SOURCE: Kuehn, Heinz R. “A Separation of Spheres.” Sewanee Review 107, no. 3 (summer 1999): R80–R85.

In the following review of My German Question, Kuehn praises Gay for his intense self-reflection expressed in the memoir and the discussion of his psychological survival strategies as a youth in Nazi Germany.

This is not an autobiography; it is a memoir that focuses on the six years, 1933 to 1939, I spent as a boy in Nazi Berlin. … This book records one man's story, the story of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.

These are the first sentences in Gay's preface to My German Question. He wrote them in 1997, at the age of seventy-four, when he could look back at a distinguished career as a cultural historian and author of numerous books that include a five-volume work on the bourgeois experience, several works on Freud, and a biography of Voltaire. By mentioning these...