George Mosse, the USA academic historian, was born September 16, 1918, Berlin, Germany; he died January 22, 1999, in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Edit
Life and Career
George Mosse was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. His grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, was the founder of the Mosse Verlag publishing house which published Germany's leading liberal newspaper
Berliner Tageblatt. In 1933, aged 19, George Mosse escaped the Nazis by way of Switzerland and fled to Paris and then England.
He was at Bootham, a Quaker school in York, and then Downing College, Cambridge. In 1939 he went to the USA and enrolled at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Iowa, and then joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1955, to become a professor of history and Jewish studies. He was the Bascom-Weinstein Emeritus Professor of History at Wisconsin. In 1989 he became the first Shapiro senior scholar-in-residence at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. His expertise was European culture, the development of Hitler ‘s ‘final solution ‘, and concepts of respectibility and masculinity. He pioneered the analysis of popular culture. He was mentor to many other students who became professors including Russell Feingold (US senator from Wisconsin), Rabbi Levi Kelman of Kehillat Kol Haneshama in Jerusalem, Rabbi Andrew Bachman director of the Bronfman Center at New York University, and Professor Steven E. Aschheim from the Department of History, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
He retired from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988 (after being there for 33 years) but still worked on the ideological roots of Hitler's ‘final solution ‘. He also regained the family property in Berlin that had been seized by the Nazis. In 1993 he was appointed an A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He was also Koebner Professor of History Emeritus at the Hebrew University in Jeruselum, and he also taught at the University of Munich.
When he died of liver cancer in 1999, aged 80, he left a bequest to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for the study of lesbian and gay history and modern Jewish history. His life partner was John Tortorice.
EditWork
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 1964, Fertig Howard Inc., 373 pages, ISBN 0865274266 (paperback).
Germans and Jews: the right, the left and the search for a third force in Nazi Germany, 1970,Wayne State UP, ISBN 0814318932 (paperback).Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, 1985, Howard Fertig, ISBN: 0865274290 (paperback).Masses and Man, 1987, Wayne State UP, ISBN 0814318959 (paperback).The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1988, Westview Press, 430 pages, ISBN 081330623X (paperback).Europe in the Sixteenth Centurywith H.G. Koenigsberger and G.Q. Bowler, 1989, Addison Wesley Longman Higher Education, 564 pages, ISBN 0582046157 (hardcover)/0582493900 (paperback).Synopsis:“This edition has been revised, rewritten and expanded. It examines 16th century Europe as a complex, but interconnected whole, and explores the different political structures of Europe, such as the monarchies and city-republics, how they operated and related to one another. In particular it incorporates the most recent scholarship in this field and emphasizes the increasing importance of town-life in the 16th century, and the economic background of political change. In includes an entirely new chapter on ‘social life ‘, taking into account and recent work on demographic history, attitudes to women, the family, and on the impact of education, war and disease, concentrating on the Reformation and the religious and intellectual movements that fuelled it.”Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich, 1991, Cornell Univ Pr, ISBN 080149978X (paperback).Fallen Soldiers, 1991, Oxford University Press, 264 pages, ISBN 0195071395 (paperback).Synopsis:“War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this {study. Mosse offers an} . . . analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience.. . . Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. . . . Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse {aims to} demonstrate how these nations - through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs - glorified the {First World War} and fostered a popular acceptance of it. . . . {He argues that in Germany} the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II.”Reformation, 1991, Paperbook Pr., Inc., 64 pages, ISBN 1877891029 (paperback).Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, 1993, Brandeis University Press, 220 pages, ISBN 0874516358 (hardcover)/0874516366 (paperback).Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, 1997, Howard Fertig, ISBN 0865274282 (paperback).The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, 1999, New York: Howard Fertig, 230 pages ISBN 0 86527 432 0 (hardcover).Beauty, death and colonelsby Michael Burleigh inThe Times Literary Supplement, 17th. March, 2000, pages 28-29. “Mosse ‘s most recent work included a brilliant book entitledFallen Soldiers, about the reverberations of the First World War throughout this dark century, and studies of the history of masculinity and sexuality, neither of which he converted into an agenda, cause, or way of life, a self-restraint evident in his more intermittent forays into the history of the Holocaust.”“This collection of essays shows the extraordinary range of his interests, and most attractive of all, his capacity for speculative leaps, rather than the rehearsal of the familiar.” “The final essay concerns the moral coding represented by the cold body beautiful, the Nazis ‘ favoured means of depicting the de-eroticized human body. This essay makes some rather tenuous connections between the 1937Degenerate Artexhibition, and attempts to ban shows of Robert Mapplethorpe ‘s photographs, which might have benefited from more dispassionate and sustained discussion not of ‘bourgeois morality ‘ but the extent to which minorities within minorities have a right to inflict their ‘culture ‘ on the majority, as distinct from enjoying it privately.”
The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 1996, Oxford University Press Inc, USA, 240 pages, ISBN 0195101014 (hardcover)/0195126602 (paperback).- Synopsis:“What does it mean to be a man? to be manly? This text examines the manly stereotype, which stresses courage, moral restraint and athletic comportment, which from the 18th century onwards became representative of normative modern society. The important role of women and the so called ‘unmanly men ‘ from Jews to homosexuals in maintaining the stereotype are also examined, as well as the possible erosion of the stereotype in our own time.”
- Institute of Historical Research web site with a review by Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College, London, and a response from George Mosse.
Co-editor (with Walter Laqueur) of the Journal of Contemporary History.Confronting History: A Memoirwith a forward by Walter Laqueur, 2000, University of Wisconsin Press, 224 pages, ISBN 0299165809 (hardcover).
EditPress Cuttings
Bringing in the outsiderObituary by Michael Berkowitz in The Guardian, 3rd. March, 1999. “George Mosse continually challenged his students to uncover and explode the myths of history and their lives. He will be recalled for his unbounded dedication to his craft, his joy in life, his immense pride in the achievements of his colleagues and students, his keen, often self-deprecating, sense of humour, and for his capacity for sincere friendship across borders, nationalities, and faiths.”3 million bequest for gay researchin The Pink Paper, 9th. April, 1999, issue 578, page 4. “An American philanthropist has left more than 3 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to finance the study of lesbian and gay history and modern Jewish history.”“The bulk of the bequest will fund scholarships and fellowships in modern Jewish history. Money will also be set aside for the George Mosse Teaching Fellowship, set up by him before his death, to encourage the study of gay and lesbian history. It is believed it will become the largest ever gay and lesbian research project. The university ‘s chancellor David Ward said, ‘In addition to the rich intellectual legacy he left us all, he has created an extremely generous philanthropic legacy that will benefit many future generations ‘. The precise value of his estate will not be known until it is inventoried and valued.”