Fritz Stern, born in Breslau, Germany, in 1926. Ph.D. from Columbia University, New York City. Professor Emeritus of Columbia University, New York City. († 2016)
Guest of the Rector (Spring 1998)
In my all-too-brief but thoroughly happy time at NIAS I prepared a lecture on “Death in Weimar” which I delivered at King’s College in Cambridge in May. I tried to show how death hung over the Weimar Republic, beginning with grief that afflicted millions of Germans, the manner of mourning, the bloodshed after the war, the depiction of death and the appearance of the crippled on the streets, and the material costs of pensions and disability pay. I also emphasised that four key supporters of the Republic died at an unusually early age, the enemies of the Republic lived to an exceptionally old age. The lecture was well received, and I shall expand it in some form.
I wrote and delivered the annual Uhlenbeck Lecture: Five Germanies I have known and wrote and delivered a paper for the Bertelsmann International Forum in July 1998 on “The Return of History”, parts of which have appeared in the International Herald Tribune and in Die Zeit