My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

Rating:
Summary: troubled feelings
Review: As a historian I was recently confronted with a request by one of my students to find memoirs of a young Jewish person who had lived in the 1930s in Germany. Looking for memoirs of that type in English proved to be difficult. Most childhood recollections are anyhow problematic - due to the time difference and the natural lapses in memory. Then I stumbled across Peter Gay's book. After having read the book I decided to go to Amazon to see once again what other people thought about the book.

Indeed, I found mixed reviews concentrating on Peter Gay as the scholar or Peter Gay as the survivor etc. I am German myself and on top of it a history professor who is teaching right now a course on Collaboration and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Europe. So, the book became interesting to me from several perspectives. While I did not learn anything new as far as his years in Berlin are concerned, his judgments on Germany and the Germans troubled me deeply. Although I could not share Peter Gay's eye for an eye statements - especially concerning the bombing of Dresden and the acts of Zionist terrorists in early Israel (terrorism remains terrorism - no matter what side) - I was once again confronted with my German identity. Since I am born in 1959 I had nothing to do with those times directly - nevertheless my compatriots overall did commit those crimes to humanity. Gay's statements troubled me in the sense that once again I asked myself to which extent could we Germans have prevented this from happening. What could the "ordinary German" - to remain in Christopher Browning's words - have done? The resistance of Gay's friend Busse did not do much either in preventing the Holocaust! So, what could have been the solution?

Rating:
Summary: Mixed Reaction To This Book
Review: I first became annoyed with the author for talking and intellectually telling us his story in the manner he does. He was one of the few Jews in Berlin who was able to continue his life with family, friends and others until late in the decade. He tells us but shares little about feelings or what it was like emotionally to be there. What did he feel attending a "Gymnasium" with non Jewish Germans long after most Jews could have. Was there conflict and ambivilance, guilt? The discription of his first return to Germany in the early 60's is gripping. Soon a profound sorrow and rage for this educated and intellectlal man overcame me. He indeed was a victim of the Holocaust as much as any other victim albiet he was lukier than some. As a psychiatrist I've treated many holocaust survivors and their children. He actually explains though indirectly that his ultimate survival as an integrated person lied in his ability to repress, supress and disconnect from much of the horror. I wanted something that he could not give me. I believe he is a hero for writing this book and exposing as much as does to himself and others. It is so easy to become angry with the victim. He has surely suffered his share in life. His survival is his badge of courage.
Jo Ann Terdiman

Rating:
Summary: Mixed Reaction To This Book
Review: I first became annoyed with the author for talking and intellectually telling us his story in the manner he does. He was one of the few Jews in Berlin who was able to continue his life with family, friends and others until late in the decade. He tells us but shares little about feelings or what it was like emotionally to be there. What did he feel attending a "Gymnasium" with non Jewish Germans long after most Jews could have. Was there conflict and ambivilance, guilt? The discription of his first return to Germany in the early 60's is gripping. Soon a profound sorrow and rage for this educated and intellectlal man overcame me. He indeed was a victim of the Holocaust as much as any other victim albiet he was lukier than some. As a psychiatrist I've treated many holocaust survivors and their children. He actually explains though indirectly that his ultimate survival as an integrated person lied in his ability to repress, supress and disconnect from much of the horror. I wanted something that he could not give me. I believe he is a hero for writing this book and exposing as much as does to himself and others. It is so easy to become angry with the victim. He has surely suffered his share in life. His survival is his badge of courage.
Jo Ann Terdiman

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling memoir
Review: I quite disagree with the negative comments being given. Of course, this book does not tend to be a historical study. This is meant to be a book about the author's psyche. It is also a statement about the Jewry in Pre-War German Society, an attack on those people that accuse the jews of being to slow in recognizing Hitler's monstruous 'Solution'. It concentrates on that. It is also a very thin book: 170 pages. It is not the type of sensitive study Peter Gay is known for, but that is inherent to the character of this personal memoir. That he did not serve in World War II is not at all important, in this study. It is a brilliant and thrilling ego-document. For Freud-haters it is a little bit dissapointing, the book is a product of an psycho-historian, and therefore contains a lot Freud theory, (which is very readable, though). But I am an Freud-addict too. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: enttäuschend!
Review: If you're familiar with PG, and assuming you've liked what you've read, you may be in for a rather unpleasant surprise. The prose, although not horrid, is sub-standard, chunky, and cliche ridden. This may be the effect of too much psycho-therapy, and he never lets up flogging dead freudian horses: Mother! , etc. Easily entertained Freud-heads may enjoy it, but his psychological epiphanies were so banal I began to question Gay's ability to perform the most rudimentary of introspective tasks, eg., knowing if one's bladder is full. The simplicity of the prose is neither crystalline nor minimalistic, it is just simple. Perhaps PG or his publisher felt that such a book concerning Nazis-Holocaust-Jews would be able to reach a much wider audience then say, 'Weimar Germany'. Therefore, it must be dumbed down. The content is likewise disappointing. In the context of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, his life is a cake-walk, and a dull one at that. One shouldn't blame PG for escaping horror, but he could at least write about the mundane in a style that does not augment its drabness. And to hear him complain about his less than ideal existence as a Jewish exile moved me to a certain degree of indignation. The basic lessons PG learns through life are as follows: -some people still don't like Jews. -Nazis are evil. -not all Germans are Nazis -not all Germans are evil -I am still very angry. -I hate Germans. This last lesson is the most disturbing, and not because it is distressing to find out that a Jewish survivor harbors hatred for Germans. But since much of PG's work touches on Germany and Germans, it calls much of his work into question. Even the best of historians have biases, but white-hot hatred is not conducive to scholarly accuracy.

