George Mosse

George Mosse, visiting professor at Cambridge University, 1991

George Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918, Berlin, Germany – January 22, 1999, Madison, Wisconsin, United States) was a German-born American cultural historian. The author of over 25 books, on topics as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity, he is best known for his studies of Nazism. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited.

Biography

Mosse was born in Berlin into a very prominent and wealthy German Jewish family. His maternal grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, founded what became the biggest advertising agency in Germany, and his media empire included the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. His father, Hans Lachmann Mosse, commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn to redesign the Mossehaus where the Tageblatt was produced until the Nazis closed it and forced the family to emigrate. He was educated at the famous Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin, and from 1928 onwards at the elite Schule Schloss Salem. He describes himself as a rebellious child. The headmaster at Salem, Kurt Hahn imposed a demanding physical education regime upon its pupils. Although Mosse disliked the nationalistic ethos of the school, he conceded that its emphasis on character building gave him "some backbone".

In 1933, with Hitler's rise to power, the Mosse family fled and separated. His mother went to Switzerland, as did his sister. His father moved to France with his new wife. Mosse attended the Quaker Bootham School in York, England, whose teachers began to stimulate his intellectual curiosity, and where, according to his autobiography, he became aware of his homosexuality. A poor student, he failed several exams, and it was because of the financial support of his parents that he was able to attend Cambridge University. At Cambridge began to get interested in historical scholarship, attending lectures by amongst others G. M. Trevelyan and Helen Maude Cam. While at Cambridge the Spanish Civil War (although he admitted he had little idea about what was going on) awakened his hostility to fascism.

In 1939, his family relocated to the United States, and he completed his undergraduate studies at Haverford College in 1941. While at Harvard University he studied for a PhD, successfully obtaining a scholarship which was only available to students born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His 1946 dissertation on C16th & C17th English constitutional history, supervised by Charles Howard McIlwain, was subsequently published as The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950).

Mosse's first paid job as a historian was at the University of Iowa, where he focused on religion in early modern Europe, and published a brief study of the Reformation that became a widely used textbook. In 1955, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began to lecture on modern history. His The Culture of Western Europe: the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, An Introduction (1961) which summarizes these lectures, also became a widely used textbook.

Mosse taught for more than thirty years at the University of Wisconsin, where he became the John C. Bascom Professor of European History and Weinstein-Bascom of Jewish Studies, while concurrently holding the Koebner Professorship of History at Hebrew University. From 1969, Mosse spent one semester each year teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also became a visiting professor at University of Tel Aviv and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin, he taught at Cambridge University and Cornell University. Mosse was the first research historian in residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Scholarship

The George L. Mosse Humanities Building (right), University of Wisconsin

According to Mosse, his first published work was a 1947 paper in the Economic History Review describing the Anti-Corn Law League. He claimed that this was the first time the landed gentry had tried to organize a mass movement in order to counter their opponents. In The Holy Pretence (1957), he suggests that a thin line divides truth and falsehood in Puritan casuistry. Mosse declares that he approaches history not as narrative, but as a series of questions and possible answers. The narrative provides the framework within which the problem of interest can be addressed. A constant theme in his work is the fate of liberalism. Critics pointed out that he had made Lord Chief Justice George Coke, the chief character of his book The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950), into a liberal long before liberalism had come into existence. In his book The Culture of Western Europe (1961), reviewers noted that his sub-text was the triumph of totalitarianism over liberalism.

His most well known book, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1965), analyses the origins of the nationalist belief system. Mosse claims however that it was not until his book The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), which dealt with the sacralization of politics, that he began to put his own stamp upon the analysis of cultural history. He started to write it in the Jerusalem apartment of the historian Jacob Talmon, surrounded by the works of Rousseau. Mosse sought to draw attention to the role which myth, symbol, and political liturgy, played in the French Revolution. Rousseau, he noted, went from believing that "the people" could govern themselves in town meetings, to urging that the government of Poland invent public ceremonies and festivals in order to imbue the people with allegiance to the nation. Mosse argued that there was a continuity between his work on the Reformation and his work on more recent history. He claimed that it was not a big step from Christian belief systems to modern civic religions such as nationalism.

In the Crisis of German Ideology, he traced how the "German Revolution" became anti-Jewish, and in Towards the Final Solution (1979) he wrote a general history of racism in Europe. He argued that although racism was originally directed towards blacks, it was subsequently applied to Jews. In Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectable and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, he claimed that there was a link between male eros, the German youth movement, and völkish thought. Because of the dominance of the male image in so much nationalism, he decided to write the history of that stereotype in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996).

Mosse sees nationalism, which often includes racism, as the chief menace of modern times. As a Jew, the rejection of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe took on a personal character, as it was the Enlightenment spirit which liberated the Jews. He noted that European nationalism at the beginning tried to combine patriotism, human rights, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance. It was only later that France and then Germany came to believe that they had a monopoly of virtue. This claim was influenced by the work of the historian Rudolf Vierhaus, who argued that it was Gottlieb Fichte and others made the turn towards aggressive nationalism. Mosse traced the origins of Nazism in völkisch ideology back to a 19th-century organicist worldview that fused pseudo-scientific nature philosophy with mystical notions of German soul. The Nazis made völkisch thinking accessible to the broader public via potent rhetoric, powerful symbols, and mass rituals. Mosse demonstrated that antisemitism drew on stereotypes that depicted the Jew as the enemy of the German Volk; an embodiment of the urban, materialistic, scientific culture that was supposedly responsible for the corruption of the German spirit.

