The Story of a Poisoning

...Faustus —"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it"— points to the continuing burden of Gay's "German Question," whose traumatic character may have eased over the years but has not disappeared...

...The second salient dimension of Gay's ongoing "German Question" involves his connection to postwar Germany and the Germans—a not surprisingly ambivalent relationship that he has worked hard to resolve...

...Yet what is remembered and recorded—"the outrages I witnessed and the insults I swallowed"—clearly reads like an installment of an autobiographyin-progress...

...Indeed, they account for much of his narrative's interest and appeal...

...Trained in psychoanalytic theory, he often dissects his youthful feelings, intellectual preoccupations and behavior in nondoctrinaire Freudian terms...

...If not for those laws and the ultimate repudiation they represented, the Fröhlich family would have been content to blend into the mainstream of German society...

...The origins and nature of the question are easy to identify: "I had blue eyes and a straight nose, brown hair and regular features—in short, like my parents, I did not 'look Jewish.'" For all of that, the young Peter Fröhlich suffered the daily indignities of being a Jew in Hitler's Germany, even as he had the good fortune of tolerant teachers at school, enjoyed himself at soccer matches, and experienced the thrill of attending the 1936 Olympic games...

...They were Germans...

...My parents were modern liberals," Gay tells us...

...Through frequent trips to his native land and especially through the discovery of "good Germans," Gay believes he has managed to reintegrate Germany into his personal and professional life...

...he no longer feels as uneasy as he once did in the company of his former countrymen...

...the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were" —the Fröhlichs knew it was time to leave...

...At least that was so until November 9, 1938, and the outbreak of Kristallnacht, "a collective orgy hard to believe and impossible to forget...

...Moreover, the emotions that repeatedly break onto the page—anger, fury, frustration, loathing, contempt, and a notable desire for revenge—give the elegance of Gay's prose its special bite and indicate the persistent, highly charged nature of his engagement with the "German Question...

...Gay also insists his book is not an "apology," but significant stretches of his prose carry an apologetic tone, albeit an aggressive and not an abject one...

...In fact, he hardly addresses them...

...One is his open contempt for people who have "berated those German Jews for attempting to blend into German society and for not emigrating sooner...

...The family arrived in Cuba in 1939, and two years later settled in the United States...

...To be continued" —promise more...

...Two issues concern him in particular...

...For the author's father, displacement was an outrage he could not come to grips with: "Hitler had broken him...

...By his own admission, he has kept at a distance from any significant confrontation with the history of the Holocaust, has avoided seeing Claude Lanzmann's important film Shoah, has not wanted to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and refused to accompany his wife on a visit to Auschwitz...

...It is almost as if the "other Jews" have come to supplant the "Germans," who previously held primacy of place in the author's pained psyche and now keep alive his fury...

...While there is no doubting the value of his reconciliation on the personal level, Gay has been notably less successful in coming to terms with the larger issues surrounding the Jewish catastrophe under Hitler...

...Some of their relatives were less fortunate in obtaining visas and ended up in the gas chambers...

...Nevertheless, he confesses that "some 60 years later, fragments of Nazi Berlin still sometimes haunt me and will haunt me to the day I die...

...Peter Joachim Israel Fröhlich Anglicized his name to Peter Jack Gay...

...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Borens Jewish Studies Program...

...They manifested an "uncompromising rejection of any tribal identification," he explains...

...It is a pity, for the larger historical and cultural aspects of his story go unexplored in favor of the advancement of personal ease and adjustment...

...Gay himself, younger and more resilient, made his way through the educational system of his new country and went on to a highly successful career as a respected academic historian and writer...

...Living under a dictatorship did not entail living consistently at a level of high tension," Gay recalls...

...Finally, although the author asserts that "over the years I have managed largely to free myself from the poisons in my past and go my own way," his frequent confessions of rage show that the detoxification process is hardly complete...

...His disclaimers aside, the creative elements of autobiographical invention are evident in Gay's projections of himself as a former Berliner, an adoptive American, a professional historian, and a marginal Jew...

...Israel" was a gift from the Nazis, a symbolic brand imposed on Jewish males under the racial laws that singled out the Jews and set them apart...

...instead he merely alludes generically to "other Jews...

...Indiana University When the eminent American historian Peter Gay left his native Berlin in 1939, his name was Peter Joachim Israel Fröhlich...

...Ambivalence, openly acknowledged, is everywhere felt...

...It is odd to encounter a historian of Gay's background and accomplishments who has taken so little interest in the mass murder of European Jewry...

...The "German Question" in the title has several sides to it, but before I describe them, a few words of mild dissent...

...Hitler had other ideas about people like the Fröhlichs, however, and, as the author notes, in 1933 "we had suddenly become Jews...

...These were empty slogans to them—and hence to me...

...Jewish awareness...

...Gay insists in his Preface that what he has written is not an autobiography but a memoir of his six years (1933-39) as a boy in Nazi Berlin...

...His father continued to thrive in business longer than expected, and for their pleasure the family went on motor trips throughout the country...

...The process of becoming an American began immediately, but the trauma of living for six years in "that great prisonhouse called Germany' did not so quickly abate...

...The idea of attachment to a social community or a common heritage was virtually meaningless...

...Gay's story of this transformation and the many ordeals that accompanied it—"the story of a poisoning"—makes for gripping reading...

...The general atmosphere was hostile, most Jews suffered, but life was manageable for those who had luck and the right instincts for surviving under such conditions...

...On numerous occasions, Gay turns prickly and combative toward these critics...

...The epigraph from Christopher Marlowe's Dr...

...One looks forward to future installments of Peter Gay's autobiography...

...It is not sentimental to say that he died of a broken heart...

...Much of Gay's book is given over to collecting these fragments and to tracing their impact on him...

...Thereafter, despite their strongly felt connectedness to thennative land—"We were Germans...

...Jewish identity...

...Surely Gay has his reasons for this avoidance, but they render his rapprochement with Germany an act of "self-liberation," a purely private affair...

...In this country, the "German Question," which in Berlin was really a "Jewish Question," took on other facets...

...His impatience is understandable, yet it surfaces so frequently and with such vehemence as to make one wonder who the real targets of his contempt actually are...

...Apart from a passing reference to Gershom Scholem, the German-Israeli historian of ideas, he does not mention any names...

...And yet, the book's last words —"Fortsetzung folgt...