Fritz Richard Stern

Professor Fritz Stern was the former University Professor Emeritus and Provost of Columbia University. He specialized in Modern European History, particularly German history, Jewish history, and historiography. Much of Stern's work tracks the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, tracing that the origins of Nazism back to the 19th century völkische movement. In Stern's opinion, the virulently anti-Semitic völkische movement was the result of the "politics of cultural despair" experienced by German intellectuals who were unable to come to grips with modernity. He rejects the Sonderweg interpretation of German history which considers Germany to have followed a unique course from aristocracy into democracy distinct from other European countries. In the 1990s, Stern was a leading critic of the controversial American author Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners he denounced as unscholarly and full of Germanophobia. His books include: The Politics of Cultural Despair (1963); The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (1956); Gold and Iron (1977); The Failure of Illiberalism (1973); Dreams and Delusions (1987); Einstein's German World (1999); and most recently Five Germanys I Have Known (2006). Stern passed away in May 2016.