FIVE GERMANYS I HAVE KNOWN

Stern (Professor Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Einstein's German World, 1999, etc.) traces 100 years of his homeland's history, at the same time telling the story of his coming-of-age as an intellectual and a citizen.

Despite its title, the book really describes six Germanys: the pre-World War I “ancestral” country of the author's parents; the Weimar Republic, in which he was born, in 1926; Hitler's Third Reich; the West and East Germanys of the Cold War; and the unified, post-Communist nation. The obvious dividing line in Stern's life is 1938, when his Jewish family narrowly escaped the country. Transplanted to New York, he grew up as Germany provoked and then lost World War II. In 1946, he embarked on an academic career that focused on German history just as his native country was beginning decades of change. As a historian, he writes, his professional life has been dedicated to investigating how “the human potential for evil became an actuality” in the Germany of his youth. The author engagingly mixes personal experiences, including friendships with poet Allen Ginsberg and historian Richard Hofstadter, with the politics of the times, ranging from Konrad Adenauer's leadership of West Germany to the ideological turmoil that raged on Columbia's campus in 1968. His underlying concern is the individual's responsibility within society. For Stern, the only choice is an engaged citizenship, standing up for liberal values when they are threatened by autocrats and radicals from the left or the right. He faults Germans who went along with Hitler's hatred of Jews as well as young American dropouts of the 1960s who chose to detach from society rather than work to change it. Those who do not defend for their freedoms, he writes, endanger them.

An expansive, eloquent fusion of “memory and history” that examines the moral questions posed by the political and social upheavals of the last century.