Karl Stern: The Pillar of Fire
I’d discovered a quotation from The Pillar of Fire in an article about Montreal history by a local scholar, Sherry Simon. Stern, it turns out, was a Bavarian-Jewish refugee, and he recalled looking down at his adoptive city from the mountain at its center. “From the top of Mount Royal,” he writes after his arrival in 1939, “you can almost directly perceive currents of European history of the last few centuries in a petrified form.” …
How did Karl Stern become so forgettable? Little has been written about him since the decades following his death in 1975. The list of heavyweight European intellectuals who fled to North America—the Arendts and Adornos, Horkheimers and Fromms—is so long. Is it any wonder that so many others, especially north of the border, have fallen through the cracks?
