Hitler, Freud and Mr Pooter
Alan Judd
MY GERMAN QUESTION by Peter Gay
Yale, £15.50, pp. 208 This book is about the author's child- hood and adolescence with his Jewish parents in pre-war Nazi Berlin. His family was lucky because they got out and so missed the Holocaust in its full horror. Mind you, to call someone lucky who was legislated into becoming a despised stranger in the land of his birth, from which he had to flee with nothing and which butchered his relatives and scarred him for the rest of his life, is itself some small indi- cation of the scale of the horror. For we who were spared the nightmare, it always bears repetition. Gay is good on the humiliations of daily life, the remorseless bureaucratic process by which loyal Jewish Germans were stripped of all rights, freedoms, dignities and possessions and turned into non- humans, thus making it so much easier to dispose of them by number, by decree, by fiat, by shoulder-shrugging, like the car- casses of so many long-dead rats. Gay is a writer who remembers and his description of the decisive Kristallnacht and the events that followed, when the pogrom flared into nationwide violence against Jews and their properties, is the best part of the book.
But he doesn't remember everything and his frank admission that 'the advent of the Third Reich is a blank in my mind — a conspicuous instance of repression at work' is a reminder of that part of the book that is not its best, From early on, we become aware that Mr Gay is very interested in himself. His iteration of the fact that he was so well behaved that his parents never spanked him — apparently another indica- tion of repression — is one among many warning signs. Page by page, one after another, the usual suspects appear — the apparent repressions, the intriguing projec- tions, the anxieties and antagonisms, the traumas that survive 'the soothing touch of love, even psychoanalysis', the sub- terranean streams, the discovery of his mother 'entrenched in my superego' until it is clear that we have a case of full- blown Freudianism. Nothing is what it seems, everything is a cover for something else and everything about oneself is of con- suming interest, The Real Repression the overwhelming horror that people actu- ally suffered — seems of less interest to Gay than his own personal repressions and reactions, all part of the fascinating story of how it influenced him in becoming what he now is, a distinguished American histo- rian.
This is a legitimate subject for a book, but it needs careful handling in order not to make us feel that the function of history is to provide psychoanalytic material for the author. That deadly combination of ingenuity and naivety, essential to the enthusiast, is accompanied by the fell shade that haunts so many autobiographers the ghost of Mr Pooter. Imagine that Mr Pooter had read Freud (and even written books about him) and you will know how parts of this book read.
There is of course a problem in criticis- ing books by people who have experienced what most of us must hope never even to dream of: the respectful feeling that we must tiptoe round them. That may be put aside, though, when their self-concern so obviously outweighs the momentous events they lived through. It is usually more inter- esting to read about what happened than what was felt, and when such monstrous things happened around you it seems a dereliction to concentrate on yourself, even though your own small part of the story is all that is directly available to you.
Nevertheless, there is a theme that strengthens as the book goes on, that is not a facet of Gay's psyche and about which he writes with controlled, understandable anger. This is the questioning and hostility he has encountered in America, particular- ly from American Jews, who blame him and his like for not fighting back, for not getting out earlier, for not foretelling the future — in fact, for being victims. As he explains, when the madness descended it was at first not credible and then too late. So far as people like his admirable father were concerned, they were the Germans and it was Germany that left them, not the other way round. Also, the forces that bear down on you in a totalitarian state have to be felt to be fully appreciated. In an aside that should encourage hope for recovery from his Freudian spell, Gay says of his questioners that he 'could cheerfully throttle them'. That would be a fine, unrepressed contribution to the debate and it would be nice to see him making more of them.
It is Mr Pooter, however, who has the last line. In thanking his wife, the author tells us that her reading every version of his manuscript 'greatly contributed to my self- understanding as we unceasingly discussed my all-consuming topic'. That just about says it all.
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