Fritz Stern, author, historian and Columbia University professor, died last week at age 90. He was born in Breslau in 1926 to a physician father and a mother with a physics doctorate. Though both sides of his family had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in the 19th century, Nazi persecution of Germans with Jewish ancestry forced the Sterns to flee to the U.S. in 1938. Stern attended Columbia University with the intention of becoming a doctor. When he found himself torn between medicine and humanities, Stern asked family friend Albert Einstein for advice. Stern ignored Einstein's urging to stick with the sciences, and went on to earn a Ph.D. and professorship at Columbia. He is survived by his wife and sometime co-author Elisabeth Sifton, former senior v-p of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Stern's scholarship focused on the roots and rise of National Socialism in Germany, which was the focus of his first book, The Politics of Cultural Despair. He also wrote Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire, a dual biography of Otto von Bismarck and his Jewish financier Gerson Bleichröder, and Einstein's German World. Stern was a respected voice in Germany for his work as an historian and for his advocacy of liberal values in a united, peaceful Germany. Five Germanys I Have Known, a mix of memoir and history, explores the burning question of his life's work: "Why and how did the universal potential for evil become an actuality in Germany?" It was last published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2007 ($16, 9780374530860). --Tobias Mutter
