The historian and political scientist Alfred Grosser has died at the age of 99. The Frankfurt native is considered to have had a formative influence on German-French relations.
Audio contribution
Audio
03:06 Min.
|
08.02.24
|Marcel Wagner
Obituary for Alfred Grosser
Audio End of audio article
The German-French historian and political scientist Alfred Grosser is dead. He died at the age of 99, his family confirmed on Thursday. Grosser, who came from a Jewish family, was one of the intellectual pioneers of the German-French friendship treaty known as the Élysée Treaty.
Grosser was born in Frankfurt in 1925 as the son of a Jewish pediatrician. The family fled the National Socialists to France in 1933, where the father died shortly after arrival. The mother and her children received French citizenship in 1937. This saved her from internment in 1939.
German-French understanding as a life’s work
“I belong in France, I support Germany from the outside,” said Grosser, describing his role. He wrote more than 30 books – and explained Germany to the French and France to the Germans. From 1965 he worked for numerous newspapers and television companies. Among other things, he wrote columns for the daily newspapers “La Croix” and “Ouest-France”.
In 2014 he gave the commemorative speech in the Bundestag on the outbreak of the First World War 100 years earlier. He was honored many times for his role as a mediator between Germans and French. In 1975 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Critical attitude towards Israel’s politics
Grosser was also repeatedly criticized: Grosser was confronted with accusations of anti-Semitism at least since his 2009 book “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem,” which he personally found to be absurd. In the work he explained to the Germans why they should treat Israel more critically.
There was also anger over Grosser’s participation in a commemoration of the pogrom night in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in 2010. The philosopher gave a speech at the invitation of the then Mayor Petra Roth (CDU). Members of the Central Council of Jews in Germany threatened in advance to leave the room if Grosser became “abusive towards Israel.” In the end there was no scandal and no one left the room.
He also supported the writer Martin Walser, who in his speech at the 1998 German Book Trade Peace Prize ceremony said that “Auschwitz” was not suitable as a “moral club”. In the debate about Günter Grass’ criticism of Israel and his political poem “What must be said” from 2012, he sided with the German writer, who died in 2015.
French ambassador: “demanding pioneer”
“We are losing one of the greats. From Frankfurt to Paris, no one has shaped our view of Franco-German reconciliation as much as he has,” wrote Cornelia Woll, President of the Hertie School in Berlin, on the online service X, formerly Twitter.
“All actors in the German-French friendship feel orphaned today,” wrote François Delattre, the French ambassador in Berlin. Grosser was a “demanding pioneer” in relations between the two countries.
Further information
End of further information