Past history is always contemporary. 
George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses

Toward the end of his life, writing in his memoir Confronting History, George Mosse recalled the occupation of Mossehaus by the Spartacists during the Janaury uprising of 1919. This was the Berlin headquarters of his grandfather’s publishing empire and contained the printing presses of Germany’s leading liberal newspapers. By this time, Rudolf Mosse was too old and frail to deal directly with the Spartacists himself, so he sent his son-in-law and company director Hans Lachmann to negotiate on his behalf. As George later recalled:

My father went into the occupied building and talked all night to one of their leaders, Rosa Luxemburg, who wanted to prevent the publication of the Berliner Tageblatt, scheduled for the next morning. He managed to keep her in conversation until the paper actually appeared and was delivered in the early morning hours. For the rest of his life this committed liberal and capitalist was fond of saying that Rosa Luxemburg was the most intelligent woman he had ever met. (1)

In the following days, the Communist revolt was crushed and Luxemburg murdered by Freikorps troops, a casualty of the counterrevolution that would contribute so many men to the ranks of the SA and SS. Although they did not know this yet, the Mosses would also become victims of the Nazis, targeted by the regime as “ready-made symbols of the so-called Jewish Press” (2).

In his history of Zionism, Walter Laqueur drew a detailed portrait of the post-emancipation Jewish bourgeoisie of Germany, quoting the politician and economist Ludwig Bamberger who

stressed that the symbiosis, the identification of the Jews with the Germans, had been closer than with any other people. They had been thoroughly Germanised well beyond Germany’s border; through the medium of language they had accepted German culture, and through the culture, the German national spirit. He and his friends thought there was obviously some affinity in the national character which attracted Jews so strongly to Germany and the German spirit. (3)

This was the world in which George Mosse was born and raised, as a privileged child of the liberal Jewish elite of Berlin. He did not consider his opulent lifestyle of grand houses, country estates, private chauffeurs and indulgent governesses to be anything out of the ordinary. The Mosses were well-connected employers and philanthropists who felt secure in their national identity and were therefore complacent about the Nazi threat when it first emerged. Mosse recalled that

like many liberals of his generation…my father could bring himself only with difficulty to take the Nazis seriously. He used to say that Hitler did not belong in the front part of the newspaper, but in the Ulk, the comic supplement. (4)

The family considered itself German “without giving it another thought” (5) and were unprepared to confront a regime that viewed them as enemies of the völk. “To be sure,” Mosse wrote, “such families as ours shared some of the self-criticism of Jews and had a lively consciousness of antisemitism, but in the last resort, German, Jew and family were interchangable concepts” (6). For the Mosses this faith in Germany, liberalism and the tradition of the Enlightenment — which had, after all, secured their emancipation and provided them with the opportunity to succeed so spectacularly — also underpinned their anti-Zionism, a position that George would only abandon later in life. 

Everything changed in 1933 when the Nazi agent Wilhelm Ohst held Lachmann at gunpoint and forced him to sign over the Mosse firm as part of the mass expropriation of newspapers and publishing houses by the Nazis. An SA thug, racial occultist and petty criminal backed by the power of an antisemitic regime, Ohst was no Luxemburg, as Mosse later noted: “this indeed was a different sort of occupation from that of the Sparticists with whom [my father] had dealt so easily after the First World War” (7). With no prospect of negotiation, the family was forced to abandon their business and property and escape into exile in France. They would never return to live in Germany and the experience of dispossession and exile would define the rest of their lives. For George, it would determine his future course as a historian of fascism, nationalism and racism: “I could not simply walk away from the failure of socialists and liberals to understand National Socialism,” he wrote in his memoir, “this failure in which, as we have seen, my own family’s publishing empire had been involved, was constantly before me” (8). It turned out that the Mosses were fortunate to have been targeted so early: by the Second World War they had settled in America, safe from Nazi extermination. Nevertheless, in an essay to mark his retirement, Mosse would conclude that

all my books in one way or another have dealt with the Jewish catastrophe of my time which I always regarded as no accident, structural fault or continuity of bureaucratic habit, but seemingly built into our society and towards life. Nothing in European history is a stranger to the Holocaust… (9)

