Peter Gay
Peter Gay, a
Jewish American historian of the
social history of ideas, born in
Berlin in
1923 as
Peter Joachim Frohlich . After witnessing
Kristallnacht in 1938, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His family initially booked passage on the
SS St. Louis (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) fortuitously changed their booking for an earlier voyage to the U.S. Many of his works focused on the social impact of
psychoanalysis. Educated at the Goethe Gymnasium.
Taught at
Columbia University & at
Yale University.
Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University (retired 1993)
Awards
- AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction.
Works
- The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx - 1952
- The Rise of Modern Paganism - 1966
- Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider - 1968
- The Science of Freedom - 1969
- The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment - 1971
- Historians at Work - 1972
- The Enlightenment; A Comprehensive Anthology - 1973
- Style in History - 1974
- Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian - 1976
- The Enlightenment: An Interpretation - 1977
- Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture - 1978
- The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx - 1979
- Education of the Senses - 1984
- The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud - 5 vols, 1984-1998 (includes The Education of the Senses and The Cultivation of Hatred)
- Freud for Historians - 1985
- The Tender Passion - 1986
- A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis - 1987
- Freud: A Life for Our Time - 1988
- Voltaire's Politics: The Poet As Realist - 1988
- Style in History - 1988
- Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments - 1990
- The Cultivation of Hatred - 1993
- The Naked Heart - 1995
- Pleasure Wars - 1998
- My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin - 1998 (autobiography)
- Mozart - 1999