Five Germanys I Have Known: A History & Memoir Paperback – July 24, 2007

“Es ist vollbracht.” (It is accomplished!) I have finally finished reading this book that I have been gnawing on for four months. Why did I read all 511 pages of annoying fine print that my 75-year-old astigmatic eyes had severe trouble to cope with? Why did I chew and re-chew all these complicated constructed tapeworm sentences containing words I had never heard or seen before? Why did I take the trouble to look up these words, only to find many of these words not only missing in my modest ESL vocabulary but also in renowned dictionaries? Why did I bother to read every paragraph twice and some up to five times? Patience is not one of my virtues. So why did I stick it out?The answer to the above questions: I found this book a treasure trove of knowledge about 20th century history. I had known so very little of this history.I blame Germany’s chosen amnesia for this lack of education. Our history teachers in “Gymnasium” (= high school and college combined) had started three times with the old Greeks, had enlightened us with the “Goetterwelt” (pantheon) of the Greeks and the Romans, had hammered into us dates, names, and places of wars and battles, including names of “Feldherren” (military leaders), had fed us with dates and names of crusades, had carefully avoided the Spanish Inquisition (one does not wish to embarrass the Catholic Church), had bored us almost to death with the Stauffen Kaiser dynasty, had told us about Napoleon, Karl the Great, and a bit of Bismarck (yet by this time I might have already stopped listening because history classes, containing hardly anything but names and dates, were so terribly boring), and then stopped abruptly when approaching the year 1900, hurrying to return to the old Greeks. In other words: Our history teachers (assumedly following instructions of the “Kultusministerium” [ministry of education]) had shied away from the infamous German history of the early and middle 20th century like from the plague. —One does not wish to embarrass former German nationalists and even less [former?] Nazis. Wildly guessing that one half of the German population had been Nazi, not only would every second teacher have been a Nazi or a descendant of Nazis (not to even speak of the civil servants in the “Kultusministerium), at least every other student would have been a descendant of Nazis. (One does not wish to embarrass colleagues and even less superiors. And you just simply cannot give students information that indicates to about half of them that their parents and/or grandparents had been supporters of a criminal regime, if not worse.) So self-chosen amnesia was the way to go. Was it really? You decide.You’ll probably say that there were books. Well, I am sure there were, at least about the history of the very early 20th century (i.e. the time of and around WWI), yet books about the Third Reich and the mass murder of Jews (then not yet called the Holocaust) were only written in later years. Regardless of when any related books were written, I never saw any displayed in bookstores or libraries; they must have been hidden on upper or lower shelves. So how about German literature classes in “Gymnasium”? Wouldn’t there, at least, have been some mandatory reading of books related to 20th century history? The answer is a clear “no”. We read Goethe and Schiller and Kleist and Lessing, and the Nibelungs in “Mittelhochdeutsch”, and “Pole Poppenspaeler” in “Plattdeutsch (“Mittelhochdeutsch” and “Plattdeutsch”, more or less, being foreign languages), anything—ANYTHING!—to avoid contemporary historic or time-critical literature. Only one German teacher recommended casually, on the side, to read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, which I (and some of my classmates) did, yet neither was this book mandatory reading, nor was it discussed in class.And now you might say that I could have asked for related books in bookstores and libraries. And I could have, but I didn’t because not knowing that any such books existed, it never entered my mind to ask for any such books. Well, maybe I wasn’t very inquisitive in this respect. And this might have been because I didn’t grow up with books. During my childhood (= during WWII and the deprived years following the war), there were hardly any books available, and when they became available, they were expensive. Besides, my parents weren’t readers, and my hometown didn’t have a library to speak of. Let’s nor forget: There was no internet, no Goodreads, and no Amazon. Knowledge wasn’t as easily to come by as it is today.The above book taught me more about the 20th century than all my years of school and college combined.Fritz Stern is a Jewish historian, who has escaped the Holocaust because his family made it out of Germany in time. “Five Germanys I Have Known” is just as much an insightful chronicle of the 20th century as it is a captivating personal memoir. It also tells a lot about the academic life of a historian, which might not be appealing to everyone. (It wouldn’t be my idea of a dream profession.) I feel unable to give a summary of this book as it is so very comprehensive.I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in European history of the 20th century, provided that he or she doesn’t mind complicated tapeworm sentences, has a more extensive vocabulary than the average ESL reader (namely, I), and last but not least, has better eyes than I have. (Yet there might be an edition with larger print.) If none of these requirements are met, the reader should, at least, be very determined. I was very determined, and I am glad I read this book, even though it took me four months to gnaw through it and, at times, felt more like doing homework than enjoying a leisurely read.P.S. This review will already give you a little training in reading tapeworm sentences. :-)

