On November 10, 2000, the first two Fritz Stern Dissertation Prizes were awarded at the annual symposium of the Friends of the German Historical Institute. The prize is named in honor of Professor Fritz Stern, a pre-eminent scholar of modern German and European intellectual history, author of numerous well-received and widely read books, a former provost of Columbia University, and an important figure in the postwar German-American dialog. Selected by a committee comprised of Peter Fritzsche (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dagmar Herzog (Michigan State University), and Mary Lindermann (Carnegie-Mellon University), the first prize recipients were Frank Biess (University of California at San Diego), who has written a fascinating study of the integration of returning prisoners-of-war into East and West Germany, and H. Glenn Penny (University of Missouri at Kansas City), who has written an innovative work on the cultural politics of ethnographic museums in Imperial Germany. The first five years of the prize are funded by a generous grant from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The Friends are now actively seeking support for a permanent endowment.
The ceremony was attended by the public, including many of Professor Stern's former students, esteemed scholars, and an interested lay public. The award ceremony symbolized the passing of the torch of scholarship in German studies to a new generation of Americans. Following the award ceremony and the presentations by the prize winners a conversation took place between Fritz Stern and the audience; questions were posed by the president of the Friends, Professor Jarausch (KHJ), as well as members of the audience (Q).
KHJ: The first question I want to put to you, Professor Stern, has to do with your personal background, because you have an unusual life history that is to some degree typical of a specific group of people. Even if you may not want to give us a full preview, since you are writing your memoirs, perhaps you could begin with a few words about where you were born, your boyhood, your family, and the circumstances under which you came to the United States.
A: Let me start by thanking the Friends of the German Historical Institute, the judges of the prize, and congratulate the speakers, who are very impressive. This event was quite wonderful, and I am indeed deeply touched by it; it means a great deal to me because I think the encouragement of first-rate dissertations is so incredibly important. I had to say that before I answer your question.
I was born in Breslau, now known as Wroclaw. Incidentally, I will be in Breslau again; since 1989 I have been there quite a few times at the invitation of the Poles. I am supposed to give a talk in the context of a major exhibition on Hans Poelzig, a German architect. The only furniture he designed, so it appears (I'm being historically careful; I know of no other claim), he designed for my grandfather, who like most of my male ancestors was a doctor. My grandfather had saved his life - or at least did what doctors did in those days, which was to provide a kind of moral encouragement along with medical care - and Poelzig turned around and designed a great deal of furniture for him. Some of it is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and some of it is in my home in New York.
I don't want to leave you with the impression that I am writing a memoir. Forgive me if I expand on that for a second. Two years ago I gave a lecture in Holland, published as "Five Germanies I Have Known." I am expanding that, although at the moment I have taken refuge in an introduction, the second sentence of which reads, "It's the Germany I didn't know that I know best," the Germany of my parents and grandparents. I found that my parents, who left in September 1938, took with them boxes and boxes of letters - I don't mean packing boxes, but the wooden crates one had in those days. At least a few of the letters go back to the 1860s, a great many to the late 1880s, and then there is an extraordinary correspondence from the First World War. As somebody remarked to me quite rightly, "That's a great danger because you're used to doing that kind of work, archival work, as it were, but you must not forget the other part." The other part is not yet complete, and my own life doesn't deserve that kind of attention. I shall therefore probably offer reflections, as it were, on the Germanies that I have experienced, felt, and seen.
KHJ: But that is quite an unusual starting point, because for most refugees it was impossible to take along material possessions such as letters, family mementos, and so on. I think this gives you a chance to reconstruct over several generations the life of an ordinary Jewish family.
A: A Jewish family that converted in various branches, I have to acknowledge. I don't want to give the impression that I possess a full record. There are bits and pieces that are full, certainly for the First World War, simply because of the enforced separations. But there is a great deal, enough to piece together quite an interesting story, which confirms what we know rather than adding much that is new. It supplies additional evidence for what the German historian Manfred Hettling recently termed the "Wertekatalog des deutschen Bürgertums" - the values of the German Bürgertum. What I have discovered are interesting documentary bits and pieces of that kind of thing.
