Perhaps because he was a sometimes doted-upon, only child in an upper-middle-class, highly assimilated Jewish family whose members were able to leave before the “Final Solution,- Gay was partly insulated from some of the worst anti-Semitic and other horrors of the Third Reich. Rather, he spends some time commenting upon psychohistorian Peter Loewenberg’s view of the event as a Nazi-organized “degradation ritual” against the Jews. For example, even when describing the November 1938 national pogrom known as Kristallnacht, he gives short shrift to his own observations and reactions. All the intellectual and stylistic dimensions that make master historian and biographer Gay (author of the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience, etc.) such a superb academic writer-a somewhat detached, reflective, intellectually thorough and elegant approach’serve him less well when writing autobiographically. A disappointingly lackluster memoir focusing on the six boyhood years (1933-39) Gay spent in Nazi Berlin.
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