Customer Reviews

My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

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This is one of the most moving survivor books I have read since Into Thin Air. Unlike other readers who found it uninsightful, I found in the simple telling of this terrible story ample insights for the perceptive reader. The prevailing confessional genre of our day has desensitized us, and led to expect a memoirist to bare his soul, beat his breast, bemoan his fate. Such antics would be antithetical to a man of dignity, and Professor Gay always retains his dignity. It is enough that he describes faithfully, but with detachment, his daily life in Nazi Germany as a youth. We supply the necessary subtext. Gay need only relate dispassionately his bike ride on the morning after Kristallnacht, and the sensitive reader understands that there are things that cannot be made explicit, but that must be inferred. He tells the reader his father's non-Jewish partner expropriated his business. He describes without emotion how, a top student, he was expelled from school at age 15. He describes the trashing of his relatives' dry goods store. He shows us a picture of his lovely blond aunt, who played "Germania" at a school pageant, and tells us she was killed by the Nazis. He describes how his family finally managed to escape at the eleventh hour and come to America. He relates how his father worked uncomplainingly at a physically taxing factory job. I would not cavil at what Gay does not include. Peter Gay has done us a great service by undertaking the wrenching job of writing this book, obviously for the sake of the historical record. He writes as a historian. Do not ask for passion. The feeling is inherent in the narrative, at least for the sensitive reader.

Some readers were disappointed with this book, because it does not explain why and what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany; what it does is give a highly personal account of Gay's "growing up in Nazi Berlin". At first the normalcy of the family described here may seem disappointing, but this changes when the Nazis declare a family of fervent atheists to be Jews. Gay's book explains how he survived psychically in a country which said he was worthless; and he points out what kept his family from leaving before 1939. The answers to those two questions are important contributions to our understanding of Nazi Germany.

Supporting the local Berlin football team is more than just that when it is one of the very few means of belonging, of not being singled out. And watching the 1936 Olympics is different when all you hope for is that it will prove that Aryans are not as superior as they keep telling you every day.

I feel grateful for this book. Peter Gay came to hate the Germans who would have killed him if his father had not managed to get the family out of Germany; this memoir, however, by telling us who and what helped him survive, also tells us what was once beautiful about Germany.

As a historian I was recently confronted with a request by one of my students to find memoirs of a young Jewish person who had lived in the 1930s in Germany. Looking for memoirs of that type in English proved to be difficult. Most childhood recollections are anyhow problematic - due to the time difference and the natural lapses in memory. Then I stumbled across Peter Gay's book. After having read the book I decided to go to Amazon to see once again what other people thought about the book.

Indeed, I found mixed reviews concentrating on Peter Gay as the scholar or Peter Gay as the survivor etc. I am German myself and on top of it a history professor who is teaching right now a course on Collaboration and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Europe. So, the book became interesting to me from several perspectives. While I did not learn anything new as far as his years in Berlin are concerned, his judgments on Germany and the Germans troubled me deeply. Although I could not share Peter Gay's eye for an eye statements - especially concerning the bombing of Dresden and the acts of Zionist terrorists in early Israel (terrorism remains terrorism - no matter what side) - I was once again confronted with my German identity. Since I am born in 1959 I had nothing to do with those times directly - nevertheless my compatriots overall did commit those crimes to humanity. Gay's statements troubled me in the sense that once again I asked myself to which extent could we Germans have prevented this from happening. What could the "ordinary German" - to remain in Christopher Browning's words - have done? The resistance of Gay's friend Busse did not do much either in preventing the Holocaust! So, what could have been the solution?

