Gunter "Guy" Stern is a German scholar of literature, primarily German and comparative.
Life
Stern was born in 1922 to an assimilated Jewish family in Hildesheim, Germany. He was the only member of his five-person family to escape to the United States in 1937, and was assisted by an uncle in St. Louis and an American-Jewish agency. He also encountered a well-meaning consular official in Hamburg. Despite his best efforts, he later was unable to secure passage overseas for the rest of his family. After the war he learned that his whole family was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto and had perished there. In 1940, Stern started studying romance languages; he also later studied German. In 1942, he volunteered for naval intelligence, but was initially rejected because he was not born in the United States; he was subsequently drafted in 1943. In 1944, he landed in Normandythree days after D-Day as a member of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a special military intelligence unit composed mainly of German, Austrian, and Czech refugees and immigrants to the United States, mostly Jewish. Part of his duty was the interrogation of German prisoners of war and defectors. He was member of IPW Team 37. For this he gained the Bronze Star Medal. After the war, he went back to his studies, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages in 1948, a Master of Arts in Germanistics in 1950, and a PhD in 1953 from Columbia University in New York City. After teaching at Columbia, he received an assistant professorship at Denison University in Ohio, and was later professor and head of the department for German Language and Literature at the University of Cincinnati in 1963. He was later head of the German and Slavic Studies department at the University of Maryland, then until his retirement served as a distinguished professor of German Literature and Cultural History at Wayne State University and intermittently as senior vice president and provost. He was a visiting scholar at the German universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Potsdam and Munich. He is currently the director of The Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. He is one of the founders of the Lessing Society, acting as its president from 1975 until 1977. As author and editor he published several books and compilations on German literary history, focusing mainly on literature on emigration and immigration. In 1998 he gave a lecture at the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht at the German parliament Bundestag in Bonn. Stern has received several awards throughout his life, among them the Grand Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Goethe Medal. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University. Stern is married to the German author Susanna Piontek.
