Peter Gay
In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939â€”â€œthe story,â€ says Peter Gay, â€œof a poisoning and how I dealt with it.â€Â  With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelingsâ€”then and nowâ€”toward Germany and the Germans.,Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family: as a schoolboy at the Goethe Gymnasium he experienced no ridicule or attacks, his fatherâ€™s business prospered, and most of the familyâ€™s non-Jewish friends remained supportive. He devised survival strategiesâ€”stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the likeâ€”that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938â€“39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the familyâ€™s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gayâ€™s accountâ€”marked by candor, modesty, and insightâ€”adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.
History,Autobiography,Memoir,Nonfiction,War,World War II,Biography,Autobiography,World War II,Holocaust,Biography,Cultural,Germany,War,Academic,School
My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin