In the late Sixties, Hubert Humphrey, then running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, claimed that while he backed free speech, he questioned the rights of many dissenters to speak and act against the Vietnam War. I wrote and asked him to define the kind of dissent he did favor. His reply? “Responsible dissent” — whatever that meant. I then asked if he would reserve the right to disagree only for people with whom he agreed. I never received a reply.
In Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), he writes that he once gave a speech quoting “so radical a Marxist as Rosa Luxemburg [who] cried out weeks before her death [murdered by an early Nazi Freikorps gang], ‘Freedom is always freedom for the man who disagrees with you.’” Today, Stern remains an outspoken liberal, tolerant in the face of intolerance on and off the campus, his life forever marked by the destruction of the liberal if flawed Weimar Republic in his native Germany.
Five Germanys includes analyses of Weimar, the Third Reich, West and East and united Germany, and is a valuable recognition of the absolute necessity for democratic societies to accept and welcome open debate and the questioning of authority.
Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1926 where his family had resided for many generations, Stern, University Professor Emeritus of History and former provost of Columbia University, was the child of a professional and intellectual class destroyed by the Nazis. Most of his clan became Protestants, though Nazi racist policies would define them as Jews.
For Stern, the collapse of Weimar symbolized the vitriolic attacks against liberalism and moderation by reactionary and anti-Semitic German writers, dating to the late 19th century, and is echoed in the “pseudo-religious attraction” many Americans now seem to have for a “new authoritarianism” in the so-called “age of terror” and attacks on liberalism by the extreme left and right.
“I was born into a world on the cusp of avoidable disaster, and I came to realize that no country is immune to the temptations of pseudo-religious movements of repression such as those to which Germany succumbed.”