Confronting History: A Memoir Book

"A historian who redefined the interpretation of European fascism and Hitler's Germany, and who made decisive contributions to the liberal historiography of modern Europe. He was a man of uncommon intellectual vivacity and a great teacher."-New Republic "The late George Mosse was, as he says at the close of his autobiography, a child of this century. This book, even more than recent interviews or profiles of Mosse, reveals how very true this claim is. The most German of Germans, the most Jewish of Jews, the most American of Americans, Mosse lived out the complexities of all these categories. This autobiography plumbs the depths of the inner man and leaves those who knew him as well as those who wish to get to know him better for having read it."-Sander Gilman, University of Chicago 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. Confronting History is the autobiography of an internationally renowned historian. George Mosse, who recently died, was a pioneering scholar of German history and one of the founders of what today we call cultural history-which means that he was the first historian to investigate the cultural, sexual, and psychological roots of National Socialism and the Nazi movement. Mosse's life-story is also interesting as a purely human document that casts a new, vivid light on the Holocaust. A member of a German Jewish elite family who published the leading leftist Berlin newspaper, Mosse saw his family denounced by name in Hitler's earliest speeches. Managing to escape Germany just before it was too late, the historian would flee to the U.S. where his life of exile (and his status as an increasingly open gay man) reveals much about our own history, and the changing shape of academia.Read More