KHJ: But do you yourself have any memories of Breslau, of your childhood, and schooling? Are those painful recollections? Did you encounter a lot of discrimination? One hears different kinds of stories. Some people had relatively protected childhoods, but other refugees were victims of discrimination and ugly incidents that generated traumatic memories.
A: I had a very peaceful childhood, insofar as that's possible, from the time of my birth in 1926 until 1932. I can remember the election of July 1932, which puzzles me, now that I mention it, but it is honestly true that I can remember it. I can recall the riots, the street-fighting in the fall of 1932, and I very well remember that I was the one, coming home from elementary school, who brought the special newspaper issue, the Extrablatt, to my parents announcing that Hitler had been made chancellor. And I knew, as I gave it to my father, that this was very bad news.
My father was a well-known doctor who had a large practice that included political friends, mostly from leftist circles. I remember that in the fall of 1932 a bomb was thrown into the house of one of these men, Ernst Eckstein. He was a kind of Lassalle descendent in the sense that he had the same demagogic or great oratorical gift and led the Socialist Workers Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei), which tried to find some middle way between the Communists and the Social Democrats, some bridge. They were more radical than the Social Democrats, less Leninist than the Communists. The Nazis hated him precisely because he was successful. He was found dead in a prison cell in the early weeks of May 1933. All that made an enormous impression on me as a child. I had the great fortune of having a father who, for some reason, took me into his confidence and wanted me to know some of these things. As I wrote or said somewhere, I knew who threw bombs before I knew where children came from. That was part of my education.
Since you asked how we took our papers out, that's a very complicated story. My father had the very good sense to want to get out in the summer of 1933. I have not talked about the personal unpleasantness or the growing anxiety of everyone I grew up with. When a close friend and patient of one's father is murdered, you don't have to go very far to understand that one is very much in danger.
What is unforgettable, and I want to bring it up precisely as a kind of counterpoint to the growing terror, was that it was known that we were making preparations to emigrate in July and August of 1938. One evening that summer the doorbell rang, and I opened the door. My father had his medical office and examination rooms in our large apartment. Although it was late, I opened the door to a retired major of the German army, now in civilian clothes. I will never forget him. It was absolutely unprecedented for someone to ring without announcement at nine o'clock at night. The major said, "I want to talk to your father." So I let him in and obviously didn't go to bed; I had to find out what brought him there. My father told my mother, my sister, and me that the man had come and said, "I've always told you not to emigrate because my wife has been a patient of yours for years." I still remember that myself and that she had a serious illness. He went on, "She needs you. But I am told that you have made up your mind to emigrate. And I have come tonight to tell you that my active comrades in the army tell me that it is very likely that there will be war with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland. And if there is a war, you'll be drafted into the medical corps. And therefore I think that you ought to get out as soon as possible."
The notion that by that time a non-Aryan, Jewish doctor would be drafted into the Wehrmacht shows some of the illusions that existed at the time. But there also was the decency of the man to come. Instead of packing leisurely, my father and I left the next night, and my mother and sister left two or three nights later. Since everything had been relatively prepared, my parents were able to take their papers along with lots and lots of other stuff. Because we could not take any money out and there wasn't any left after all the various exit taxes we had to pay, my parents included even a refrigerator because they thought that it was needed in the United States - we didn't have one in Germany. So when we arrived with the refrigerator, it's needless to say that it didn't work in this country because of differences in voltage.
Q: How did you leave? By train?
A: That is a very good question, although I am afraid that I may be boring you. We left by train from Breslau to Berlin, where we stayed with my aunt. She was married to somebody who didn't recognize the danger. We tried to get them out later and failed. My aunt and her husband were later killed. We stayed with them for a couple of days and then flew from Tempelhof Airport to Amsterdam. Tempelhof was surrounded by anti-aircraft guns. I remember that vividly. It was a direct flight, the first time I was on a plane, and I was elated to get out. The joy I felt was extraordinary. Suddenly, we landed in Hannover because there hadn't been enough fuel in Berlin. I'm serious. For obvious reasons they kept as much gasoline in the capital as they could. The fact of landing on German soil one more time was terrible, but the flight went on all right. In Amsterdam we suddenly discovered that the flight from there to London was also a German flight - painted on the back of the plane was a swastika and so on, a horrible moment - but that too passed and we landed in Croydon. My mother's older brother lived near Cambridge, England, and we spent a great week with them before we took the boat to America from Rotterdam.
