Stern, Fritz

Friends in the United States, especially Marga Stern s brother Rudolf Stern (Fritz Haber s friend and doctor) and Albert Einstein, mounted a campaign to save the Haber family and obtained exit visas for them. At the end of 1940, the family escaped from France, traveling first to Portugal and then to the Caribbean. The British interned them there for several months until Einstein again intervened. In June of 1941, Hermann, Marga, and their three daughters arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey. 

Fritz Haber s eyes filled with tears and his voice shook Stern, Fritz Haber Personal Recollections, p. 72. 

Stern remembered the trip as an idyllic time Stern, Fritz Haber ... 

Stern, Fritz. Dreams and Delusions The Drama of German History. New York Knopf, 1987. 

Hevesy, Georg von/Otto Stern Fritz Habers Arbeiten auf dem Gebiete der physi-kalischen Chemie und Elektrochemie, Die Naturwissenschaften 16 (1928), p. 1052-1058. 

Stern, Freunde] Stern, Fritz Freunde im Widerspruch. Haber und Einstein, in [Vierhaus, Brocke, Forschung im Spannungsfeld], p. 516-551. 

Fritz Stern. Einstein s German World. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1999. Source for the richest English-language portrait of Haber the man. Source for Breslau patriots Virchow and Max Planck Einstein quotations help with Einstein s divorce Ostwald ignores Einstein chess and detective novels. 

No one at the time seems to have suspected any deeper meaning in this story. But more recently, the historian Fritz Stern has suggested that it reads as an allegory of baptism. Stern s personal history is intimately entwined with Fritz Haber s—Stern is Haber s godson, and Fritz Haber was a mentor to his parents. Baptism is also an immersion in water, Stern wrote, and it did aid Haber s climb up the academic ladder. So when Haber told this story, did... 

Others, though, saw a different Fritz Haber, charming, mentally acute, and still the life of the party. Almost to the very end, Haber had the ability to gather himself and perform his accustomed public role, though he often paid the price later. Rudolf Stern remembered one such occasion, when he accompanied a weak and depressed Fritz Haber to a formal dinner in 1929. They ended up seated at a small table with Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding and Hjalmar Schacht, president of the central bank. It was a socially awkward arrangement, for Schacht, who would later serve the Nazis loyally and lead Hitler s economics ministry,... 

Charlotte, rid of her rival, hoped for a cozy life with Fritz and their two children, but it was not to be. As always, there was work, travels, and Fritz s declining health, which took him—alone—to various sanatoriums for periods of rest. At the end of 1926, Fritz decided to relax in Monte Carlo with his friend Rudolf Stern for nearly a month, leaving her to pass the Christmas and New Year s holidays alone with the children. To make matters worse, Ludwig got very ill during that time. 

Fritz Stern, an eminent historian at Columbia University, became a guardian of Fritz Haber s legacy not because of genetic ties, but through friendship. Stern is Fritz Haber s godson, the son of Rudolf Stern, Haber s friend and doctor, who accompanied the aging and infirm chemist on his final trip. 

Even after Haber s death, memories of the famous chemist and conversations about him filled the home where Fritz Stern grew up. Stern s parents were in awe of Haber s intellectual powers and grateful for the aid and encouragement he d given them. I grew up under the shadow of Uncle Fritz, recalls Stern. I arrived in the United States in 1938, and Fritz wasn t the most fortunate... 

Small framed photographs of Fritz Haber hang on the wall of the hallway leading to the front door of Stern s elegant New York apartment. One depicts the chemist in profile. In another he faces the camera, clothed in black coat and hat, eyes smiling, a cigar in his mouth. 

Like Lutz Haber, Fritz Stern became a historian and explored the world of his parents, imperial Germany. He wrote about Ger-son von Bleichroder, a Jewish banker who managed the fortunes of Germany s political leaders during the nineteenth century, and about Germany s illiberalism —its rejection of democracy, individual freedom, and tolerance. 

But he never forgot Uncle Fritz. And when Fritz Stern accepted an invitation to speak in Jerusalem about Einstein s Germany in 1979, his research led inevitably back to Fritz Haber Gradually I came to realize that I could not abandon the subject. ... 

I never believed in it in the least Einstein to Haber, May 19, 1933, HC 983. Quoted in Fritz Stern, Einstein s German World, p. 159. 

Stern, Rudolf. Fritz Haber Personal Recollections. In Yembook of the Do Baeck Institute (196S). New York Leo Baeck Institute, 1963. Pp. 70-102. 

Fig. 5.19. From left to right, Fritz Stern, Dietrich Ranft and Robert Gerwin from the Press Department of the MPG at the celebration of the 75 anniversary of the Institute on 31 October 1986.

Fritz Stern, Haber s godson, had this to say on this matter in his notes to a speech he delivered during the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Fritz Haber Wilhlem Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in 1986 ... 

Stern, F. 1987. Fritz Haber the scientist in power and in exile. In Dreams and Delusions. New York Knopf, p. 65. I do not find any of these explanations convincing. 

Saussure, Nicholas Theodore de, 1 Scheele, Carl Wilhelm, 2-3 Scheuch, Heinrich, 228 Schilbach (Bosch), Else, 86 Schiller, Georg, 113 Schloesing, Theophile, 16 Schmitz, Hermann, 104 Schonherr, Otto, 75-76 Schwann, Theodor, 2 Stern, Georg, 94-95 Strassman, Fritz, 231 Stresemann, Gustav, 224 Suess, Hans, 178... 

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