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Fritz Stern - Einsteins German World: New Edition

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The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century could have been Germanys century. In 1900, the country was Europes preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einsteins German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germanys great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitlers regime.
Sterns central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nations defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germanys past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germanys reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today.
At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einsteins German World illuminates the issues that made Germanys and Europes past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.

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Einsteins German World New Edition - image 1
EINSTEINS GERMAN WORLD
Einsteins German World New Edition - image 2 FRITZ STERN Einsteins German World New Edition - image 3
Einsteins
German World
Picture 4
New edition
With a new preface by the author
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright 1999 by Princeton University Press
New Preface, Copyright 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey, 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, OX20 1TR
All Rights Reserved
Fifth printing, and first paperback printing, 2001
First new edition paperback printing, with a new preface by the author, 2016
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17130-2
eISBN 978-0-691-21406-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932645
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
press.princeton.edu
To Elisabeth
PREFACE TO THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION
Picture 5
IN POLITICS, a week is a long time, as we know; in history, sixteen years can be revolutionary. In 1999, when this book first appeared, I could still write in the glow of what had happened in 1989: the peaceful self-liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europea grand process, a kind of benevolent contagion that had begun in Poland with the founding of Solidarno and had aroused East Germans to march peacefully in the streets demanding their freedom. And the demise of the East German regime made the unification of Germany possible.
It is a very different world today: better in some respects, bleaker in many others; and for me, infirmities of age may add a further melancholy note. The murder in Paris in November 2015, committed by men allied with the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Syria, has changed everything: this new barbarism of Isis is armed with ancient hatreds, aims at universal destruction, and employs the most modern means of organizing evil. As the American president did after September 11, 2001, the French president now speaks of war and orders the bombing of the presumed Isis headquarters. Isis can reach Europe most easily, but no country, no citizen, is safe anywhere.
Even before the tragedy in Paris, the European Unionthat gigantic achievement of the post-World War II era, which for more than a half-century ensured peace and granted Europeans full freedom of mobility within its borderswas in crisis. Europeans had begun to take the EU for granted: its benefits assimilated, its deficiencies the sport of discontents. And indeed, the reality of Brussels, with its bloated bureaucracy and its democratic deficit, seems like a mere shadow of the EUs original promise. And now the EU must cope with a world-historical challenge: the multitudes of migrants from war-torn Syria and elsewhere desperately seeking a new home in Europe, most especially in northern Europe. Brussels dithers and national policies diverge as the migrants seek stability and unwittingly threaten it. The chaotic influx of newcomers creates immense and immediate problems in finding food and shelter for people who, because of their faith or simply because they are foreign, face suspicions. Radical right-wing political parties exploit the collective miseries, hoping to gut the EU, which seems caught in its own incapacity. Nationalists clamor to reassert the sovereign rights of their countries; their resentments of the EU overshadow all reason, and they seem willing to sacrifice the progress the EU has actually achieved. These multiple assaults may well usher in a new era of right-wing authoritarianism. Where are the statesmen or philosophers who might suggest ways to provide safety without sacrificing freedom?
The Federal Republic of Germany has become the most powerful and probably the most prosperous country in Europe. The old economic and political differences between West and East Germany have been largely attenuated although remnants persist: wages are still lower in the eastern provinces, while Euro-skepticism and xenophobia are greater. During the European crisis of 2014-15 over economic policies affecting Greece, Angela Merkels government insisted that the EU enforce a program of enfeebling austerity on the country; yet Merkel is now championing a humane, hospitable European policy toward the unprecedented migrations from Syria and other places of hunger and despair. Perhaps this is in accordance with her own past as the child of a left-leaning pastor living under the repressive East German regime, remembering too that twenty-five years ago millions of East Germans rejoiced when the Berlin Wall fell and they themselves streamed west, if only for a breath of fresh air or something exotic like an orange.
Today most Germans have ambivalent feelings about these issues and are divided on the question of migration: individually, mostly kind and hospitable; collectively, fearful that they have lost control of the situation and certain that the boat is full. The influx of tens of thousands of strangers has put an enormous strain on local communities, which face impossibly expensive outlays for the migrants as they wait for the central government to make plans for assistance. In some cities like Hamburg, local authorities have gone ahead on their own and, for example, designated empty buildings as places of shelter; in other places xenophobic violence has broken out. Odd: hospitality and hostilitythis is how Germans in the pre-Hitler days treated a more permanent minority, German Jews.
Burdened with memories of that national shame, Germans also have to grapple with new evidence of their present-day moral failings. Many Germans fear that the crimes uncovered in the workings of Volkswagen, its most famous company, have made a mockery of the proud boast implicit in the slogan Made in Germany. And was the choice of Germany as host country for the soccer World Cup in 2006a wonderful innocent season of national exuberancethe fruit of bribery? The country is not at ease with itself.
And it is not alone in its uncertainty. Israel is embattled at home and abroad. Palestinians and Israelis spew hatred at each other, and both sides, while ritualistically intoning their commitment to a two-state solution, have in fact abandoned it. Palestinians will not recognize a Jewish state, and they demand their right of return, meaning a return of Arab refugees in far greater numbers than those originally uprooted from what is now Israeli land. Meanwhile, decades of a deliberate Israeli humiliation of Palestinian lives, dispossessing their lands and creating more and more Jewish settlements in the territory Israel conquered in 1967, have brought about not a third intifada, but unceasing random and murderous aggressions by Arab youth against Israelis. The holy places of Jerusalem have become battlegrounds, while Tel Aviv luxuriates in sybaritic affluence. Right-wing secular extremists, such as those who howled for the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and ultra-orthodox fundamentalists alike balk at the liberal judgments handed down by the Supreme Court; even without the return of Arab refugees, demographers project an ever-larger Arab population within Israel, which will create problems of democratic governance. Israeli settlers clamor for more land on the West Bank and racial hatred has replaced liberal nationalism.
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