The German Genius

Nazis.
    Hajo Holborn was a Berliner whose father was a well-known physicist, highly political and deeply liberal. This rubbed off on the son, an influence reinforced when he studied under Meinecke, who stimulated in Holborn a lifelong interest in the history of ideas. His first book was a study of Ulrich von Hutten, Luther’s close friend, in which Holborn argued that the Reformation and the history of humanism were parallel—but separate—intellectual movements, and that the conservative strand of German thought, culminating in Bismarck, was not as directly related to Luther as it suited the conservatives to say. His subtext was that German historiography had a right-wing bias that had caused German history to be misunderstood. From Berlin, Holborn moved to Heidelberg, where he unsuccessfully attempted to resist the Nazis’ interference in history teaching and historical understanding.
    He was barely thirty when he arrived at Yale. 65 There he worked on two major books, The Political Collapse of Europe (1951), which had an impact on American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and his three-volume A History of Modern Germany (1959–69), for many years the standard work. Here he showed how the founding idealism of German thought had become obsolete in the contemporary world. During the war he worked in the Office of Strategic Services as chief of the research and analysis branch, responsible for scrutinizing Nazi policies and drawing up plans for postwar Germany. 66 In 1946 he became an adviser to the U.S. Department of State and wrote a book on the American military government in Germany that had a major impact on postwar political organization. Later he became an unofficial mediator between the United States and the Federal Republic. His students included Leonard Krieger and Charles McClelland. 67
    In some ways the most successful—and successfully adjusted —émigré historian was Fritz Stern. He wasn born in 1926 in Breslau, where his father was a doctor and an enthusiastic member of the Bildungsbürgertum , who numbered Fritz Haber among his friends and who became Fritz Stern’s godfather. The family emigrated in 1938, relatively late, when Fritz was already twelve. He avoided the admonition from his father to become a scientist, choosing history instead. Stern’s life, as a professor at Columbia, and his father’s, touched many of the well-known German émigrés—the Mann brothers, the Werfels, Einstein, Marcuse, Max Wertheimer at the New School, Felix Gilbert, Hans Jonas—and he formed friendships with many artists and scholars, among them Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, Kurt Hahn, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hajo Holborn, Tim Garton-Ash, and David Landes. His students included Peter Novick (see Introduction) and Jay Winter, whose Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning , is a brilliant and moving exploration of war memorials. 68
    In his work, Stern concentrated on two themes, German history in the run-up to World War II, and American historiography, especially in regard to Europe and Germany. He researched a variety of figures, including Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck, as well as scientific figures such as Haber, Einstein, and Planck. He also devoted fourteen years to a detailed study of the relationship between Bismarck and Bleichröder. This took him back to Germany (including East Germany) in search of correspondence, and made him well known in the German corridors of power. Many of his conclusions have been incorporated into this book.
    Besides the books he produced, Stern served on several American-German committees and academic and diplomatic bodies, making him a trusted expert on German-American relations, psychological as well as policy-oriented. He took part in a number of celebrated confrontations, including the Historikerstreit , the Fritz Fischer controversy, Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners , and the role of culture in the German self-image. When Richard Holbrooke was appointed ambassador to Germany by President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, Holbrooke took Stern with him as an adviser. A friend and/or colleague of Henry Kissinger and Chancellors Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, and Willy Brandt, Stern attended the notorious meeting at Chequers to advise Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on what a reunified Germany would mean. Stern has had fingers in many pies on both sides of the Atlantic, and was asked by Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister, to take part in the