SOURCE: Schwartz, Amy E. Review of My German Question, by Peter Gay. Wilson Quarterly 22, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 100.

In the following review of My German Question, Schwartz praises Gay's memoir for its focus on the psychological effects of Nazism on both Gay's personal development and on the population of German-Jews in Berlin.

Historian Peter Gay introduces this memoir [My German Question] of his youth in Nazi Berlin and his family's forced emigration with an epigraph from Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr. Faustus: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” In adding to the sky-high stack of Holocaust-related memoirs of recent years, the eminent chronicler of the Victorian era seeks to create something more complex and subtle than merely another tale of suffering. Gay wants to sketch two essentially interior landscapes: first, the psychological and behavioral effects of what he experienced during those years of ceaseless Nazi...