My German Question

Back in 1961, Peter Gay, historian of Weimar, Freud and the 'bourgeois experience' of nineteenth-century Europe, was driving through France. He and his wife crossed over into Germany, which Gay had last seen when he escaped in desperation in 1939. In his new book he recalls how he stopped the car at a little kiosk and got out to exchange some dollars for marks. He saw a young woman clerk behind the grille, waiting to serve him. She looked at him coldly, 'her eyes registering pure hatred as 1 handed her my passport'. A glance at the girl 'left no doubt in my mind: murderous anti-Semitism was alive and flourishing in my native land'.