George Mosse

George Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918 – January 22,

1999) was an emigre from Nazi Germany, first to Great Britain and
George Lachmann Mosse
then to the United States, who taught history as a professor at the
University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the
Hebrew University.[1] Best known for his studies of Nazism, he
authored more than 25 books on topics as diverse as constitutional
history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity. In 1966,
he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary
History, which they co-edited.

Contents
Biography
Scholarship
Distinction as a teacher
Legacy
Awards and honors
George Mosse at Pembroke
Published works
College, Cambridge University,
Articles
1991
References
Born September 20, 1918
Further reading Berlin, Kingdom of
External links Prussia,
German Empire
Died January 22, 1999
Biography (aged 80)
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Mosse was born in Berlin to a prominent, well-to-do German Jewish
family. His maternal grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, founded what Awards Goethe Medal (1988),
became Germany's largest advertising agency, and his media empire Leo-Baeck-Medal (1998),
included the respected liberal newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. His Ph.D. h.c. mult.
father, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, commissioned the architect Erich
Mendelsohn to redesign the iconic Mossehaus where the Tageblatt was published. In his autobiography,
George Mosse described himself as a mischievous child given to pranks. He was educated at the noted
Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin and from 1928 onwards at Schule Schloss Salem, a famously spartan
boarding school that exposed the scions of rich and powerful families to a life devoid of privilege. The
headmaster at Salem, Kurt Hahn, was an advocate of experiential education and required all pupils to
engage in physically challenging outdoor activities. Although Mosse disliked the school's nationalistic ethos,
he conceded that its emphasis on character building and leadership gave him "some backbone."[2] He
preferred individual sports, such as skiing, to team activities.
In 1933, with Hitler's rise to power, the Mosse family emigrated and separated. His mother, Felicia (1888–
1972), and his sister, Hilde (1912–1982), relocated to Switzerland, while his father moved to France, where
in 1939 he got a divorce, married Karola Strauch (the mother of Harvard physicist Karl Strauch), and
subsequently emigrated to California. George Mosse moved to England, where he enrolled at the Quaker
Bootham School in York. It was here, according to his autobiography, that he first became aware of his
homosexuality. A struggling student, he failed several exams, but with the financial support of his parents he
was admitted to study history at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1937.[3] Here he first developed an
interest in historical scholarship, attending lectures by G. M. Trevelyan and Helen Maude Cam. While he
was at Cambridge, his hostility to fascism was deepened by the Spanish Civil War (although he later averred
that he had only a superficial understanding of the conflict).

In 1939, his family relocated to the United States, and he continued his undergraduate studies at the Quaker
Haverford College, earning a B.A. in 1941. He went on to graduate studies at Harvard University, where he
benefited from a scholarship reserved for students born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His 1946 Ph.D.
dissertation on English constitutional history of the 16th and 17th centuries, supervised by Charles Howard
McIlwain, was subsequently published as The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950).

Mosse's first academic appointment as an historian was at the University of Iowa, where he focused on
religion in early modern Europe and published a concise 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, was also widely adopted as a textbook.

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

Scholarship
Mosse's 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 suggested that a thin line
divides truth and falsehood in Puritan casuistry. Mosse declared that he approached 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 Sir Edward Coke, the chief character of his book The Struggle for
Sovereignty in England (1950), into a liberal long before liberalism had come into existence. Reviewers
noted that the sub-text in his The Culture of Western Europe (1961) was the triumph of totalitarianism over
liberalism.

His most well-known book, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964),
analyses the origins of the nationalist belief system. Mosse claimed, 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
played by myth, symbol, and political liturgy 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 (1985), he claimed that there was a link
between male eros, the German youth movement, and völkisch 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 saw nationalism, which often includes racism, as the chief menace of modern times. As a Jew, he
regarded the rejection of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe as a personal threat, as it was the
Enlightenment spirit which had liberated the Jews. He noted that European nationalism had initially 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 on virtue. In developing this view Mosse was influenced
by Peter Viereck, who argued that the turn towards aggressive nationalism first arose in the era of Johann
Gottlieb Fichte and Ernst Moritz Arndt. 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, Romani people, and the mentally ill. Many 19th-
century thinkers relied upon binary stereotypes that categorized human beings either as "healthy" or
"degenerate", "normal" or "abnormal", "insiders" or "outsiders". In The Image of Man: The Creation of
Modern Masculinity, Mosse argued that middle-class male respectability evoked "counter-type" images of
men whose weakness, nervousness, and effeminacy threatened to undermine an ideal of manhood.

Mosse's upbringing attuned him to both the advantages and the dangers of a 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 argues that during the Weimar
Republic, Bildung contributed to a blindness toward the illiberal political realities that later engulfed Jewish
families. Mosse's liberalism also informed his supportive but critical stance toward 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."

