Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - George L. Mosse (review date 26 November 1977)

George L. Mosse (review date 26 November 1977)

SOURCE: Mosse, George L. Review of Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, by Peter Gay. New Republic 177, no. 22 (26 November 1977): 40–41.

[In the following review of Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Mosse observes that Gay's treatment of specific historical figures is convincing, but argues that the book fails to account for the virulent anti-Semitism which persisted in Germany throughout the first half of the twentieth-century.]

The present interest in German-Jewish intellectuals has tended to distort the past. Jewish intellectuals living in Vienna, Wilhelmian Germany or in the Weimar Republic became models for some of the radicals of the 1960s—symbols for their feeling about America. Such intellectuals were thought to be outsiders, Modernists whose anti-rationalism, alienation and experimentalism reflected their own supposed marginality. Peter Gay's collection of previously...

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