The Search for the “Other Germany”: Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany and the Contested Historical Legacy of the Resistance to Hitler

Abstract

During his visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in the summer of 1954, Fritz Stern, a young history professor at Columbia University, witnessed in Berlin the memorial service for the victims of the July 20, 1944, revolt against Hitler. His feelings were stirred at the sight of the sorrowful faces of the widows and children of the conspirators who were executed in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, and by President Theodor Heuss's speech, recalling the anguish and courage of the Germans who made the decision to rebel in an act of atonement. Born in Germany in 1926 to Protestant parents of Jewish ancestry, Stern experienced racist antisemitism in the Third Reich firsthand before his family emigrated in 1938. He returned to Germany with conflicted emotions. During World War II, when the magnitude of the annihilation of European Jewry was uncovered, he felt intense hatred toward National Socialism. The distinction between German and Nazi became blurred. And yet, he could not bring himself to hold the German people collectively guilty for such crimes and to reject his native land. At the ceremony he struggled with his own feelings, saying to himself at first that “their purposes had not been ours.” Then a sense of shame for his indiscriminate hatred overwhelmed him. He left Germany in August “purged of hatred—though not disloyal to the feelings of the past, and full of forebodings about the future.”