My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

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Cultural historian Peter Gay (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time) applies his considerable analytic skills to his memoir of his early years as a Jew in 1930s Berlin. Light-haired, blue-eyed, and culturally assimilated, the Frohlich family, as they were then known, convinced themselves that, despite the growth spurt of the Nazi party, anti-Semitism was on the wane among the German populous. Gay recalls that his daily life was relatively unaffected by the Totalitarian regime. That is until 1933, when, according to law, he became a Jew overnight. Soon the family found their living quarters shrinking and their awareness of their plight growing (though no one could possibly conceive of what would come). Though still a boy, Gay remembers that "one of the greatest moments in my life" came when the German women's relay team dropped their baton at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Then came Kristallnacht, which crystallized the family's sublimated fears and precipitated their flight from their home. After a certain suspenseful series of necessary deceits and circuitous travels, the family began their new life in America--12-year-old Peter spoke barely a word of English. Now, decades later, Gay employs his new native tongue to uncover the psychological impulses that fed his parents' decision to stay in Berlin as long as they did and governed his own behavior as a boy. The result is credible answer to the question: How could they have stayed?

Book Description

In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, antireligious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939. Peter Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner. In so doing he provides a curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting, different, well-worth reading.......2007-05-26

I usually make a point of not re-reading other Amazon reviews before writing my own review of a book I've just finished, but in this case, for some reason, I strayed from my usual practice...

I'm surprised that few of my fellow reviewers have mentioned how amusing Peter Gay's book is - this is the one aspect that drew me in when I finally got around to reading "My German Question" - his description of projecting anti-semitism on a German money changer when returning to Germany as an adult. I found his self-deprecating self-analysis very funny and very entertaining.

Many people, including non-jews, who pay attention to such things, feel ambivalent about modern Germany. I myself, an erstwhile German Literature scholar, have said things in anger that could probably get me arrested (I have since been told that it is actually illegal to call someone a Nazi in Germany today), to a native who had taken my seat at the Hofbrauhaus. One of the minor disappointments of my life was to discover that Germans today are not obsessed with the question of German collective guilt - that Germany exists only in the novels of Heinrich Boell, from what I can tell.

I agree with those who have noted that Gay has a tendency to tell us that times were tough, without really describing what specifically was tough about it, in detail. We read a lot about his strategies for coping with his isolation as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and I found this very interesting, but I missed seeing more description of what it was exactly he was coping with.

The book makes a very interesting companion to Wolfgang Samuel's "German Boy" and especially "Coming to Colorado" which I also read recently. It's ironic that both Samuels and Gay should end up in Denver, of all places.

One minor frustration with this paperback edition: the book is tall and thin, an annoying form factor that I did not enjoy holding. I probably would not buy this book if I had picked it up browsing in a bookstore, and I put off reading it after ordering from Amazon simply because I didn't like the shape. In the end however, I'm glad I overcame this deterrent!

Quiet, passionate and thoughtful memoir .......2005-07-12

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.

Mixed Reaction To This Book.......2003-12-12

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

the lucky one.......2003-08-13

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.

troubled feelings.......2001-03-14

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?

Average customer rating:

Met my expectations

Great sequel

even better than the first!

A Perfect Addition To Your Holocaust Collection

My Brodges of Hope

My Bridges of Hope : Searching for Life and Love After Auschwitz
Livia Bitton-Jackson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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I Have Lived A Thousand Years: Growing Up In The Holocaust

Hello, America: A Refugee's Journey from Auschwitz to the New World

Hello, America

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No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War

ASIN: 0689820267

Book Description

Elli Friedmann was fourteen years old in April 1945 when American soldiers liberated her from her Nazi captors and the harrowing year she spent at Auschwitz and other concentration camps where Jews were mass murdered.

At the opening of this book, Elli, her mother, and brother, recently reunited, return to their home in Czechoslovakia, expecting to pick up the lives they left behind. Instead, they confront the harsh realities of a house stripped bare, a town occupied by strangers, and the news that Daddy will never return. The anti-Semitism that still remains makes life there so oppressive that Elli and her family decide to immigrate to America -- a journey that will take six harrowing years of waiting in one temporary shelter after another.

Along the way Elli builds bridges of hope for other Holocaust survivors. She rescues Jewish orphans from rioting Slovak partisans, smuggles Jewish refugees to Palestine, and becomes a headmaster of a Jewish school, all the while struggling with her nightmarish past and questions about her future. Her teenage years, which culminate in a daring escape from behind the Iron Curtain, are a dizzying merry-go-round of danger, excitement, and love.