KHJ: If I may, I would like to change the subject. What did it feel like to arrive in the United States, how did you get to college, and what was your graduate training like?
A: It was blessed, simply a kind of liberation, although it wasn't easy. It was terribly difficult for both of my parents. As you probably know, a physician first had to take an English-language exam, and my father, who could quote Greek until the day he died and whose Latin was very, very good, had French as his only modern language. The English came later. After having been a specialist in internal medicine, he had to take all the medical boards again. It was all very difficult, and we had no money. But I remember a prolonged sense of liberation.
I got into Columbia College in 1943 and wanted to be a doctor like my father, my two grandfathers, and my four great-grandfathers - I had no choice, but I was helped by my remarkable incompetence in chemistry and physics, and by the fact that I had two very different but each very wonderful teachers: Jacques Barzun, the European cultural historian, and Lionel Trilling, the literary scholar. I always like to say that I had Lionel Trilling before he was Lionel Trilling. He was then an assistant professor, not yet the celebrated, great man, but I must say it was an absolutely overwhelming experience to have been in Lionel Trilling's class on romantic poetry in which I distinguished myself mostly by being silent and overawed. To give up Barzun and Trilling for chemistry was just too much.
It wasn't an easy decision. I hesitated and in fact consulted Barzun, who knew I was thinking of switching. Barzun said, "Marry medicine and keep history as your lifelong mistress." When I went back to him a second time - I mention that because it's pedagogically interesting - two or three months later, I said, "I can't get it out of my system," and he said "Let me ask a question: What do you want to do?" and I said "I want to teach" and he said, "I know the headmaster of the Lawrenceville School [a private school in New Jersey] very well, would you want to teach there?" I said "Sure. That would be very nice." And he, "I think you'd make a good historian." He wanted to make it clear to me that I shouldn't think that I could go into college-level teaching or anything like that. I believe the test, which to him was intuitive, was to ask, "Would you be satisfied teaching history in high school, albeit a special high school?" And since that seemed perfectly reasonable to me, that was that.
It happens that I have found, in all the mementos that are slowly re-emerging, my mother's date books from the entire period in the United States. And I found there by chance the date on which she went to see Einstein to show him the mathematical material she had devised for a different approach to teaching mathematics. He came downstairs after he had spent an hour looking at her material and afterward asked me what I was doing. I told him that I couldn't make up my mind between the two subjects, and he said, "It's easy, medicine is a science and history is not, therefore you'll be going into medicine." I obviously didn't follow his advice. One person once said to me, "You've taken your revenge on him by writing about him."
KHJ: In between your leaving and getting to Columbia University a process of cultural transformation must have taken place. How did that work for you? Did you find it easy to speak English? Did you have Latin and Greek in Breslau, and what was that like? Here you were competing in one of the leading American institutions with lots of people who were steeped in their own culture. For some refugees, at least, these kinds of transitions were hard.
A: I have nothing but happy memories of my time in Public School 152, Queens, where I began as a twelve year-old in first grade. And you're right about the Latin and Greek. I took two-and-a-half years of Latin and three months of Greek at the Gymnasium - in preparation for emigration, obviously. I can't honestly recall the difficulties you're alluding to. I do remember in the fall of 1940 I was given a scholarship to a New York private school, which doesn't exist anymore, and in school we had a debate. Even in those days they had presidential elections, and I volunteered to be the spokesman for F.D.R. I spoke with all the passion I commanded, and a wonderful girl spoke for Willkie and did very well. The Democrats won, I'm glad to say. So I always meant to be politically active.
All in all, I think college was hard for me, partly because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and later I felt that I was ill prepared.
KHJ: You didn't tell us how you got to your subject in history, since it is a large field. There are many different kinds of things you could possibly have done. Since your teachers also worked on other topics, how did you end up with the German subject, after you had just physically escaped that country?
