US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke. In 2010, Stern spoke at the former German military headquarters building, the Bendlerblock, on the 66th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Hitler. Looking back in January 2016, he told an interviewer, "Sometimes I bemoaned the fact that I had to grow up amid the disintegration of a democracy; now, at the end of life, I am having to experience again the struggles of democracy." Stern died on May 18, 2016 in New York, at 90. Scholarship The focus of much of Stern's work an attempt to track the development of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its characteristics. Stern traced the origins of Nazism back to the 19th-century völkische movement. Stern considered that the virulent anti-Semitic völkische movement to have been the result of the "politics of cultural despair" experienced by German intellectuals, who were unable to come to grips with modernity. However, Stern rejected the Sonderweg interpretation of German history and considered the ideas of the völkische movement to have been merely a "dark undercurrent" in 19th-century German society. In the 1990s, Stern was a leading critic of the controversial American author Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners was denounced by Stern as unscholarly and full of Germanophobia. Another major area of research for Stern was the history of the Jewish community in Germany and how the Jewish culture influenced German culture and vice versa. In Stern's view, the interaction produced what Stern often called the "Jewish-German symbiosis". In Stern's view, the best example of the "Jewish-German symbiosis" was Albert Einstein. Selected works Author The Politics Of Cultural Despair: A Study In The Rise Of The Germanic Ideology, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1961, 1963. Adapted from Stern's dissertation; essays on Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. The Failure Of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1972, . A collection of essays. Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire, New York: Knopf, 1977, . A dual biography of banker Gerson Bleichröder and Otto von Bismarck. Germany 1933: Fifty Years Later, New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1984. Leo Baeck memorial lecture. Dreams and Delusions: The Drama Of German History, New York: Knopf, 1987, . A collection of essays. Einstein's German World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, . Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels: Ansprachen