Peter Gay (1923–2015)

Abstract

P ETER Gay died in Manhattan on May 12, 2015. A professor at Columbia and Yale, Gay was one of the preeminent cultural and intellectual historians of his generation. His enormous output of scholarship, on subjects as varied as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Sigmund Freud, Victorian sexuality and modernist art, testifies to the range of his erudition and his restless urge to make his views known. He was the recipient of numerous awards, honorary doctorates, and other distinctions, including the National Book Award in 1967 for The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996, and the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 1999. After retiring from Yale he became the founding Director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, a post he held from 1997 to 2003. He remained extraordinarily productive as a scholar well into his eighties, publishing essays, articles, and books, including a massive history of modernism. His final book, Why the Romantics Matter, appeared last year. Peter Joachim Fröhlich was born into a secularized Jewish family in Berlin in 1923. His father co-owned a firm that arranged for the manufacture of inexpensive versions of high-end porcelain and glassware, which were then sold in department stores and specialty shops. Described by Gay as a "self-made man," Moritz Fröhlich was born in 1894 in the predominantly Polish village of Podjanze in Upper Silesia and received only an eighth-grade education before embarking on a business career. 1 Despite his middle-class standing, Gay's father was a lifelong supporter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a pronounced secularist, views he passed onto his son. Gay's mother Helga was born in Breslau in 1900 and married Fröhlich at the age of twenty-two. Peter, their only child, was born the following year. Gay would characterize himself as quiet and studious, a "a most tractable boy" who enjoyed playing alone and only rarely got into trouble. 2 The rise of the National Socialists to power in 1933 overturned the Fröhlichs' middleclass existence and eventually forced them out of Germany.