Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of many books on the history of modern Europe, including Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History, The Politics of Cultural Despair. His books have been widely translated. He is the 1999 winner of Germany's prestigious Peace Prize, awarded annually by the German Publishers' Association at the Frankfurt Book Fair. A recipient of many prizes and fellowships, he received an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1985. He has been a member of the Editorial and Executive Committees of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein since 1984.
"Stern's portrait of [Einstein] is sparklingly comic and profound.
. . . He writes with the wisdom and truth of a historian who never
fails to empathize with the human uncertainty and frailty that
operate in extreme as well as everyday historical conditions. . . .
No one has written better on the country's rise and fall than Fritz
Stern."---Jackie Wullschlager., Financial Times
"Elegiac, subtle and wide-ranging in scope, Fritz Stern's book goes
a long way to restoring one's hopes for a Germany that once
included Einstein."---Michael Burleigh, Times Literary
Supplement
"Revealing, absorbing, and often poignant. . . . Frtiz Stern's
writing has an unmatched authority and a magisterial sweep that
throws a brilliant light on the tragic disintegration of a noble
culture, one in which science reigned supreme. . . . Stern's is the
civilized voice of reason and understanding; his book is revealing,
absorbing and often poignant."---Walter Gratzer, Nature
"A superb and gripping collection of essays."---Stanley Hoffmann,
Foreign Affairs
"This is a book pervaded by a genuine sense of pity. Fritz Stern is
alive to moral and historical ambiguity, arguing that there is no
simple judgment on the compromises of a Max Planck, any more than
there is a simple way to characterize German-Jewish relations or
the circumstances that made the Holocaust possible. Fritz Stern has
been successful beyond the historical profession as a voice of
liberal tolerance. . . . [He] has earned his reputation as a
non-historian's historian."---David Blackbourn, London Review of
Books
"A rich collection of essays--some scholarly, others more
personal--written during the past decade. Without ever pointing an
accusatory finger, Stern's approach helps readers to grasp how the
extraordinary potential for 'what could have been Germany's
century' ended so disastrously."
*Publishers Weekly*
"[In these] elegantly written essays. . . . we come to understand
something about the fabric of this world that no abstract social or
cultural theory can provide. . . . [I]t was a bright and shining
moment and we should thank Fritz Stern for bringing it back to life
so vividly."---Omer Barton, The Wall Street Journal
"In his wide-ranging collection of nine essays, lectures and
Festschriften, the eminent historian Fritz Stern, who grew up in
Germany 'in the shadow of the First World War,' assembles a complex
mosaic--mainly from historical and personal profiles of eminent
Jewish scientists--illustrating the attitudes, prejudices,
complexities, intricacies and subtle ambiguities of the
relationship between Germans and Jews before Adolf Hitler and
thereafter. Anti-Semitism, Mr. Stern finds, came in the most
diverse guises--from irritation at Jewish successes to paranoid
fear and fury at the thought of Jewish power threatening German
life and virtue. He dismisses the view that the rabid anti-Semitism
in Hitler's party was a reflection of the sentiments of German
culture and questions theories that it formed an important bond
between Hitler and the German population."---Viola Herms Drath, The
Washington Times
"[E]ssential reading for any student of Einstein."---Jeremy
Bernstein, The Times Higher Education Supplement
"Well-documented, extremely readable collection. . . . What makes
this compendium a must for those interested in European history is
that Stern not only places all of these people within the history
of science, but also discusses how they both reflected and
influenced the times in which they lived."
*Choice*
"A small series of fine . . . essays on eminent personalities
surrounding Albert Einstein in pre-Hitler Germany, and some
considerations illuminating the changes that followed each of the
two world wars."---Helmut Rechenberg, Physics Today
"Fritz Stern is alive to moral and historical ambiguity, arguing
that there is no simple judgement on the compromises of a Max
Planck, any more that there is a simple way to characterize
German-Jewish relations or the circumstances that made the
Holocaust possible."
*London Review of Books*
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