My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin
by Professor Peter Gay
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Book Summary Information
Author: Professor Peter GayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-11-10
ISBN: 0300080700
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Yale University Press
Book Reviews of My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin
Book Review: A compelling and deeply personal memoir
Summary: 5 Stars
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.)
Summary of My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin
In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated 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, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings -- then and now -- toward Germany and the Germans. His insightful account is a significant contribution to the history of German Jewry and to the art of autobiography.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?
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