For Mosse, like Benedetto Croce, history is always contemporary. This was the root of his contention — by no means universally accepted — that the Holocaust was not a historical aberration but an event with deep roots in the European experience. Croce was a key influence on Mosse; in 1976 he would tell the young historian Michael Ledeen that the Italian had “influenced me, above all, through his concept of the totality of history, something I believe very much — that outside history there is no reality” (10). His belief — in common with Croce — that the individual is central to historical understanding helped Mosse to maintain the careful balance between political commitment and impartial analysis in his own work. He would later acknowledge that his identity as a Jewish German exile and a closeted homosexual had largely determined his central historical themes: “I have always been instinctively suspicious of historians who have held an overriding belief, including a faith in a traditional religion,” he later explained, “now I realise that this attitude, while still desirable as an ideal, was unfair…The temper of the times made a neutral stance impossible and perhaps even undesirable to maintain” (11). But this was subtle: political commitment did not give way to mere activism and he would never explicitly link his research to a contemporary cause. His work overlapped with the Frankfurt School and he would scope out territory explored by Foucault and occupied by Gender Studies, but he would never join an intellectual movement or adopt the terms of passing theoretical trends. This was a form of freedom: it is what gave his writing its scope and clarity but also determined his own historical methodology.

“I have always believed that empathy is the chief quality a historian needs to cultivate,” Mosse wrote in Confronting History (12), but when he tried to view the interwar fascist movements as they had viewed themselves he transgressed the boundaries of acceptable academic debate in a way that was considered either misguided or sinister. This independence — or singularity — led to relative obscurity outside of the niche of comparative Fascist Studies, where his work remains controversial and to some degree subliminal. In Italy, where he was genuinely and widely appreciated, fame was clouded by the scandal surrounding his friend Renzo De Felice that followed the publication of the 1974 Intervista sul fascismo with Michael Ledeen. As Ledeen recalled:

for months, it was virtually impossible to read a newspaper, watch an evening of television, or listen to a few hours of radio without running into a supercharged attack on De Felice, not only for the presumed ‘errors’ of his historical analysis but also for ‘corrupting Italian youth.’ More than one critic suggested that he be forbidden to teach at Italian universities. (13)

Mosse, for his part, publicly defended De Felice, and the two historians found inspiration and support in each other’s ideas and work. Most importantly, they quickly acquired the same enemies and for largely the same reasons: by taking the ideas and aesthetics of fascism seriously they found themselves accused of revisionism by critics who sought to make political gains from the scandal or behaved defensively, in reaction to a perceived attack on their own theoretical assumptions. At the heart of this was a deliberate misunderstanding of ‘historical empathy’ which Mosse had defined as “putting contemporary prejudice aside while looking at the past without fear of favour” (14) and which was emphatically not the equivalent of sympathy. 

In practice, ‘historical empathy’ was a method that allowed Mosse to focus on the myths, symbols and perceptions of fascist movements, their supporters and mass participants. Crucially, this did not simply mean the study of high culture, but also popular culture or populist theories, ranging from pulp novels to occult movements. This doesn’t seem very controversial now, but Mosse broke etiquette in two ways: by analysing cultural materials that had been treated as unworthy of consideration by serious historians and treating fascism and Nazism as coherent ideologies in their own right. In the introduction to his 1999 essay collection The Fascist Revolution, Mosse described his approach and its relation to contemporary interpretations of fascism: “Fascism considered as a cultural movement means seeing fascism as it saw itself and as its followers saw it, to attempt to understand the movement on its own terms,” he wrote, “only then, when we have grasped fascism from the inside out, can we truly judge its appeal and its power” (15). The objective of this was not to rehabilitate fascism, but to understand it better: both its historical reality and its existing danger. Ideas put forward by Mosse and De Felice — such as their contention that the Italian Fascist and Nazi regimes ruled by consensus, or their definition of fascism as a middle class revolution of the right — posed a direct challenge to both Marxist and liberal traditions. In Germany, “consensus” was a sensitive topic and, as a consequence, Mosse was largely ignored by German historians; in Italy, the Marxist and liberal cultural and academic elite of the First Republic claimed jealous possession of the revolutionary tradition and saw any attempt to question the unity of Italian fascism and Nazism to be a fascist act, hence the vilification of De Felice and (by extension) Mosse.  

