Five Germanys I have Known

"This is a bit more of a left-field selection in the sense that it was published in 2006, just a year after Merkel became chancellor. She is mentioned only in a footnote, which celebrates her rise to power as “an implicit recognition of the talents that had been liberated in the old east.” But it’s a great book, a blend of history and memoir by one of the foremost scholars of German history. The five Germanys he refers to in the title are Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the two Germanys between 1945 and 1990—West Germany and the GDR—and then reunified Germany. He was born in 1926 and grew up in what was then German Breslau, part of the Weimar Republic and is now the city of Wroclaw in Poland. He came from a family of Jewish origin, although I think his grandparents had converted to Christianity. He certainly didn’t grow up culturally Jewish, although, of course, for the Nazis that didn’t matter, given their biological theories of race. His family were quite wealthy, very cultured and surrounded by intellectuals. They eventually, belatedly perhaps, emigrated to the US in 1938. So he does have childhood memories of Nazism. But he watched the war from the US and he established his academic career in the US at Columbia, and stayed there, became an American citizen, but made regular recces back to West Germany after the war. He was quite frustrated with what he considered to be some of the slightly superficial analyses of how Nazism emerged, particularly in American scholarship. That is explored amply in this book, but what sets it aside are the regular injections of memoir, particularly the scenes painted of Weimar Germany and of his childhood. It really brings that period to life colourfully. Nazism is on the edges of things, it doesn’t feel real, or like something that’s going to affect him, until it does. There are particular vignettes about the emigration office or encounters with SS officers, where you get this creeping feeling that something devastating is happening to this country, and potentially something devastating could happen to him. And, eventually, his family make the decision to emigrate. Chapter 10, is “Unified Germany: A Second Chance?” It’s really moving because for most of Stern’s adult life, the division of Germany into East and West was considered an immovable, fundamental fact. The Cold War felt eternal and unchangeable. Then, all of a sudden, when Stern is approaching his twilight years, it all changes, the Wall comes down, the country is unified. There is a moving epilogue to the book, in which Stern is invited in 2002 to give an address to mark the 300th anniversary of the University of Wroclaw, in the town of his birth. Bar a brief visit in 1979, described in noirish fashion at the start of the book, he has not been back since emigrating in the 1930s. The German and Polish presidents attend, he delivers a homily to the European peace and unity that had proved so elusive for most of his life, and a performance of Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem, drives him to tears. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Here is a city that has now taken on a new life as a Polish city, in a free Poland, after the end of the Cold War , at peace with its German neighbour, as well as with its Russian neighbour, something that for many Poles might have felt almost unthinkable for large parts of history. So although all of those parts of his own personal childhood have been pretty much expunged from the city, he is able to see a fresh beginning as a city in Poland that epitomises the new Europe. And a city that can connect him to a childhood that is by now distant, but not yet forgotten. It’s a slightly tenuous link to Merkel but it does give you a different context for thinking about the Germany that Angela Merkel inherited, especially for a chancellor that herself grew up in the GDR and who for most of her young life would not have had any idea that her destiny was to be part of a free and unified Germany anchored in a secure Europe at peace with its Polish neighbour. Here it is presented by somebody who remembers not only the Cold War, not only Nazi Germany, but actually remembers Breslau as a German city in the Weimar Republic. It’s a fascinating piece of context for thinking about the Germany in Europe that Angela Merkel was to inherit."