It can be very difficult to write a review for such a tome. With over-500 pages in length (many pages of which could be expanded into individual essays themselves), and an incredibly enormous cast of characters that populate the five Germanys the author has experienced during his lifetime (Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germany, and the unified country after 1990), this work is a weighty, but recommended, read for anyone interested in not only furthering their insight into the changes that the country of Germany has experienced since the nineteenth century, but achieving a better glimpse at these Germanys through the eyes of a German Jew who became an American. While this reviewer does agree with some other reviewers here that much of the content found here can be seen as academic, borderline elitist, and not looking at German history from an everyman perspective, Fritz Stern is a renowned historian who offers so many personal observations throughout this memoir that this reviewer finds these traits largely benign to readers who can read between the lines using their own education and experience.Stern writes that that he "was intermittently drawn from my study and classroom onto the fringes of political life in both Germany and America, and counted myself lucky to be able to see and respond to historic events that were shaping the new Europe in its new relations to the United States. I still thought of this as the public work of history. For decades, I shied away from writing about my private experiences: I wanted to keep the professional and the personal properly apart. But right after I had returned for the first time to my native city of Breslau in Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, I did write a private account of it for my children, and I called it 'Homecoming 1979'. Only now do I fully realize the ironic, perhaps even self-delusionary character of my title: a 'Homecoming' was precisely what it was not. I had gone to Wroclaw out of the deepest kind of curiosity; I don't think I realized then that the journey had been a quest, that somehow I needed to see that my home had been destroyed and that the country into which I was born had ceased to exist. My sense of loss was overlain by an all-pervasive gratitude for having found a second, better home in the United States. But that little essay was, indeed, my first effort to write personally about going back to where I had begun[.]"Later, Stern writes that "in relating here the history of the five Germanys I have known to the Germanys I have studied professionally, to my personal experiences, and to my own, often unconscious emotions, I am trying to fuse memory and history - those distant twins, supportive and destructive of each other. Memory is notoriously fallible, and for nations as for individuals it is subject to the congenial, self-serving deformations that afflict us all. I also know that there is such a thing as honest (and healthy) forgetting. Yet for all its flaws and distortions, memory does recall the drama of the past, suggests some of the feelings that enveloped facts. And I bring some professional knowledge about the reconstruction of the past along with a (surprisingly large) reservoir of documented memory in the form of troves of letters from three generations of my family; I also have my own diaries of over fifty years and other memorabilia that over the decades I have allowed to accumulate. We all seek tangible traces of a past to which we are irresistibly drawn, and we try to fill them with life. We want to see connections and meanings in the scattered remains and in the varied documents of the past. I wish I could say that what follows is a mixture of 'poetry and truth' - I can only hope it contains a bit of both."This reviewer personally found the chapters entitled "Ancestral Germany", "Weimar", "The Third Reich", and "The Fourth and Forgotten Germany" especially insightful, and the chapter entitled "German Themes in Foreign Lands" somewhat misplaced. Never has this reviewer read such an intimate account of the struggles associated with seeking acceptance in a culture so dominated by cultural Christianity, especially by an individual who was not even initially aware of his Jewish roots. A reading of this book alongside a simultaneous reading by this reviewer of Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" (see my review) especially magnified this recounting, and the complaints made by other reviewers here that an academic viewpoint permeates the entire text are quite simply easily discredited after a reading of the first third of this book. In the opinion of this reviewer, however, the discourse that Stern provides on the "American Question" following an examination of the "German Question" is probably best suited for another work, although his definitions of "conservative" and "liberal" in the context of United States politics do add insight to the author's beliefs. Well recommended.

Riveting and gripping book

Too personal. Tends toward famous people I have known, but some observations of interest amongst the name dropping.

