Dreams and Delusions.

FRITZ STERN is perhaps the most respected representative of the emigre view of German history first popularized by academic refugees from Hitler. This view, briefly stated, assumes political and cultural continuity between earlier German history and the Nazi epoch, with earlier catastrophes leading almost inescapably to the Third Reich.

Though no sensible historian would deny the impact of the past or, as John Lukacs stresses, the historical relevance of national character, the emigre view of German history is remarkably selective. For these historians, the major causes of Hitler's takeover were not crises in the Weimar Republic or Nazi machinations. Rather, Nazi ideas and policies grew out of such varied misfortunes as the Germans' rejection of the French and other Revolutions; Romantic literature; Luther's political theology; and Otto von Bismarck's establishment of an insufficiently liberal Second Empire in 1871. The historian of this school typically sees Germans as Nazi-prone in failing to move quickly enough in a "progressive" direction.

Led by-among others-Fritz Stern, American interpreters of German history gave a largely uncritical reception to Fritz Fischer and Immanuel Geiss, two German historians who claimed to discern geopolitical and psychological connections between Imperial and Nazi Germany. Expansionist politics and truculent nationalism, it was now understood, marked the German nation from at least the 1890s on. The outbreak of World War I was not the consequence of blunders, but of German world-politics consistently pursued.

From the perspective of the emigre historians, we are still writhing in the shadow of the Third Reich. Admittedly, Stern writes more in disappointment than in malice. To the extent that he does uphold Fischer, Geiss, and other exponents of the continuity thesis, it is perhaps to purify Germans morally. By forcing them to believe the worst about themselves, Stern, like other self-proclaimed voices of German conscience, would prod Germans into "overcoming their past."

From his latest collection of essays, it is apparent that Stern (who came to the United States as a refugee at the age of ten) has tentatively begun to overcome his own past. His first two essays-on Einstein's experiences as a German Jew and on Fritz Haber, the chemical engineer who developed poison gas-are models of careful judgment. Stern properly stresses that, in 1932, the scope of Nazi anti-Semitism was inconceivable to German Jews, who could look back on more than a century of genuine progress in their relations with their Christian countrymen. The personal fate of Haber (who was Stern's godfather) was particularly tragic. Despite his Jewish ancestry, Haber had viewed himself, and been viewed by others, as a fervent German patriot, who had gone so far as to convert to the Prussian state religion. He died a broken and confused man, in voluntary exile on the Swiss-German frontier, in 1934.

Of more questionable value are the middle sections of Stern's anthology, in which his emigre persona reasserts itself with a vengeance. Apropos of the background of Nazism, Stern states that, before and during the First World War, the German people were exposed to "organized mendacity" and "pervasive hatreds." The fact that "Germans were taught to hate their enemies" prepared them for Nazi hysteria. But, as Stern himself explains in his last essay, in 1917 Americans too were taught to hate their enemies.

Stern's prejudices color his judgment even when he discusses an unquestionable factor in the rise of the Nazi Party: the secularization of German, and especially German Protestant, society. Studies by Peter Merkl and Sarah Gordon reveal a definite correlation between support for Nazism and alienation from organized Christian religion. Now Stern, who laments the sexual hangups of the old German bourgeoisie, has nothing against secularization per se. What he finds objectionable is that secularized Germans, contrary to Marx's fond hope, embraced a "nonsocialist, anti-capitalist movement" -German nationalism. Human nature failed to bend to his own vision of a new socialist humanity.

Despite this one-sided perspective, Stern and others of his kind do point to social and cultural problems that may have contributed to the world Hitler built. Ethnic prejudice, unscrupulous businessmen, and a contempt for constitutional government probably did aid the Nazis in their ascent to power. The problem is the exaggerated emphasis that leftist Teutonophobes place on these factors, while disregarding other variables, like the revolutionary-socialist appeal of Nazism, the severity of Germany's depression, and Hitler's unique and evil genius. Moreover, Stern anachronistically links the "German catastrophe" to an earlier generation's failure to think like himself. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (in the September 11, 1987, issue of NATIONAL REVIEW) recalls his irritation fifty years ago when German refugees were telling the American public that "National Socialism was the work of wicked capitalists eager to destroy the Labor unions, aided and abetted by big landowners, by heel-clicking, monocled Junkers with horsewhips, by wife-beating, authoritarian professors, by fat Catholic bishops, and by arrogant bankers." The same cast of characters still dominates Stern's narrative, despite modest attempts at variation. By now, we are entitled to something more suitable for grown-ups.