SOURCE: Ahr, Johan. Review of My German Question, by Peter Gay. Modern Judaism 20, no. 1 (February 2000): 116–23.

In the following review, Ahr offers a positive assessment of My German Question, describing it as “an eloquent memoir whose strengths far outnumber its weaknesses.”

The prolific Peter Gay, long Professor of History at Yale University, currently Director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, usually points his readers in the direction of the heroic, where civilization can be exalted. With the publication of My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, an eloquent memoir whose strengths far outnumber its weaknesses, all of us have now been invited to understand this academic's appealing if at times also limiting bonhomie, his fascination with the likes of Voltaire and Sigmund Freud as champions of progressive reform.¹ Although a worthy, profound interpreter of Enlightenment thought, Gay nevertheless has tended to...