We can learn much from dead guys. Including those who have recently passed on like globally respected historian and author Fritz Stern who died a couple weeks ago at 90.
Part of a family with Jewish roots which left Nazi Germany in 1938, Stern dedicated his life to researching how it was possible for Adolf Hitler to assume power and turn an entire nation into holocaust collaborators. As The Economist described in his obituary – he became expert in the things which made Germany go mad.
Prof Stern studied and taught at New York’s Columbia University for half a century and had a global profile. He is best known, though, for proving that liberal democratic ideas are extremely fragile – and able to be subverted by those promoting nationalism and racial prejudice.
His conclusion: the Nazis took control of Germany not because of the magnetism of their leader, their cultish symbols or even because of brutal thugs surrounding Hitler. Rather, said Stern, the disaster was made possible by the weakness and cowardice of supposed guardians of German moral standards. Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?