A: I did not think of myself as a German historian until much later. When I first worked under the tutelage of Barzun and Trilling - and on my own volition - I thought of myself as an historian interested in European culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I wrote my dissertation, or certainly meant to write it, as a study of a German subject within a European context. This seemed to me self-evident. Perhaps my wish to be a Europeanist was arrogant. One can't, of course, master it all. But the desire was always there. I wanted to see the content and the context of German history, which I first taught in 1951 at Cornell, when my employment at Columbia had ended and I had to scrabble for a job. At Cornell I was an "acting" assistant professor since I had no Ph.D. I was teaching four courses and finishing my dissertation. One of the courses was German history. To put together a syllabus for a German history course in 1951 was actually not an easy matter. There was A. J. P. Taylor's Course of German History (1945), but otherwise not all that much. But that made the field quite open. There was an element of luck in that situation.
German history was central not just to me but to the world after the Nazis. Something terrible had happened, and good German historians and many American scholars asked themselves, How could it have happened? They actually may have been helped by the fact that the page was blank, or at least relatively blank, compared to what it is now. The unsatisfactoriness of A. J. P. Taylor, however enticing he was, was apparent. It was an exciting situation.
KHJ: Your answer clarifies a quality of your own work, which sees German problems in a broader perspective. This, I think, is essential because in some other cases there is a narrowness in discussions about the German legacy. You also pointed this out at a very important lecture at the centennial meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) - on a panel that we shared - that the professional development of Central European history is an achievement of the postwar or Cold War period. European history did, of course, exist in this country before, but it was much more generalized - as we think about Bernadotte Schmitt and Sidney B. Fay. They dealt with the grand politics of Europe. But beyond diplomatic history, research on internal, cultural, social, and other kinds of German history was developed as a result of your own cohort.
A: I am grateful to you for mentioning the AHA talk because it meant a lot to me to dig into the work of American historians and try to prove that there was a good deal going on at the time. The names that instantly come to mind - this is by no means a complete list - are Pauline and Eugene Anderson, Walter Dorn, who wrote important articles, and Sidney Fay, whom you mentioned. Then of course there was Hajo Holborn, who is very important to me, particularly here in this context, and having looked at his picture [hanging in this lecture hall] all morning long with the deepest affection. I had the good fortune to become his friend in the late 1940s or early 1950s, although never formally his student, but there was no distinction between being a friend and a student of Holborn, who was teaching at Yale. That was an enormous influence. I am also bound by ties of friendship to Felix Gilbert - the other picture I was gazing at here. They were of a different generation, both students of Friedrich Meinecke. And as Holborn sometimes said, "I danced in Meinecke's house, as he had danced in Ranke's." Holborn and Gilbert had a feeling for a longer tradition - and Germans now talk about this tradition that was lost. When you think about what the German historical profession lost when these young men were forced to emigrate, and they were not the only ones - there was Hans Rosenberg and many others - it is quite extraordinary.
KHJ: I completely agree. I only wanted to point out that it is a considerable part of your generation's achievement, that your cohort had an enormous influence in the United States by pushing the beginnings further back and articulating them; it wasn't just the refugees who were already mature and settled as historians and scholars. How did you get to The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961)? There was a lot of older literature around. We already mentioned Taylor, but there was also Rohan Butler and so on; there were all sorts of explanations for Germany having gone wrong through the centuries, whereas you were wrestling with the same question but in a much more precise and constructive manner.
A: I did my master's essay on Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. I can't tell you now how I happened to stumble on van den Bruck, but he was quite fascinating. By tracing his life and thought I came to realize that he came out of certain traditions that went back further. So, for my dissertation I picked two other people to study, of two different generations. One, Paul de Lagarde, and the other, Julius Langbehn, from a generation later. I was fascinated by their writings. I realized they were second-rate - at one time I toyed with a dissertation or book to be called "After Nietzsche," since Nietzsche had an enormous influence on these people. I should add that I had a particular fascination with Nietzsche from the beginning. So I was just looking at what one might call a neglected side of "lower" German intellectual history, and yet the impact of these thinkers was considerable, precisely because it was cultural and political at the same time. They had their European analogues, which I tried to make clear in both the introduction and the conclusion.
