SOURCE: Cowley, Jason. “Stolen Identity.” New Statesman 129, no. 4470 (24 January 2000): 57–58.

In the following review, Cowley praises My German Question as a “dignified memoir” which convincingly addresses the question of why German-Jews didn't foresee the dangers facing them in Nazi Germany.

Who, at some time, perhaps on catching a glimpse of themselves in a shop window, has not thought: who on earth is that? Who has then not gone on to wonder about the person they might have become, perhaps wanted to become, the person who occupies the shadowy margins of another, imaginary life. Peter Gay, the distinguished American cultural historian, has long been haunted by thoughts of a shadow life, a life that was wrenched from him when his family belatedly escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939. More accurately, he has been haunted by the very “Germanness” that was taken from him. “Two dates frame this initial exploration,” he writes...