Mosse’s breakthrough work of 1964, The Crisis of German Ideology, put forward a new, and for German historians difficult, proposition: that Nazism was made possible by a German völkisch movement that had  “penetrated deeply into the national fabric” and “showed a depth of feeling and a dynamic that was not equaled elsewhere” (16). This was the first attempt to analyse the cultural traditions of Germanism and the institutionalisation of völkisch thought in the German Youth Movements, schools, universities, nationalist organisations and political parties of the right. (‘Leadership, Bund and Eros’, a chapter devoted to the links between masculinity, homo-eroticism and völkisch ideals, was a revolutionary piece of research and analysis in itself.) The point wasn’t that Nazism was an inevitable culmination of German history or an innate expression of German character  — the ‘From Luther to Hitler’ school or Sonderweg paradigm. Instead, Mosse argued that the success of völkisch ideas in a newly unified and rapidly industrializing Germany created the conditions in which Nazism could succeed by general consensus. The “human perceptions, hopes and longing for the good life” (17) that contributed to this could not be seen in total isolation from broader economic and social forces common to other countries, but the specific historical reality of Germany could not be avoided: “as a result of the lost war, Germany became the nation in which the völkisch dream was realised [and] the alliance between racism and völkisch nationalism triumphed” (18). Racism was key to the development of German nationalism and the central innovation of Nazism was to turn the German Revolution into an Anti-Jewish revolution (“the dehumanisation of the Jew is perhaps one of the most significant developments in the evolution of the völkisch ideology”, 19). Hitler’s defining achievement was to organise a diffuse völkisch movement into a new religion of state by combining the irrational mysticism of the Germanic Faith with ruthless and pragmatic political tactics. “Mein Kampf is devoted 50 percent to theory and 50 percent to organisation,” Mosse told Ledeen in a 1976 interview, “and that’s about right as far as Hitler is concerned because he believed that theory was all important — the myth was central — but it would be no good unless it could be translated into action” (20). The Nazi myth needed a tradition to activate and The Crisis of German Ideology was the first attempt to analyse and catalogue the origins, character and structure of that tradition. “You cannot have any successful myth without historical preparation,” Mosse explained, “I tried, then, to show the roots of this myth” (21).

The scope and range of Mosse’s work at this time was unique — linking texts and ideologies to movements, institutions and, finally, mass murder — but not everybody thought it was warranted. Fritz Stern had covered similar ground a couple of years earlier, but most of Mosse’s contemporaries considered fascism to be empty of theoretical content and therefore deemed its ideological roots to be irrelevant. This was largely because fascism did not conform to their own definitions, as Mosse was willing to point out:

all fascisms rejected classical political theory, that is why Anglo-Saxon scholars have such a difficult time discussing it. They’re always looking for logical, consistent political theories. But fascism regarded itself, always, wherever it was, as an attitude of mind, an attitude towards life. (22)

Unlike Communism, with its foundation in the canonical works of Marxism, fascism was not a textual doctrine, but a visual revolution; it did not proceed by rational explication of theory, but by the mobilisation of masses of people through myth, symbols and ritual. This crucial insight provided the foundation for Mosse’s 1975 masterpiece The Nationalization of the Masses in which he described the contribution that national monuments, sacred spaces, architecture, public festivals, theatre, cultural organisations and popular taste all made to the Germanic myth. Here Mosse touched on new themes that would contribute to a general theoretical framework for all of his work: the idea of politics as a civic religion; the continuity between fascist and bourgeois aesthetics; the links between the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, nationalism and fascism; and the concrete objectification of myth in rituals, art and monuments. Mosse termed this the New Politics and defined it as a secular political style that developed from the French Revolution to the Second World War “through the use of national myths and symbols and the development of a liturgy which would enable the people themselves to participate in such worship” (23). In Germany and Italy — the youngest of the major European nations — the end point of this was fascism, a political style that stood outside the rational, logical systems of traditional political theory:

