Peter Gay (Author of Frd)

Contents:

• PETER GAY & CO
• PETER GAY (1923–2015)
• PETER GAY

PETER GAY & CO

We follow the amb medil stunt's long, sexually starved urtship of Martha Bernays, a romance that, acrdg to Gay, fluenced his theori about the sexual roots of mental ailments. 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.

”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. This entailed not only buyg new tickets but also alterg the date and ship name on the fay's certifite of passage, a fery Gay's father acplished wh precisn and patience.

Wh the necsary documents hand and a few valuabl packed a small crate, Gay's fay parted om Hamburg on April 27, 1939, and arrived Havana two weeks later. 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. Gay's mother, often poor health and now sufferg om tuberculosis, was sent for treatment to the Natnal Jewish Hospal Denver, brgg the whole fay along wh her.

PETER GAY (1923–2015)

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.

” 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.

PETER GAY

”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.

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.