Thrilling, touching, and thought-provoking, this sequel to I Have Lived a Thousand Years offers a firsthand glimpse into post-war Europe. Elli's indomitable spirit shines through every page, making this an inspiring memoir.

Customer Reviews:

Met my expectations.......2007-01-18

Came close to what I expected. Not as powerful as her previous book (I HAVE LIVED A THOUSAND YEARS) but gives a good overview (specially the first 2/3) of what it was like coming back to a soon-to-be Communist (Stalinist) country behind the Iron Courtain, and what it took to flee it and keep on living in limbo for years - and all that in the teenage years.

Great sequel.......2005-01-06

This is one of the best sequels to a Shoah memoir I've read yet. Too many such sequels fall into the trap of simply recounting what happened next and aren't as compelling as the first book because there's no constant suspense and wondering what's going to happen next, which of these people being spoken about survived and who perished. In this sequel, though, there are a lot of interesting details about what happened next, such as Elli's involvement in the Bricha, the refugee house she liked to visit and hang out at, her work at a childrens' summer camp in the mountains, her training to become a teacher, and the long hard road she and her mother went through on their way from escaping from their home town to America before it was too late and the Iron Curtain closed permanently. It was also nice that each chapter was prefaced with the date or dates during which it transpired, so you had a real timeframe of things. The only minor complaint I have is about the languages used; in this book, the Friedmanns' town has returned to Czechoslovakian control and is in what is now the free nation of Slovakia, so they speak Slovakian, though in the first book, when they were in Hungarian hands, they seemed to be native speakers of Hungarian, and in the section of this book where Elli and her mother are being cross-examined when they're sneaking over the border with a transport of real Hungarians, Elli says they can make it, since they speak Hungarian as well as natives. I can't find any mention in the first book about the Friedmanns being Slovakians or speaking that language like their native tongue, but overall, apart from that minor unexplained detail, it's a really good sequel.

even better than the first!.......2004-07-14

I recommended the first book to two of the people I know, but what was dissapointing was that they never wanted to read the second book. I think that this was even better than the first, which was really good too! This was a really good addition to the first, very suspenseful and interesting. You only want the best for her.

A Perfect Addition To Your Holocaust Collection.......2004-01-13

My Bridges of Hope is a fascinating and well-written book that keeps you hooked from the first word to that last. Livia Bitton-Jackson gives you insight into what happened to those who were among the few to survive the Holocaust. The girl in the story is actually a younger Bitton-Jackson when she was growing up. This autobiography is more like a story than a recollection of one's past. The book is set in Czechoslovakia where before the war, Elli (Bitton-Jackson), her brother Bubi, and their parents lived. After the war, their beloved home feels abandoned and changed. Other settings of the book include Elli's apartment and various temporary homes that they live in on their way to finding hope in America.
They have survived the horrid concentration camps but return to find that their father and aunt both perished in the war. The book describes events that happened through June of 1945 to March 30 of 1951 to a young Jewish woman. Elli is 14 when the book starts out. While fighting her past, she helps out in a camp for orphans, helps refuges escape to Palestine, and continues her education. After her schooling, Elli becomes a teacher. Elli is strong-willed, confused, and hopefully. She is loving and smart. Elli's mother is a seamstress and wants to go to America because they can't stay in their homeland any longer. Her mother loves her children very much and is unfamiliar with the "newer" age. Bubi is Elli's older brother. He is a warm, caring, and affectionate. Elli looks up to him and often finds herself needing his comfort.
Although both her mother and brother want to go to America, Elli wants to join her friends in going to their "homeland" The dialog in the book was appropriate because she was the character. The words were probably even words she used herself. She keeps you interested because she adds in different languages and so it matches the period. Her style is wonderful and it flows and blends perfectly. She always made it so you understood what was happening. I think this book was written so she could move on and maybe start healing. I think she also wanted others to know what the Jews went through.
I think this is a wonderful book for young adults. It shows how a young girl changes into a confident woman while she is fighting her past and trying to live her future. It is a great book to add to anyone's Holocaust collection.