If you want to read about a Jewish nerdling who emmigrated because of the Nazis and then wrote a lot of books and had a generally happy life before finally writing a bland memoir, this book is for you. Otherwise, especially perhaps if you like his other works, skim it at the library lest you embarrass your bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: the lucky one
Review: It is perhaps best to begin by saying what this deeply personal and moving account is not. It is not the memoir of a man whose mother or father "had been hauled to a concentration camp" (p. 22). This is the memoir of "one of the lucky ones" (p.22). It is nonetheless, a tale of a survivor.

It is the story of a man whose hormones forced him, a young adolescent Jew, to look at the hated newspaper Sturmer which portrayed Jews as evilly lusting after pure Aryan girls but which "could not leave sex alone." And while he looked at the images of the dangerous cockroach-like Jew lusting after pure beauties-him-he grew of age. Is it to be wondered at that he did not, as he tells us, lose his virginity until long after university?

And yet, Peter Gay was one of the lucky ones. He only lost two members of his family to the gas chambers. Both were blond and, in my opinion though not Peter's, rather pretty. One of them played Germania in school plays. The Nazis (or perhaps ordinary Germans? Or maybe Poles, Croats, Latvians?) gassed her. Peter, however, was not gassed. He was not even in a concentration camp. Peter was one of the lucky ones.

All he did was live in a world, a Berlin that became smaller and smaller. Not only could he not do certain things but more and more he could not go certain places, be on certain streets, or associate with certain people. Non-Jewish doctors for example. And the radio and announcements and the laws and the newspapers made it plain to him that he, a Jew, was a "blot on humanity" with whom "true" Germans should not associate. Gradually, his world became his immediate family and his aunts and uncles. Gradually, gradually he became a true pariah.

Because he had become a Jew by dictat. For Peter makes it clear that his family was (and took pride in being) an assimilated German family. They did not think of themselves as Jews or as pariahs. To them madmen were running their country: Germany. And they were the true Germans. None of this, of course, impressed the Nazis and since the madmen had the power, they, the true Germans, had to leave. With a sensitive boy who was suffering from depression. A boy who was one of the lucky ones.

And finally this is the story of the lucky boy grown into a man; a man who tries to reconcile himself to his Berlin. A boy/man who wants to desperately say (as did President Kennedy but in proper German) Ich bin Berliner but who cannot quite do so. A man who still roots for Hertha H.S.C. (a German soccer team) and who "regrets architectural adventurism that is working toward effacing the unique atmosphere of [Berlin]" (204) but who cannot quite say that he is a Berliner. A man who insists on being an American in the city of his birth; a man to whom Nazi Berlin clings like shards of Kristallnacht glass.

For, in the end this lucky boy/man is a survivor. Because the Nazis made him a Jew by dictat.

Rating:
Summary: Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones
Review: Many late 20th century Jews have at times asked the question, "When things started to get bad in Nazi Germany, why didn't you just LEAVE?" Peter Gay answers this question and others in a hard to put down but still disturbing summary of growing up in Germany in the 30's. Be sure and look at the name of the person to whom the book is dedicated. You will see that name again.

Rating:
Summary: A very personal view of Nazi Berlin
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A very personal view of Nazi Berlin
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones
Review: This book haunts me because I also grew up in a totalitarian society. As a child I felt the same feelings of helpnessness although the racial hatred was directed at black South Africans and not specifically at me, a Jew. Peter Gay's restrained anger is directed at so many people - the nazis, the ordinary Germans, his parents and American Jews. The nazis were psychopathic criminals, most Germans were accomplices, most were afraid and some were heroic (just the same mixture as the rest of us in similar circumstances;parents are parents and Prof. Gay has his mixed feeligs about them; American (and other western)Jews are another story. I remember my father's humiliation when he tried to enlist the help of western Jews to get his remaining sister out of the Soviet Union. We should not judge others, but I have also heard of projection of guilt. Let us rather blame German Jews for not leaving, for not resisting, than blame ourselves for not helping. The nazi criminals set in motion a series of events that destroyed most of the Jewish People of Europe and damaged emotionally those who survived. I applaud Peter Gay for writing this unadorned memoir that is largely free from psychobabble. His reminiscences have opened flood gates of my own childhood. But he has also helped me understand more about the plight of German Jews. Life is so complicated - one has only to read 'The Nazi Officer's Wife' and 'Stones from the River' and "To paint her life' and 'My German Question' to begin to realize how complicated life can be. We liberals and intellectuals and academics talk and think and psychoanalyse and the criminals in power continue to steal and rape and pillage and kill. So, clever people, what's the answer?