From
The Christian Science Monitor, August 29, 2006
Within a week of Fritz Stern's arrival in New York in 1938, the 12-year-old was banging out letters on his battered typewriter to friends and relatives left behind in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The steady correspondence - and carbon copies he saved - marked the early signs of a historian in the making. And what a historian.
From the day he taught his first Western Civilization course at Columbia University 60 years ago, Stern has sought to understand and explain Germany's tortured past. Stemming from his personal experience as a Jewish émigré during the Third Reich, he evolved into what he calls an "engaged observer" of history, becoming an adviser and friend to West German, other European, and US politicians and diplomats, and a prize-winning author and lecturer.
Now, Stern's experience and scholarship come together in
Five Germanys I Have Known. Part memoir, part history, the book follows Stern and Germany on a path of personal and political reconciliation: from the world of his Christian-convert forebears - a line of doctors - in imperial and then Weimar Germany, through Hitler's Germany, the two postwar Germanys, and finally, united Germany...
Full review here