the fascists themselves described their political thought as an “attitude” rather than a  system; it was, in fact, a theology which provided the framework for national worship. As such, its rites and liturgies were central, an integral part of a political theory which was not dependent on the appeal of the written word. (24)

This would later be described as Mosse’s “visual turn”: a new and innovative analysis of fascism that incorporated aesthetics and anthropology, simultaneously widening the scope and altering the terms of the debate.

The Nationalization of the Masses — a relatively short work of 216 pages — established a new foundation for the cultural history of nationalism and fascism. The book had its greatest impact in Italy where it intersected with the ideas of De Felice and set a course for Emilio Gentile. In an interview published in Corriere della sera in 1985, Mosse speculated that his popularity in Italy was due to “the widespread diffusion in your country to think visually: a predisposition which is very important for understanding my writings, the encounter between symbols and myths” (25). During this time, the relationship between Mosse and De Felice was particularly productive — even their disagreements led to clarity and refinements. Their insistence on the differences between Nazism and Fascism led to separate conclusions: for De Felice it rendered any general definition of fascism futile, while Mosse would attempt a generic theory in his 1979 essay ‘Towards a General Theory of Fascism’. The distinction De Felice drew between the radical, activist ‘fascist-movement’ of the squadristi and the reactionary, establishment ‘fascist-regime’ of Mussolini found an echo in Mosse’s own analysis of Nazism as an “anti-bourgeois bourgeois revolution” (26) and the provocative link he made between Hitler’s apocalyptic racism and bourgeois tastes. Both Mosse and De Felice saw the fundamental difference between the Nazi and Fascist movements resided in the way they viewed human nature. For the Nazis, human identity was fixed and immutable and their racism was rooted in ancient German history; for Italian Fascists, human identity was open-ended, dynamic, a matter of ‘spirit’ rather than blood, and therefore racism had less traction. These fine but crucial distinctions, shared with slight nuance by both historians, directly challenged the received wisdom of Marxist and liberal historiography in Italy, and they were bitterly contested. The “storm over De Felice” exploded precisely because the bestselling Intervista sul fascismo presented these ideas with a clarity and concision not found in his own books, thereby setting a clear challenge to the intellectual foundations of the First Republic. In fact, this clarity was important: it did not minimise the crimes of the Fascist regime, but helped to define its true nature. 

For the study of modern European politics, tracing the origins of racism as an ideology was essential to understand its ultimate triumph in the Third Reich, as Mosse knew. In the German case, racism was the central component of Nazi ideology and the direct motivation for unprecedented crimes. In 1978, Mosse finally reckoned with the origins of Nazi mass murder and produced one of the angriest books he ever wrote: his history of European racism, Toward the Final Solution. The anger, as such, did not communicate itself in the style or the tone or even the method, all of which was as cool and expansive as ever, but in the details of his analysis and conclusions. Mosse traced the roots of modern European racism to two traditions: Romanticism (also the root of nationalism) and the Enlightenment. Racism combined science with aesthetics: scientific classification and Greek ideals of beauty found a joint application in eugenics, physiognomy and the Aryan stereotype, all Enlightenment legacies. In Germany this combined with völkisch nationalism and led a nation down the fatal path of racial mysticism, race war and Lebensraum. Racism, as a political ideology, social aesthetic and national movement, required an antithesis and an enemy to give it dynamism: in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe this could only be the Jew. The Jew in this taxonomy was therefore given a distinct look that stood in direct contrast to the Aryan male, itself a derivation of Classical aesthetic models revived during the Enlightenment: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, for Mosse, visual ages, a key element in his analysis. Finally, the Jewish stereotype came to embody everything that threatened or corrupted the national community: urban culture, financial capitalism, international cosmopolitanism, and sexual and aesthetic decadence.

