Guy Stern was born into a Jewish family on 14 January 1922 and named Günther Stern. With help from an aid organisation and one of his uncles he was able to escape the Nazi dictatorship in 1937 and make his way to the USA. However, his hope of bringing his family at a later date was never to be fulfilled. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. His parents Julius and Hedwig Stern (neé Silberberg), and his siblings Werner and Eleonore were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto in March 1942 and were murdered in an unknown location in Poland.

In the USA Guy Stern attended high school and in 1940 went to Saint Louis University to study romance languages. In 1942 he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army. At Camp Ritchie in Maryland he was trained as a member of a special military intelligence unit. In the same year he officially became a US citizen under the name of Guy Stern. In 1944 he was one of the now-famous “Ritchie Boys” who interrogated prisoners of war. It was not until his return to Hildesheim as a soldier in the U.S. Army that he discovered that his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. Guy Stern returned to the USA where he continued his studies of romance languages, to which he added German in 1948. This was the beginning of his successful career as a professor of German which took him to various universities around the USA and Germany. Guy Stern made fundamental and pioneering contributions to the field of exile research. In 1978 he, Wulf Koepke and John M. Spalek found the Society for Exile Studies (now known as the North American Society for Exile Studies) and was closely involved with the Gesellschaft für Exilforschung, of which he became an honorary member. Guy Stern was Vice-President of the Kurt-Weill-Gesellschaft and President of the Lessing Society, which he co-founded. To name but a few of his other roles, he served as a trustee of the Leo Baeck Institute, director of the International Institute of the Righteous of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit, and President of the PEN Centre for German-Speaking Writers Abroad. The many honours and awards presented to Guy Stern during his life include the Bronze Start Medal, the German Order of Merit, and the Goethe Medal, and he held honorary citizenships of Hildesheim and Utah Beach, and an honorary doctorate at Hofstra University.

Guy Stern was closely involved with the German Exile Archive for many decades. While in Germany he made use of the collection and corresponded on many topics. In 2017 he was awarded with the OVID Prize of the PEN Centre for German-Speaking Writers Abroad in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library. The following year he gave the laudatory speech for the 2018 winner, Herta Müller. In January 2022 we celebrated his 100th birthday with a virtual event hosted by the GExile Archive in partnership with the PEN Centre for German-Speaking Writers Abroad. Companions from Germany and abroad offered their congratulations and shared insights into his richly varied output. Two publications have been published to celebrate Guy Stern’s 100th birthday. Aufbau Verlag published a German edition of his autobiography “Invisible Ink”, translated by his wife Susanna Piontek. Friedrick Lubich and Marlen Eckl edited the wide-ranging Festschrift on Stern’s life and work “Von der Exilerfahrung zur Exilforschung – Zum Jahrhundertleben eines transatlantischen Brückenbauers“ (published by Königshausen & Neumann).

We look back with gratitude on Guy Stern’s many visits to the German Exile Archive. He was deeply valued as a companion and an outstanding expert in exile research, among other fields. What we will remember most, though, is his humanity, friendliness, spontaneity and humour. We mourn the loss of a great person, one who has left a lasting mark and whose impact will be felt for a long time to come.

Speaking in an interview in 2018, Guy Stern said, “As the only survivor, my self-imposed task has always been to live a life that means something.”

This he achieved. Thank you, Guy Stern.

(Dr. Sylvia Asmus)