Historian James Franklin argues that:

as a teacher and scholar, George Mosse has posed challenging questions about what it
means to be an intellectual engaged in the world. The central problem Mosse has examined
throughout his career is: how do intellectuals relate their ideas to reality or to alternative
views of that reality?.... Mosse has chosen to focus on intellectuals and the movements with
which they were often connected at their most intemperate.... For Mosse, the role of the
historian is one of political engagement; he or she must delineate the connections (and
disconnections) between myth and reality.[4]
Distinction as a teacher
At the University of Wisconsin, George Mosse was
recognized as 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 charmed his students by mingling
critical skepticism with humor, irony, and empathy; but they
also admired the way he applied his historical knowledge to
The George L. Mosse Humanities Building
contemporary issues, attempting to be fair to opposing views
(right), University of Wisconsin
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 modest
endowments to support LGBT studies at both the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of
Amsterdam, where he taught as a visiting professor. These endowments were funded by the restitution of the
Mosse family's properties expropriated by the Nazi regime that were not restored until 1989–90, following
the collapse of East Germany. The George Mosse Fund was created at the University of Amsterdam to
further the advancement of gay and lesbian studies.[5] The American Historical Association annually awards
the George L. Mosse Prize.[6]

Awards and honors

Goethe Medal of the Goethe-Institut, 1988[7]
Leo-Baeck-Medal of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1998[8]
Prezzolini Prize[9]
Honorary doctorates from Hebrew University,[10] Hebrew Union College,[11] Lakeland College,
and the University of Siegen[12]

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 (htt
p://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001595614), 1961.
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 1964.
Corporate State and the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany (http://www.archive.org/
stream/georgemosse00reel12#page/n157/mode/1up) Brussels, Éditions de la Librairie
Encyclopedique, 1965.
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 (translated into German in
1993 and into French in 1999).
Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, 1993.
The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 1996.
The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, 1999.
Confronting History (autobiography), 2000.

Articles
"Image of the Jew in German Popular Culture: Felix Dahn and Gustav Freytag (http://www.arc
hive.org/stream/georgemosse00reel12#page/n1176/mode/1up)" in Year Book II of the Leo
Baeck Institute London, Leo Baeck Institute, 1957
"Culture, Civilization and German Anti-Semitism (http://www.archive.org/stream/georgemosse0
0reel12#page/n272/mode/1up)" in Judaism Vol. 7 #2 Summer 1958
"Mystical Origins of National Socialism (https://archive.org/stream/georgemosse00reel14#pag
e/n134/mode/1up)" in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. XXII #1 Jan. -May 1961

References
1. Eric Pace, obituary (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/world/george-l-mosse-dies-at-80-aut
hority-on-nazi-germany.html?module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=World&action=keypress&
region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article), New York Times, 31 January 1999.
2. Confronting History – A Memoir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2000. p. 69.
3. Confronting History, p. 93.
4. James E. Franklin, "Mosse, George L." in Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and
Historical Writers (1999) 2:841.
5. Plessini, Karel (2014). The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural
History (https://books.google.com/books?id=dfphAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA260). University of
Wisconsin Press. p. 260. ISBN 978-0-299-29634-6.
6. "George L. Mosse Prize" (https://www.historians.org/awards-and-grants/awards-and-prizes/ge
orge-l-mosse-prize). American Historical Association. Retrieved 3 February 2019.
 7. "Goethe-Medaille - Die Preisträger 1955 – 2018" (https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf15
3/01_startseite-bersicht-preistrger-der-goethe-medaille-1955-2018-final.pdf) [Goethe Medal -
The awardees 1955 – 2018] (PDF). Goethe-Institut (in German). 2018. Retrieved 3 February
2019.
8. "Recipients of the Leo Baeck Medal" (https://www.lbi.org/about/leo-baeck-medal/recipients-of-l
eo-baeck-medal/). Leo Baeck Institute New York. Retrieved 3 February 2019.
9. Benadusi, Lorenzo; Caravale, Giorgio, eds. (2014). George L. Mosse's Italy: Interpretation,
Reception, and Intellectual Heritage (https://books.google.com/books?id=QltHBQAAQBAJ&pg
=PA9). New York, US: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-349-49648-8.
10. "Honorary Doctorates" (http://www.huji.ac.il/huji/eng/aboutHU_doc90.htm). Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Retrieved 3 February 2019.
11. Plessini, Karel (2009). "Mosse's Work Between Recognition and Neglect" (http://biblio.unibe.c
h/download/eldiss/09plessini_k.pdf) (PDF). From Machiavellism to the Holocaust : the Ethical-
Political Historiography of George L. Mosse (PhD). University of Bern. p. 276. Retrieved
3 February 2019.
12. "Ehrendoktorwürde für Prof. Dr. George Mosse - "Eine bescheidene Geste der
Wiedergutmachung" " (https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/promotion_habilitation/ehrenpromotione
n/mosse.html) [Honorary doctorate for Prof. Dr. George Mosse - "A modest gesture of
reparation"] (in German). University of Siegen. Retrieved 3 February 2019.

Further reading
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.
Aschheim, S. (2020). George Mosse, Nationalism, Jewishness, Zionism and Israel. Journal of
Contemporary History.
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.
Plessini, Karel. The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History
(University of Wisconsin Press; 2014), 280 pages; scholarly biography
Tortorice, John. "Bibliography of George L. Mosse." German Politics and Society, vol. 18
(2000), pp. 58–92.

External links
 Works by or about George Mosse (https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n80-69015) in libraries
(WorldCat catalog)
The George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (http://moss
eprogram.wisc.edu/), with photos, audio recordings of lectures, and other resources
The George L. Mosse Program in History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (https://web.arc
hive.org/web/20110721133637/http://mosse.huji.ac.il/default.asp)
Website of the "Mosse Lectures" series at the Humboldt University of Berlin (in German) (htt
p://www.mosse-lectures.de)
(in Dutch) Foundation George Mosse Fund (http://mosse.nl/) (English (http://mosse.nl/about-george
-mosse/))

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