Mosse, George Lachmann b. September 20, 1918; Berlin, Prussia d. January 22, 1999; Madison,Wisconsin
One of the most influential cultural historians of the twentieth century, Mosse published over 300 books and articles on topics ranging from the Reformation to modern German Jewish history, to gender studies and fascism.
Gerhard Lachmann- Mosse (he later anglicized his name) was born into an eminent German Jewish family. His father was Hans Lachmann, grandson of Salomon Lachmann, a wealthy Prussian grain merchant and son of Edmund Lachmann, one of the first Jewish officers in the Prussian army. His mother, Felicia Mosse, was the only daughter of the media and advertising mogul Rudolf Mosse. The latter founded the Mosse publishing house, which published several newspapers, including the liberal Berliner Tageblatt (The Berlin Daily). By 1920 Rudolf Mosse had become one of the wealthiest men in Germany. The same year, Rudolf Mosse died, and his son-inlaw, Hans Lachmann, took charge of the family business.In 1933, with the rise of the National Socialists to power, the prominent family was forced to flee Germany. Already during the 1920s the family had been targeted by the National Socialists because the Mosse family was seen as the face of liberal German Jewish culture. Fleeing from Germany to Switzerland, George Mosse’s family went to France, while Mosse went to England to attend boarding school at Bootham, York. He later began his university education at Downing College, Cambridge University. In 1939 Mosse joined his father in the United States and completed his bachelor’s degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard in early modern European history, completing his doctoral degree in 1946 under the direction of Charles Howard McIlwain. By this time Mosse had already worked at the University of Iowa for nearly two years. In 1955 George Mosse joined the history department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he remained until his retirement in 1988.
In 1969 Mosse, who had spent much time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was given a joint appointment: from 1969, he spent half the academic year in Madison as Bascom professor and half a year in Jerusalem as Koebner professor of history.Throughout his academic career, Mosse was both a committed teacher and a prolific writer. As a professor, he influenced the scholarship of two generations of students on both sides of the Atlantic and helped young scholars build successful careers in various subfields of European
cultural history. Mosse began his career as a historian of early modern English history, but already by the mid-1960s he had changed his focus and begun studying twentieth-century European history. In many respects, his personal experience and identity became the focal point for his studies, though this identity remained secular and academic. He considered himself intensely German and was proud of the direction in which postwar Germany was moving. Yet, while never directly writing on the subject, his work remained a meditation on how something like the Holocaust happened. He wrote in his autobiography Confronting History, “Being Jewish dominated my fate, but did not lead to a preoccupation with Judaism” (Mosse 2000, 172). For Mosse, the personal and the historical were intertwined. As a selfdescribed outsider, both a Jewish and homosexual man, Mosse spent years studying fascism, Nazism, and German Jewish history. Near the end of his career, he turned his attention to gender and sexuality. Among his most noteworthy books are The Crisis of German Ideology (1964), Nazi Culture (1966), The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), Toward the Final Solution (1977), and The Image of Man (1996).
Sarah Wobick
See also Intellectual Exile; Plant, Richard References and Further Reading Kraus, Elisabeth. Die Familie Mosse: Deutsch- Judisches Burgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999.
Mosse, George L. Confronting History: A Memoir. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2000.
Runge, Irene, and Uwe Stelbrink, George Mosse: ‘Ich bleibe Emigrant’ Gesprache mit George L. Mosse. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991.