MY GERMAN QUESTION: GROWING UP IN NAZI BERLIN

Memoir by Peter Gay, 1998

In My German Question (1998) Peter Gay discusses the Holocaust from two viewpoints. From a historical perspective he explains why German Jews did not leave the country as soon as Adolf Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933 and why they meekly submitted to increasingly anti-Semitic decrees and violence. On a personal level Gay explores how growing up in Nazi Germany affected him.

In his examination of the behavior of German Jews, Gay rejects the claim made by Gershom Scholem that while the Jews loved the Germans, the Germans never loved the Jews. Gay was born in 1923 and recalls his first ten years as idyllic. Even after the Nazis came to power, he continued to spend summers with the Gentile parents of the family's maid; they were like a second set of parents to him. Another Gentile, Emil Busse, was a close family friend who took many risks to help the Gays escape Germany. The decency of some Germans served to lull Jews into a false sense of security, as did the Nazi regime's uncertainty about how it would deal with the Jews. In 1935, the year of the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, which severely restricted Jewish civil rights, Gay's uncle Siegfried Kohnke received the Iron Cross for his service in World War I. The award was made in Hitler's name. According to Gay, ambivalence rather than a determination to annihilate German Jewry marked the Nazi's attitude, allowing Jews to convince themselves that they would be able to remain and survive in the only home they had known. He also notes that even if Germany's Jews had wished to emigrate, they had no place to go. Gay directs his anger not only at the Germans who killed the Jews but also at the rest of the world that refused to provide a safe haven.

With his mother and father, Gay narrowly escaped the fate of his two aunts, who died in the Holocaust. Still, the years 1933-39 left their mark on the historian. To compensate for his low status in his native land, he became a fan of winning sports teams. For more than two decades he refused to return to Germany. When he finally did go back in 1961, the visit was ruined by his paranoia.

Over the years Gay has come to reject the view that the only good German is a dead German; he has adopted a more nuanced attitude towards Germany and its inhabitants. His Columbia University dissertation dealt with the German political philosopher Eduard Bernstein, and his two-volume study of the Enlightenment (1966-69) and his five-volume survey of the Victorian era (1984-97) discuss a variety of German intellectuals and artists. While Gay has thus reintegrated Germany into his intellectual world, My German Question demonstrates that the pain inflicted in the 1930s has not vanished. As of 1998 Gay had never watched the movie Shoah , had not visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and had not gone to Auschwitz. As Gay writes, "Some sixty years later, fragments of Nazi Berlin still sometimes haunt me and will haunt me to the day I die."

—Joseph Rosenblum