My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin - Hardcover

Gay, Professor Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300076703 ISBN 13: 9780300076707

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

The respected historian and prolific author traces his youth as an assimilated, atheistic Jew during the early years of the Nazi regime, his family's increasingly urgent emigration in 1939, and his lingering ambivalent feelings toward Germany and the Germans. UP.

About this title

Review

Cultural historian Peter Gay (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time) applies his considerable analytic skills to his memoir of his early years as a Jew in 1930s Berlin. Light-haired, blue-eyed, and culturally assimilated, the Frohlich family, as they were then known, convinced themselves that, despite the growth spurt of the Nazi party, anti-Semitism was on the wane among the German populous. Gay recalls that his daily life was relatively unaffected by the Totalitarian regime. That is until 1933, when, according to law, he became a Jew overnight. Soon the family found their living quarters shrinking and their awareness of their plight growing (though no one could possibly conceive of what would come). Though still a boy, Gay remembers that "one of the greatest moments in my life" came when the German women's relay team dropped their baton at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Then came Kristallnacht, which crystallized the family's sublimated fears and precipitated their flight from their home. After a certain suspenseful series of necessary deceits and circuitous travels, the family began their new life in America--12-year-old Peter spoke barely a word of English. Now, decades later, Gay employs his new native tongue to uncover the psychological impulses that fed his parents' decision to stay in Berlin as long as they did and governed his own behavior as a boy. The result is credible answer to the question: How could they have stayed?

About the Author

Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and director of the Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library. He is the author of many books, including the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud; Freud: A Life for Our Time; A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis; Voltaire’s Politics; and Reading Freud, the last three published by Yale University Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300076703
• ISBN 13: 9780300076707
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222