Alfred Grosser, champion of French-German reconciliation, dies at the age of 99
Alfred Grosser, a French political scientist and historian whose writings and activism were instrumental in reconciling two ancestral enemies, France and Germany, in the aftermath of World War II, died on February 7 in Paris. He was 99.
His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Marc.
Through more than twenty books of history, political science and memoirs, decades of teaching at one of France’s leading universities and many articles on contemporary affairs, Mr. Grosser made it his life’s work to bring together two countries with a long history of mutual to bring together distrust. if it is not mutual hatred.
The need for reconciliation, he said, was acute after a war that had left Germany in ruins, spawned German atrocities on French soil, torn France’s social and political fabric apart through the traumas of occupation and collaboration, and its own German- Jewish family had been torn apart. also. He was as skeptical about French purity after the war as he was about the need to collectively condemn the Germans.
“Women whose heads were shaved,” he wrote of France in the immediate postwar period in a memoir, “A Frenchman’s Life” (1997). “’Collaborators’ mistreated by people who had plenty to blame for themselves – these were not scenes to arouse enthusiasm!”
Mr. Grosser occupied a unique French-German niche. Called “one of the architects of post-war reconciliation with Germany” by The New York Times in 1995, he was the only French citizen ever invited to address the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. three times, according to the Institut d’Études Politiques (Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences-Po as it is known in France), where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 1992. The last time, in 2014, was in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“On the ruins of the Second World War, he helped our two peoples hold their heads high and look to the future hand in hand,” said a statement from the Élysée Palace, seat of the French presidency. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany called him “a great man, thinker and inspiring European.”
Born in Germany to a Jewish family that was forced to flee at the age of 8, Mr. Grosser acquired French citizenship at the age of 12 and became a fiery but critical Frenchman who for decades advocated among his countrymen for understanding the brother-enemy all over the world. Rhine, and vice versa. France’s enemies, he insisted, had been Hitler and the Nazis, not the German people.
Together with the Germans, he tried to soften the sometimes offensive side of French arrogance and vanity, as well as what he called France’s “characteristic predilection for prestige.”
Discussion of his book “Germany in Our Time: A Political History of the Post-War Years” (1970) in The New York Review of Books in 1972the Scottish writer Neal Ascherson called Mr. Grosser “the emperor of West German studies in Europe.” And the French critic Jean-Michel Djian wrote in Le Monde in 1997 that Mr. Grosser “had a rare talent that makes this convinced European one of the most difficult intellectuals of our century to place.”
Mr. Grosser’s convictions about Franco-German reconciliation were acquired early. A night he spent as a teenage refugee digging up bodies after what he called in his memoirs a “stupid” American bombing of Marseilles in 1944 left him deeply scarred, his son Marc said, and showed him that the atrocities were not limited to limited to one side. “I was absolutely certain that hatred of a collective was not the right response to collective hatred,” Mr. Grosser wrote.
In 1945, he was certain that he would be “completely French, but with a fate marked by Hitler, a fate that gave me responsibility for the future of post-war Germany,” he wrote in 1995 in the French magazine Plein Droit. he added that it was about “regimes and not peoples or nations, and that meant, or should have meant, a transnational responsibility for the preservation of rights and freedoms.”
A return trip to a devastated Germany in 1947 set him to his life’s work, “half a century of attempts to exert a double influence, however small, on a double dispute”, as he put it in his memoirs: in France , ‘to explain German reality’, and in Germany ‘to spread a reasonable vision of France’.
That year he became one of the founders of the Committee for Dialogue with the New Germany, an organization of French and German intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Le Monde wrote that during its meetings “French and Germans learned to forget their Manicheanism.”
Mr Grosser had no doubts about his belief that Europe no longer had to fear the Germans. “Young Germans indoctrinated by the Nazis were perfectly ‘recoverable’ for democracy and freedom, as long as we did not reject them,” he wrote in Le Monde in 1991.
In later years, Mr. Grosser became sharply critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, claiming that peace in the Middle East would only be possible if “the Israeli authorities finally show genuine sympathy for the suffering in Gaza and the ‘territories ‘”, as he wrote. in “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem” (2009).
“You cannot expect young Palestinians to mourn the victims of horrific attacks when the suffering of their own people is ignored,” he added. “Perhaps it is necessary to take two Arab questions seriously and answer them: ‘Why should we have to bear the heavy consequences for Auschwitz?’ and ‘Why are our refugees and expelled people not allowed to return, even though the Jews claim the right to return to Israel after two thousand years?’”
In 2010, the Central Council of Jews in Germany urged that Mr. Grosser be removed from the speakers’ list in commemoration of the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. An Israeli diplomat in Germany called his views “illegal and immoral” and “tainted by self-loathing.” But the mayor of Frankfurt, where the ceremony took place, refused to withdraw the invitation.
Mr. Grosser was proud to tell German interviewers who wanted to claim him as one of their own that he was actually French, but with caveats: “I am a man, a Parisian, a husband, a father, a civil servant, a professor” , he wrote in his book ‘Difficult Identities’ (1996), as quoted in Le Monde. “When I’m riding, I hate cyclists. And when I’m on my bike, I hate drivers.” He added: “My identity seems to me to be the sum of my loyalties – together with, I hope, something that synthesizes and controls them.”
Alfred Eugène Max Grosser was born in Frankfurt on February 1, 1925, the son of Paul and Lily (Rosenthal) Grosser. His father was a doctor who had served in the German army in World War I before becoming director of a children’s clinic.
Paul Grosser was kicked out of both the clinic and the university where he taught and fled to France with his family in December 1933. Less than two months later he died of a heart attack. Mr. Grosser later wrote about the French teachers who raised him when he was a fatherless Jewish immigrant child.
In June 1940, Alfred and his older sister, Margarethe, his only sibling, fled the German advance into France by bicycle, and the family regrouped in Saint-Raphaël, in Provence, a part of France initially governed by the Italians. were more sympathetic towards refugee Jews than the French. (Margarethe died a year later from what Mr. Grosser called “the effects of the Exodus.”)
He followed secondary and graduate studies in Nice, Cannes and Aix-en-Provence. Years later he received his PhD in recognition of the many books he had published.
In addition to his son Marc, he is survived by three other sons, Pierre, Jean and Paul; his wife, Anne-Marie; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Grosser was drawn to Christian theology, calling himself “a Jewish-born atheist spiritually connected to Christianity.”
“I am against egocentrism,” he wrote, “against the morality of solidarity that applies only to one’s own community, and I am in favor of understanding the suffering of others, of defining one’s neighbors in terms that include every human being .”
Stephen Kinzer And Daphne Angles reporting contributed.