Professor Fritz Stern
Honoree of the Leo Baeck Medal

My thanks to Foreign Minister Fischer for his presence and for his most generous remarks; my thanks to Michael Blumenthal, to Ismar Schorsch, to Richard Holbrooke, to Anna-Maria Kellen, to Carol Strauss and the Leo Baeck Institute—to all of you. I see many friends here? It’s heart-warming and mind-numbing to be praised for simply doing what I thought had to be done. To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency to barbarism gave the question “how was it possible” an existential immediacy. So I did no more than what others of my generation did as well: wrestle with that question, try to reconstruct some parts of the past, perhaps intuit some lessons. So I find it easier and more appropriate to translate your kind words into a celebration of Clio, the historian’s exacting and often elusive muse, and to use today’s festive occasion to acknowledge friends, colleagues, mentors, American and European, who have inspired me by example and encouragement. Writing is painful and solitary; scholarship at its best offers companionship, even harmonious companionship. No wonder that I am grateful for the exuberant exaggerations uttered tonight.

I am also grateful for the timing of this event. It would be nice to ascribe this to some invisible hand, but I suspect it had to do with the visibly crowded schedule of the Foreign Minister. Still, for me it is felicitous because it is an encouragement at a hard time; events of the last ten days have intensified my reasoned apprehension, my worry about the immediate future of the country that saved us and taught us and gave us so much. I take heart from tonight, since renewed hope is itself a marvelous gift. Herr Fischer, I can’t divine your thoughts and feelings about this country—they may be buried in your diplomatic heart—but let me say that what you see in this hall tonight is something very special and inspiriting: if the United States were a parliamentary democracy, if we had a House of Commons where the opposition faced the government in weekly contest, you would recognize here leading members of the shadow government.

Among us we have persons who could be your partner in statesmanship, and we have talent also to fill Treasury and Justice; we have many ministers of education, a minister for human rights, and when I look at my grandson I realize we even have junior ministers. We are reminded of the strength and vitality of this country. The world must envy us this bounty—and some day even our own citizens will appreciate our blessings.

I take special joy in saying this because the German-speaking refugees who came to this country in the 1930s and thereafter had similarly enthusiastic feelings about this country. Not only gratitude for saving us, giving many of us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances—I think of my own parents—but love and admiration for a country that was, when we arrived, still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” unlike his German contemporary, who preached fear in order to exploit it. The United States was the sole functioning democracy of the 1930s—that “low, dishonest decade—and under FDR it was committed to pragmatic reform and in inimitable high spirits. No, I haven’t forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days—the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-semites—but the dominant note of Franklin Roosevelt’s era was ebullient affirmation of reform and progress.

We are here to celebrate the Leo Baeck Institute, 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 with his German colleagues during his great years in Berlin with 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 after 1933.

The ties between us had been close, and when they were broken, when so many Germans decided they didn’t 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 of many refugees, and they founded the Institute to be a repository of this legacy. Its archives are a treasure for historians and scholars from everywhere—in recent decades especially from Germany itself—have come to its unique library. The LBI has contributed to greater understanding and reconciliation between Americans and Germans, between Christians and Jews.

The founders probably seized quickly upon the name Leo Baeck, to recall the last liberal Rabbi of Germany—a student of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, someone who deepened theological learning by taking a fuller account of the irrational, mysterious elements in human existence. However much he and Paul Tillich had understood the power of the demonic when they studied it in the 1920s, Baeck couldn’t have imagined that he would live to see the triumph of hate-filled unreason. In the end, he had to endure living under that triumph, in a unique position as the last head of Germany’s Jewish community, its representative to Nazi authorities, which finally sent him to Theresienstadt, that Nazi mockery of a model concentration camp, where for a time specially selected victims, spared as yet from extermination, were allowed to retain some form of a community before they died of hunger and disease. Baeck survived his years there—perhaps he met my father’s sister and her husband in Theresienstadt before they were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Richard von Weizsaecker, in his extraordinary presidential address on the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender, warned that sparing German feelings would be of no avail. The wounds remain and need to be acknowledged. In that same spirit of candor, let me say that the work of the LBI is all the more important in light of what an earlier head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gerson Cohen, wrote in a Leo Baeck Yearbook in 1975. He mentioned that German Jewry had had “a bad press” in recent literature, being depicted occasionally as epitomizing submissiveness and self-hatred.

Theirs is a complex history, and hence the importance of the diverse testimony collected at the Institute; but it is also appropriate to recall Heine’s thought--that Jews are like the people they live among, only more so. Hence German Jews, who came in great variety—orthodox, liberal, secular, converted—were like Germans only more so: ambitious, talented, disciplined, and full of ambivalence.