I did not write in an effort to whitewash the Germans, as it were. After all, I am known and decried as someone who has defended the notion of a German Sonderweg. Not that I didn't agree and indeed say that there was such as thing as a German Sonderweg, a deviance from the West. But it was nevertheless terribly important to me to make it clear that in order to recreate the past, we have to show the many connections to a larger culture, which for historical-political reasons in Germany took a particular turn. There were also political analogues, but in Germany politics took a world-historical leap that fortunately did not take place in other countries.
KHJ: It's interesting that these figures, as you quite rightly said just a moment ago, expanded the scope of intellectual history because the older generation was still examining the great thinkers. Referring to those who were thought of as somewhat second-rate must have been difficult and daring to some degree. You kept doing this also in a political context. Of course, with Germany questions of politics always intrude, and one can't do intellectual history with the politics left out, to paraphrase a cliché.
A: Something else is and remains terribly close to my heart and brain, and that's The Varieties of History (1956). That collection of essays by great historians was purely a labor of love. I have a great capacity, if I may say so, for admiration. I don't like to deal with second-rate people, necessarily. And it has just occurred to me that this is also a reason for this other book. Somehow, in my graduate days, I was required to take a compulsory course on the history of history writing, which was incredibly dull and quite unsatisfactory. And I suddenly had the idea "I want to see what the great writers of history from Voltaire on down had said." I did this entirely for my own education. It was truly a labor of love. I owe a certain amount of encouragement to Richard Hofstadter, who said this was a very good idea. Actually, he said, "It's going to sell." I was very grateful to the publisher who took it on - royalties were three percent at the time - because I just didn't think that anything would come of it. Well, it has done very well and is still very much in print. I still read it myself again and again with fantastic pleasure, and it's something I want to pass on to other generations. The great historians, from Voltaire onward - French, English, German, American - with all the changes should still inspirit us and give us a sense of tradition that we dare to go into, that we should carry on.
KHJ: Let me ask you something else. I am not fortunate enough to have been a student of yours in a direct sense but encountered you by reading The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Varieties of History in graduate school. Your subsequent work came to focus directly on the issues of the First World War. How did that come about?
A: The First World War was a subject of abiding interest to me, in my lectures and in my teaching. Perhaps the fact that my father was in the First World War for four years on the western front had something to do with it, though relatively little except to bring a certain emotional content to the subject. The war's importance, reflected in George Kennan's remark that it was the seminal catastrophe of the century, was clear to me, I must say. The war was an absolute horror and marked a break in the world. When Peter Gay and Jack Garraty brought out a history of the world, they asked me to write the chapter on the subject, which led me to give an undergraduate seminar on the First World War. But even earlier, in The Politics of Cultural Despair, I had written a chapter on it.
I think I'm right that this was simultaneous with the eruption of the Fritz Fischer controversy. This debate, put very briefly, was sparked by a book that was published in 1961 by Fischer, whom I had met. He came to see me at Cornell in 1951, and it was an uncanny meeting. The book, which was called Germany's Aims in the First World War (1967) [original German ed.: Griff nach der Weltmacht, 1961], caused a storm in the German historical guild, and Hans Herzfeld invited me to the 1964 German Historical Congress in Berlin, where the old guard, Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, were going to finish off Fischer for good. I must say that the two students of Fischer (who were there to defend him) didn't help him very much. It was somewhat left to two outsiders - Jacques Droz, a wonderful French historian, and myself - to speak up. It was a deeply politicized meeting. Fischer's book insisted on Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War, not sole responsibility, but it did away with the comfortable notion that Europe had slithered into the war. Fischer made clear, on the basis of archival material on the German side and subsequent research, that there was far more conscious planning. But other Germans disagreed; in particular, one right-wing historian had, at the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, just written that it was a Betriebsunfall - a factory accident or an occupational accident. The audience consisted of about 1,000 people, 900 of them perhaps students. I said at one point in my prepared speech, "Is there such a thing as a whole series of Betriebsunfälle without coming to the conclusion that maybe something is wrong with the Betrieb?" The place broke up, and the response resembled a political demonstration. Right afterward, Ritter and company no longer would shake my hand, which I took to be a Germanic sign of being taken seriously. After 1968 I was accused - in jest - of having started the student revolt by inciting students with my remark, but that was rather far from my intention.
The depth of my concern for the First World War is unquestionable. I also then got ahold of the Riezler Diary, and you and I both worked on that particular text, which is an irresistible and important source. And let me add, it was an accident that I was invited to speak at the Historical Congress in Berlin in 1964. If I hadn't been invited, I'm not sure that I would have done as much work as I did. I probably wouldn't have hunted down the Riezler Diary. I would not have researched the German chancellor's confidant, from before the First World War until he was dismissed. It was very difficult to get access to the diary, etc. The accident happened to coincide with a deep, abiding interest of mine, and I am grateful that I had the chance to do it.
KHJ: Your story does illustrate a mechanism of support for critical views on the past inside Germany through Anglo-American scholars, who have played an important role in helping transform historical scholarship. I think I'm not misinterpreting you by saying that this is also one of the functions you consider important. But we should probably move on to Bleichröder and Bismarck (Gold and Iron, 1977).
A: Let me say one more thing about accidents. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, in connection with my dissertation, I wanted to do research, but there wasn't all that much archival material in the first place. I thought, the more interviewing I could do for a better sense of the people I was writing about, the better. That included an interview with Heinrich Brüning, Germany's chancellor from 1930 to 1932. And I mention that because again it's the accidental that is so interesting. Historians - and many have written about Brüning, who has remained as controversial as any major figure in history - have always been tempted to say that Brüning's First World War experience as a machine gun captain was incredibly important to him. I went to see him in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was living at the time, more-or-less in exile. In the first ten minutes he said, "You have to understand the period, the 1920s. I came from the First World War. I was a machine gun captain. And my dream, politically, was to recreate the cohesion that I felt then." And then he told me that he had all sorts of soldiers under him from every class, and they had worked together, and that's what he had hoped for in politics. I mention this because I still think that we historians must be alert to the gifts that are given to us by chance.
KHJ: If I may comment on that by citing your own words: The development of scholarship might sometimes seem to be a series of accidents, but it takes a certain sensibility to make these accidents happen. One has to be fortunate enough to encounter people with whom one can pursue those interests, but one also has to recognize such chances.
A: That is very kind of you. I accept that. The origin of Gold and Iron is quite simple. David Landes, an economic historian then at Columbia, came to me one day in 1954. We were teaching together, and he said, "Listen, I was given the papers having to do with Bleichröder, who was a major Jewish banker in Berlin."
I knew that Bleichröder had a connection with Bismarck. "I was given those papers," Landes said. "I think it would be better if you and I do the book together. We could do it in a year. This is new material. Nobody has ever seen all that is left of the political part of a major banking house in Berlin."
That was in 1955 or so. I didn't get started on it until my first sabbatical, which was in Paris, where we were going to work in the Rothschild bank. Landes had arranged access to the archives for us. That gave me a chance to work on the Banque Rothschild. It was fascinating. On the first or second day in the archives the first things we saw, covered with the historic dust of one hundred years, were what we would nowadays call the canceled checks that the Rothschilds kept under the rubric "Bleichröder." We went through them very quickly and discovered there wasn't much there. But on the second day I found a canceled check made out from the Bleichröder bank to the Rothschilds on behalf of Cosima von Bülow, née Liszt. And since Cosima von Bülow, also known as Cosima Wagner, was a woman on whom I had once written a paper, a well-known anti-Semite who is one of my most detested women of the nineteenth century, I was struck that she would have dealt with a Jewish bank. She would probably have said in self-defense, "Well there aren't any other bankers," which wasn't true. Still, it was an encouragement to the cultural historian to do what had to be done.
