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Peter Gay, Historian Who Explored Social History of Ideas, Dies at 91

Peter Gay in 1999. He wrote groundbreaking books on numerous topics including the Enlightenment, Weimar culture and Sigmund Freud.Credit...Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Peter Gay, a German-born historian whose sense of intellectual adventure led him to write groundbreaking books on the Enlightenment, the Victorian middle classes, Sigmund Freud, Weimar culture and the cultural situation of Jews in Germany, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Elizabeth Glazer.

Mr. Gay, a refugee from Nazi Germany, devoted his career to exploring the social history of ideas, a quest that took him far from his original area of specialization, Voltaire and the Enlightenment. “He is one of the major American historians of European thought, period,” said Sander L. Gilman, a cultural and literary historian at Emory University.

It was his work on the 18th century that sealed Mr. Gay’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent historians of his generation. “Voltaire’s Politics,” published in 1959, was followed by “The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,” a monumental two-part study whose first volume, subtitled “The Rise of Modern Paganism,” won the National Book Award in 1967. The second volume, subtitled “The Science of Freedom,” was published in 1969.

“That is the last great work to provide a synthetic account of the philosophes and their world,” said Margaret Jacob, a professor of history at U.C.L.A. “It was canonical. He just had an encyclopedic grasp of the subject.”

A longstanding interest in Freud’s ideas led Mr. Gay to train at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and motivated him to write a revisionist psychohistory of the Victorian middle classes, “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,” whose five volumes were published in the 1980s and 1990s. He also wrote the acclaimed “Sigmund Freud: A Life for Our Time” (1988), the first substantial Freud biography since Ernest Jones’s three-volume one in the 1950s.

Freud and Mr. Gay were both assimilated, nonreligious Jews nourished by and trapped in a Germanic culture whose anti-Semitic undercurrents gathered strength around them. Their shared predicament provoked some of Mr. Gay’s most personal and anguished historical writing, notably the essays in “Freud, Jews and Other Germans” (1978) and the autobiographical “My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin” (1998).

“He belongs to that group of German Jews, like George Mosse, who began in one field and in the fullness of their intellectual development started asking hard questions about the world from which they had been exiled,” Mr. Gilman said.

Peter Joachim Fröhlich was born in 1923 in Berlin, where his father helped run a flourishing business that supplied low-cost imitations of fancy glassware to large specialty shops. An only child, quiet and studious, he subscribed to his parents’ robust atheism and regarded himself as Jewish only by Nazi decree. “Jewish awareness? Jewish identity? These were empty slogans to them — and hence to me,” he wrote in “My German Question.”

The family prospered well into the 1930s. In his memoir, Mr. Gay recalled the pleasures of attending the 1936 Olympics — spoiled only by the sight of Hitler and Göring in the stands — and the confusing mix of savage repression and tolerance that characterized life under the Nazis until 1938. He would later argue vehemently against the notion that Jews in Germany should have seen the outlines of the final solution once the Nazis took power.

It was “plausible, almost appropriate,” he wrote in his memoir, for families like his to be vigilant about the Nazi regime but also determined to maintain a relatively normal private life. “The indictment of denial that German Jews have had thrown at them for decades does not really fit such responses.”

In 1938, Mr. Gay was forced out of his school, and his father’s gentile partner appropriated the glassware business. The next year, aided by relatives in the United States, the Fröhlichs set sail for Havana on the last ship from Nazi Germany to be admitted to Cuba. There Mr. Gay attended business school and taught himself English by reading magazines like Time and Collier’s. The family gained entry to the United States in 1941 and settled in Denver, where Peter’s mother had been admitted to a Jewish sanitarium for treatment for tuberculosis. Because Americans found Fröhlich difficult to pronounce, Mr. Gay changed it to its English equivalent.

After graduating from the University of Denver in 1946, Mr. Gay entered Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in history in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1951. His dissertation, on the German socialist Eduard Bernstein, was published in 1952.

He taught political science at Columbia from 1947 to 1955, but after being passed over for promotion he joined the university’s history department at the invitation of the historian Richard Hofstadter. In 1969 he joined the history faculty at Yale, where he taught until retiring in 1993.

Affable and courtly, he spoke with the barest trace of an indefinable accent. Friends found him warm and generous, on the attack, however, he could be formidable. “He had a tough hide,” said Robert Weil, his editor at W. W. Norton. “He could engage in academic debate with a ferocity that was most impressive.”

In 1959 he married Ruth Slotkin, who died in 2006. Besides his stepdaughter Elizabeth, he is survived by two other stepdaughters, Sarah Glazer Khedouri and Sophie Glazer, and seven step-grandchildren.

Dissatisfied with the historian Carl Becker’s depiction of the philosophes as emotionally arid, blindly optimistic rationalists, Mr. Gay wrote “Voltaire’s Politics” in a revisionist spirit. For the next 25 years he mapped the ideas and sentiments of the disparate thinkers he described, in his preface to the first volume of “The Enlightenment,” as “a family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking.” His goal, he wrote, was to establish connections between thinkers formerly seen as isolated. Written in a graceful, lucid prose style, with a strong narrative line, his books appealed to the general reader as well as historians.

In “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider,” with its emphasis on Oedipal revolt, Mr. Gay signaled a Freudian turn in his interpretation of history that was ratified by his formal psychoanalytic training in the 1970s. Psychohistory, he later wrote in “Freud for Historians” (1985), “simply turns inward my old program to grasp ideas in all their contexts.”

In an extended application of this approach, he turned to the much-maligned 19th-century bourgeoisie and systematically attacked prevailing historical notions of the middle classes as sexually repressed, philistine and hypocritical. In “Schnitzler’s Century” (2002), he used an emblematic figure, the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler, to compress the main arguments of “The Bourgeois Experience” into a single book.

Some critics found Mr. Gay’s Freudian tour of the 19th century long on colorful instances but short on analytic rigor, suggestive rather than persuasive. And his previous work on the Enlightenment came to seem somewhat old-fashioned to a new generation of historians schooled in social history and trained to shine a light on marginalized figures and social groups rather than Mr. Gay’s canonical thinkers.

“He said he wanted to do social history, but he really was not equipped for it,” Ms. Jacob said. “You read ‘Voltaire’s Politics’ and at the end you don’t really know what his politics were, in the sense of his year-to-year responses and changing ideas under the pressure of events.”

The sweep and daring of his intellectual project, and his immense erudition, ensured that Mr. Gay remained an unignorable historian long after his retirement. At 84, he published “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” a characteristically wide-lensed view of the subject.

“His range of interests was extraordinary,” Ms. Jacob said. “He was all over the European map, in both the 18th and 19th centuries. Everybody had been entrenched in national histories of the Enlightenment, but he stood out by saying, ‘Hey, take a look across the border.’ ”

A correction was made on 
May 12, 2015

An earlier version of this obituary misstated when Mr. Gay received his Ph.D. It was 1951, not 1952. It also misspelled his original surname. It is Fröhlich, not Frölich.

A correction was made on 
May 15, 2015

An obituary on Wednesday about the historian Peter Gay referred imprecisely to the ship on which he and his family left Germany in 1939. It was the last ship to be admitted to Cuba from Nazi Germany, not the last ship ever admitted. The obituary also referred incompletely to the publication of the five volumes of Mr. Gay’s “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.” They came out in the 1980s and the 1990s, not just the 1980s.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Peter Gay, Historian and Freud Biographer, Dies at 91 . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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