What do you think?

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Memories

Last week I started reading Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). Winds of War kind of piqued my interest in European history of the time, so I picked up some nonfiction works from abebooks.com. Stern is a German born, mostly American educated author of European history. Five Germanys is a memoir. Stern was born in 1926 in Silesia, then part of Germany, now part of Poland inhabited by Poles, Germans and Czechs. He and his family emigrated to the United States in 1938 and settled in Queens, New York. He attended Columbia University. As the title indicates, he describes the five tumultuous periods in modern German history: the German Reich (what we now call the Weimar Republic), the Third Reich, the divided Germany (East and West) and Germany after unification in 1990. Stern was born into an educated, not necessarily wealthy but reasonably comfortable family of Jewish ancestry. He and his sister were baptized as infants, but he does not mention attending church or synagogue at any time. His father was a physician and his mother a teacher. I've read the first two chapters: Ancestral Germany and Weimar, covering roughly 1919 to 1933. Indeed this was a turbulent time in Germany and all over the world. The planet was awash in militant revolution: Russia, Argentina, Ireland, Estonia, Egypt, the Punjab and probably other places less well known, spiraled into general anarchy. Workers were striking and rioting all over the place, crippling railroads, shipping docks and steel mills. These were the days of Pancho Villa as well as Albert Einstein. In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died and Sir Edmund Hillary was born. Toward the end of this period of course was the great economic depression. Things were bad everywhere, but especially so in Germany. Apparently the German currency was so devalued that people used stacks of German marks as scratch paper. And we think we've got problems. So far, I am enjoying the book. I was afraid it might be boring. It's not.