Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became a prominent historian, government adviser and a longtime professor at Columbia University, has died. He was 90. (...)

Stern's books included "The Politics of Cultural Despair," ''The Failure of Illiberalism" and "Five Germanys I Have Known." He also was a frequent commentator on current events. In a 2004 speech, he spoke of parallels between the Nazis and the Christian right. Earlier this year, he told The History News Network that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was a symptom of the "dumbing down of the country."

"When I arrived in this country, Franklin Roosevelt was the president," he said. "That someone like Trump, who is a nobody except for his money, immense ambition and ugliness, is not only offering himself but is actually accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply incomprehensible."

He recently warned against a new extreme right movement in Europe and other regions of the world.

"I believe we find ourselves in an era of fear ... fear spread all over the place ... of fear used politically by the right,” he told DPA in New York.

"I sometimes regret having grown in the middle of the end of democracy, and now, towards the end of my life, I must once again fight for democracy. A sad balance,” he concluded. Stern also found it hard to understand why people were backing the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, who he defined as the best example “of the the growing idiocy of the United States and the horrific role of money.”

He was particularly interested in the role that the political and cultural elites — the ostensible gatekeepers and guardians of civilized values — played in smoothing the way for Hitler’s rise, and in the German resistance to liberal modes of thought.

He pursued these avenues of inquiry in the essays collected in “The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany” (1972) and “Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History” (1987).

Fritz Richard Stern was born on Feb. 2, 1926, in Breslau. His father, Rudolf, was a physician, like nearly all his male relatives. His mother, the former Käthe Brieger, held a doctorate in physics. Both families had converted to Lutheranism.

Dr. Stern, falling into line with family tradition, entered Columbia as a pre-med student, but classes with Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling stoked his enthusiasm for the humanities.

Torn, he approached Albert Einstein, a family friend, for counsel. Should he pursue the study of history or medicine? “That’s simple: Medicine is a science, and history is not,” he recalled Einstein replying. “Hence medicine.”

Ignoring the advice, Professor Stern pursued history, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1946, a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1953. (...)

The distinguished chemist Harry Kroto died on April 30, 2016, at the age of 77, according to Chemical & Engineering News (May 2, 2016). Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes, carbon molecules assuming exotic shapes, such as the spherical buckminsterfullerene. As Chemical & Engineering News observed, "The discovery was greeted with both enthusiasm and skepticism, noted the Nobel Prize committee when announcing the 1996 prize: 'No physicist or chemist had expected that carbon would be found in such a symmetrical form other than those already known.'" Kroto was also concerned with the public understanding of science, helping to establish organizations to aid science communicators and science educators. (...)

Former Sen. Conrad Burns dead at 81

• By MATT HUDSON and TOM LUTEY mhudson@billingsgazette.com tlutey@billingsgazette.com

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