After their civic emancipation in the nineteenth century, German Jews made an unprecedented leap to achievement, prominence, and wealth within only three generations, but some special insecurity and vulnerability clung to them, as it did to many Germans. I remember finding in an obscure book Disraeli’s confession to young Montefiore: “You and I belong to a race that can do everything but fail.” What a poignant remark, I thought, and mentioned it to my son, who instantly responded, “How hard on the others.”

It probably was hard on the others, but now many Germans regret the absence of that creative complicated element of German Jewry. They recall the inestimable contributions that Jews made to German life and culture in their century of partial emancipation. But their forbears had more complicated feelings on the subject, and even the most successful Jews felt, as Walther Rathenau once said, that “there comes a moment in every Jew’s life when he realizes he is a second-class citizen.”

Perhaps that strange mixture of German hospitality and hostility to Jews evoked the ambivalent response of some of the greatest of German Jews. They were the brilliant diagnosticians of German-European hypocrisy, the memorable breakers of taboos: think of Heine’s mockery of German sentimental pretense, of Karl Marx’s insistence that the cash nexus trumps virtue, or of Sigmund Freud’s exposure of sexual hypocrisy and falsehood. Disturbers of a false peace are indispensable but rarely welcomed. So anti-semitism, which comes in many guises and degrees, existed in pre-1914 Germany, as it did more ferociously in other countries. In Germany, it became an all-consuming political weapon only after the Great War. It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last century.

It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice, for equality, for women’s emancipation, for all of human rights. The war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular, the most murderous, the most seductive, and the most repressive regime of the last century.

But the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.

We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Let me cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason. Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Nobel-laureate in physics and a philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-1980s saying that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like “the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves hadn’t understood. He may well have been right: the Nazis didn’t realize that they were part of an historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason. German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of pseudo- religion and disguised interest. The Christian churches most readily fell into line as well, though with some heroic exceptions.

Though modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery, German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy, the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.

Another lesson is the possibility of reconstruction, for the history of the Federal Republic since World War Two, a republic that is now fifty-five years old, exemplifies success despite its serious flaws and shortcomings. Postwar Germany made a democracy grow on what was initially uncongenial ground, when its people were still steeped in resentment and denial. American friendship supported that reconstruction, especially in its first decade.

I fear that an estrangement is now taking place, and I suspect that all of us here would wish to preserve in the private realm what may be in jeopardy in public life. German democracy, German acceptance of Western traditions, has been the precondition for its gradual reconciliation with neighbors and former enemies, with Poles and Slavs; for its efforts at reconciliation with Jews; for a general acceptance of the burden of the past and a collective commitment for the future. This German achievement is remarkable—but it too needs constant protection.

Herr Fischer, thank you for coming, and thank you for your kind words. We wish you success and Fortuna. Your great predecessors Walther Rathenau and Gustav Stresemann longed and worked for a peaceful Europe; your responsibilities go beyond Europe, which at last is peaceful. My hope is for a renewal on still firmer grounds of a trans-Atlantic community of liberal democracies. Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all.

© Copyright by Fritz Stern

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Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany
Award Presentation

It is my great pleasure, and indeed a great honor, to be able to speak to you here today. I was very happy to accept your Institute's invitation. It is named after one of the most important Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. Following the war and the horror of the Shoah, Rabbi Leo Baeck, a survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp, was able to reach out to the emerging democratic Germany. His approach to the young Federal Republic was marked by understanding. He even kept the door open for reconciliation. Through his research and writings on the history of German Jews, he made a decisive contribution to preserving this important heritage of our country – a heritage that the National Socialists wanted to eradicate with the most criminal means. We are deeply grateful to the Leo Baeck Institute and its research centers in the U.S., Israel, and Germany for keeping this heritage and this spirit alive.

For me, it is a particular honor and pleasure to be able to award the Leo Baeck Medal to a great historian, Professor Fritz Stern. He, too, has maintained close ties to the country of his childhood, even though he and his family were only able to flee Nazi Germany at the very last minute, and even though it was this same country that demeaned and dispossessed him and his family and forced them into exile. His attitude toward democratic Germany is also marked by confidence and understanding. In a sense, he follows in Leo Baeck's footsteps. After fleeing the Nazis, 12 year old Fritz Stern arrived in New York in 1938. Here, in this great city, he was greeted with open arms. This is where he grew up. His brilliant academic career is closely linked to Columbia University.

It is not least thanks to Fritz Stern that today in America, excellent and balanced research is being conducted on Germany and German history. And that there is so much understanding for my country in the U.S. is not only because of his excellent research – it is also because of his ability to convince and communicate his ideas. Fritz Stern is not a researcher who simply remains within the ivory tower. On the contrary, Stern addresses society as a whole. Many of his studies intentionally speak to a broad audience. This is how he sees responsible historical research. Such responsible research is even more important given his observation: "Historians are no longer the chief custodians of the past. They now share that responsibility with influential television and movie directors, who represent the past often in unavoidably abbreviated form, often inexcusably distorted form."

