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 | | My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin by Professor Peter Gay ISBN-10: 9780300080704 ISBN-10: 0-300-08070-0 ISBN-13: 9780300080704 ISBN-13: 978-0-300-08070-4 Paperback 1999-11-10 Yale University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, antireligious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939. Peter Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner. In so doing he provides a curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry. | ||
Amazon.com 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? | ||
Reviews | ||
My German Question 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! | ||
A compelling and deeply personal memoir 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.) | ||
Interesting, different, well-worth reading 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! | ||
Quiet, passionate and thoughtful memoir 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. | ||
Mixed Reaction To This Book I first became annoyed with the author for talking and intellectually telling us his story in the manner he does. He was one of the few Jews in Berlin who was able to continue his life with family, friends and others until late in the decade. He tells us but shares little about feelings or what it was like emotionally to be there. What did he feel attending a "Gymnasium" with non Jewish Germans long after most Jews could have. Was there conflict and ambivilance, guilt? The discription of his first return to Germany in the early 60's is gripping. Soon a profound sorrow and rage for this educated and intellectlal man overcame me. He indeed was a victim of the Holocaust as much as any other victim albiet he was lukier than some. As a psychiatrist I've treated many holocaust survivors and their children. He actually explains though indirectly that his ultimate survival as an integrated person lied in his ability to repress, supress and disconnect from much of the horror. I wanted something that he could not give me. I believe he is a hero for writing this book and exposing as much as does to himself and others. It is so easy to become angry with the victim. He has surely suffered his share in life. His survival is his badge of courage. Jo Ann Terdiman | ||
 | | MY GERMAN QUESTION: GROWING UP IN NAZI BERLIN by Peter Gay ISBN-10: 9780300080704 ISBN-10: 0-300-08070-0 ISBN-13: 9780300080704 ISBN-13: 978-0-300-08070-4 Paperback 1998 Yale University Press Find Lowest Price |