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Title: Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History by Fritz Richard Stern ISBN: 0-300-07622-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Why this Nightmare?
Comment: After reading Cszeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind" a fascinating memoir of his watching various intellectual sell-outs to Stalinism, I began searching for a corolary description of elite German society before Hitler's dictatorship. Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" were somewhat helpful, as were the wave of books pointing fingers at Pope Pius XII. Then I found this short history by Columbia University Professor Fritz Stern. What an impression it made on me. The book is really a series of essays divided into two parts. The first part concerns the initial rise of Nazism in Germany.
How, asks Stern, did Germany and especially Berlin -- among the most modern and scientific of Europe's cities -- become the center for Nazism? This was the center of modern physics, of Kant's aufklarung, a haven of Lutheran literacy and Prussian constitutionality facing an autocracy of Red to its east. Yet within less than a generation all this would become unhinged.
To cut into the belly of this seeming paradox, Stern begins by introducing us to an Albert Einstein few of us imagined: A pessimist progressive who carried to his death hurt feelings over Weimar, its militant anxieties, its daemonic need to assert itself; what Stern calls "its frantic search for greatness." In contrast to the romantic view of Einstein as supreme autodidact, Stern asserts that he actually quit school to avoid compulsory army service. When he returned from Switzerland after WWI, he found the Berlin intellectual scene at the cutting edge of science --- but totally without the self-assured cosmopolitanism Einstein presumed for himself. Likely nary a one of them would have reached for their guns upon hearing the word, but men as deeply intelligent as Planck and Haber could fear that "culture" which Einstein regarded as his secular Jewish birthright. Haber, a genius chemist, solved the problem of gathering nitrogen from the atmosphere which gave us modern agriculture... and modern munitions. As a converted Jew, a thoroughly practical scientist, and a dutiful apologist for his nation, he was Einstein's opposite in virtually all respects. Such peers as these were, Einstein feared, the top of Berlin's heap, and so he left Weimar permanently.
Stern acknowledges many of the obvious reasons for Einstein's reaction, but also gives a remarkable rebuttal to the wave of scholarship, following the holocaust, that tried to paint Germany as uniquely evil, conceivably to mitigate worries that such a thing might happen again. Stern rejects the tacit belief of earlier scholars that German history ought to be judged solely in the light of the Holocaust. He gives a fascinating view of German Jewish life in the 19th-century, concluding that the experience of modernity which all Germans underwent to some degree, appeared to them to be tantalizingly typified by the experiences of Jews. In the end, they were not so very different from their fellow citizens - and this was the problem! Jews' rather sudden assimilation after centuries of isolation could only inflame the self-consciousness of anxious German elites. Stern blames Hitler's rise on these passive elites who virtually condoned "the elimination of Jewish colleagues and competitors from almost every sphere of activity."
Among the book's merits is Stern's emphasis on the special responsibility of the Protestant churches for the absence of controversy during Hitler's rise. Many urban Protestants were nominal Christians by this point but they too recoiled from the anxieties of modernity. Catholics tired of watching Pius XII (the most authentic traditionalist of this century's popes) drug over the coals should find much comfort in Chapter 6 of this book. Stern does not a vindicate Rome or make apologies for it's terrible mistakes, but simply states the fact that Nazism, despite Hitler's background, was not the product of the Catholic south, but of the north, of Berlin -- the center of Lutheran Prussia. Yes, the Church, by Pious XII's infamous 1933 capitulation to Hitler, did disband its national political party - the Center Party - at a dangerous point, unintentionally opening the field for Nazism. (This minority party had been utterly opposed to Hitler). And the Vatican, though deeply resentful of Hitler and Mussolini's regimes probably rightly feared "Godless" Communism as an even greater threat to itself. But Catholics were also quick to reject the Nazi doctrine of eugenic differences between Jews and Christians as being grounds for nullifying conversions... a view that almost all Protestant sects accepted without question. (The justly celebrated Dietrich Bonhoffer being a special exception.) Like Bonhoffer, many of the Catholic clergy suffered for their convinctions. "Nearly a third of them were censured and arrested," writes Stern.
Stern concludes with several interesting but less abiding essays on Germany's purpose prior to unification. These are interesting for the historic record but can no longer be taken as statements about contemporary Germany.
All in all, this is a fine book: readable, different enough from popular conceptions to be abidingly interesting, and judiciously well-documented. I heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to know how any of this ever could have happened and what its lasting effect on the German psyche has been.
Rating: 4
Summary: A brilliant, original book
Comment: Stern has a uniquely personal grasp of the rise of the Nazis -- he himself was a refugee -- yet his insight and his presentation is grounded in work of a brilliant and original historian. Stern cites extensively from Eintstein , Fritz Haber, and other prominent intellectuals of the time. He has a deep love and sympathy for Germany. The ramifications of his book go far beyond the time and country that is his subject. I have rarely read a better book, on any subject.
Rating: 5
Summary: This is a brilliant, original work of history.
Comment: Stern is almost unique in his grasp of European and German history, from Rilke to Rommell. He is one of the best historians I have ever read, on any subject
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Title: Einstein's German World by Fritz Stern ISBN: 0691074585 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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