In Toward the Final Solution, he claimed that racial stereotypes were rooted in the European tendency to classify human beings according to their closeness or distance from Greek ideals of beauty. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe extended these insight to encompass other excluded or persecuted groups: Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies (or Roma), and the mentally ill. Many 19th-century thinkers relied upon stereotypes in which human beings were either "healthy" or "degenerate", "normal" or "abnormal", "insiders" or "outsiders". In The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Mosse argues that middle-class male respectability evoked "counter-type" images of men whose weakness, nervousness, and effeminacy threatened to undermine an ideal of manhood.

His upbringing attuned him to both the advantages and the dangers of an humanistic education. His book German Jews Beyond Judaism (1985) describes how the German-Jewish dedication to Bildung, or cultivation, helped Jews to transcend their group identity. But it also exposed how, during the Weimar Republic, it contributed to a blindness toward the illiberal political realities which later engulfed Jewish families. His liberalism also informed his supportive but critical judgment on Zionism and the State of Israel. In an essay written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Zionism, he wrote that the early Zionists envisioned a liberal commonwealth based on individualism and solidarity, but a "more aggressive, exclusionary and normative nationalism eventually came to the fore."

Popularity as a teacher

At the University of Wisconsin, George Mosse was a charismatic and inspiring teacher. Tom Bates' Rads: A True Story of the End of the Sixties (1992) describes how students flocked to Mosse's courses to "savor the crossfire" with his friend and rival, the Marxist historian Harvey Goldberg. Mosse's popularity was not only due to the fact that he laced his critical skepticism with humor, irony and empathy; he also applied his historical knowledge to contemporary issues, attempting to be fair to opposing views while remaining true to his own principles.

Legacy

Mosse left a substantial bequest to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to establish the George L. Mosse Program in History, a collaborative program with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also left an endowment to support LGBT studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Amsterdam, where he had taught as a visiting professor. The endowment was largely funded by the restitution of Mosse family properties expropriated by the Nazi regime, which were restored to the Mosses family in 1989-90 following the collapse of East Germany.

Awards and honors

• American Historical Association's award for Scholarly Distinction
• 1998 Leo-Baeck-Medal of the Leo Baeck Institute
• Goethe Medal of the Goethe-Institut
• Prezzolini Prize
• Honorary doctorates from Hebrew University, Hebrew Union College, Lakeland College, and the University of Siegen

Published works

• The Struggle for Sovereignty in England from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to the Petition of Right, 1950.
• The Reformation, 1953.
• The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop, 1957.
• The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. An Introduction, 1961.
• The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 1964.
• Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, edited by G.L. Mosse, 1966.
• 1914: The Coming of the First World War, edited by G.L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur, 1966.
• Literature and Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by G.L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur, 1967.
• Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a "Third Force" in Pre-Nazi Germany, 1970.
• Historians in Politics, edited by G.L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur, 1974.
• Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918-1945, edited by G.L. Mosse and Bela Vago, 1974.
• The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, 1975.
• Nazism: a Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism, 1978.
• Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, 1978.
• International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches, edited by G.L Mosse, 1979.
• Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality, 1980.
• German Jews beyond Judaism, 1985.
• Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, 1985.
• Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, 1990.
• Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, 1993.
• The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 1996.
• Confronting History (autobiography), 2000.

Bibliography

• Aramini, Donatello. George L. Mosse, l'Italia e gli storici. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010.
• Aschheim, Steven E. "Between Rationality and Irrationalism: George L. Mosse, the Holocaust and European Cultural History." Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. 5 (1988), pp. 187–202.
• Breines, Paul. "Germans, Journals and Jews / Madison, Men, Marxism and Mosse." New German Critique, no. 20 (1980), pp. 81–103.
• Breines, Paul. "With George Mosse in the 1960s." In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, pp. 285–299. Seymour Drescher et al., eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1982.
• Drescher, Seymour, David W. Sabean, and Allan Sharlin. "George Mosse and Political Symbolism." In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, pp. 1–15. Seymour Drescher et al.,eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1982.
• Fishman, Sterling. "GLM: An Appreciation." In Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, pp. 275–284. Seymour Drescher et al., eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1982.
• Franklin, James. "Mosse, George L." The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol. 2, pp. 841–842. Kelly Boyd, ed. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.
• Gentile, Emilio. Il fascino del persecutore. George L. Mosse e la catastrofe dell'uomo moderno. Rome: Carocci, 2007.
• Herf, Jeffrey. "The Historian as Provocateur: George Mosse's Accomplishment and Legacy." Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 29 (2001), pp. 7–26.
• Tortorice, John. "Bibliography of George L. Mosse." German Politics and Society, vol. 18 (2000), pp. 58–92.

External links

• Template:Worldcat id
• The George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with photos, audio recordings of lectures, and other resources
• The George L. Mosse Program in History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Website of the "Mosse Lectures" series at the Humboldt University of Berlin (in German)