CONFRONTING HISTORY

A richly enjoyable autobiography of the esteemed cultural historian.

Mosse (1918–99) was born into a wealthy German-Jewish family in Prussia. Young George grew up in rather grand, if lonely, family houses in Berlin and its environs, and combined the family ethos of hard work with the values of discipline and physical hardship that he learned at Salem, his English-inspired boarding school. He continued his education at Bootham, a Quaker public school in Yorkshire, and attended Cambridge for two years. In America visiting family on the eve of the WWII, he decided to remain in the US rather than risk internment as an enemy alien in Britain. He was admitted to Haverford College and later completed a Ph.D. at Harvard. He taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was renowned for his lectures, and routinely attracted over 500 undergraduates to a single course. Mosse produced groundbreaking scholarship establishing that there were intellectual and cultural foundations to Nazism and Fascism. His more recent works concentrated on Jewry, representation, and sexuality in Modern Europe. He trained a generation of scholars and wrote over a dozen books (including The Crisis of German Ideology, Toward the Final Solution, The Nazionalization of the Masses, Nationalism and Sexuality, Germans & Jews, and Fallen Soldiers). With Walter Laqueur, Mosse was the cofounder and coeditor of the Journal of Contemporary History. Mosse concentrates here on his intellectual development and is circumspect about the more personal aspects of his life (such as his homosexuality). While his memoir may not satisfy those looking for a confessions and sensation, it succeeds admirably in portraying him for what he was—a great scholar and teacher who just happened to be a German, a Jew, and a homosexual.

A delightful and illuminating memoir of a man whose piercing insights changed our understanding of Modern Europe. (30 b&w photos, 6 b&w illustrations)