George Mosse

George Mosse studied at Harvard University, Bootham School and Downing College. The recorded working language is English, French and German. The field of work recorded is history. Places of work recorded in the authority are Cambridge, Madison and Jerusalem. Employment is recorded with University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Amsterdam. Distinctions recorded are Leo-Baeck-Medal and Goethe Medal.

• Name — George Lachmann Mosse • Birth Name — Gerhard Lachmann Mosse • Born — 20 September 1918 • Birthplace — Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire • Died — 22 January 1999 • Place of death — Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. • Influences — * Kurt Hahn • G. M. Trevelyan • Helen Maude Cam • Peter Viereck • Discipline — History • Sub Discipline — European intellectual history • Boards — Co-editor, Journal of Contemporary History • Education — Schule Schloss Salem, Cambridge University • Alma Mater — * Haverford College • Harvard University • Main Interests — Germany, fascism, intellectual history, gender studies • Notable Works — The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectable and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (1985) • Workplaces — * University of Iowa • University of Wisconsin-Madison • Hebrew University of Jerusalem • Cambridge University • Cornell University • US Holocaust Memorial Museum • Doctoral Advisor — Charles Howard McIlwain • Doctoral Students — * Michael Berkowitz • Seymour Drescher • Jeffrey Herf • Anson Rabinbach • David Warren Sabean • Awards — Goethe Medal (1988) Leo Baeck Medal (1998) • Footnotes — He was the brother of Hilde Mosse and a second cousin of Werner E. Mosse.

Mosse was born in Berlin to a prominent, well-to-do German Jewish family. His mother Felicia (1888–1972) was the only daughter of the publisher and philanthropist Rudolf Mosse, the son of a doctor imprisoned for revolutionary activity in 1848, and the founder of a publishing empire that included the leading, and liberal, newspapers the Berliner Morgen-Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt. These were the most highly regarded and prestigious papers produced by the big three of Berlin publishing during the Weimar Republic, Ullstein, Scherl (taken over by Hugenberg), and Mosse. A maternal uncle, Albert Mosse, a constitutional scholar, had helped frame Japan's Meiji Constitution. Mosse believed there was photograph from the year 1936 in which Hermann Göring and the Japanese Crown Prince (possibly confused by Mosse with the 1937 visit of Prince Chichibu) stand before his uncle's grave in the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee. Mosse's father Hans Lachmann (1885–1944) (he adopted the double-barrel Lachmann-Mosse following his marriage) was the grandson of a wealthy and religious Jewish grain merchant. He rose to manage his father-in-law's media empire. In 1923 he commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn to redesign the iconic Mossehaus where the Tageblatt was published (the building was restored in the 1990s). In his autobiography, 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." He preferred individual sports, such as skiing, to team activities.

Mosse described his parents, who practiced Reform Judaism and were anti-Zionist, as being, in their own minds, completely integrated as Germans ("gänzlich eingedeutscht"). He suggested that they did not take seriously the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis until henchmen of the new regime forced his father, at gunpoint, to sign over control of the publishing house. Mosse may have been speaking metaphorically: his father in April 1933 had left for Paris seeking refuge, not only from the Nazis but also from business creditors, who had had foreclosed on the publisher the previous autumn. Insolvency could not be avoided, and the regime seized the opportunity to force a transfer of ownership. In Paris, Lachmann-Mosse received an invitation from Hermann Göring to return to the Berliner Tageblatt as its business manager with the protective status of an Honorary Aryan (Ehrenarier); Mosse suspected that the motive was to wrest control of the network of foreign press agencies and offices that had remained in the family's possession. His father spurned the offer and never returned to Germany. With his wife and children in Switzerland, from Paris Lachmann-Mosse secured a divorce and married Karola Strauch (the mother of Harvard physicist Karl Strauch). In 1941 the couple moved to California where his father died, a celebrated patron of the arts, in 1944. From Switzerland, 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. Here he first developed an interest in historical scholarship, attending lectures by G. M. Trevelyan and Helen Maude Cam. Unlike his second cousin (and fellow Cambridge history student) Werner, however, Mosse's exam results remained mediocre: upon sitting Part I of the historical tripos in 1939 he was awarded only a lower second.

In 1939, Mosse's 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 PhD 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). With others of what he describes politically as the "Spanish Civil War generation", Mosse was a member of the Socialist Club at Harvard. They were, he concedes, naive about the nature of the Soviet Union, seen first and foremost as the opponent of fascism, and the indispensable ally against Hitler. 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. Here he organized opposition to McCarthyism and, in 1948, support for the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace. Despite being in the center of a conservative farm state, he experienced no personal repercussions. Against Joseph McCarthy he found allies among conservative Republicans who regarded the red-baiting senator as a "disruptive radical". In 1955, Mosse 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 LMU Munich. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin in 1989, he taught at Cambridge University and Cornell University. He was named the first research historian in residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

• Illustration — The George L. Mosse Humanities Building (right), University of Wisconsin-Madison At the University of Wisconsin, Mosse was recognized as a charismatic and inspiring teacher. Tom Bates's 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 contemporary issues, attempting to be fair to opposing views while remaining true to his own principles. He served as director for 38 Ph.D. dissertations.

• 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. • Corporate State and the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany, 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). • "Ich bleibe Emigrant." [In conversation with Irene Runge and Uwe Stelbrink.] Berlin: Dietz, 1991 (in German). • 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 – A Memoir, 2000.

• ″Image of the Jew in German Popular Culture: Felix Dahn and Gustav Freytag″ in Year Book II of the Leo Baeck Institute London, Leo Baeck Institute, 1957 • ″Culture, Civilization and German Anti-Semitism″ in Judaism Vol. 7 #2 Summer 1958 • ″Mystical Origins of National Socialism″ in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. XXII #1 Jan.–May 1961

George Mosse worked in history. He was employed by University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Amsterdam. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. He worked at Cambridge, Madison and Jerusalem.