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  • Obituary

In Memoriam: Fritz Stern

Holocaust and Genocide Studies notes the passing of Fritz Stern, one of the pioneer students of the origins and evolution of German radical conservatism. An expert as well on German-Jewish interrelations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stern was University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Born in 1926 in Breslau to a Lutheran family of Jewish ancestry—his father was a doctor and his mother a prominent educational reformist—Stern was the grandson of Fritz Haber, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. After emigrating to America in 1938, Stern’s parents reestablished their careers and their son went on to study at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1953. Stern started teaching at Cornell University but soon moved to Columbia, where he became full professor in 1963, Seth Low professor of history in 1967, provost in 1980 (through 1992), and university professor in 1992. He retired in 1996. Stern also taught occasionally at the Freie Universität Berlin, and later in his career he advised British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke. He was widely admired in Germany as the leading American historian of that country.

Stern’s earliest major work, and perhaps his most seminal, was The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961), which traced the careers of several lesser-known intellectuals to identify the deeper pre–World War I anti-liberal and anti-rationalist currents that preconditioned postwar radicalism. That radicalism culminated in the Nazi dictatorship. Stern’s massive Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (1977)—a classic in its own right—explored German economic history while continuing the author’s examination of the German-Jewish encounter. The studies gathered in The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (1972) and Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (1987), along with other works, further elaborated Stern’s thinking about the rise and decline of right radicalism in Germany; more recent events moved him to comment on the irony of its re-emergence in this century. His 1999 study Einstein’s German World involved a family connection, as the physicist was a friend of Haber’s; yet Stern’s most personal published work was his 2006 Five Germanys I Have Known, which combines autobiography and history to ponder the place of Germany in both Europe and the world. [End Page 431]

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