George L. Mosse

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University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Document 1459
1 November 1999

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION OF THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ON THE DEATH OF PROFESSOR EMERITUS GEORGE LACHMANN MOSSE
(1918-1999)

George L. Mosse, one of the most distinguished and creative figures in the history of the University of Wisconsin-Madison History Department, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Madison on January 22, 1999, after suffering six weeks from advanced, untreatable cancer. He was born to great wealth in Berlin in September 1918, grandson of the eminent Jewish publishing and advertising magnate, Rudolf Mosse. After Hitler came to power, the family was forced to flee Germany and lost most of its possessions. His education was completed in England at Bootham School and Cambridge University, and then, after the outbreak of war drove him to America, at Haverford College and Harvard University, where he completed his doctorate in 1946.

Mosse began his teaching career in the Army Specialized Training Program at the State University of Iowa in 1944 and became a regular member of the Iowa History Department in the following year. There he quickly developed his extraordinary talents as a lecturer, soon instructing an enormous survey course with hundreds of students. He became something of a celebrity in central Iowa, much in demand to speak at high school commencements, and he would later refer to these years as the time in which his Americanization was completed.

He was brought to Madison in 1956 at the rank of associate professor, chosen by the specialists in American history, who then led the Department, to invigorate with his teaching and scholarship a small and weak program in European history. Here he quickly established the same commanding position in the classroom that he had enjoyed at Iowa, becoming one of Wisconsin's first stars in European history, and during the 1960s he played an active and important role as a reformer in Department and campus affairs.

"George," as he was always known to colleagues and graduate students alike, achieved the same spectacular success in teaching on the graduate level, eventually advising a total of 38 students who completed their doctorates under his direction. They were a highly diverse group in outlook and specialization, who often disagreed among themselves intellectually and politically, for he encouraged them all to think independently and critically. His personal relationships with his students were unfailingly warm and close; no other professor in the history of the History Department has in turn inspired greater continuing affection and devotion over the decades among his former students.

Mosse began his career as a specialist in the era of the English Reformation, producing two book-length monographs in that field, as well as his influential brief general account, The Reformation (1950), which remained in use for many years. Soon after moving to Madison, however, he turned to the field that would involve the major part of his career--modern European cultural history—with subsequent sub-specializations, in the fields of fascism, German cultural history and Jewish history. This fundamental turn in his career was signaled by the publication of a key work, The Culture of Western Europe: the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1961), which still remains in print in several languages.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his unusually fertile career was Mosse's ability to anticipate and lead a whole sequence of new trends and subspecialties in modern European history from 1960 through the 1990s. Those ranged from the new cultural history to the comparative historiography and analysis of fascism, to the history of racism, of political symbolism and mass movements, the history of monuments and of mourning, ethnic and Jewish history, and finally the history of sexuality. In each of these fields he made original and fundamental contributions. In his books, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964) and Nazi Culture (1966), he illuminated the intellectual origins and cultural doctrines of National Socialism. Mosse's subsequent study, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (1975), became a pioneering study of political symbolism and mass mobilization, while his work, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1977), laid bare the intellectual development of racist ideas in Europe. His most personal book was probably German Jews Beyond Judaism (1985).

Mosse continued to move into new research fields even after his retirement from teaching. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990) became a cornerstone of the new historiography of national monuments and of mourning, and he made highly original contributions to the new history of sexuality and of the body in Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (1985) and in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996). Equally important, with Walter Laqueur he co-founded in 1966 the Journal of Contemporary History, which became the leading journal in English for the history of twentieth-century Europe, and which he continued actively to co-edit to the end of his life.

Mosse was probably the only professor in the history of the University of Wisconsin known to have refused a Vilas Professorship, because it would have required him to reduce his teaching by 50 percent. Instead, he became John C. Bascom Professor of Modern European History, helping to initiate the new category of Bascom Professorships, and later was appointed the first Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies. He taught the first course in Jewish history at Wisconsin and was one of the principal founders of Wisconsin's Jewish Studies Program. During the 1970s he began to teach every other semester at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he was later made the Koebner Professor of History.

Mosse was much in demand as visiting lecturer and scholar in the United States and many other countries, as invitations to teach or lecture took him as far as South Africa and twice across the Pacific to Australia. Though he retired from regular teaching in 1989, the pace of his work and travels flagged very little, while new activities were added, such as a series of appearances for fundraising on behalf of the Jewish Studies Center, the Department of History and the University. Among his many distinctions were the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction, the Leo Baeck Medal, an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University, and appointment as the Holocaust Museum's first Scholar-in-Residence.

The last of his more than 25 books was a volume of memoirs, Confronting History, which he completed in the late autumn of 1998, on the eve of his fatal illness. Mosse's autobiography is, in its own way, as remarkable as his scholarly writings, avoiding the tedium and dryness of most professional memoirs, enlivened by his inimitable humor and rare capacity to tell jokes about himself. Confronting History, which contains a chapter of vivid pen portraits of the leading figures of the Wisconsin History Department of the 1950s and 60s, will shortly be published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

George Mosse is survived by his partner, John Tortorice of Madison, and his niece Joy Mosse of Beverly Hills, California. He has left sizable bequests to the Department of History, Jewish Studies and Hebrew University. His friends, colleagues and former students have endowed in his name an annual prize to be bestowed by the American Historical Association on the best book published each year in European cultural history since the Renaissance, with the first George L. Mosse Prize to be awarded for the year 2000.
The passing of this extraordinary teacher, scholar and friend leaves a void that will not readily be filled.

MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
Stanley Payne, Chair
David Sorkin
Rudy Koshar

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