Fritz Stern arrives at this conclusion with certain uneasiness. These remarks were made in 1999, "at the end of the bloodiest century in Europe's history." He made them in Germany, on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt. And it was no coincidence that he chose to say this in my country, in Germany. Today, German history of the 19th and 20th century is being researched more clearly and in more detail than ever before. But it is precisely when recent memories fade that there is a great danger of simplifying, distorting, and forgetting.

Stern believes that historians have a duty to deal with this issue. A past that is so horrible that it "will not go away," as he puts it, must always be present. The idea is not to point the finger of blame, but to develop a sense of responsibility for the present – to learn from history, and to draw the right conclusions. This is what Fritz Stern sees as his calling. That is why he wants to keep memory and remembrance alive and at the same time embed it in a greater historical context.

It is a very personal calling, because it is closely related to his own life. Germany is the country of his childhood. It is the country that brutally forced him and his family into exile. And had he not escaped his murderers, Germany would have killed him, too, together with millions of other German and European Jews in the extermination camps. That is precisely why his interest focuses primarily on Germany and its history. Fritz Stern was born in Breslau in 1926 into a cosmopolitan, educated German Jewish family. One can associate the Sterns with the intellectual elite that since the end of the 19th century had made Germany "a land of dazzling achievements," as he says; a land of many Nobel Prize winners, world-famous artists, ground-breaking researchers, and independent thinkers.

This intellectual elite generated a period of blossoming creativity – in the areas of culture, science, and the economy. Model universities, a growing industrial sector, a diverse cultural landscape, and a dynamic society meant that Germany, its culture and its language, was held in high international esteem. With this creativity, Germany could have left its mark in the world. The 20th century could have been a German century, in the best sense of the word – if Germany had used its soft power rather than military strength. At the same time, however, Stern also shows the fatal weaknesses of the Kaiser Reich: aggressive foreign policy, excessive nationalism, senseless efforts to increase armament, and bitter internal politics marked by confrontation. All this overshadowed the great social and intellectual achievements, eclipsing them from view and causing their significance to fade. Instead of using its great "soft power" potential, Germany chose to rely on "hard power." Through the Great War, Germany lost the opportunity of a peaceful future in which it could have been a model to the world. This failure, this "lost opportunity", as he called it, is one of the main focuses of Stern's academic work. He analyzes this period in great detail, above all using biographies and biographical portraits. His approach is to conduct a psychological examination of history. He has little time for a mere materialistic interpretation of the past. For example, he examines in their historical context the figures Paul Ehrlich, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein – as well as Walter Rathenau and Thomas Mann. Stern's best-known work is his book on Otto von Bismarck and his banker Gerson von Bleichröder, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire. It impressively demonstrates the connection between money and state power in the Kaiser Reich. It also portrays the threatening rise of anti-Semitism at the close of the 19th century – which increasingly became a severe problem even for Jews of such high social standing as Bleichröder. From today’s perspective, the growing anti-semitism within the German elite foreshadowed the catastrophe to come.

Therefore, the issues that interest Fritz Stern always somehow relate to his own experience in life. According to former Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, Stern does not examine the fate of Germany "with the transatlantic distance of an outside observer or objective judge." Rather Geremek believes that, as a result of Stern's experience in life, he can gain psychological access to the times he writes about: "Stern is a historian who participates in a special way. He desires to understand, not to justify."

This is especially true for the second focus of Fritz Stern's research: the history of National Socialism. To Stern, denouncing the catastrophe of the Third Reich was not enough. Early on, he wanted to understand how it could have happened. "National Socialism as Temptation" is the title of one of his essays. He describes how the Third Reich grew out of the psychological situation of the German people. Here it becomes especially clear that Stern is never exclusively an outside observer. He does not hesitate to reflect on his own life. Although Stern never passes judgment, he also does not hide his great sympathy with those who were brave and honest enough to oppose National Socialism. "It is not easy to achieve a balanced judgment of one's own past," he writes.

However it is precisely this relationship to his own past that makes Stern such an exceptional historian. This lends even greater credibility to his calling, which is to ensure that lessons are drawn from the past. The Nazi years put an end to the century-old blossoming of Jewish culture and life in Europe and especially in Germany. The Stern family, too, was forced to leave its traditional home of Breslau.

With the expulsion and murder of German Jews, Germany also forever destroyed a major part of its cultural identity, a major part of itself, indeed of its soul. The German state and the majority of the German people at the time were the perpetrators. Those whom they excluded from society, deprived of their rights, humiliated, dispossessed, expelled, and in the end murdered, were Germans, compatriots. Scientists like Albert Einstein, authors like Lion Feuchtwanger, directors like Ernst Lubitsch – their groundbreaking achievements were trampled underfoot by their own compatriots, and they themselves were forced to flee their fatherland.

