SOURCE: Amsel, Anja. Review of My German Question, by Peter Gay. Political Quarterly 70, no. 3 (July–September 1999): 355–56.

In the following review, Amsel offers a negative assessment of My German Question, asserting that the memoir offers little new information to the existing body of Holocaust literature and fails in “touching the heart” of the reader.

A subtext to the official histories of Germany in the thirties is the considerable collection of personal memoirs, autobiographies and diaries of survivors of the Nazi regime. The gamut embraces people who were in opposition to the system, those who admit to Nazism at the time and who have now reviewed their past and, more poignantly, the accounts by the true survivors, obviously predominantly Jews: some from the most extreme excesses of the camps, others who were in Germany up to 1939 and then managed to escape. My German Question falls into the last group. This...