Fritz Stern

Fritz Stern, from the NYT Obituary.

Fritz Stern (1926-2016) was a historian of German culture and a professor of history at Columbia University. He served as provost of Columbia from 1980 to 1983. His interest in the deep roots of Nazi culture have more resonance now than I would like to think about. He wrote: "I was born into a world on the cusp of avoidable disaster.... The fragility of freedom is the simplest and deepest lesson of my life and work."

The decline of German cultural leadership, according to Stern, dated to 1914, when German intellectuals signed the "Manifesto of the 93" declaring loyalty to the German war effort. Stern wrote:

"Most of these men had once cherished German scholarship and had admired a country that in so many ways had been full of promise, with its astounding creativity in the sciences and its legacy of music and the arts. In truth, Germany had been a country of thinkers and poets. But the old bonds snapped in October 1914, when ninety-three of Germany's leading artists, scholars, and scientists signed the Manifesto of the 93, defiantly addressed 'to the Kulturwelt,' proclaiming German innocence, insisting on the absolute identity of German culture and German militarism, defending Germany's invasion of Belgium, and denying all allegations of atrocities." (Einstein's German World, p. 210)

From Stern's obituary in the New York Times, May 18, 2016:

"Like many German historians of his generation, Professor Stern sought to explain the causes behind the events that upended his own life and that of his family, Jews who lived a prosperous, assimilated life in Breslau until oppressive conditions forced them to emigrate to the United States in 1938.

"'Though I lived in National Socialist Germany for only five years, that brief period saddled me with the burning question that I have spent my professional life trying to answer: Why and how did the universal potential for evil become an actuality in Germany?' he wrote in the introduction to 'Five Germanys I Have Known,' a blend of memoir and history published in 2006."

I've recently been reading Stern's book Einstein's German World (1999), where he describes the lives of several important scientists and others who were Einstein's acquaintances. He knew several of them personally, as his father, a physician, was their friend and in some cases their doctor. He points out that by the time he was writing, few people still had direct memories of the time and of the people in his book, which makes it all the more interesting.

I've enjoyed my reading so far, and I hope to read other books by Stern.

Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber, 1919. From Wikipedia.

Fritz Haber (1868-1934) is in my view, an antihero; I have not classified many of my subjects in this blog in this way. Haber was an important scientist in pre-World-War-I Germany. An enthusiastic patriot, he invented an important industrial process for manufacturing ammonia, which had many uses. It was needed for fertilizer that Germany needed to be more self-sufficient in food production, as well as for explosives.

In my own view, I mainly remember him for his development of poison gas that was used on the battlefields of World War I under his direction. He's thus known as the "father of chemical warfare." Historian Fritz Stern in Einstein's German World, described Haber's participation in World War I as follows:

"During and after the war, Haber tried to explain his work in developing a weapon that outraged many people -- in Germany, but especially abroad. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had prohibited the use of poisoned weapons. Haber believed that the use of gas would bring the war to a quick conclusion; he argued that the gas, which immobilized but usually did not kill, was a more humane weapon than the artillery bombardments that had become routine; he pointed out that the Allies had their own plans for introducing gas warfare, and Germany had merely anticipated them. It would appear that neither Haber nor those closest to him, like Willstätter, worried about the legal and moral issues involved, such was the brutish atmosphere of war. Gas warfare did not prove decisive, though its horror -- the terrifying choking, the blinding, the deaths, the experience even for survivors of a living death -- has become an inextinguishable part of our collective memory, an early instance of science put to satanic service. (p. 120)

The industrial work continued after World War I. Haber was head of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Although the Nazis would have at least temporarily allowed him to stay in his position despite being Jewish (though a convert to Christianity like many ambitious German scientists), he resigned when it became obvious that he would be required to fire all his Jewish subordinates. He left Germany, but died soon afterwards.

There's much more to say about Haber, his life, and his work. I only mention that one of his commercially-produced types of poison gas was Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers.