My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

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 movi

Peter Gay's elegant, unsparingly honest testament to the Berlin he knew as a young person is unlike any other memoir I've encountered. One would think, reading some of these other reviews, that Gay should be faulted for not suffering enough. He explains his own passage through childhood in an honest, decent way, and not without humor, either. This quiet, passionate and thoughtful memoir is the work of a disciplined historian whose writing is scrupululously honest and is remarkably free of the usual taint of egotism that characterizes so many memoirs. A valuable document of social history as well as a satisfying read.

Some readers were disappointed with this book, because it does not explain why and what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany; what it does is give a highly personal account of Gay's "growing up in Nazi Berlin". At first the normalcy of the family described here may seem disappointing, but this changes when the Nazis declare a family of fervent atheists to be Jews. Gay's book explains how he survived psychically in a country which said he was worthless; and he points out what kept his family from leaving before 1939. The answers to those two questions are important contributions to our understanding of Nazi Germany.Supporting the local Berlin football team is more than just that when it is one of the very few means of belonging, of not being singled out. And watching the 1936 Olympics is different when all you hope for is that it will prove that Aryans are not as superior as they keep telling you every day. I feel grateful for this book. Peter Gay came to hate the Germans who would have killed him if his father had not managed to get the family out of Germany; this memoir, however, by telling us who and what helped him survive, also tells us what was once beautiful about Germany.

This is one of the most moving survivor books I have read since Into Thin Air. Unlike other readers who found it uninsightful, I found in the simple telling of this terrible story ample insights for the perceptive reader. The prevailing confessional genre of our day has desensitized us, and led to expect a memoirist to bare his soul, beat his breast, bemoan his fate. Such antics would be antithetical to a man of dignity, and Professor Gay always retains his dignity. It is enough that he describes faithfully, but with detachment, his daily life in Nazi Germany as a youth. We supply the necessary subtext. Gay need only to relate dispassionately his bike ride on the morning after Kristallnacht, and the sensitive reader understands that there are things that cannot be made explicit, but that must be inferred. He tells the reader his father's non-Jewish partner expropriated his business. He describes without emotion how, a top student, he was expelled from school at age 15. He describes the trashing of his relatives' dry goods store. He shows us a picture of his lovely blond aunt, who played "Germania" at a school pageant, and tells us she was killed by the Nazis. He describes how his family finally managed to escape at the eleventh hour and come to America. He relates how his father worked uncomplainingly at a physically taxing factory job. I would not cavil at what Gay does not include. Peter Gay has done us a great service by undertaking the wrenching job of writing this book, obviously for the sake of the historical record. He writes as a historian. Do not ask for passion. The feeling is inherent in the narrative, at least for the sensitive reader.