It was this middle class development and promotion of stereotypes that underpinned Mosse’s description of the Nazi as the ideal bourgeois and also inspired his depiction of the nineteenth century “struggle to control sex” (27) through stereotypes and manners in 1985’s Nationalism and Sexuality — an equally angry book that was in many ways a companion piece to Toward the Final Solution. For Mosse, racism and respectability stemmed from the same impulse to classify and thereby exclude, as well as the same fatal combination of science and aesthetics. The story of racism was not “the history of an aberration of European thought” but “an integral part of the human experience” (28), while

respectability provided society with an essential cohesion that was as important in the perceptions of men and women as any economic or political interests. What began as bourgeois morality in the eighteenth century, in the end became everyone’s morality. (29)

This was the paradox of the Enlightenment that Mosse identified — what gave birth to liberalism and led to Jewish emancipation also spawned the twin evils of racism and respectability. 

These were key concerns for Mosse because they were directly rooted in his own past and personal experience. However, in his late memoir, he qualified one crucial aspect of this attack on the European bourgeoisie: “the repression involved in the maintenance of respectability seemed to strike reviewers, and indeed I might have overstressed this aspect of nationalism and respectability by failing to suppress sufficiently my anger over the fact that the strictures of respectability had made my own life so much more difficult” (30). Furthermore, in his preface to the republication of The Crisis of German Ideology, Mosse expressed second thoughts about the origins of National Socialism that had implications for all of his work on nationalism, racism and fascism:

If I were to write this book today…the First World War, which prepared the breakthrough of völkisch thought, would be given greater space. Not only because the myth of the war experience proved susceptible to völkisch ideas, but because, as a result of the lost war and its consequences, Germany became the nation in which the völkisch dream was to be realised. This could not have been foreseen before the war. (31)

Mosse redressed this in Fallen Soldiers, his 1990 study on the memory of war that finally gave the First World War the “space” it had not been accorded in his earlier work. Influenced by cultural historians such as Marc Ferro and Paul Fussell, Mosse came to see the First World War as the great catalytic event of the twentieth century, a collective experience that gave nationalism and racism the dynamism and momentum that led directly to fascism and the Holocaust. Fallen Soldiers drew together all the social, cultural and military trends that had developed from the French Revolution to 1914 in order to identify the defining features of the Great War and its aftermath: the myth of the war experience, the cult of the fallen, the worship of the nation, the brutalisation of politics, the mechanisation of all aspects of life and the dehumanisation of the enemy. For Mosse, “the encounter with mass death” during the war “took on a new dimension, the political consequences of which vitally affected the politics of the interwar years” (32). All of the nations involved felt these effects to different degrees, but none more so than Germany, a country both traumatised and brutalised by the war experience and with a völkisch ideology ready to be activated and exploited by the parties of the right, with the Nazis at the vanguard. The First World War was the decisive point at which all the key elements Mosse had traced in his work — from the stereotypes of race and gender to the ideologies of nationalism and völk — were fatally radicalised, with antisemitism, racial mysticism and the cult of violence moving from the margins to the centre of European politics. In the final analysis, it was the Great War that led to Nazi culture and Holocaust morality, the dark heart of European modernity. 

The last major works of Mosse — Fallen Soldiers and The Image of Man (1997) — developed all of the key themes and subjects from across his career, providing a rich coda to his long study of the politics of nation, race and gender from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both books represented a final reckoning with his times and with his own personal experience; they were also his most beautiful and underrated works. After his death in 1999, tributes were paid to his influence and achievement in the form of obituaries, essays and conferences, and to this day his academic legacy is kept alive through programmes, funds, conferences and prizes all bearing his name and often paid for by the Mosse estate, stolen by the Nazis in 1933 and returned by the newly unified German state in 1990. Most significantly, in 2020 the University of Wisconsin Press finally began to publish Mosse’s collected works with new critical introductions, and as a result The Crisis of German Ideology, Nationalism and Sexuality, Toward the Final Solution and The Fascist Revolution are already back in print. I assumed this would be big news, but then I have not seen any acknowledgment of these new editions in the British or American press — not in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books or even Commentary, a magazine that once published him.

