German Politics and Society

We are very proud to have initiated this truly special issue by offering

German Politics and Society as a forum to guest editors Phyllis

Cohen Albert and Alex Sagan.

George L. Mosse died on January 22, 1999, leaving a legacy of scholarly innovation in the study of European, German, and German-Jewish history. The memorial symposium of October 1, 1999 that produced the following articles brought together some of the many students, colleagues, and friends who were deeply influenced by Mosse’s life and work. They offered reflections on his contributions as researcher, author, teacher, and friend.

This article is dedicated to John Tortorice, associate director of development

in the library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and

George Mosse’s life-partner. As muse and critic, John worked closely

with George on the latter’s memoir. After George’s death, John saw

the work into print, under the title, Confronting History (University of

Wisconsin Press, 2000). The press did not accept the original title

John had generated, “Finding Myself in History.” This is unfortunate

because it is a fine double entendre that fits the memoir perfectly. To

acknowledge that title and to honor John and the joy and new possibilities

he brought into George’s life, I have borrowed from him in the

title of these remarks.

George Mosse wrote European intellectual and cultural history in a way that recast its meaning. Because he did so without a specific theoretical program, the extent of his accomplishment in this regard at times went unnoticed. He was a member of the remarkable generation of European refugee historians who together formed the core of the American study of European culture and ideas in the postwar era. For his contemporaries, such as H. Stuart Hughes, Peter Gay, Leonard Krieger, Carl Schorske, and Fritz Stern, writing European intellectual history meant two things. First, it was a salvage operation, an effort to recall and preserve the traditions of humanism and liberalism destroyed by fascism and Nazism. Second, and related to that task, it entailed writing about other intellectuals—philosophers, social theorists, and novelists and artists of the first rank—who represented the best that had been thought in Europe.

A survey of his extensive bibliography reveals that George Mosse wrote very little about the only movement that he ever called his political “Heimat”: antifascism. Nonetheless, in his last years, while writing his memoir Confronting History, he returned to the scenes of his youthful engagement on the left, acknowledging that his “political awakening” was due not merely to his being the refugee scion of the eminent Berlin German-Jewish family whose newspapers were excoriated almost daily by the Nazis. Rather, like many in his generation, at age seventeen George was roused from a sleepy indifference to his studies at the Quaker Bootham School in York-shire by the Spanish Civil War. If his activity on behalf of Spain was still “sporadic” during his last year at Bootham, at Cambridge, which George entered in the fall of 1937, commitment became more intense and eventually, he recalled, “marked my two years as an undergraduate.”

George Mosse viewed history as a totality. It should come as no surprise, then, that his vision of the modern Jewish experience was in accordance with this predilection. Just as, for him, the political and the religious, the scientific and the aesthetic realms, were intertwined, deeply co-implicated, he refused to pigeon-hole and separate, or to use one of his favorite terms, “ghettoize” Jewish history and cut it off from the larger European whole. When he arrived in the late 1960s at the Hebrew University, I recall, he rather jolted the more conservative historians there not only because they were aghast at the fact that, already then, George was discussing the history of masturbation in his classes(!), but, more pertinently here, also because he challenged the prevailing ethnocentric bias that Jewish history by definition followed its own unique narrative and immanent laws.

Bibliography of George L. Mosse

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron, et. al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

Gregg O. Kvistad, The Rise and Demise of German Statism: Loyalty and Political Membership (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999)

Hartmut Lehmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (eds.), German and American Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999)

Jonathan P.G. Bach, Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and Identity after 1989 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999)

David F. Patton, Cold War Politics in Postwar Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999)

Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)

Celeste A. Wallander, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies: German-Russian Cooperation after the Cold War (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999)

Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor; Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997)