[In the following review, Berger offers a positive assessment of My German Question.]

Peter Gay's memoir [My German Question] will be welcomed by all who have admired his work over the past forty years. From his early studies of Eduard Bernstein (1958) and Voltaire (1959), to his essay on Weimar Culture (1968), his textbook on Modern Europe (1973, with R. K. Webb), and his many volumes on Freud and on The Bourgeois Experience (published from 1978 to 1998), Gay has had an enormous impact on how North Americans understand central and western Europe. This personal account offers a glimpse into some of the influences that shaped his own development, especially during his formative years in Germany. “This is not an autobiography,” Gay insists in the first line of the Preface: “it is a memoir that focuses on the six years, 1933 to 1939, I spent as a boy in Nazi Berlin” (p. ix).

Gay structures his book chronologically, although his knowledge of history and psychoanalysis inform and enrich that organization. From his sequential base Gay flashes forward as well as back and reflects on the frailty and sometimes deceptiveness of memory Chapter 1, “Return of the Native,” recounts impressions from Gay's first trip to Germany in 1961 after an absence of 22 years. Here and in the preface he raises “his” German question(s) and anticipates many of the answers that the rest of the book develops. How did the years in Nazi Berlin influence him? It was a “poisoning,” Gay writes: “the Nazis had poisoned my hometown as they had poisoned so much else, including me” (p. 20). What was his response? “Conflicting,” Gay says (p. 13); he openly expresses “hatred for Nazis past and present” (p. x) but is also quick to thank those German gentiles, like Emil Busse to whom he dedicates the book, who helped his family. Gay admits to reaching no closure in his position toward Germany. On his first return, he writes, “I was at an unstable midpoint along a winding road toward answering my German question, a question that I have not yet completely put to rest and probably never will” (pp. 6–7). Since then he came to realize that “there was no ‘correct’ attitude to take toward the Germans” (p. 4).

Gay is more decisive when it comes to another “central preoccupation” of the book (p. 113). His Preface echoes a question repeatedly asked German Jews: “Why didn't we pack our bags and leave the country the day after Hitler came to power?” (p. xii). Gay makes his answer clear in the titles to several chapters: German Jews received “Mixed Signals.” They developed “Survival Strategies.” Developments outside their control thwarted their “Best-Laid Plans,” and not all had the resources necessary for “Buying Asylum.” Much of his memoir, Gay concedes, is “an apology” for his parents and other German Jews. But, he adds, “it is an unapologetic apology” (p. 113). Gay expresses not only “contempt” but anger toward the critics of supposed German Jewish passivity: he “could cheerfully throttle them” (p. 176). Gay's defense of German Jewry is related to his “German Question.” Like the diarist Victor Klemperer, Gay's ambivalence toward Germany reflects inward: “But we were Germans,” he writes; “the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were” (p. 111).

Gay rejects the labels of “survivor” and “victim.” Nevertheless he recognizes that “even the most fortunate Jew who lived under Hitler has never completely shaken off that experience” (p. 21). Although his story is personal it has wider implications too. Some of the most intriguing parts describe intersections between “major public tremors” and “mundane personal matters” (p. 73). Through the eyes of the “super-good boy” Peter Joachim Frohlich, we see Nazi theft of Jewish property; the 1936 Olympics; the public “degradation ritual” of Kristallnacht; and the voyage of the St. Louis, on which, without his father's quick action, Gay and his family would have sailed. Gay also describes his family's period of waiting in Cuba and his Americanization, armed with a new name: Peter Jack Gay. Much of this material echoes other accounts by refugees from Nazi Europe: elsewhere too one can read of European Jews' frustration with the world's indifference and obstructions to immigration—Evian spelled backwards, Gay tells us, is “naive” (p. 120). Other memoirs also mention the jokes that constituted “pathetic weapons”: “What does the ideal Aryan look like? As tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering, as blond as Hitler” (pp. 94–95). Even something as private as Gay's sexual coming-of-age, he suggests, was representative: “I shared the life history of thousands of Jewish adolescents in Nazi Germany who had somehow to come to terms with their hormones amid massive slanders of their ‘race’ and mounting threats to their survival, threats which were in themselves, not so subtly, offenses to their manhood or conviction of desirability” (p. 90).

But aspects of Gay's memoir are unpredictable too. As with every life, details distinguished Gay and his family from those around them. Not only were his parents secular, he says, they were atheists who declared themselves “konfessionslos” already in Weimar Germany (p. 52). Because he was born in Silesia Gay's father was included in the Polish rather than the German quota for American immigration (p. 140); that fact had significant consequences. A few of Gay's historical claims are surprising, like his assumption that Germany made “extortionate reparations payments” after World War I (p. 97). And of course his familiarity with Freud means that he reads his own past in insightful, self-critical ways. “We are poor judges of ourselves,” he points out (p. 203), in an admission of the barriers to self-understanding—and the limits of the memoir.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the book is its anger. “Anger,” Gay writes in a candid passage, “long remained a confused category to me” (p. 41). Viewed historically Gay's main targets are unsurprising. Who would not expect Gay to hate the propagandist Julius Streicher or to have nursed wartime dreams of revenge against the Germans? “My fantasies must have been lurid and bloody in the extreme,” he writes in a description of Nazi officials; “my inability to feel rage, of which I have spoken, never stopped me from hating the guts of the swine who were lording it over us” (p. 151). In a profession that privileges detachment it is somehow reassuring to read such frank statements of anger.

Gay's other targets are less obvious. Even his gentle and loving parents, he realizes, must have inspired some anger in him as a child, although he repressed it (pp. 39–42). And he rails against know-it-alls who criticize German Jews. But in one of the book's oddest passages Gay transforms his rage toward the perpetrators of the Holocaust and postwar critics of German Jewry into contempt and even blame of Eastern European Jews: “Sadly out of touch with the world, Jews in Poland faced with the necessity for immediate action, even after Kristallnacht and other Nazi pogroms, allowed their memories of the good Germans of the past to overpower their incomplete and inaccurate information about the evil Germans of the present. The result was Nazi mass murder” (p. 113). How Gay, who so eloquently defends German Jews against their accusers, can assume that Polish Jews somehow had more options—or more agency—is unclear. But perhaps his statements remind us that anger, like other emotions, is both a path and a barrier to insight. My German Question is a fascinating book by a keen observer. Both disarmingly open and carefully guarded it reminds us that all history is lived history.