Alfred Grosser, a French political scientist and historian whose writings and activism played a major role in conciliating two ancestral enemies, France and Germany, in the wake of World War II, died on Feb. 7 in Paris. He was 99.
His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Marc.
Through more than two dozen books of history, political science and memoirs, decades of teaching at one of France’s premier universities and many articles on contemporary affairs, Mr. Grosser made it his life’s work to bring together two countries with long histories of mutual mistrust, if not mutual hatred.
The need for reconciliation, he felt, was acute after a war that had left Germany in ruins, spawned German atrocities on French soil, torn France’s social and political fabric apart through the traumas of occupation and collaboration, and torn his own German Jewish family apart as well. He was as skeptical of French purity after the war as he was of the need to condemn Germans collectively.
“Women whose heads had been shaved,” he wrote about France in the immediate postwar period in a memoir, “A Frenchman’s Life” (1997). “‘collaborators’ mistreated by people who had plenty to reproach themselves for — these were not scenes to inspire enthusiasm!”
Mr. Grosser occupied a unique Franco-German niche. Called “one of the architects of postwar reconciliation with Germany” by The New York Times in 1995, he was the only French citizen ever invited to address the Bundestag, the German parliament, three times, according to the Institut d’Études Politiques (Institute for Political Studies, or Sciences-Po as it is known in France), where he taught from 1953 until he retired in 1992. The last time, in 2014, was in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“On the ruins of the Second World War he helped our two peoples hold their heads up and look toward the future, hand in hand,” a statement from the Élysée Palace, seat of the French presidency, said. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany called him “a great man, thinker and inspiring European.”
Born in Germany to a Jewish family that was forced to flee when he was 8 years old, Mr. Grosser gained French citizenship at 12 and became an ardent but critical Frenchman who for decades pleaded with his compatriots for understanding of the brother-enemy across the Rhine, and vice versa. France’s enemies, he insisted, had been Hitler and the Nazis, not the German people.
With the Germans, he tried to soften the sometimes offensive edge of French arrogance and vainglory, as well as what he called France’s “distinctive predilection for prestige.”
Discussing his book “Germany in Our Time: A Political History of the Postwar Years” (1970) in The New York Review of Books in 1972, the Scottish writer Neal Ascherson called Mr. Grosser “the emperor of West German studies in Europe.” And the French critic Jean-Michel Djian, writing in Le Monde in 1997 wrote that Mr. Grosser had “a rare talent that makes this convinced European one of the most difficult-to-pigeonhole intellectuals of our century.”
Mr. Grosser’s convictions about Franco-German reconciliation were acquired early. A night spent unearthing corpses as a teenage refugee after what he called in his memoirs a “stupid” American bombing of Marseilles in 1944 marked him deeply, his son Marc said, demonstrating to him that atrocities were not confined to one side. “I was absolutely certain that hatred for a collective was not the right response to collective hatred,” Mr. Grosser wrote.
By 1945 he was sure of “being fully French, but with a destiny marked by Hitler, a destiny that gave me a responsibility for the future of postwar Germany,” he wrote in the French periodical Plein Droit in 1995. The Allies’ victory, he added, had been over “regimes and not peoples or nations, and that meant, or should have meant, a transnational responsibility for the preservation of rights and liberties.”
A return trip to a Germany in ruins in 1947 set him on his life’s work, “a half-century of attempts to exert a double influence, however small, on a double dispute,” as he put it in his memoirs: in France, “to explain German realities,” and in Germany, “to disseminate a reasonable vision of France.”
That year he became a founding member of the Committee for Dialogue With the New Germany, an organization of French and German intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Le Monde wrote that at its meetings, “French and Germans learned to forget their Manicheanism.”
Mr. Grosser didn’t waver in his conviction that Europe no longer needed to fear the Germans. “Young Germans who had been indoctrinated by the Nazis were perfectly ‘recoverable’ for democracy and liberty, as long as we didn’t reject them,” he wrote in Le Monde in 1991.
In later years Mr. Grosser became sharply critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, asserting that peace in the Middle East would be possible only if “the Israeli authorities finally show genuine sympathy for the suffering in Gaza and the ‘territories,’” as he wrote in “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem” (2009).
“One cannot expect young Palestinians to mourn the victims of horrific attacks if the suffering of their own people goes ignored,” he added. “Perhaps it is necessary to take two Arab questions seriously and to answer them: ‘Why should we bear the onerous consequences for Auschwitz?’ and ‘Why are our refugees and expellees not allowed to return, although the Jews claim the right of return to Israel after two thousand years?’”
In 2010, the Central Council of Jews in Germany urged that Mr. Grosser be stricken from the list of speakers in a commemoration of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. An Israeli diplomat in Germany called his views “illegitimate and immoral” and “tainted by self-hatred.” But the mayor of Frankfurt, where the ceremony was being held, refused to retract the invitation.
Mr. Grosser was proud to tell German interviewers who wanted to claim him as one of their own that he was actually French, but with reservations: “I am a man, a Parisian, a husband, a father, a civil servant, a professor,” he wrote in his book “Difficult Identities” (1996), as quoted in Le Monde. “When I am driving I hate bicyclists. And when I am on my bicycle, I hate drivers.” He added, “My identity seems to me the sum of my allegiances — along with, I would hope, something that synthesizes and masters them.”
Alfred Eugène Max Grosser was born in Frankfurt on Feb. 1, 1925, to Paul and Lily (Rosenthal) Grosser. His father was a doctor who had served in the German Army in World War I before becoming the director of a children’s medical clinic.
Kicked out of both the clinic and the university where he taught, Paul Grosser fled with his family to France in December 1933. Less than two months later, he died of a heart attack. Mr. Grosser wrote later of the French schoolteachers who nurtured him when he was a fatherless Jewish immigrant child.
In June 1940, Alfred and his older sister, Margarethe, his only sibling, fled the German advance into France on bicycles, and the family regrouped at Saint-Raphaël, in Provence — a part of France that was initially administered by the Italians, who were more benevolent toward refugee Jews than the French. (Margarethe died a year later from what Mr. Grosser called “the consequences of the Exodus.”)
He pursued secondary and graduate studies in Nice, Cannes and Aix-en-Provence. He received a doctorate years later in recognition of the many books he had published.
In addition to his son Marc, he is survived by three other sons, Pierre, Jean and Paul; his wife, Anne-Marie; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Grosser felt drawn to Christian theology, calling himself “a Jewish-born atheist spiritually tied to Christianity.”
“I am against self-centeredness,” he wrote, “against the morality of solidarity that applies only to one’s own community, and I am for understanding the suffering of others, for defining one’s neighbors in terms that embrace every human being.”
Stephen Kinzer and Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.
