Another German

WHAT made Germany go mad? Having fled the Nazis as a boy, Fritz Stern spent the rest of his life trying to understand and explain the murderous frenzy which beset his homeland.

His life spanned five states of Germany: the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s Nazi Reich, the prosperous, guilt-ridden Federal Republic, the harshly run communist East, and finally the reunified country, which bestowed on him its highest honours. His impeccable credentials—American, Jewish, a refugee from Hitler—meant he could praise something that modern Germans could not. He termed it anderes Deutschland (“another Germany”): not a state, but a place of noble ideas and brave behaviour, a cultural powerhouse and a force for European unity. After the Stern family’s flight from Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, Germany could no longer be his fatherland, but German, precise and expressive, was still his mother-tongue—and there was nowhere else, he said fondly, where he could use it in the same way.