DREAMS AND DELUSIONS
The Drama of German History
Fritz Stern
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
309 pp., $19.95
The publisher of Dreams and Delusions tells us that Fritz Stern is "widely regarded as America's foremost authority on modern German history." He holds an endowed chair at Columbia University and served as provost of Columbia from 1980 to 1983. He and Gordon Craig of Stanford University are the best known academic commentators not only on modern German history, but also on contemporary Germany. Stern became well known with his double biography of Bismarck and his Jewish banker, Gerson Bleichroder, Gold and Iron, a work that received extravagant praise from the reviewers. Joseph Losos in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "one of the finest historical books of the decade."
The Fritz Stern who has written the essays here collected is a subtler man than the Fritz Stern who wrote Gold and Iron more than ten years ago. Stern's mellowing is particularly noticeable in his essays on Albert Einstein and the chemist Fritz Haber, and there are traces of it in the essay on German Jewry, which make up the most readable part of the new collection. Rather than focusing on the unattractive aspects of German, and more particularly, Prussian life before World War I and on German anti-Semitism, as he did in Gold and Iron, the new Fritz Stern can emphasize the positive. He can understand why Einstein became a Berliner despite his detachment from Germany, or, for that matter, from national feeling of any kind. Nor does Stern seem to fault Fritz Haber, a baptized Jew, for being "German in every fiber of his being."
Pre-Hitler Germany, it turns out, was not all bad. Germany had "their highest rate of literacy and the highest per capita expenditure for public education....From the inception of [the Nobel] Prize to the rise of Hitler, Germans garnered a larger share of prizes than any other nationality, about 30 percent." And of those German prizes, "German Jews won nearly 30 percent; in medicine, 50 percent. Germans and Jews shared a certain immodesty in talent."
False dichotomy between Jews and Germans
This formulation implies a dichotomy between Jews and Germans, a dichotomy so much written about that one would suppose that the subject had been exhausted, at least for those who take the dichotomy for granted. Stern certainly does. Yet in these essays he emphasizes facts that, looked upon from a respective other than his, suggest that this dichotomy - Germans on the one hand, Jews on the other - is an artificial construct.
Thus, in discussing why Einstein stayed in Germany after the First World War, during which, as a pacifist, an internationalist and a Zionist, he had been thoroughly out of tune with the temper of the country, Stern writes: "He stayed despite his misgivings about Germany; he stayed because Berlin in the 1920s was the golden center of physics; he stayed because, as he wrote Ehrenfest in September 1919,...he could not 'walk out...on the very people who have surrounded me with love and friendship...You have no idea with what affection I am surrounded here...'" In discussing the ties of friendship and collegiality
...
Read Full Article
|
