---
product_id: 4714195
title: "Five Germanys I Have Known: A History & Memoir Paperback – July 24, 2007"
brand: "fritz stern"
price: "€ 29.16"
currency: EUR
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reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.nl/products/4714195-five-germanys-i-have-known-a-history-and-memoir-paperback
store_origin: NL
region: Netherlands
---

# Five Germanys I Have Known: A History & Memoir Paperback – July 24, 2007

**Brand:** fritz stern
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- **What is this?** Five Germanys I Have Known: A History & Memoir Paperback – July 24, 2007 by fritz stern
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    More informative than what I ever learned in history classes
  

*by L***L on Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2015*

“Es ist vollbracht.” (It is accomplished!) I have finally finished reading this book that I have been gnawing on for four months. Why did I read all 511 pages of annoying fine print that my 75-year-old astigmatic eyes had severe trouble to cope with? Why did I chew and re-chew all these complicated constructed tapeworm sentences containing words I had never heard or seen before? Why did I take the trouble to look up these words, only to find many of these words not only missing in my modest ESL vocabulary but also in renowned dictionaries? Why did I bother to read every paragraph twice and some up to five times? Patience is not one of my virtues. So why did I stick it out?The answer to the above questions: I found this book a treasure trove of knowledge about 20th century history. I had known so very little of this history.I blame Germany’s chosen amnesia for this lack of education. Our history teachers in “Gymnasium” (= high school and college combined) had started three times with the old Greeks, had enlightened us with the “Goetterwelt” (pantheon) of the Greeks and the Romans, had hammered into us dates, names, and places of wars and battles, including names of “Feldherren” (military leaders), had fed us with dates and names of crusades, had carefully avoided the Spanish Inquisition (one does not wish to embarrass the Catholic Church), had bored us almost to death with the Stauffen Kaiser dynasty, had told us about Napoleon, Karl the Great, and a bit of Bismarck (yet by this time I might have already stopped listening because history classes, containing hardly anything but names and dates, were so terribly boring), and then stopped abruptly when approaching the year 1900, hurrying to return to the old Greeks. In other words: Our history teachers (assumedly following instructions of the “Kultusministerium” [ministry of education]) had shied away from the infamous German history of the early and middle 20th century like from the plague. —One does not wish to embarrass former German nationalists and even less [former?] Nazis. Wildly guessing that one half of the German population had been Nazi, not only would every second teacher have been a Nazi or a descendant of Nazis (not to even speak of the civil servants in the “Kultusministerium), at least every other student would have been a descendant of Nazis. (One does not wish to embarrass colleagues and even less superiors. And you just simply cannot give students information that indicates to about half of them that their parents and/or grandparents had been supporters of a criminal regime, if not worse.) So self-chosen amnesia was the way to go. Was it really? You decide.You’ll probably say that there were books. Well, I am sure there were, at least about the history of the very early 20th century (i.e. the time of and around WWI), yet books about the Third Reich and the mass murder of Jews (then not yet called the Holocaust) were only written in later years. Regardless of when any related books were written, I never saw any displayed in bookstores or libraries; they must have been hidden on upper or lower shelves. So how about German literature classes in “Gymnasium”? Wouldn’t there, at least, have been some mandatory reading of books related to 20th century history? The answer is a clear “no”. We read Goethe and Schiller and Kleist and Lessing, and the Nibelungs in “Mittelhochdeutsch”, and “Pole Poppenspaeler” in “Plattdeutsch (“Mittelhochdeutsch” and “Plattdeutsch”, more or less, being foreign languages), anything—ANYTHING!—to avoid contemporary historic or time-critical literature. Only one German teacher recommended casually, on the side, to read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, which I (and some of my classmates) did, yet neither was this book mandatory reading, nor was it discussed in class.And now you might say that I could have asked for related books in bookstores and libraries. And I could have, but I didn’t because not knowing that any such books existed, it never entered my mind to ask for any such books. Well, maybe I wasn’t very inquisitive in this respect. And this might have been because I didn’t grow up with books. During my childhood (= during WWII and the deprived years following the war), there were hardly any books available, and when they became available, they were expensive. Besides, my parents weren’t readers, and my hometown didn’t have a library to speak of. Let’s nor forget: There was no internet, no Goodreads, and no Amazon. Knowledge wasn’t as easily to come by as it is today.The above book taught me more about the 20th century than all my years of school and college combined.Fritz Stern is a Jewish historian, who has escaped the Holocaust because his family made it out of Germany in time. “Five Germanys I Have Known” is just as much an insightful chronicle of the 20th century as it is a captivating personal memoir. It also tells a lot about the academic life of a historian, which might not be appealing to everyone. (It wouldn’t be my idea of a dream profession.) I feel unable to give a summary of this book as it is so very comprehensive.I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in European history of the 20th century, provided that he or she doesn’t mind complicated tapeworm sentences, has a more extensive vocabulary than the average ESL reader (namely, I), and last but not least, has better eyes than I have. (Yet there might be an edition with larger print.) If none of these requirements are met, the reader should, at least, be very determined. I was very determined, and I am glad I read this book, even though it took me four months to gnaw through it and, at times, felt more like doing homework than enjoying a leisurely read.P.S. This review will already give you a little training in reading tapeworm sentences. :-)

