The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present

Fritz Stern was born in the former German province of Silesia (now in Poland) on February 2, 1926 to a prominent family that had converted from Judaism to Christianity. The Sterns felt increasingly threatened by Hitler's reign and left for New York in 1938. He received an undergraduate and master's degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He taught at Columbia University for more than 40 years, specializing in European history, before retiring in 1997. He wrote several books during his lifetime including The Politics of Cultural Despair, The Failure of Illiberalism, and Five Germanys I Have Known. He occasionally advised government officials including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on German reunification in the early 1990s and held government positions like being appointed a senior aide to Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, in 1993. He died May 18, 2016 at the age of 90.