Reflection: Lessons from German History

Fritz Stern

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

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Summary:  German history teaches that malice and simplicity have their appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable. It also proves that democratic reconstruction is possible, even on initially uncongenial ground.

Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University.

This article is adapted from the author's remarks at the tenth annual dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, at which he was honored for distinguished scholarship in German history and for contributions to good relations between the United States and Germany. Reflections on his career and accomplishments were made at the November 14 dinner by Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister; W. Michael Blumenthal, director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin; and Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency to Nazi barbarism gave the question, how was it possible? an existential immediacy. Along with others of my generation, I wrestled with that question, trying to reconstruct some parts of the past and perhaps intuit some lessons.

Today, I worry about the immediate future of the United States, the country that gave haven to German-speaking refugees in the 1930s. (In 1938, at the age of 12, I came with my family to New York.) We refugees are grateful to the United States for saving us and for giving us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances. We loved and admired this country that, when we arrived, was still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," while his German contemporary preached fear in order to exploit it.

The United States was the best functioning democracy of the 1930s -- that "low, dishonest decade" -- and under President Franklin Roosevelt it was committed to pragmatic reform and maintained inimitable high spirits. I have not forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days -- the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-Semites -- but the dominant note of Roosevelt's era was ebullient affirmation.

LASTING MEMORIAL

The Leo Baeck Institute is a monument that German Jewish refugees built as a memorial to their collective past, a troubled, anguished, glorious past to which many of them remained loyal even after National Socialism sought to deny and destroy it. It is impossible to generalize about German Jews in the modern era, but common to most of them was an earlier deep affection for their country, its language, and its culture. Perhaps they loved not wisely but too well. Even Albert Einstein, with his abiding antipathy for things German, remembered his unique, never duplicated companionship during his great years in Berlin with his German colleagues Max Planck and Max von Laue.

I remember from my childhood the decent Germans, so-called Aryans who, being opponents of the Nazi regime, disappeared into concentration camps in and after 1933. The ties between us had been close, and when they were broken, when so many Germans decided they did not want to know what was happening to their Jewish or "non-Aryan" neighbors, when they denied their common past, the pain was deep. But something of what had once been remained in the minds ...

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