Confronting History: A Memoir

Just two weeks before his death in January 1999, George L. Mosse, one of this century’s great historians, finished writing his memoir, a fascinating and fluent account of a remarkable life that spanned three continents and many of the major events of the twentieth century. Writing about the events of his life through a historian’s lens, Mosse gives us a personal history of our century. This is a story told with the clarity, passion, and verve that entranced thousands of Mosse’s students and that countless readers have found, and will continue to find, in his many scholarly books.

Confronting History describes Mosse’s opulent childhood in Weimar Berlin; his exile in Paris and England, including boarding school and study at Cambridge University; his second exile in the U.S. at Haverford, Harvard, Iowa, and Wisconsin; and his extended stays in London and Jerusalem. Mosse also deals with matters of personal identity. He discusses being a Jew and his attachment to Israel and Zionism. He addresses his gayness, his coming out, and his growing scholarly interest in issues of sexuality.

This touching memoir, sometimes harrowing, often humorous, is guided in part by Mosse’s belief that “what man is, only history tells,” and by his constant themes of the fate of liberalism, the defining events that can bring about the generational political awakenings of youth (from the anti-fascism struggles of the 1930s to the campus anti-war movement of the 1960s), the meanings of masculinity and racial and sexual stereotypes, the enigma of exile, and—most of all—the importance of finding one’s self through the pursuit of truth, and through an honest and unflinching analysis of one’s place in the context of his times.

Writing about the events of his life through a historian's lens, Mosse gives us a personal history of our century, including his encounters with Carl Jung, Martin Buber, Albert Speer, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others among the famous and infamous. This is a story told with the clarity, passion, and verve that entranced thousands of Mosse's students and that countless readers have found, and will continue to find, in his many scholarly books.

Kirkus Reviews

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 confessionsandsensation, 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)