A Season in Hell

The cover of the review copy of this book reads: “My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.” On the title page, however, the book’s title is different: “A Season in Hell: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.” A publishing glitch, but also an inadvertently profound comment. A season in hell is an absolute experience. Yet Peter Gay has undertaken to investigate its categorical quality by exploring its finer shadings. Therefore, I’m not sure the contradiction in titles should be emended in the book’s finished version. It is built into Gay’s task.

Several months ago an Austrian newsmagazine asked me to write an autobiographical piece on just the subject to which Gay has devoted his book. The only difference lies in the context--Viennese, in my case, not Prussian.

Like the protagonist of Gay’s memoir, I was a Jewish boy in Mitteleuropa whose pubescence was a troubled mix of women’s legs and “Heil Hitler!” shouts; who escaped with his family to the New World; who lost his accent together with his original name; who came of age intellectually in the English language to become, eventually, an American byline.

All this, on the outside. Inside, of course, Peter Frohlich haunts Peter Gay just as Fritz Mandelbaum ghosts on in Frederic Morton. And Peter Gay recollecting Peter Frohlich’s Berlin, as well as Frederic Morton looking back on Fritz Mandelbaum’s Vienna, are faced by the question: Can we forgive our native cities for turning our youth into a season in hell? To which both Gay and Morton must respond with the ambiguity nourishing us as writers: Well, that’s our German (and / or Austrian) question, two sides and all.

In “My German Question,” Gay pursues the answer for more than 200 pages. Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let-up, powered by its unremitting candor. He has no patience with himself or the one-dimensionality of victims. His account does not reduce young Frohlich to yet another standard little lamb being herded toward slaughter. Quite the contrary. Gay is something of a nerdy teacher’s pet, a pedant in knee pants, a bit humorless, quite somber if not downright solemn.

His parents appear in a more affectionate light, which before long illuminates every wart. Father Frohlich seems unfailingly supportive but in a manner that shapes his child into a prematurely finished, stiff and perfect imitation adult. Mother Frohlich’s faith in her son’s superior intelligence is unsmothering, restrained. Her restraint, though, inflates into remoteness; for a long time it chills Gay’s emotions, especially those that might otherwise have kindled to a girl’s smile. It is through their imperfections that humans recognize each other’s humanity. It is through the Frohlich’s fallibilities, conjured by Gay in such tender detail, that we slip into their skin as they tremble and hope and bumble and cringe their way through the Nazi gauntlet, and stumble at last into survival on a steamer bound for Cuba.

These Frohlichs touch us because Gay makes us know them by their middle-class nerve ends, as flawed sufferers, just like you or me. Thus he proves, not so incidentally, the insensitivity of a charge often leveled at German Jews of their generation: They went too gently into that evil night; they lingered too long on lethal ground. That ground, after all, the very ground on which the SS boots marched toward them, was the only earth of their roots.

“My German Question” teaches another complexity. It shows that, yes, Germany was vile to German Jewry, but (pace, Daniel Goldhagen) a number of Germans were guardian angels to a number of Jews. Gay dedicates his pages to Emil Busse, an Aryan business associate of his father’s who helped the Frohlichs during several scary moments at considerable risk to himself.

Here is a complexity that perplexes. Had Germany been uniformly monstrous, exile from it would have been easier. But then exile is always a precarious estate. Often it is spiritually irreversible even after the cause forcing it has vanished. As for the exile’s landfall elsewhere, the heart is not easily naturalized. Gratitude toward one’s haven cannot be equated with the native’s sense of belonging.

During his refugee years in New York, the Viennese essayist Alfred Polgar wrote: Ein Emigrant verliert seine Heimat und erhalt dafur zwei Fremde (“An emigrant loses his homeland and gains instead two foreign countries”). Not estrangement but stranger-ness simmers in many a line of Gay’s story. So does the plaint of the Polish poet whose name escapes me but whose line I’ll never forget: “Only he who has lost his fatherland will truly love it.”

That Gay can explore such paradoxes in the soul is remarkable. He is neither a poet nor a novelist but an eminent historian. True, part of his oeuvre has significantly engaged Freud’s impact on our times; he is no babe in the psyche’s darker woods. Still, his style leans to the formal side, obviously more at home in tracing the dynamics of an epoch than in evoking intimate nuances. Yet he often manages to do both here, sometimes with an engaging awkwardness reminiscent of Edward Gibbon’s autobiography. By revealing personality he lights up history--the historic spasm, in particular, which ambushed, stained, formed him and which also ambushed, stained, formed me. Peter Frohlich, Fritz Mandelbaum salutes you.