My Brodges of Hope.......2003-04-30

My Bridges of Hope is an excellent book about a girl named Elli returning from the dreadful Holocaust. Elli returns home expecting everything would be all right, but to her surprise everything has changed and she must too. The Friedmann family goes through many challenges when returning home and must also cope with the loss of family members. The family has to make many tough decisions and just as one problem is solved another comes along. They know they cannot stay in Czechoslovakia but where else would they go? They spend many years waiting and finally their chance comes to be sent to America to start a new life.
This is an excellent book and I recommend reading it. Even though the Holocaust was over Jews still had many challenges to overtake. Although we think the end of the war was the end of Jewish troubles it was not. This book gives one account of a person's life after the Holocaust.

Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824

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Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824 by Aleksandr Nikitenko [Paperback
A fascinating look at life in early 19th century Russia

Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824
Aleksandr Nikitenko
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0300097166

Book Description

Aleksandr Nikitenko, born into Russian serfdom in 1804, almost miraculously gained his freedom as a young man, thirty-seven years before serfdom was abolished in the Russian Empire. His compelling autobiography -- here translated into English for the first time -- is one of the very few ever written by a former serf. Nikitenko describes the tragedy, despair, unpredictability, and astounding luck of his youth, bringing to life as never before the experience of a serf in nineteenth-century Russia.

Customer Reviews:

Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824 by Aleksandr Nikitenko [Paperback.......2005-09-18

good

A fascinating look at life in early 19th century Russia.......2001-10-30

What a fun book! The author tells of his life as a serf in the Imperial Russia of the early 19th Century. Admittedly, his was not the life of a typical serf--he was well educated, eventually being emancipated by his "owner" (and the description of this process is in itself fascinating). The great part of this book is in the details--the descriptions of the people, places, and interactions of his childhood; the reader cannot help sympathizing with his poor father who tries over and over again to make the best of his situation, yet is trapped by his social standing. This work is a great addition to the current understanding of life in Russia during the period.

Stories from My Life: Cassandra Walker Talks to Teens About Growing Up

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Stories from My Life: Cassandra Walker Talks to Teens About Growing Up
Cassandra Walker , and Cassandra Walker Simmons
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You're Next!: Outrageous Stories from My Life that Could Change Yours

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You're Next!: Outrageous Stories from My Life that Could Change Yours
Greg Stier
Manufacturer: Tyndale House Publishers
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Up to 50% of born-again teens forsake Christianity by their senior year of college. In You’re Next! author Greg Stier uses personal, real-life stories to help teens grow in their faith and equip them with a "ready defense"--30 core truths to help prepare them for life in the world.

An autobiography, from my youth up;: Personal reminiscences, (Gerritsen women's history)

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An autobiography, from my youth up;: Personal reminiscences, (Gerritsen women's history)
Margaret Elizabeth Munson Sangster
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FROM MY YOUTH UP
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From My Youth Up (Signal Lives)
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From My Youth Up, Personal Reminiscences: An Autobiography

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From My Youth Up, Personal Reminiscences: An Autobiography
Margaret E. Sangster
Manufacturer: Fleming H. Revell Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000L1ZQ3Y

Book Description

ennifer Olsson had a successful fly-fishing career in add-ition to being a wife, mother, and co-owner of a tackle shop in Bozeman, Montana, when she got an invitation to Sweden. A riverkeeper named Lars was trying to attract attention to his river, Idsjstrmen, which was being rescued from abuse and overfishing. There she fell in love-with the country, with the river, and with its keeper. Life was realigned. Jennifer and Lars Olsson would spend half their time in Sweden, half in Montana. For Jennifer, moving to Lars's rural village seemed the stuff of fairy-tale romance-until she and her son Peter were hit by culture shock. Starting a life with a Swedish riverkeeper-and, for Lars, with an American fly-fishing guide-would take patience. Luckily, anyone who fishes has patience in abun-dance. Here is a memoir about second chances and not letting them go.

Customer Reviews:

Another Swede speaks out.......2006-01-29

Gunnar's (a typical Swede) review criticized this book for being narrow-minded, critical and cliché about Swedes and for encouraging stereotypes about "bipolar herring-munchers who live deep inside the forest in little red houses without indoor plumbing."

Well, I'm Swedish, and I had a completely different reaction. Reading it made me feel like I was at home - it brought back so many wonderful memories and I felt it truly captured the Swedish spirit. Where he saw criticism of Swedes from the author, I instead saw respect and admiration. Swedes are different than others, but that's not necessarily a negative thing.

And I completely disagree that there should have been more about the son. As a matter of fact, I could have done without the emotional drama and lovey-dovey bit all together.

All I need is some good fishing, and to feel like I'm back in Sweden at Midsommar.