This succinct, extremely well written slice of autobiography and history is valuable to those who would (and should!) garner some very personal recollections of what it was like to be a young man growing up in Germany, moving to Denver (of all places!), and becoming one of the premier historians of our time. I emphasize "of all places" because, although somewhat younger than the author, I, too, fled from Germany and found in Denver the midpoint of my maturation. But I also found matters there considerably less agreeable than Gay did. He seems to have encountered none of the simultaneous anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism that I experienced. This may be a matter of a ten-year age difference, or a difference in temperament (then and now), as we both lived in the same part of Denver. It may also mirror different approaches to the topic. It may also be that the meanness in Denver paled, as did everything else, against the cruelty in Germany. Professor Gay offers an excellent psychoanalytic interpretation of Germans under Nazism. This is also a study of the author himself as the tormentors' fury acccelerates. Responses are invariably haphazard or inadequate. He is here not much interested in the cultural aspects (which he handled so well in "Weimar Culture").He correctly attacks some of the simple (or simplistic!) reactions to the experience of exile, but comes to this attack late in his own life. Why, it might still be asked, did it take him more than two decades to begin to re-examine his unscholarly hostility toward Germany and Germans? As he nears the closest he will, I suspect, ever come to a reconciliation with Germany, he correctly attacks the "white anti-Semitism" of the philo-Semites he encountered in contemporary Germany. And he finds his "good Germans." But, again as one who had similar experiences teaching in newly united Germany, I must ask, what responses has he for Germans, young and old, who expect a Jewish German-born American professor to help them fathom Nazism? These, often, expect us to come as purifying agents, to tell Germans, once again, that there were "good Germans," and that they are among them. The book, as good as it is, provides only hints as to what Gay's answers might be. Unfortunately, he seems most to have enjoyed sharing thoughts about this and other questions with academics or notables. This provides, it seems, a safe haven as it includes those whose profession it is to assay the problems of Nazism, and not to ask painful questions. Perhaps some psychoanalytic explanation might help here. More important, though, than the motivations for such safety, is the fact that the author seems still not to have over- come the distance between himself and Germans, most of whom have only historians' versions of what occurred. Here it is worth noting that Gay maintains that the historian seeks truth. One might agree with this judgment, and still attempt to place it within the framework of the so-called "Historikerstreit." All sides claim to follow Clio to the truth. If young Germans who have only historians' versions of that quest are denied the opportunity to talk with one as humane and sympathetic as Gay, an important educational occasion would be lost. Peter Gay's very personal history, if carefully thought about, addresses something bothersome: the tendency on all sides to lament the loss of potential geniuses, their names come easily to mind, while ignoring the perfectly ordinary Jews -- like Gay's and my families -- who also either fled or died. The book is a success if a reader closes it realizing this. It is not only that Germans lost Peter Gay, the eminent and graceful historian. It also lost Peter Gay who worked at a men's clothing store or an ice cream parlor in Denver. Some will be struck, as I was, that Gay has not been to the Holocaust Museum or to Auschwitz Given his psychological resistance even to visit Germany until late in his career, against which the historian's quest for truth seems long to have been blunted, the refusal to visit these shrines makes sense. They are not history for the historian. They are reconstructions for and by those who believe history can be learned by visits to haunted places. This may, only may, be true for battlefields or slaughter houses of old. But It is no answer to say Gay would surely visit other places where murder was done . For despite the millions represented by these memorials (and others present and planned), these are singularly haunted (so intended?). Each of us, even a well-trained scholar who has, by luck or pluck, been able to escape death at the Nazis' hands, remains haunted as a single person. This Professor Gay has made clear in an elegant, often poetic, work. It deserves the widest audience. Peter K. Breit Professor emeritus Mystic, CT

Peter Gay's elegant, unsparingly honest testament to the Berlin he knew as a young person is unlike any other memoir I've encountered. One would think, reading some of these other reviews, that Gay should be faulted for not suffering enough. He explains his own passage through childhood in an honest, decent way, and not without humor, either. This quiet, passionate and thoughtful memoir is the work of a disciplined historian whose writing is scrupululously honest and is remarkably free of the usual taint of egotism that characterizes so many memoirs. A valuable document of social history as well as a satisfying read.

Many late 20th century Jews have at times asked the question, "When things started to get bad in Nazi Germany, why didn't you just LEAVE?" Peter Gay answers this question and others in a hard to put down but still disturbing summary of growing up in Germany in the 30's. Be sure and look at the name of the person to whom the book is dedicated. You will see that name again.

I quite disagree with the negative comments being given. Of course, this book does not tend to be a historical study. This is meant to be a book about the author's psyche. It is also a statement about the Jewry in Pre-War German Society, an attack on those people that accuse the jews of being to slow in recognizing Hitler's monstruous 'Solution'. It concentrates on that. It is also a very thin book: 170 pages. It is not the type of sensitive study Peter Gay is known for, but that is inherent to the character of this personal memoir. That he did not serve in World War II is not at all important, in this study. It is a brilliant and thrilling ego-document. For Freud-haters it is a little bit dissapointing, the book is a product of an psycho-historian, and therefore contains a lot Freud theory, (which is very readable, though). But I am an Freud-addict too. Read it.

American scholar Peter Gay, until the age of ten or 12, considered himself to be just another German schoolboy from Berlin. The problem was that Gay's family was Jewish, in the eyes of the Nazi regime that rose to power in 1933. And still, for years, the assimilated family clung to their conviction that is was themselves who represented the 'real Germany' -- cultured, broad-minded, etc. -- and the thuggish Nazis who were the anomaly. But the Nazis had the power, and Gay was forced to deal with the way they proposed to solve their "Jewish Question". Decades after his family finally fled, he responds by addressing his own "German Question" in this thoughtful memoir.

