Five Germanies I Have Known (review)

In a combination of personal memoirs and social and political commentary, a distinguished scholar of modern German history who spent most of his career at Columbia University reviews his life and his reactions to the five Germanies he experienced. An account of his family's lives in what was then Breslau, now Wroclaw, is followed by memories of Stern's early life in Weimar and National Socialist Germany. From what had by then become an American perspective, he next covers the years when there was no Germany at all but occupation by the Allies. Discussion of the West German Federal Republic is followed by his view of "The Fourth and Forgotten Germany," his term for the East German state. Discussion of German influences outside German borders is, in turn, succeeded by Stern's fifth Germany, the reunited Germany of the most recent past.

The book engages the special status and problems of a family that, by Nazi definitions, fell into the category of "Jewish Christians." Converted to Christianity, with Stern himself baptized, they were, nevertheless, considered Jewish not only by Nazi authorities but by Stern's teachers and fellow students in school who made his life as miserable as possible. The broader issues of insiders considered outsiders by many are repeatedly touched on openly in the years up to the family's escape to the United States. Thereafter, they are implicitly engaged by Stern's own double identification with his officially certified religion and his personal empathy for the Jewish community.

In the early years because of family connections and friendships and in the later years because of Stern's own prominence, the account touches on numerous individuals of wide significance. The reader here meets Fritz Haber, Chaim Weitzmann, Margaret Thatcher, Bronislaw Geremek, Albert Einstein, and Stern's special friend, Marion Countess Doenhoff, to name only a few. In addition to the author's comments on events and personalities in Germany, there is an account of Stern's role in and perception of the upheavals at Columbia University during the 1960s that those who lived through those years in American universities will find of great interest. And the author shows perceptively how intolerance for the views of others could lead to developments like those that had disfigured Nazi Germany anywhere and at any time.

Readers who follow Stern's comments on the Germanies he experienced will not always agree with him, but they will be impressed by the range of his contacts and the effort at balance and judiciousness even when paired with very strong views. The author also offers some insight into the trajectory of his own scholarly work that has done so much to illuminate the world of Otto von Bismarck and of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although he does not point it out, Stern's personal acceptance of the transformation of a family home in Wroclaw into the residence of a retired Polish officer in a way mirrors a general acceptance of the border by the overwhelming majority of Germans in the reunited country, a country that in the last chapter of the book is referred to as perhaps having "A Second Chance."