My German Question

October 5, 1998
Gay is best known for his painstakingly researched series on the Enlightenment and, more recently, on The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. In this memoir of his early life, particularly of the years between Hitler's chancellorship in 1933 and Gay's eventual escape in 1939, one can almost see the evolution of his obsessive concentration in the intense devotion to stamp collecting and sports that helped him block out the increasing din of Nazi racism. But this is not only a memoir, it's also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany. "We were not so stupid, not so deluded, certainly not so treacherous as we have been judged to be." In responding to these often facile charges, Gay is defending his beloved father, who through persistence and risky subterfuges managed to get his son and consumptive wife out of the country. In one episode, he recalls his father desperately doctoring a family certificate: "I can still see him at work committing this crime: using a straight razor, he gently scratched away at the ink, with St. Louis and May 13 growing paler and paler." This smart, funny, personable and resourceful man never adapted to his new life and died prematurely in 1955. Gay does not apologize for his father or other German-Jews, but rather offers an explanation of the mixed signals and the difficulty of escape. Or if it's an apology, it is, as he says "an unapologetic apology."

Starred review from August 1, 1998
Gay's many books include an insightful study of Weimar Germany and an acclaimed biography of Sigmund Freud (Freud: A Life for Our Times, LJ 7/88). His family was fortunate to emigrate from Germany to America shortly after the 1938 Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass" when Nazi-sponsored riots destroyed synagogues and Jewish stores. But Gay (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale) takes issue with the suggestion that German Jews should have fled when Hitler came to power in 1933. He points out that Germany had a tradition of being among the most civilized nations in the world. The Gays themselves were liberal and assimilated, the father a decorated World War I veteran. But the impulse to live with their American relatives grew ever stronger as the Nazi stranglehold increased. The Gays endeavored to live a normal life: the author writes touchingly, for instance, about a passion for stamp collecting he shared with his father that provided some solace and orderly refuge. This thought-provoking, accessible memoir is recommended for most libraries.--Paul M. Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL

August 1, 1998
An acclaimed biographer of Freud and a historian of Victorian culture, Gay applies the qualities of insight and introspection that characterize those tomes to this absorbing memoir of his adolescence in 1930s Berlin. Though Gay's theme is his own psychology, his subtextual purpose is answering the question put to him by American Jews: Why did you stay after 1933? Could you not recognize the approaching Holocaust? The Frohlichs (which was then his family's name) did not escape until April 1939. Until the late 1930s, Gay remarks that life "under a dictatorship did not entail living consistently at a level of high tension." His father was prosperous enough; anti-Jewish persecutions drove him from business in 1938. Remembering his own feelings, Gay expresses surprise at the importance that trivia--his interest in sports, philately, and sex manuals--assumed in the face of mounting anti-Semitic pressures. Naturally, he detested the Nazis and cheered on Jesse Owen in person, but Gay recalls the chicanery impeding emigration and his family's extraordinary luck in getting out. A searching, sensitive portrait of Gay's youth, as crystalline as memory can be made. ((Reviewed August 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)