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Memoir by an "engaged observer" of Germany
  

*by E***R on Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2010*

It can be very difficult to write a review for such a tome. With over-500 pages in length (many pages of which could be expanded into individual essays themselves), and an incredibly enormous cast of characters that populate the five Germanys the author has experienced during his lifetime (Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germany, and the unified country after 1990), this work is a weighty, but recommended, read for anyone interested in not only furthering their insight into the changes that the country of Germany has experienced since the nineteenth century, but achieving a better glimpse at these Germanys through the eyes of a German Jew who became an American. While this reviewer does agree with some other reviewers here that much of the content found here can be seen as academic, borderline elitist, and not looking at German history from an everyman perspective, Fritz Stern is a renowned historian who offers so many personal observations throughout this memoir that this reviewer finds these traits largely benign to readers who can read between the lines using their own education and experience.Stern writes that that he "was intermittently drawn from my study and classroom onto the fringes of political life in both Germany and America, and counted myself lucky to be able to see and respond to historic events that were shaping the new Europe in its new relations to the United States. I still thought of this as the public work of history. For decades, I shied away from writing about my private experiences: I wanted to keep the professional and the personal properly apart. But right after I had returned for the first time to my native city of Breslau in Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, I did write a private account of it for my children, and I called it 'Homecoming 1979'. Only now do I fully realize the ironic, perhaps even self-delusionary character of my title: a 'Homecoming' was precisely what it was not. I had gone to Wroclaw out of the deepest kind of curiosity; I don't think I realized then that the journey had been a quest, that somehow I needed to see that my home had been destroyed and that the country into which I was born had ceased to exist. My sense of loss was overlain by an all-pervasive gratitude for having found a second, better home in the United States. But that little essay was, indeed, my first effort to write personally about going back to where I had begun[.]"Later, Stern writes that "in relating here the history of the five Germanys I have known to the Germanys I have studied professionally, to my personal experiences, and to my own, often unconscious emotions, I am trying to fuse memory and history - those distant twins, supportive and destructive of each other. Memory is notoriously fallible, and for nations as for individuals it is subject to the congenial, self-serving deformations that afflict us all. I also know that there is such a thing as honest (and healthy) forgetting. Yet for all its flaws and distortions, memory does recall the drama of the past, suggests some of the feelings that enveloped facts. And I bring some professional knowledge about the reconstruction of the past along with a (surprisingly large) reservoir of documented memory in the form of troves of letters from three generations of my family; I also have my own diaries of over fifty years and other memorabilia that over the decades I have allowed to accumulate. We all seek tangible traces of a past to which we are irresistibly drawn, and we try to fill them with life. We want to see connections and meanings in the scattered remains and in the varied documents of the past. I wish I could say that what follows is a mixture of 'poetry and truth' - I can only hope it contains a bit of both."This reviewer personally found the chapters entitled "Ancestral Germany", "Weimar", "The Third Reich", and "The Fourth and Forgotten Germany" especially insightful, and the chapter entitled "German Themes in Foreign Lands" somewhat misplaced. Never has this reviewer read such an intimate account of the struggles associated with seeking acceptance in a culture so dominated by cultural Christianity, especially by an individual who was not even initially aware of his Jewish roots. A reading of this book alongside a simultaneous reading by this reviewer of Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" (see my review) especially magnified this recounting, and the complaints made by other reviewers here that an academic viewpoint permeates the entire text are quite simply easily discredited after a reading of the first third of this book. In the opinion of this reviewer, however, the discourse that Stern provides on the "American Question" following an examination of the "German Question" is probably best suited for another work, although his definitions of "conservative" and "liberal" in the context of United States politics do add insight to the author's beliefs. Well recommended.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    The most ininteresting period of German  hisory from the author's biography
  

*by G***S on Reviewed in Canada on March 9, 2020*

Riveting and gripping book

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*Last updated: 2026-01-23*