This book is a fusion of the personal life of Stern and his family and of the history of the country in which he was born and from which they emigrated to the United States in 1938. The history of Germany up to 1945 is told in a workmanlike and rather dry manner. Soaked as we are in this history already, we can read that elsewhere. We hear of the personal experiences during the Nazi period of acculturated and patriotic German Jews (both Stern's parents, though of Jewish origin, had been baptized as children at the end of the 19th century); but these, too, have been the subject of countless books. Although Stern's father, grandfathers and the circle of friends were distinguished medical men and scientists, they may not be of the same absorbing interest to the reader as they are to the author, especially if, as here, the author does not really bring them to life, so that they remain mere names. The book becomes more interesting after the first 130 pages which cover the period from 1871 to 1938 and are concerned mostly with the older generations; for the author himself was just seven years old when the Nazis came to power, and just 12 when the family emigrated.But the child's experience of life in Nazi Germany had been unpleasant enough, and they made Stern aware of politics at an age when children in more fortunate lands are unlikely to concern themselves with such matters. In the United States, from his schooldays onwards, Stern began to speak and write on politics. He attributes his liberalism (his opposition to communism and also to McCarthyism) to what he had learnt from the deprivation of liberty in Nazi Germany. In due course he became a prolific organizer of petitions and resolutions against authoritarianism wherever he found it, determined not to be like those intellectuals who had kept silent during the Nazi period. And he was a severe critic of American foreign policy, of its reliance on military force, and of the neo-conservatives.On graduating, Stern had become a historian at Columbia University, and had focussed increasingly on German history. Immediately after the war, while detesting the Nazis, he knew that there had been a democratic Germany which the Nazis had overwhelmed but whose roots could surely be nourished. I recognize, as someone who has had similar experiences, the mixed feelings with which he first went back to Germany on a lecture tour in 1954, aware that many Germans had lived in an inner emigration during the Nazi period, but wondering about the past of so many Germans who claimed never to have been Nazis; feeling a sense of virtue as a representative of democracy, and relishing that he was returning as an American and under American auspices and protection. He continues, of course, with his narrative history of Germany, and this becomes more interesting after 1945 - in part because our schools and universities pay so little attention to it (compared with the emphasis on Nazi and pre-Nazi Germany) and also because the adult Stern has more first-hand and detailed experience of it than he had of the earlier period.The varying views of German academics he reports in a series of anecdotes reveal the many-faceted nature of German reactions to their past, ranging from the aggrieved and insensitive to a full-hearted acceptance of the indelible stain of Nazism. He is good at discussing the several debates between Germans about their own past: in the 1960s about Germany's responsibility for the First World War (the Fischer controversy), in which Stern himself took part, essentially on Fischer's side; in the 1980s about the so-called Historikerstreit, triggered by Nolte's attempts to relativize Nazi atrocities by presenting them as reactions to earlier Soviet atrocities; and in the 1990s about Goldhagen's unscholarly attack on the entire German nation as having been `Hitler's Willing Executioners', which Stern vehemently critiqued.The five Germanies of the title are pre-Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany, the GDR, the DDR (where Stern was allowed to consult historical archives), and Reunited Germany; but stretches of the book have nothing to do with any of these: there is, for example, a long passage on the 1968 student revolt at Columbia University and Stern's attitude towards it: sympathetic towards the students' grievances, strongly critical of their bullying methods. And there is a chapter of 58 pages which, though not without interest, is attached to the German question by the thinnest of threads or no threads at all; but they give Stern the excuse for including accounts of his travels, often financed by the Ford Foundation, to study the political climate and/or to lecture in Northern Africa, the Middle East, India, Latin America, France, the Soviet Union under Brezhnev (interesting analysis), Poland on the eve of Solidarity, and post-Maoist China (after the Cultural Revolution but before Tienanmen Square). Everywhere Stern had received introductions to prominent people (especially to dissidents).Stern was much in demand as a speaker on the international stage. The high point of this was the invitation in 1987 to address the Bundestag on the anniversary of the East Berlin uprising of June 17 1953. I found the pages dealing with this speech and its reception (pp.443 to 450) among the most gripping in the book.Stern is critical, not of German reunification, but of the way Kohl handled the issue and of the insensitive way in which West Germans have treated the East Germans.Stern's judgments on historical and political issues strike me as being wise and sane. His book, however, is sadly marred for me by a narcissistic flavour (despite frequent protestations of feeling humble and surprised at the honours bestowed on him), and not least by his frequent quotations of laudatory reviews and congratulatory remarks in letters he received from famous people.

I could write you a long review on this book. But there is no point, it really speaks for itself. It's up there with Victor Klemprer and others.

Well written and interesting subject matter wonderfully explained