Niall Ferguson
Safe at Last
My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin
By Peter Gay
Yale University Press 208pp £15.50 order from our bookshop
Peter Gay is perhaps the only historian to have applied Freud successfully to the past. His five-volume The Bourgeois Experience is one of the great achievements of postwar cultural history, alive with absorbing insights into the inner transformation of European life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘There are no … accidents’, he writes here, arrestingly, ‘in the universe that Freud has discovered for us.’
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