Fritz Stern

Fritz Richard Stern (born February 2, 1926) is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University. His work focuses on the complex relationships between Germans and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the first half of the 20th century.

Biography

Fritz Richard Stern was born on February 2, 1926 in Breslau, Silesia, to a locally prominent medical family of Jewish heritage. His father, Rudolf Stern, was a physician, medical researcher and a veteran of the First World War. His mother, Käthe Brieger Stern, was a noted theorist, practitioner, and reformer in the field of education for young children. Through family, friends, and colleagues, they were connected with some of Europe's (and later America's) leading scientific and cultural figures.

The family had converted from Judaism to Lutheran Protestant Christianity at the end of the 19th century, while sharing the increasingly secular worldview frequently found among Germany's educated classes. Stern was baptized shortly after his birth and named after his godfather, Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber (also a Christian convert from Judaism). Nonetheless, the family emigrated to the United States in 1938, forced to leave by the virulently anti-Jewish policies of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government and the increasing violence against all Germans of Jewish ancestry.