The Enlightenment, Volume 1 by Peter Gay

Indeed, Peter led a charmed life, being admitted to a grammar school under the Nazis because his father was a decorated and war-wounded army veteran and surviving the early years of the Third Reich without any great difficulty as a blond, blue-eyed boy who did not conform to the Nazi image of a Jewish person in any respect. Of Jewish ancestry, his parents were social democrats and so, in consequence, atheists, bringing their only child up without recourse to beatings or other forms of discipline common at the time. This was, essentially, the culture into which Gay was born, in Berlin, as Peter Joachim Fröhlich, the son of Helga and Moritz, a small businessman of left-leaning views and liberal habits of mind. But taken together, they are a fundamental text for anyone who wishes to understand bourgeois culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The books are full of obscure and often surprising information, most notably about bourgeois sexuality, which he argued, with a wealth of examples drawn from diaries and letters of the time, was far from being as prudish as popular memory imagined.Ĭovering subjects as varied as love and marriage, art collecting and connoisseurship, attitudes to crime and deviance (dealt with in a pathbreaking volume on The Cultivation of Hatred), literature and much more besides, the volumes can be criticised for omitting such central preoccupations and pastimes as politics, music, respectability and so on. In his encyclopedic The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (five volumes between 19), Gay explored in wonderfully readable prose a wide range of aspects of the European – especially the British, French and German – and the North American middle classes in their heyday.

The first volume, subtitled The Rise of Modern Pagansim, of Peter Gay’s massive study, was widely acclaimed far beyond the academic world

The Enlightenment, Volume 1 by Peter Gay