Waiting for the Sequel..........2004-11-30

Jennifer Olsson's Fly Fishing the River of Second Chances is not so much a book about fly fishing as it is a travel memoir of the secrets of Sweden as seen through an American's eyes.
Jennifer's chapters are pieces of the simplistically complicated Swedish life. She comes to this rural area above Stockholm with her son to start a new relationship with a Swedish fly fisherman. She has to adjust to this culture in a rental cottage that lacks the most basic necessities. Her choices are few at the local store but Jennifer learns this is a metaphor for all things Swedish, that fewer choices are better. Jennifer writes with the cadence of Swedish life - uncomplicated and unhurried. She describes the people whose lives she enters with the same casualness that Swedes have toward one another. Swedes like to know everything about everyone without letting on they know. Jennifer knows and she tells us. Mrs. Olsson does take us fly fishing occasionally. But the reader will not learn any fishing secrets from this professional fisherwoman. Her observations are of the beauty of the grayling, an indigenous fish to the waters of Gimdalen, and to the unusual Swedish characters who fish Lars and Jennifer's stream.
It is good to read that not all things Swedish are likable to Jennifer Olssen no matter how ingrained in this Scandinavian life they are, as her experience with eating surströmming reminds us. We cheer when she is invited to go moose hunting but refuses to carry or shoot a gun, and we empathize with her at the death of calf as she strokes its warm head. She takes us to a barn dance where dating rituals are a throwback to a time before. We walk with Jennifer through the pine forests across beds of fir needles and bathe in the silence and the beauty. We hunt for berries and mushrooms, and battle mosquitoes the Swedes are naturally resistant to. After finishing this book, I hope that Jennifer Olssen takes us back when she returns to her renovated cottage to uncover the next layer of life in Gimdalven.

As for the review by gunnarswede, he must be Norwegian.

Reinforcing the stereotype.......2004-02-26

In case you didn't know: Swedes are bipolar herring-munchers who live deep inside the forest in little red houses without indoor plumbing. The Swedish men always prefer to live with their mom until she dies - sometimes longer... In some cases though, in their mid-forties when they hit a mid-life crisis, they go to Thailand to buy a bride and bring home to the mosquito infested village. Swedes rarely say anything at all, if they do it is something shallow about the weather or expressing the urge to get stupid-drunk on moonshine. Swedes also hunt or collect everything they eat i.e. moose and lingonberries. Swedes are indeed primitive, but really harmless and fun to watch. This is the portrait Jennifer Olsson paints of Sweden.

The general problem with this book is that Olsson hasn't bothered to look outside the little village she resides in to get an idea of what life is like in the rest of Sweden, but she frequently makes statements like "Three out of four Swedes prefer moonshine, fermented herring and cloudberries over burgers, fries and a super-sized coke". The entire book gives a disturbingly distorted view of life in Sweden.

If I set out to replicate her mission from a Swedish perspective I would have to abandon my dysfunctional family in Sweden and move in with a salmon fishing guide in Alaska preferably in a native Indian territory. Then I would report to my fellow Swedes about the wildly exotic, "Americans" living in teepee's hunting buffalo on dirt bikes, making a living on revenues from tax-free cigarette sales and having wild parties in the chief's double-wide - and then claim that:" This is America and this is how Americans live and interact with each other!

Instead of dozens of anecdotes about all the "cute-but-weird-Swedes" and their habits it would have been nice to know more about the fishing, how your son reacted to this drastic change in environment and your friends responses. Now we are stuck with an overly ego-centric Bill Bryson-like burlesque but without the depth, irony and humor he masters.

I'm sorry to break it to you - but almost anyone can join a moose hunt if they ask politely and promise to shut up for the duration of the hunt.

Gunnar - a typical Swede

Honest and funny.......2003-11-19

This book is a lovely memoir. It's honest, funny, poignant and filled with great details about life (and food!) in rural Sweden. It is also supremely optimistic--about the possibilities of love and the possibilities of rehabilitating a stream that had been damaged by years of logging abuse. This is a story about restoration, personal and environmental. A very enjoyable read.

Fly Fishing the River of Second Chances.......2003-11-17

Jennifer puts something for every reader in this delightful novel. She brings back memories of family time; both good and bad. She entices the reader into the challenge of starting life over again, under any circumstance. The aspect of fly fishing is generously covered throughout, but one doesn't have to be a fan to completely indulge the novel. Hats off to Jennifer and Lars.

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