Nonetheless, Gay successfully explains how comprehensive Nazi ideology was in affecting people's lives. The counter example is kristallnacht when members of his family had businesses destroyed and his father went into hiding for a short time. In many ways, he world was quite isolated from the events that popular culture focus on leading up to World War II. He never suffered direct physical mistreatment by a Nazi officer. Gay never experienced a concentration camp. What makes this book fascinating is how far the path strays from the stereotypical representation of life in the 1930s. In the 1990s, Gay chose to write an autobiographical examination of life as a Jew in Nazi Berlin. I first encountered Gay in a history class on 19 th Century Europe with the book Schnitzler's Century. He is probably most well-known for his extensive writings on Sigmund Freud. Gay is a respected European historian who has written extensively on cultural questions in Modern Europe. However, unlike many Jewish people in that world, Gay and his family succeeded in escaping in 1938 to Cuba, eventually emigrating to the United States. He was an adolescent in the 1930s and obviously was severely affected by the Nazi regime and their treatment of the Jews. Peter Gay grew up a Jewish individual in Berlin.

However, there are definite limits to the work for the non-academic reader. It adds a direction to German history that I think has been little covered in the scholarship. I'm glad to have read Peter Gay's addition to the literature on life in Nazi Germany. However, I decided to assign it as a choice for my students' book review this semester and knew that I needed to have read it before my students. It has sat on my shelf for the past two years because I rarely pick up a non-fiction book to read for enjoyment.

The book was being used in a history course and the topic caught my attention. I picked up My German Question at a university bookstore a few years ago.

My German Question by Peter Gay