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Peter Jack Gay was born Peter Joachim Froehlich in Berlin on June 20, 1923. Having left in 1939, Gay describes his return in 1961 poignantly. Already anxious on entry into Germany, on the road they passed by an anti-Semitic demonstration. Very soon after, on handing his passport to a young clerk he perceived that she had looked at him with “murderous anti-Semitism” (p. 5). But in fact he recounts, “the clerk dealt with me as she dealt with everyone else: correctly and impersonally … [even with] boredom … [Gay recognizes his projection:] this clerk did not hate me; she barely registered my existence. I hated her” (p. 6). He wondered then had he accepted this invitation to return to Berlin too hastily? But is it not so immensely reasonable that he would in fact not ever have been sufficiently prepared to address “[His] German Question” without the stirrings the visit roused in him?
Gay takes us to Berlin. Once there, he introduces us with delighful morsels to his family of the time. He narrows the focus of this Memoir on his life in Berlin during 1933-1939, when he was from 10 to 16 years old. He is right “One brings everything one knows, everything one is, to the trauma when it hits” (p. 22). As Gay notes, one of the things he was during his life under the Nazis was a Jewish boy whose “upbringing was not simply irreligious; it was antireligious” (p. 50). This position seemed especially well reasoned by his father, a business man well loved and admired by his brilliant son, a man who, leaning on Karl Marx, would say that “religion, every religion, failed to make people less cruel or more moral. Quite the contrary, it provided alibis for egotism, bigotry, … and the release of aggressive impulses” (p. 51). His nuclear family was “without denomination” (p. 52). And confronted by an older Jewish teenager who tried to persuade him to have a bar mitzvah, 12 year old Peter in self defense declared “the Jewish religion mean[s] nothing