It was incredibly hard, in retrospect, to get to all the archives I needed - these included the private Bismarck archives, archives in the GDR, and many others. A committee of French communist historians who knew perfectly well that I was a bourgeois historian helped me get in. But that, too, involved an incredible accident - having been there in 1961 and 1962, three months before the building of the Berlin Wall and a year afterward, and finding rich material. David Landes then decided that he needed to work on something else, though he was always willing to read what I had written and remained enormously helpful. But in the end it was left to me. The book took not one year but sixteen years of writing. But I learned a great deal, and it, too, had a great impact on my life.
KHJ: My graduate students are still admiring the work, since we just discussed it in our reading course. Books have a life of their own once they leave the author's desk. I hope it will please you to hear that it is still in demand, because it speaks to the quality of that double biography and the very difficult economic and diplomatic connections that you had to work through in order to put it together. If we had more time we could also talk about your most recent work, the various essay collections, the book on Einstein's German World (1999), and so on. But I do also want to bring up the question of you being a transatlantic public figure, your efforts to promote a critical conception of the past in Germany and, finally, your role in teaching a differentiated kind of German history in an Anglo-American context.
A: I think I sort of stumbled into that role. I grew into it. There are many in this audience who have played that role as much as I have, unlike what happened after the First World War, or in the 1940s and early 1950s. Beginning in the early 1950s we formed collegial relationships, even friendships, with German and European historians. It became a common enterprise, which didn't exclude having "common targets" or common causes of great interpretation. I would mention, above all, Ralf Dahrendorf and a great many more of whom I really would want to speak. We were essentially united by a sense of what had happened and what could be learned from the German disaster.
I was very fortunate early on in having good relations with German historians. The first ones I became particularly close to in European history were Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, and so on. It was wonderful. We worked separately and together, and sometimes refuted in different ways what we would assume to be common misinterpretations, attacks on us, or whatever - but never along national lines.
One other aspect of the question that you rightly posed is that since the 1950s I also have tried to have a civic life in the United States, and occasionally, when the spirit moved me or when the occasion demanded it, I did want to be a citizen in a political situation. Recently, I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, attacking Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement that the Bush administration would withdraw our troops from Kosovo ("We don't need the 82nd Airborne division to escort kids to kindergarten"), and I called that particular statement "frivolously irresponsible." Jokingly, I refer to that letter as my job application to the Bush administration. So I do take the responsibility to take sides as a citizen, not as a professional historian.
KHJ: I am glad that you were able to comment on your public commitment as well. You have, of course, spoken out in a variety of venues such as the Bundestag, the journal Foreign Affairs, also some articles in the German media. Since I do see questions from the audience, we now want to turn to your students, colleagues, and friends here.
Q: Let me say at the outset what a privilege it is and how moved I am to participate in this unique occasion, this personal and highly enjoyable discussion. Against this background, I wonder whether you would like to share your impressions of when and under what conditions you first went back to Germany. What impressions and feelings did you have?
A: When I went back to Germany, to Munich, for the first time in 1950, I worked in the library for my dissertation. I chose Munich in part because a group of Social Democratic Sudeten Germans who had been expelled were there. They had been friends of my family when I was a child and had found themselves in Munich. I had the great fortune to meet Franz Schnabel there and spend some time with him. He was a liberal, Catholic historian.
My feelings toward Germany then were very bad. That's probably an understatement. Suffice it to say, I had to overcome ugly feelings, I mean strong antipathies, to put it mildly.
I recently discovered in my disorder, which students of mine will remember from my office, a review I wrote of a book by H.H. Tettens, a German refugee, that was called Know Your Enemy (1944). It was a flaming attack, a denunciation basically even more punitive than the Morgenthau Plan. When it first came out in the early 1950s I wrote a review denouncing it, saying, "This won't do." This was a totally ahistorical effort. I had a sense that one can't condemn a whole people - which again may in part have to do with the fact that, after all, I grew up knowing German democrats.
Q: As you may know, yesterday there was a very impressive demonstration of 200,000 people in Berlin and elsewhere. Even CNN covered it, I was quite moved. I wonder whether you would like to share your views on this and the background that led to the demonstration.
