Weimar Culture : the Outsir as Insir Peter Gay (Seeker » 23 May 1969 » The Spectator Archive

Contents:

• WEIMAR CULTURE : THE OUTSIR AS INSIR PETER GAY (SEEKER
• PETER GAY (1923–2015)
• WEIMAR CULTURE - GAY,
• BOOK REMENDATN: WEIMAR CULTURE, BY PETER GAY

WEIMAR CULTURE : THE OUTSIR AS INSIR PETER GAY (SEEKER

The ste system William H's Germany pro- voked the outsir to creative prOtt and then, as Profsor Gay puts , the Weiar Republic turned the tabl and the outsir was put to mand or somethg like . Gay's, study serv, special praise for, s emphasis, upon the importance of the atmosphere of, Berl_ the tellectual and artistic life of the Weimar Republic, and also for s emphasis upon the ntributn of Herich and Thomas Mann. Profsor Gay's acunt of German life the 'twenti provis stctive parisons wh the problems of our own time, the nflict between generatns, the applitn of psychiatry, and so on.

Dcribed by Gay as a “self-ma man, ” Morz Fröhlich was born 1894 the predomantly Polish village of Podjanze Upper Silia and received only an eighth-gra tn before embarkg on a bs reer. Footnote 1 Dpe his middle-class standg, Gay's father was a lifelong supporter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a pronounced secularist, views he passed onto his son.

PETER GAY (1923–2015)

”Footnote 3 By mid-1937, Gay's parents had formed a plan to move the fay om Berl to Florida, where an uncle lived wh his Amerin wife, but the events of 1938 ratcheted up the prsure even further. Footnote 5 In the meantime, Gay explored the entertaments of Havana and worked on his English, polishg his prose at the Havana Bs Amy (to which he received a scholarship) and vourg Amerin perdils like Time, Collier's, and the Saturday Eveng Post.

Jt weeks after arrivg Colorado, Gay's fay applied for Amerin cizenship, and, followg the example of a who had immigrated several years earlier, they Amerinized their first, middle, and last nam.

This was ma possible by the terventn of Gay's former high school English teacher, Helen Hunter, who worked out a plan to allow Gay to fish his high school gree by pletg a private urse wh her on William Shakpeare. Lookg back years later, Gay nsired fortuo that he had spent the early years “Middle Ameri, ” a place where was possible to pe the ncerns of the German immigrant muny and bee fully (or at least mostly) “Amerinized.

WEIMAR CULTURE - GAY,

” Gay moved to New York 1946 to beg graduate study at Columbia Universy the School of Public Law and Government (he turned down an offer om Harvard bee s fancial terms were too meager). In Gay's study, Bernste is very much the hero, the reformer who sought to ee the ethil re of Marxism om s encstatn Hegelian metaphysics and rencile socialism's visn of equaly wh the polil stutns of parliamentarism and mocracy.

The choice of Bernste reflected Gay's rejectn of both the Stalist left and the McCarthye right; was also a rebuff to those of his lleagu and acquatanc who had migrated om one polil extreme to the other—typilly om the far left to the far right: “I felt fortunate beg immune om what I took to be an often willful polil bldns of two warrg groups who disputed their ground at New York cktail parti and on the Wellfleet beach. ”Footnote 7 Gay remaed fundamentally optimistic regardg Amerin polil stutns, even if his worldview was shaped ccially by tellectuals—many of them also German-Jewish émigrés—whose views of Ameri were hardly naïve or uncril. ”Footnote 8 Marce not only helped persua Gay to take Frd serly, but also to see his view of human nature as fundamentally psimistic, such that s unpleasant featur were unlikely to disappear a postpalist society.

BOOK REMENDATN: WEIMAR CULTURE, BY PETER GAY

Here Gay benefted om the support of Henry Roberts, a specialist Eastern European history, and Richard Hofstadter, a supremely acplished Amerin historian who had bee Gay's clost iend at Columbia. Although she never earned a doctorate, Ruth Gay would go on to wre a seri of well-received works on Jewish history, cludg The Jews of Germany: A Historil Portra (1992), Unfished People: Eastern European Jews Enunter Ameri (1997), and Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II (2002).

”Footnote 15 In a siar manner, Gay sought to vdite the Enlightenment's attu toward history, argug that s notns of historil atn and culture were far richer than prevly acknowledged, and s nceptns of progrs far more tentative, particularly given the philosoph’ ls-than-rosy timate of human nature. Above all, Gay objected to the notn, promoted by Becker and later by nservative scholars like Jab Talmon, that the Enlightenment had simply replaced Christiany wh a new fah or “secular relign. Gay sisted, agast this le of thought, that the philosoph had sought a tly scientific view of the world, ground not ratnalist philosophy but rather a skeptil empiricism whose rults uld be revised light of new evince and new rmatn.