Fritz Stern

Fritz Richard Stern (February 2, 1926 – May 18, 2016) was a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history and historiography.

He was a University Professor and a provost at New York's Columbia University.

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 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 United States For example, when trying to decide on his career objective while in college, Stern discussed choosing between history and medicine with Albert Einstein.

The Sterns emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape the virulent anti-Jewish policies of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government and the increasing violence against all Germans of Jewish ancestry.

The family settled in Jackson Heights, Queens, where Stern spent the remainder of his childhood, attended public school and quickly learned English while his parents re-established their respective careers.

He then attended Columbia University, where he received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.

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 the rest of Europe.

In the 1990s, Stern was a leading critic of the controversial American author Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners was denounced by Stern 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, the 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.

In 1993 to 1994, Stern served as an adviser to the US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke.

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.

In 2010, Stern spoke at the former German military headquarters building, the Bendlerblock, on the 66th anniversary of an assassination attempt on 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."

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

The focus of much of Stern's work an attempt to track the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its characteristics.

His work focused on the complex relationships between Germans and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the first half of the 20th century.

The family had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in the late 19th century and shared the increasingly-secular world view that was frequently found among Germany's educated classes.

Stern was baptized shortly after his birth and named after his godfather, another member of Breslau's intellectual élite, the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber (also a Christian convert from Judaism).

Stern traced the origins of Nazism back to the 19th-century völkische movement.

Stern considered that the virulent anti-Semitic völkische movement to have been 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 and considered the ideas of the völkische movement to have been merely a "dark undercurrent" in 19th-century German society.