanys, and the unified country after 1990. Through his engagement with the nation from which he and his family fled, he shows that the tumultuous history of Germany, alternately the strength and the scourge of Europe, offers political lessons for citizens everywhere—especially those facing or escaping from tyranny. In this wise, tough-minded, and subtle book, Stern, himself a passionately engaged citizen, looks beyond Germany to issues of political responsibility that concern everyone. Five Germanys I Have Known vindicates his belief that, at its best, history is our most dramatic introduction to a moral civic life. Review: "In 1944, upon visiting the desolate ruins of Stalingrad, Gen. Charles de Gaulle reportedly said, with a touch of awe, ' Quel peuple!' He was referring not to the Russians but to France and Russia's mutual enemy, the Germans. According to Stern ( Einstein's German World), former provost of Columbia University and among the most venerable of America's German historians, de Gaulle grasped the 'deep ambiguity that hovers around German greatness': Germans were not only the destroyers of historic Europe but also its creators. In this fascinating memoir, Stern looks back over the 'five Germanys' his generation has seen — the Weimar Republic, Nazi tyranny, the post-1945 Federal Republic, the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic and, lastly, the reunited Germany of the present — and explains how he came to reconcile himself with his birth country (which his Jewish family fled in 1938) as it has come to terms with its new place in today's more cohesive and peaceful Europe. His history, says Stern, can be read as 'a text for political and moral lessons, as a drama in dread and hope.' The book's intriguing structure makes it a wonderful combination of history, memoir, analysis and even poetry." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Like a puzzle with an infinite number of answers, the Holocaust keeps turning up new stories, different angles, fresh versions of events we thought we knew already. Unexpectedly, Fritz Stern, one of the most distinguished historians of Germany in this country, has now produced a new story of his own. I say 'unexpectedly' because Stern is best known for his extraordinarily thorough use of archives: ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) For 'Gold and Iron,' his celebrated book on the close relationship between the 19th-century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichrvder, Stern carried out research across Europe. But in 'Five Germanys I Have Known,' Stern's best stories come not from the archives but from his own family memories. Indeed, his description of the world of his grandparents forms the first and most striking of the 'five Germanys' that he describes during the course of this essentially autobiographical book. Stern was the son of assimilated German Jews — so assimilated, in fact, that they had converted to Christianity. His paternal grandparents converted as adults. His maternal grandparents never converted but had their children baptized — among them Stern's mother, born in 1894. His parents and grandparents' closest friends were all converts, too, or else Jews intermarried with Christians. No one thought this odd: 'My grandfathers attended to both their Christian and Jewish patients with equal care and worked harmoniously with their Christian colleagues. Both families had Christian nursemaids and servants, who in many instances remained with them over decades, in a trusted if unequal relationship. In all this, the two families appear to have retained a kind of silence about what we would call their identity, neither openly boastful of their German and Christian belongingness nor openly denying their Jewish roots. They adopted a certain style of life and with it a definite ethos, much of it unspoken and habitual.' Stern goes on to explain this ethos in loving detail, starting with his grandparents' (and later his parents') dedication to work, which was not just a duty but 'what life was about.' The men in the family were all extremely distinguished doctors, the women committed to various charitable and educational projects. All had a 'kind of certainty,' writes Stern, 'about how life should be led.' They considered themselves German patriots, fought in World War I and heatedly debated the politics of Weimar Germany. They lived in Breslau (modern-day Wroclaw), then a city at the edge of Germany, now a part of Poland. They taught their children to love books, they maintained friendships with distinguished scientists — Albert Einstein was a friend — and, of course, they celebrated Easter and Christmas. And their Christianity was more than token: Stern's sister Toni became especially religious, even joining a confirmation class in 1935, a year in which it was no longer easy for grandchildren of converts to keep calling themselves Christians. Indeed, Toni's wish to be confirmed 'brought home to us the very real (if limited) conflict between the Christian churches and the Nazi regime.' The state declared that anyone with a Jewish grandparent could not be considered a Christian, but a few churches — a very few — refused to recognize that rule. Toni was eventually confirmed in one of them. The pastor of that church had already been arrested several times, and Stern, then still a child, was thrilled to learn he had communicated with prisoners in nearby cells by knocking on the wall in Morse code. The next part of the story — that of Stern's 'second Germany,' Nazi Germany — is more familiar. By the late 1930s, the Third Reich, 'by declaring race and not religion as a determinant of a person's civic identity and worth,' had effectively reconverted such Christians of Jewish descent into 'non-Aryans.' In that sense, Stern points out, Hitler succeeded. Nowadays, most people think of, say, the great 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn as a Jew, but in his lifetime neither he nor anyone else thought of Mendelssohn as anything but a German. Nor, before Hitler, had Stern's family been identified as particularly 'Jewish' either. In due course, the Stern family, like all their converted or intermarried friends and acquaintances, had to leave Germany. The story of how they searched for universities that would employ them, friends who would help them or a government that would accept them is an agonizing one, full of false starts and lethal mistakes. Some left the country, were unhappy and actually came back. Some waited too long, could not leave and died in concentration camps. For most of those who got out, the end result was a position with lower stature, less money and a more uncertain future. The Sterns wound up in the United States, where young Fritz immediately identified with American culture and developed a passionate loathing for anything German. As he grew older, though, Stern channeled that passion into a desire to understand Germany better, to make sense of what had happened to him and to millions of others. This led him first to German cultural history, including a good deal of work on the history of the Jews in Germany, and later back to Germany itself. He discovered first West Germany, then East Germany, then the fifth and final Germany of the book's title, the reunified Federal Republic. So many different professional and personal encounters did he have with these 'Germanys,' in fact, that by the end of his career he counted many prominent German politicians, intellectuals and journalists among his friends, had received dozens of awards from German institutions and had even served for a time as a semiofficial adviser to Richard Holbrooke, when he was the U.S. ambassador to Germany. Still, none of the descriptions Stern gives of the grand seminars and conferences he attended in his later years really matches, in interest or intensity, the depiction of his grandparents' world in the book's opening. Perhaps that isn't surprising: The story of what happened to the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Germany simply demands constant and new retellings, and probably always will. Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post." Reviewed by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Synopsis: World-renowned historian Stern brings to life the five Germanys he has experienced: Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germanys, and the unified country after 1990. He shows that the tumultuous history of Germany--alternately the strength and the scourge of Europe--offers political lessons for citizens everywhere. About the Author Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus and former provost at Columbia University, is the author of many works of European history, including Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire and Einstein’s German World.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780374155407
- Author:
- Stern, Fritz
- Publisher:
- Farrar Straus Giroux
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- Europe - Germany
- Subject:
- Germany
- Subject:
- Germany History 20th century.
- Subject:
- Stern, Fritz Richard
- Publication Date:
- August 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 546
- Dimensions:
- 9.22x6.36x1.70 in. 2.03 lbs.
Other books you might like
-
-
-
-
-
-
Related Aisles
|
