Remarks on Fritz Stern’s Memoir: "Five Germanys I Have Known"
By Prof. Charles Maier

Fritz Stern tells us on page 474 of his memoir that "Germans sometimes introduce me as the man of the second chance."  He used the term "Germany's Second Chance" in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article at the time of unification, and the editors made it the headline.  "I still think the term is appropriate," he writes in his memoir, "being at once celebratory and admonishing: a great gift had been bestowed on the country, and it required protection.  The past should serve as a lesson."

Like some Sunday parson, I will use that sentence for my homily tonight - a very short homily, in fact.  I do so because it opens up the topic I want to discuss.  I don't see much need to rehearse Stern's fantastically recollected and beautifully written life journey, and all of you keep up with the controversies of contemporary Germany.  Suffice it to emphasize that Five Germanys represents an artful fusion of public history and private memoir, and I am in awe of the way Fritz has woven those two dimensions together, just as I am in awe of much of what he has written - at once so sensible, so knowledgeable, so revealing, and so stylistically accomplished.  But I am versed enough in Freudian analysis to suspect that every narrative offered by a memoirist is proposed in many ways to conceal another narrative.  We always throw to our therapists, to our loved ones, and our readers a version of our life that at least subconsciously aims to cover the tracks of a story that is less coherent and often more painful.  I don't believe that there really is any resting point, any firm ground, in anyone's autobiography.  Still, as readers we must take the versions we receive with gratitude; they are not false, but rather finite.  I am not trying to put Fritz on the couch any more than anyone else; I am not claiming that his recollections (buttressed, after all, by sustained diary entries) are designed to deceive.  Indeed by anchoring his own life story to the very public history of a large nation he has brilliantly managed to move his autobiography beyond subjectivity.  This is itself an authorial strategy (a bit akin to Henry Adams's chaining himself to the accelerating flow of science and politics in the nineteenth century), nonetheless original and persuasive, especially because Fritz does not claim to be offering intimacies: for him the life of politics and of scholarship has been crucial. 

I think "the man of the second chance" is a revealing description.  For what I want to interrogate tonight is Fritz Stern's extraordinary public role in postwar Germany - and I wish both to highlight this contribution and ask why he was able to do render it.  Fritz, after all, has been the public voice of what once we called the good Germany.  In effect Fritz has served throughout as the preceptor, or the Maestro, of the second chance: I like to imagine that 500 years from now history students might read this memoir the way we look at one of those medieval painters identified in museums by their leading canvas:  "The Master of the Second Chance."  For a generation he has reminded Germans - both in intimate and restricted settings and in great public speeches before the Bundestag or the Frankfurt book fair - that they had been given a second chance and must not squander it. 

Indeed this was a role that one might think he was predestined for (although it has taken immense tact and often civil courage) to carry out.  As he writes, the aftermath of his 1984 Leopold Lucas lecture, National Socialism as Temptation, "may have augmented my unanticipated role in Germany as a foreign historian-observer with a native touch." (p.428)  After all, Fritz Stern was born in what had been the sixth most populous city in Germany; his family was forced into exile by the Nazis, he has had an immensely successful career in America's largest city, and he was able to return to say that German democracy was in fact functioning. Germans on both the moderate Left and the moderate Right - conservatives and social democrats - have recognized that he offered good advice but also provided a credible credential. He was an interlocutor of good will, but not a simple enthusiast of the Wirtschaftswunder or champion of a common Cold War containment policy. 

And as someone who has in a very minor manner - and at half a generation younger than Fritz - found myself in some of the same positions, I understand the importance of this role.  Allow a minute of autobiography to suggest one reason why this memoir has spoken to me.  I am thirteen years younger than Fritz, also of German Jewish parentage, also a New Yorker by origins, but a product of the migrations of the late nineteenth century.  Like Fritz I come from a family that has floated across conventional religious lines.  Since there were South Germans or Austrian and Bohemian Germans in the mix, these wanderings were as often Catholic as Protestant, but with some curious adventures like Christian science and ethical culture, although my family never converted and I was brought up as a secular Jew.  Alas, I derive from far humbler social and intellectual circumstances than the physicians and scientists of the Stern clan, although my mother took immense pride at her family's relations to Heine.  When I first went to Germany as a sixteen-year-old exchange student to live with a German family, I was not returning to a country whence my immediate family had been expelled or murdered, although we had some relatives who were both.  Still, going ten years after the war must have provoked immense ambivalence for my parents (who had to consent to this exchange program) and for myself as a bookish adolescent.  It took time to realize that Germans were complicated individuals - some still self-pitying, some silent out of shame.   I have known, and count as friends, many of the historians and others who are Fritz's friends, although I have played little role beyond the academy.  Fritz and I have sat on committees together - the ill-starred effort by Chancellor Kohl to organize a high-powered German-American Academic Council, the Potsdam Institute for Contemporary History, devoted to the history of the GDR, and the American Academy for Germany.  Our experiences are not identical, but there is some overlap.

