Volume 35, Number 17 · November 10, 1988
Survivor of a Lost World
By Carl E. Schorske
A European Past: Memoirs, 1905–1945
by Felix Gilbert
Norton, 229 pp., $19.95
Professor Felix Gilbert, one of the subtlest of America's historians, has chosen well the title of his memoirs: A European Past. He could have called it 'My European Past,' but the possessive pronoun would claim too much for the work as autobiography and too little for it as history. The indefinite article, 'a,' hangs suspended between 'my' past and 'the' past, between the purely personal and the historical. Gilbert has conceived his memoirs in the space between the two, where personal life and social development intermesh to shape the historical consciousness of a self. Gilbert's quest is quite literally a recherche du temps perdu, an attempt to recover his life as a German, a life he had put behind him and to some degree repressed when, immediately after Hitler's seizure of power, he chose exile.
Review, 3242 words
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