The expulsion and murder of the German Jews left a human and cultural void that has not been filled. It is a wound that pains us to this day. Especially in Berlin, the former European center of Jewish intellectual life, I can feel that void more than in other German cities. Hitler's reign of terror, the Second World War, Germany’s self-destruction and the Holocaust, that shameful crime against humanity, were the culmination of this German catastrophe – all of which began with the "lost opportunity."

Fritz Stern's calling as a historian leads to the third focus of his research. For some time now, Stern has been examining post-1945 developments in Germany. He has always followed and analyzed the history of the Federal Republic. And his voice has always been heard in my country. On June 17, 1987, he became the first foreigner to address the German Bundestag on the Day of German Unity, and his speech is unforgotten. We also recall his joy at witnessing German reunification, and his cautioning remarks on overcoming division between East and West.

Early on, Stern saw the difficulties we would encounter. Much of what he wrote about East and West Germans in the early 1990s has proven true. However, he has always described the restoration of German unity as a dream – a dream that he, too, never believed would come true.

This led Fritz Stern to coin the term "second chance," a chance that Germany was given at the close of the 20th century. Stern sees this chance in the fact that Germany, with its power and its wealth, "is directing its efforts for peace and reason in such a way that it does not merely rhetorically pledge its support for Europe, but is also practically helping to realize it."

Today, we want to – and we must – use this second chance. Stern is right when he says that it is a rare opportunity "for a people, and for individuals, to have; it is both a gift and a challenge." We must cherish this gift and we must tackle this challenge.

For foreign policy, it means that we must succeed in enlarging and deepening the European Union. Only then will we finally overcome the division of our continent. And together with our European and transatlantic partners, we must work to ensure that our problems are resolved by peaceful means in our globalized world.

Our friendship with America plays a decisive role here. Fritz Stern already made this point in 1991 in his essay on "The Second Chance." It is true that, following the end of the Cold War, we have witnessed a sea change. However, today the transatlantic alliance is more important than ever. It is a "historical imperative," as Stern himself describes it. But we must also use the second chance at home. This is true above all on a very important and sensitive issue, namely how the democratic Germany protects and respects its Jewish population.

Following the Holocaust, that shameful crime against humanity, it is almost a miracle that we once again have vibrant Jewish communities in Germany. Although it seems unlikely that they will ever regain their former splendor, the building of synagogues, the founding of Jewish institutions, and the opening of Jewish stores and restaurants fills us with hope. And the number of German Jews is growing.

But we must always remain alert. Jewish institutions still require special protection. Again and again, there are anti-Semitic attacks. These acts must be punished with the full force of the law. In this area, the German government and judiciary must prove how seriously they take our second chance. Only when German Jews, and Jews in Germany, can feel secure in our democracy and at home in our country, only then can we say that we used the second chance we were given.

Let me conclude by again returning to Berlin. One of the most visited attractions is the city's new Jewish Museum. It was designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, who last year was awarded the Leo Baeck Medal. And you, Michael Blumenthal, are the museum's Director. You, too, have received the Medal of the Leo Baeck Institute.

The museum's fractured architecture impressively demonstrates the difficult relationship between Germany and its Jews. The building houses an exhibition on one thousand years of Jewish history in Germany. When walking through it, visitors are confronted with corners and rough edges. It is an informative, yet somber walk. Part of Libeskind's design is a broad, straight corridor that runs through the entire fragmented structure. He calls it the Axis of Continuity.

This is meant to symbolize the survival of the Jews and Jewish life in Germany in spite of centuries of persecution and brutality. We must, and we will, continue to work on this axis – with all our strength. It is also thanks to people like Leo Baeck – and you, Fritz Stern, with your confident message of reconciliation – that – following and in spite of the most inconceivable barbaric acts of National Socialism and the Shoah – we have reason to hope that we can contribute to this continuity in today's democratic Germany.

Professor Stern, we in Germany pay great attention to what you have to say. We are grateful for your analyses, your descriptions, and not least for your confident outlook. I wholeheartedly share your view that we must draw lessons from history – in particular German history. And as a younger generation, too, we must shoulder the special responsibility stemming from this difficult past. We must use our second chance. I am delighted that the Leo Baeck Institute has chosen to award you this year's Leo Baeck Medal and congratulate you on this honor.

Thank you.

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The complete text of these speeches as well as the remarks by W. Michael Blumenthal and Richard C. Holbrooke given at the 10th Annual Dinner of the LBI is available in the newly published "LBI Occasional Paper #5", available for purchase for $12.00. For information please email lbaeck@lbi.org.