Germany's foreign minister Joschka Fischer has lamented the destruction of European Jewish culture by the Nazis in a speech in honor of prominent German-American scholar and Holocaust survivor Fritz Stern. Fischer, in New York to present Stern with the Leo Baeck medal for work toward German-Jewish reconciliation, noted that the former Columbia University history professor was the child of a cosmopolitan Jewish family forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938. "One can associate the Sterns with the intellectual elite that since the end of the 19th century had made Germany 'a land of dazzling achievements' as he says, a land of many Nobel Prize winners, world-famous artists, ground-breaking researchers and independent thinkers," the foreign minister said. "With this creativity, Germany could have left its mark on the world. The 20th century could have been a German century, in the best sense of the word – if Germany had used its soft power rather military strength." Fischer noted that Stern, one of the foremost American scholars on Germany, was compelled by his own biography to seek an explanation for how his birthplace could become the cradle of barbarism in the center of Europe.