Fritz Stern, prominent academic and friend of the GHI, passes away at the age of 90

May 18, 2016

The GHI was saddened to learn of the death of Fritz Stern on May 18, 2016. An acclaimed historian and commentator, Stern was a preeminent participant in German-American scholarly dialogue for more than a half century. Frtiz Stern’s first book, The Politics of Cultural Despair, appeared in German translation two years after its original publication in 1961, and from that point Stern was a fixture on the German intellectual landscape. He won the admiration of his West German colleagues with the originality of the insights into German political culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he offered in The Politics of Cultural Despair. His ability to present a nuanced analysis in a lucid, accessible manner won him a large readership among West Germans outside the scholarly community who were interested in trying to comprehend the disastrous course of modern German history. Stern quickly became recognized in West Germany not only as a leading scholar in the field of German history but as one of the most thoughtful and perceptive commentators on the meaning of the German past for political action in the present. The clearest indication of Stern’s standing as a participant in West German public discourse was the invitation he received to address the Bundestag in 1987 on what was then the country’s national holiday. He was the first foreign citizen to be so honored, and he used the occasion to give a characteristically eloquent and subtle explication of the significance of the failed East German uprising of June 17, 1953. For many Germans, this speech confirmed Stern’s standing as the model of the scholar-citizen who is an active participant in civil society. Stern’s voice was often heard in public debate in post-unification Germany as well. His career as non-resident public intellectual in Germany was capped by the publication in 2010 of a collection of wide-ranging discussions with former chancellor Helmut Schmidt entitled Unser Jahrhundert: Ein Gespräch.

Fritz Stern was one of the younger members of a group of émigrés from Hitler’s Germany who were decisive in initiating and maintaining a dialogue among West German and American historians in the decades after World War II. That dialogue did much to shape the study of European history in the U.S. and played an important part in the development of a critical and democratic academic culture in West Germany. It was in no small part in recognition of Stern’s part in fostering this transatlantic exchange that the Friends of the German Historical Institute decided to name their annual prize for the best doctoral dissertation in German history submitted to a North American university for Fritz Stern.

Fritz Stern’s association with the GHI began shortly after the institute opened its doors. He was a participant in the very first scholarly event the GHI organized, the 1988 conference “German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States, 1933–1970.” He also spoke at the follow-up conference on the “second generation” of German émigré historians held in 2012 as part of the GHI’s celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding. In between, Fritz Stern was a frequent visitor to the GHI. In 1996, the GHI paid tribute to Fritz Stern’s achievements as an historian, educator, and public intellectual with a symposium on his multifaceted career to mark his seventieth birthday. On that occasion, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, the longtime editor and then publisher of Die Zeit, noted

"Fritz Stern has achieved something that, it seems to me, is without equal. Driven away and robbed [by the Nazis], he, examined, without resentment and with passionate objectivity, the fundamental nature of National Socialist policies, which, as he said, kept the Germans in line with an irresistible combination of success and terror. In the magnificent book Dreams and Delusions,...he explains to his fellow Americans why and how that system functioned. For us Germans, too, his explanations are extraordinarily enlightening."

For more information on Fritz Stern’s life and career, see his obituary in the New York Times

Fritz Stern at the GHI in November 2015 for the 24th Annual Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize award ceremony.