This seems to be par for the course: today, the innovations and influence of Mosse go largely unacknowledged, even in research areas he helped to establish. Nevertheless, Roger Griffin continues “the Mossean legacy” in his own work and Emilio Gentile still plots a course set by his original encounter with Mosse’s books; their respective studies Modernism and Fascism (2007) and The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993) are key works in the Mosse lineage. Furthermore, Mosse’s subliminal influence is  pervasive, as Griffin suggested in 2008 when he noted “the appearance of a series of books by a younger generation of historians who find it a matter of ‘common sense’ to engage with fascism not as a reactionary, backwards-looking force, but as a revolutionary, futural one deeply bound up with the early twentieth century revolt against existing modernity that took on myriad aesthetic, social and political forms” (33). The uncontroversial acceptance by contemporary historians writing about fascism of ideas first pursued by Mosse (along with De Felice) in the face of fierce ideological hostility is, in the end, the sum of his legacy. It is a large one, and yet his name is invisible. The same holds true for the wider terrain of cultural history (Linda Colley’s Britons seems to me to be a very Mossean book, but he appears to have no acknowledged impact on her method or thinking) as well as the various schools and departments of Gender Studies, Queer Theory and LGBT history, fields in which he was a genuine pioneer. The reasons are likely to be political or stylistic, but this is wrong: Mosse still has plenty to say about the world we live in now, and he always has done. “This is still the age of mass politics,” he once wrote for an untitled speech on the subject of indoctrination,

and the same longings which were operative in 1945 are still with us surely — the political process is still a drama transmitted to us by the media…the old traditions seem to have broken down, but now we have them again under a different form, mediating between us and the world, between us and our hopes in escaping from the crisis of our time, which is the crisis of mass politics and mass democracy. Indoctrination is in reality this mediation and it would not work if it did not represent a principle of hope. Rather than condemn it we must understand its function: then perhaps we can begin to escape its all pervasive present. (34)

I think we should be reading Mosse carefully, and learning from him. 

1. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p.40
2. Ibid., p.66
3. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Schocken Books, 2003), pps.30-1
4. Mosse, Confronting History, p.41
5. Ibid., p.43
6. Ibid., p.26
7. Ibid., pps.67-8
8. Ibid., p.184
9. Quoted in Steven E. Aschheim’s introduction to George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), p.xxv
10. George L. Mosse and Michael A. Ledeen, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (Basil Blackwell, 1978), p.29
11. Mosse, Confronting History, p.6
12. Ibid., p.5
13. Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed (AEI Press, 1996), p.25
14. Mosse, Confronting History, p.5
15. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999), p.x
16. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p.10
17. Ibid., p.x
18. Ibid., pps.x-xi
19. Ibid., p.141 
20. Mosse and Ledeen, Nazism, p.59 
21. Ibid., p.32
22. Ibid., p.108
23. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Cornell University Press, 1991), pps.2-3
24. Ibid., p.9
25. Quoted in Giorgio Caravale, ‘“A Mutual Admiration Society”: The Intellectual Friendships and the Origins of George Mosse’s Connection to Italy’ in George L Mosse’s Italy: Interpretation, Reception and Cultural Heritage, ed. Lorenzo Benadusi and Giorgio Caravale (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.65
26. George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Wayne State University Press, 1987), p.6
27. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (Howard Fertig, 1997), p.9
28. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Howard Fertig, 1997), pps. xxviii-xxix
29. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p.191
30. Mosse, Confronting History, p.180
31. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p.x
32. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 1990), p.3
33. ‘The Fascination of Fascism: A Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin’ in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.214
34. Quoted in Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), p.207