The fact that Fritz's political consciousness began in the l930s contributed to the fact, as he cites his mentor Henry Roberts' telling him, that "his alarm bells went off early."  Die Gnade der frühen Geburt in 1926 with respect to mine in l939 also meant that Fritz brought to Germany a political formation during some of America's most passionate public experiences under the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, whereas we who were adolescents in the l950s were less inclined to be mobilized by public causes, not that they were lacking, certainly not by the 1960s.  Even then, however, they no longer involved European politics to the same degree. In any case, Fritz entered into the Federal Republic as an adult, and as an adult with political experience from some of America's most passionate civic conflicts in the l950s and l960s.  He had no illusions that the United States was free of divisive ideological politics, a claim that marked my college instruction. 

Despite the gap in age across the wartime years, both Fritz and I had to confront as historians the overriding question: Where and how did Germany go wrong?  Why did it diverge from the West?   This is too simple: at several points in his book Fritz insists that the German question - the susceptibility to authoritarian nationalism and anti-Semitism --was in fact a European and even a human question.  Many societies were susceptible to the viruses of fascism and intolerance even if they never succumbed.  Nonetheless, for Fritz and for so many of those who were my teachers and a decade or more older, "Where did Germany go wrong?" had to remain the German question.  On the other hand, for my colleagues ten years younger than I am, this question seemed mal posée and inappropriate:  For me in the middle range it was an inquiry that periodically recurred (as during the Historikerstreit of the l980s) but gradually lost its existential grip.  Indeed I sometimes struggled against it because I feared it would close off too many other historical inquiries.  Fritz cites Faulkner: "The past isn't dead, it's not even past."  I guess my working assumption was that the past was at least past.  And yet for all the differences in outlook that an event-filled intervening decade of political maturation must impose, the German-Jewish milieu that Fritz has described is utterly familiar.  And to a degree, so too is the "mission" that we historians arriving from the United States but familiar with Germany were asked to assume.  Working, for example, with powerful German funders on a project concerning Germany and the Marshall Plan - in this case with Hermann Abs and Kurt Birrenbach - I sensed the implicit role that German leaders of the Bonn Republic hoped we historians, especially liberal American and American Jewish historians, might serve - we were bridges back to respectability.

But one can play that role in different ways - it would have been easy just to provide a good housekeeping seal of approval.  Fritz's merit, I believe, has been to say, that continual political exertions must come with the acceptance.  German democracy - like democracy everywhere - remains a project, not just an achievement.  It is not easy to have struck that balance, but precisely for that reason I think he has played an extraordinary role both as teacher and as advocate.  And I am glad that he has shared it with us, revealing his enthusiasms and above all his friendships; for if the book shows anything it is that ideologies and politics - good and evil - cannot be separated from friendships and personal commitment.  As he writes near the end of his memoir, "friendship is the great treasure."  Stern's book testifies, moreover, to the fact that friendship can bridge the differences between conservatives and liberals (he cites his relationship with Waldemar Besson among others), although perhaps not the gulf between those who are committed to democracy and those who have contempt for it.  Friendship accommodates differences so long as there are underlying commitments to persuasion and reason.  He has been fortunate in his friends and instructive in his enemies.  And his friends have been fortunate, as they realized, in his friendship.

Fritz, of course, recognizes that the term "second chance" is revealing for his intimate as well as his public life. He has constantly tried to harness together dualist tendencies in his eighty years.  German and Jew, German and American, private and public.  Life in America was a second chance; Germany had a second chance; he acknowledges a second chance in his marriages.  He describes five Germanys, but in fact I believe that this is a story of two Germanys - one proud and creative but deeply flawed and one redeemed - and a story of two lives and two careers, lived as one.  Some of us interrogate ourselves at a certain point in our adulthood, how shall we live the second half of our life, as did Dante in his thirty-fifth year when he found himself "in the midst of a dark wood."  It is rarer to balance those halves throughout, to create a coherent whole out of dualism, out of Gold and Iron, out of blood and spirit, out of scholarship and public engagement. And although the life has been dual we all have benefited from what constitutes a singular contribution. 

These remarks appeared in the February 16, 2007 AICGS Advisor.

The event at which these remarks were given was generously supported by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, the BMW Center for German and European Studies (Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University),  the German Historical Institute Washington, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Goethe-Institut Washington, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.