A: I didn't see the event of November 9, and I'm not sure how much I can say on the subject. It would take so much time for me to sort out what's there. For the first time in German history, since 1949, and increasingly since 1970 or so, there are liberal Germans, and now there are Germans who are prepared to go out on the street and demonstrate for a decent society, let me put it that way. The fact that they have done it in the face of desecration and rising anti-Semitism, and in light of the unease with which Germans and Jews continue to live together, is another matter. Though it's a different group of Jews now, the unease is still there. We see that all the time. There is a great deal of goodwill among some Germans, but among other Germans, a different group, there is a feeling which I find hard to deal with, which is, "My goodness, what we have lost." Well, that's not that ambiguous, I mean, to bemoan the fact that your parents and grandparents participated in or accepted the expulsion of a group that now is missed. But on the whole, as I've said in the context of Austria's Jörg Haider, I think the 1930s or the experience of the Third Reich has immunized a great many Germans to a considerable extent. But I don't think that immunity lasts forever.
Q: Let me ask a question as a student: Over the years you have stressed the importance of illiberalism in German society. But another school has developed that has argued, in fact, that this is vastly exaggerated and Germany could not have missed the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. It's also contrary to your friend Lord Dahrendorf. It's a school that argues that the difference between England and Germany really isn't as great as it's been made out to be and, in fact, that Germany had a much stronger liberal tradition, and that this Sonderweg, which is tied very much to the question of liberalism, is vastly exaggerated. I wonder if you could comment on that train of thought.
A: I welcome the question for the simple reason that I could be quite wrong. I've been attacked precisely as a proponent of the Sonderweg notion, which I did not coin by any means but which I accepted. I do believe that there were different paths to modernity in Germany as against in England, France, or Belgium. I have now taken on board the marvelous studies that show how strong a liberal tradition there was - Peggy Anderson's recent book Practicing Democracy (2000) - and that there was, after all, on different communal and urban levels a relatively strong liberal tradition. I am seeing this in my own work right now. Perhaps I generalized too quickly, perhaps I overemphasized it.
However, as I've had occasion to remark in a couple of places fairly recently, the Germans themselves were not unaware of this separate identity. I mean, read Max Weber or Walther Rathenau and Ernst Troeltsch before 1914. I'm struck by Rathenau's remark, "How long can we live in a different climate?" In the 1920s others turned this sentence around to "we want to be different." Thomas Mann very quickly recovered from this national aberration of the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), but others throughout the Weimar period maintained, "We don't want to be part of the West." So I don't think the notion of a Sonderweg is entirely made up. There was an illiberal strain in German education, in student life, etc. Were there analogues elsewhere in Europe? Yes. I have always insisted, for example, that after all, considering the immensely neuralgic point of anti-Semitism, that it was certainly a European phenomenon, and before 1914 it was probably stronger in France than in Germany. In Germany, as I once put it, in the treatment of Jews there was both hospitality and hostility. The hospitality should not be forgotten.
Maybe I've even learned from some of my more extravagant critics, who see me as a favorite target because of this Sonderweg notion. Particularly young English historians who mind that some of my cohorts were guilty of what Isaiah Berlin most beautifully described as the Anglophilia of the Central European and that looked to England through rose-colored glasses.
Q: I was on the Columbia campus in 1944 in the Navy mid-shipman school, I don't remember seeing you. Nicholas Murray Butler was still around, but did you know James Shotwell, the great American historian who had edited a monumental work on the economic and social consequences of the war, the First World War that is, with a group of transnational scholars? He had earlier written The History of History (1939).
A: I met him. That's all I can say. I grew up in awe of him. That Carnegie sponsored history of the First World War which you referred to remains a marvelous attempt at an international history. A typically post-1918 American effort, getting Europeans involved.
I learned a tremendous amount from one of the books in that series, which I think I inherited somehow via another teacher, maybe even Shotwell's copy, but I'm not sure. Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's The War and German Society (1937) is a splendid book on the First World War and introduced me, in part, to the social, psychological, and cultural effects of the First World War.
And I pointed it out to the Germans. Do you realize that that book has never been translated into German? That's an astounding fact. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a major figure in political science in Hamburg in the 1920s until he had to leave Germany. He went to Oxford and wrote while at Oxford. It remains a highly suggestive and important work.
KHJ: Thank you Professor Stern for this conversation and for the illuminating answers you offered us.