“The United States at War with Itself”: Public On-Campus Lecture with Renowned Historian Fritz Stern

On Friday, September 12, 2008, Prof. Dr. Fritz Stern, the renowned US-American historian of German decent, will give a talk on “Amerika im Kampf mit sich selbst“ (“The United States at War with Itself”). Stern will be visiting Bremen on the joint invitation of the Senator for Economy and Ports, Ralf Nagel, Jacobs University, the AmCham Germany and the Bremen United States Center. The public lecture, which starts at 7 p. m. in the Conference Hall, will be held in German; there is no entrance fee.

[ Sep 08, 2008]  Fritz Stern is considered to be one of the most significant US-American historians of our times. The focus of much of Stern's work is attempting to track the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its characteristics, on which he published several important analytic works. In his most recent book, titled “Five Germanys I Have Known”, he reflects his own biography in the context of one century worth of German history. In his lecture, Stern will thematize the upcoming presidential election in the US and its impact on Europe and Germany on the backdrop of the history of US-American transatlantic relations.

Fritz Stern was born in 1926 in Breslau, Silesia, to a locally prominent medical family of Jewish heritage, who emigrated to the US in 1938. Since then Fritz Stern has been living in New York, where he studied and later on held a professorship in history at Columbia University. Even though Stern became a US-American citizen in 1947, he returned to Germany several times. He was a visiting professor at a number of German universities, for the first time as early as 1954, and in the years 1993/94 he was a consultant to Richard Holbrooke, at the time the American Ambassador in Germany. Fritz Stern received numerous distinctions, among them the “Peace Prize of the German Book Trade” (1999), the Great Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany (2006), and the “Award for Understanding and Tolerance” of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.