Fritz Stern's Dreams and Delusions: German History Review

Overview of the Book and Its Structure

Fritz Stern's 1988 book Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (republished with a new foreword in 1999) relies on a series of loosely related essays to address Germany's ongoing legacy of World War II and the Holocaust. The book is notable for its particular subject matter and methodological approach; its essay format makes for a more varied and intellectually engaging read than a more conventional monograph would allow. Stern divides the book into four sections, each discussing a different feature of German history surrounding World War II and its aftermath. These sections are titled "The Dream of Peace," "The Lure of Power," "Peace and the Release from Greatness," and "Historians and the German Past" (Stern vii–viii).

Stern's central position is that the rise of National Socialism in Germany was the product of nineteenth-century German attitudes regarding the country's place in the world, compounded by rapid industrialization. Ultimately, Stern concludes — as many historians have — that one must continually revisit and remain aware of the past, lest nations find themselves drawn back into its pull through complacency and historical ignorance. Although he was entirely unprepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany that would occur just a few years after the book's publication, his analysis of German history nevertheless remains relevant as a study of the consequences of collective complacency and self-delusion.

Stern's Background and Authorial Credibility

As a secondary source discussing the lead-up to and consequences of the rise of National Socialism, Stern's book draws on a mix of primary sources, biographical accounts, and literary and textual analysis. Stern is perhaps uniquely suited to writing such a book: aside from his distinguished career as a history professor, his family emigrated from Breslau — a city then in Germany, now in Poland — to the United States following the rise of National Socialism in 1938 (Birmele 257; Calleo 443). As a twelve-year-old boy, Stern experienced some of the immediate material and cultural effects of National Socialism firsthand, having been uprooted and forced to begin a new life in the United States. He went on to earn a PhD from Columbia University and become a prominent history professor, so that the writing of Dreams and Delusions can be traced in a kind of biographical line all the way back to National Socialism and German history itself.

This background contributes significantly to the book's emotional legitimacy. Pervading each essay is what one reviewer called "the author's alarm over publicly displayed frustrations and a new restlessness" — a restlessness that Stern fears will make "it hard, indeed impossible [for Germans] to grasp their own tormented past," rather than allowing them to unconsciously return to the ideologies and attitudes of that past (Birmele 257; Stern 4). Stern's evident personal investment in the subject, coupled with his long career of historical scholarship, leads the reader to trust him as a source of analysis on German history. He is able to simultaneously recount large-scale historical shifts while imbuing them with the immediacy and drama of personal experience.

Methodological Approach and Key Essays

This approach works best in the first section, "The Dream of Peace," which is also the most biographical, comprising three separate biographical essays. The most compelling of these is on the ostensible success of German Jewry and how that success was always circumscribed within a system of historical and institutional racism and resentment. Stern does not employ a single methodological approach throughout the book — as evidenced by the inclusion of separate essays rather than unified chapters — but, as noted above, he moves fluently between sweeping historical narrative and the intensely personal interactions with history that ultimately shape the course of events.

In the essay on German Jewry, for instance, Stern discusses the various fallacious interpretations of World War II that suggested "that only Germans or National Socialists could have committed so terrible a crime in so meticulous a fashion." He consistently uses the first-person plural, including himself among the historians and laypeople who have mistakenly or reactively considered the origins and consequences of the Holocaust. This approach makes his subsequent analysis of the historical success of Jews in Germany all the more convincing, because he effectively demonstrates how the historical — or ahistorical — understandings of an event held by a group of people are precisely what structures their responses to new or emerging ideas. In this way, Stern convincingly shows how the rise of National Socialism was not an aberration or a sudden event, but rather the end product of a long history of anti-Jewish sentiment concealed by a convenient fiction of symbiosis — a fiction that crumbled following the economic devastation of World War I and the Great Depression (Stern 99–100).