A review by Ethan A. Bayer
The people one usually calls "victims" of the Holocaust are those who suffered through the animal-like conditions of the concentration camps. A complete other group of people is often left out, but who deserve the title just as much. This group consists of the exiles-those who were forced to leave their homes and everything they knew because of the mounting anti-Semitism in Germany. Peter Gay belongs to this group, and in his autobiography
My German Question he walks through his past looking for answers and for healing.
Throughout the book, Gay refers to many things as "my question," but the question that encompasses all these is a question to his parents: Why did we stay so long in Germany, when we knew that leaving was inevitable? Perhaps this is indirectly asking something much more entrenched in who he is: Why did I have to go through this awful situation, and live with the consequences for the rest of my life? Gay is wise in not putting all the blame for the profound emotional effects of wartime Germany onto his parents. At one point he even says blatantly that he and his parents were on excellent terms, that "the absence of all anger at my parents must arouse suspicion" (p.40).
In recounting his childhood, Gay specifically recalls instances when leaving would be the optimum decision, and yet the family does not budge. Part of this is because Hitler's threats were oftentimes so "utterly implausible" (p.112) in dimension that they were easy to laugh off, seen more as a child's fantasies than the chilling omens they were. Many other pieces of logic factored into the decision to stay; the family line showed only a hint of Jewish blood, and atheism, not the Jewish religion, was practiced. Certainly this family will not be labeled with a star of David! They built a system of excuses that rested on an unsteady foundation-Hitler's leniency. As the world witnessed, this man had no leniency or mercy for anyone, not even assimilated part-Jews.
A force not so obvious, but perhaps even more influential in their decision to stay for so long is the combination of survival tactics they constructed for themselves. Sports, soccer in particular, enthralled Peter, as well as brought him closer to his father. It served as an outlet for their energy-a place where the intense disgust and hatred for Hitler was transformed into a roaring energy from the stands in support for their team. With this outlet, Peter built himself a fortress to block out Germany's harsh reality, because "the kind of attention soccer demands could banish even Hitler from my thoughts" (p.100).
Peter and his father also found asylum in stamp collecting. When voices from all sides were telling them they were useless, a hobby gave them purpose and value. It created relationships with others that had nothing to do with one's ethnicity, but rather wholly with one's passions. Collecting stamps, along with sports, grounded the family in a world where success and happiness was somewhat controllable. And while these survival techniques stabilized emotions and sanity, one has to wonder if, in the end, they provided as much benefit in the long-term as they did for those few years in Nazi Germany. If these fascinations helped make life in Berlin bearable, could they also have been the reason why they did not leave sooner? If the family had not had these fortifications to the outside, would they have been more alert to the impending disaster? I am not sure if Gay realizes the negative consequences that sports and stamp collecting possibly had, or if he remembers them only in a positive light.
As they rejoiced in the wins of a soccer team or the discovery of a rare stamp, so also did Germans celebrate the small victories against Hitler. By concentrating on a small stride backwards, though, they fail to notice the huge jumps forward that his regime made during the 1930s. They blew up the petty gains to such gigantic proportions that they obscured reality. Thus, many Germans in a sense fooled themselves into believing that Hitler's dictatorship would short-lived.
In this autobiography, Gay lays out all the puzzle pieces of his childhood to search for the answers to his question. I believe that these strands of stories do hold elucidations, but in some cases he does not focus on the right ones. Hence, he leaves the book still feeling incomplete, but knowing that by writing his quest down on paper, the answers are closer to illumination.