Peter Joachim Frohlich, who became Peter Jack Gay upon immigrating to the United States in 1941, was born in 1923 the only child of bourgeois parents.

Gay's brief reply to these questions is 'How could my father, with no foreign language and no marketable skills, live abroad at all?' His longer reply is the book itself. What makes these hostile questions all the more infuriating is that they barely conceal a knowing and derisive undertone: Whatever happened to you served you right.' 'Why did you wait for atrocities that were bound to come? Was your father paralyzed (and I am not inventing these snide inquiries) by fear that he might make less money abroad? Such questions seem reasonable if one disregards the world in which we lived and the efforts we made to escape. 'Why didn't you leave then and there?' Gay writes, paraphrasing people to whom he has told some of the outrages he and his family witnessed in Berlin. Later the phrase became shorthand for the issue of who was responsible for Jewish refugees, and then for the puzzlement - which so annoys Gay - over why Germany's Jews did not escape in time to save themselves. The title 'My German Question' is partly a play on 'the Jewish question,' an outmoded conversational signal by which polite anti- Semites once knew each other.

Gay describes the new book, a memoir of his adolescence in Berlin under the Nazi regime, as 'the story of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.' Each of these books is impressively learned and cosmopolitan, but none is as personal or moving as 'My German Question.' The one reason not to call 'My German Question' Peter Gay's best book is that this might seem to slight the great works that preceded it: his two-volume 'The Enlightenment: An Interpretation' (1966-69), the five volumes of 'The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud' (1984-98) and Gay's admirably evenhanded Freud biography.

My German Question by Peter Gay