Gay's book goes well beyond the navel-gazing and self-indulgent whimperings of many of the current memoirists. He is writing both for himself and for an outside audience, and addressing different questions for both. Why didn't the family leave earlier? Why should they have been forced to leave, to recognize that something like Auschwitz could be created by the very nation to which they considered themselves to belong? he responds, indignantly. Indeed, that raises a provocative question in a society that still grapples with the question of how to deal equitably with refugees. One otherwise intelligent person I know wondered aloud, during the days of attempted ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and later Kosovo, why people just didn't all leave when they saw the writing on the wall. My response was -- and remains -- why should they have? It was their home.

Gay tells us what made Berlin home for him for his earliest years -- the chocolate desserts, the movies, flying a kite -- and how, very gradually, the city that once was his home became an alien land. Ultimately, he ends up taking refuge in his stamp collection (dominated by tropical islands), cheering for British football teams over their German rivals, and navigating the paperwork that will be necessary to help his family reach safety. The most gripping pages are undoubtedly those in which their departure is recounted, particularly the implications of Gay's father's decision to leave two weeks earlier than planned on a different ship.

The real story underlying the events that Gay recounts is one of a different kind of survival than the more classic Holocaust narrative. Gay didn't have to go into hiding, dart from one refuge to another, embark on any heroic battles or join a Resistance group. But his story, while much more mundane in some ways, is just as powerful because it is the story of so many European Jews during this period: he had to find a way to live with himself, both during the 1930s and in the decades that followed. He had to survive, psychologically and emotionally, or the Nazis would have triumphed even if they hadn't managed to force him into a gas chamber. It's the story of how Gay overcame the trauma of his ordinary life become distorted beyond recognition during the Berlin of 1933 and 1939 that is ultimately the most moving part of the book -- in particular, how he was able to bring himself toward a partial reconciliation with postwar Germany.

Highly recommended as a compelling and highly personal memoir. It would be interesting to read this in conjunction with memoirs or fiction by those who grew up in Germany as heirs to the Nazi era, such as What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?: Growing Up in Germany or The Reader (Oprah's Book Club) (now a movie that I also highly recommend, having seen a preview last week.)

My daughter and I have been reading together since the day of her birth. She is a Sophomore at U of Miami in Coral Gables. Dad and I have been reading since I was born. She suggested this book to me. I to Dad. I have read alot of Halocaust books in my 60 years, but did as I was asked as did my Father. At first I was not impressed. But now, a month after closing the cover, I'd really like to meet this man. I have a few questions. What a childhood! The book was a very good teaching tool for my daughter AND myself. My dad, a jewish man in America who served in the Asian Theater, loved it, too. He has a whole different set of questions. So, three generations would love to have Peter and Ruth for a dinner!

I usually make a point of not re-reading other Amazon reviews before writing my own review of a book I've just finished, but in this case, for some reason, I strayed from my usual practice...

I'm surprised that few of my fellow reviewers have mentioned how amusing Peter Gay's book is - this is the one aspect that drew me in when I finally got around to reading "My German Question" - his description of projecting anti-semitism on a German money changer when returning to Germany as an adult. I found his self-deprecating self-analysis very funny and very entertaining.

Many people, including non-jews, who pay attention to such things, feel ambivalent about modern Germany. I myself, an erstwhile German Literature scholar, have said things in anger that could probably get me arrested (I have since been told that it is actually illegal to call someone a Nazi in Germany today), to a native who had taken my seat at the Hofbrauhaus. One of the minor disappointments of my life was to discover that Germans today are not obsessed with the question of German collective guilt - that Germany exists only in the novels of Heinrich Boell, from what I can tell.

I agree with those who have noted that Gay has a tendency to tell us that times were tough, without really describing what specifically was tough about it, in detail. We read a lot about his strategies for coping with his isolation as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and I found this very interesting, but I missed seeing more description of what it was exactly he was coping with.

The book makes a very interesting companion to Wolfgang Samuel's "German Boy" and especially "Coming to Colorado" which I also read recently. It's ironic that both Samuels and Gay should end up in Denver, of all places.

One minor frustration with this paperback edition: the book is tall and thin, an annoying form factor that I did not enjoy holding. I probably would not buy this book if I had picked it up browsing in a bookstore, and I put off reading it after ordering from Amazon simply because I didn't like the shape. In the end however, I'm glad I overcame this deterrent!