Peter Gay
Peter Gay was a prominent historian and author, born Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923 to secular Jewish parents. His early life was marked by the rise of the Nazi regime, prompting his family to emigrate first to Cuba and later to the United States, where he pursued education and citizenship. Gay's academic career began with a focus on the European Enlightenment, culminating in his influential work, *The Enlightenment: An Interpretation*, which earned him the National Book Award in 1967. Over the years, he shifted topics to explore the complexities of the nineteenth-century European middle class, notably in his multi-volume series, *The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud*.
In his later years, Gay also reflected on his Jewish identity and the experiences of German Jews during the Nazis' rise to power, asserting that many held onto hope regarding the regime's stability. He remained active in scholarship until his retirement in 1993, producing significant works on modernism and the Romantic period. Gay's legacy lies in his rigorous scholarship, insightful prose, and the way he opened up historical narratives, particularly in intellectual history, until his passing in 2015.
Peter Gay
- Born: June 20, 1923
- Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
- Died: May 12, 2015
- Place of death: Manhattan, New York City, New York
German-born social and intellectual historian
Gay helped define the field of modern European intellectual history, especially in the areas of the Enlightenment and the impact of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
Area of achievement: Scholarship
Early Life
Peter Gay was born Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923, the only child of secular German Jews. His father was a merchant who specialized in china and silverware; his mother was a housewife. He was an only child but grew up surrounded by numerous cousins, and he spent summers at the farm of the parents of their gentile family housekeeper until the Nazis prohibited such arrangements. Both his parents were fervent atheists, so Gay received no religious instruction. He was an above-average student at school but never at the top of his class. As a youth, he was an avid reader with eclectic tastes. His hobbies included stamp collecting and sports, interests that he shared with his father.
The central event of his youth was the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933. He was forced to leave school, and his family began to plan to emigrate in 1937, finally succeeding in leaving for Cuba in March, 1939. His family stayed in Cuba for two years. Gay attended Havana Business School, and his mother underwent treatment for tuberculosis. In April, 1941, they arrived in the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado. Gay went to high school, worked at the Imperial Cap company, and attended the University of Denver and Columbia University. In 1926, after he became a U.S. citizen, he legally changed his name to Gay from Fröhlich, which means happy in German
Life’s Work
Gay completed his dissertation at Columbia University in 1951, and it was published as his first book in 1952. In 1959, Gay began a twenty-year intensive focus on the European Enlightenment. The centerpiece of his undertaking was the magisterial The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, which appeared in 1966 and 1969. Sweeping in its scope and breathtaking in its bold assertions, the approach was traditional, with little attention to social history or the new outlook that gender studies would soon bring to the field. Gay consistently portrayed the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment in a positive light, believing fervently that almost all the positive aspects of modern thought could be traced back to the Enlightenment. In 1967, the first volume of The Enlightenment earned Gay the National Book Award for history and biography. Within a few years of this masterpiece, he published books on Weimar Germany, New England Puritans, and reading history. The last work, titled Style in History (1974), had its origins in a graduate historiography course Gay taught and is noted for its probing analysis of the work of Edward Gibbon.
Beginning in the 1980s, Gay took off in a new scholarly direction: a kaleidoscopic examination of the lives and loves of the nineteenth-century European middle class. Gay intended to shatter the image of middle-class prudery that had prevailed, and he produced five massive volumes, called collectively The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, that highlighted Victorians, eminent and otherwise, who were adventurous although discreet in their sexual tastes and practices.
After reaching his seventh decade, Gay turned inward and wrote a book titled My German Question (1998) that combined autobiography with the trained eye of a veteran historian. Gay wanted to discredit scholars and others who criticized German Jews for remaining in Germany after the Nazis seized power. Gay insisted with great eloquence that German Jews understood the anti-Semitic agenda of the regime, but that it was years before the murderous intent behind that agenda became horribly clear to all. He noted that German Jews remembered how the German army extended benign treatment to Polish Jews during World War I, and that it was not unrealistic of German Jews to doubt the Nazis would hold power very long. He was also adamant that immigration restrictions were more to blame than any single factor in enabling the Nazis to carry out their extermination plans.
After retiring from teaching in 1993, Gay continued writing and publishing. He worked on his positive evaluation of Sigmund Freud and his theories and published a large survey of modernism in 2008. After four decades of scholarship on women’s history had changed the way many historians write, Gay remained an exception, portraying modernism as a product of overwhelmingly male creative forces.
In early 2015, Gay published his final work, Why the Romantics Matter, an examination of the Romantic period and the successes of its figures in a variety of media. Only months later, he died at his home in the New York City borough of Manhattan on May 12, 2015, at the age of ninety-one.
Significance
Gay’s reverence for the highest standards of scholarship and his exaltation of truth as the highest obligation of historians earned him the respect of the academic community. His well-informed and thoroughly researched historical works, more than thirty in number, open for readers worlds that existed in the past, and his interest in psychoanalysis, especially as explained by Sigmund Freud, enlivened his assessments of historical events. With his graceful prose and insightful interpretations, Gay will be remembered as one of the foremost scholars in the field of intellectual history.
Bibliography
Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew. Yale UP, 1987. In this book ostensibly about Freud, Gay included many of his own views about the role of religion in modern society.
Gay, Peter. My German Question. Yale UP, 1998. The book focuses on Gay’s life from 1933 to 1939 and also offers valuable insights into later events in his career.
Gay, Peter. Style in History. Basic Books, 1974. As he examined the legacy of four modern historians, Gay revealed quite a bit about his own philosophy of history.
Gay, Peter. Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist. Princeton UP, 1959. This thorough study of Voltaire bolstered the reputation of the philosophe and repudiated critics who stated that Enlightenment principles were of no value in mastering the challenges of the twentieth century.
Grimes, William. "Peter Gay, Historian Who Explored Social History of Ideas, Dies at 91." The New York Times, 12 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/peter-gay-historian-who-explored-social-history-of-ideas-dies-at-91.html. Accessed 27 Oct. 2017.
Leith, James A. “Peter Gay’s Enlightenment.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1971, pp. 157–71. This article analyzes Gay’s reinterpretation of the Enlightenment.