Memoir / History / Holocaust / Gay Interest
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Confronting
History "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.
George L.
Mosse
(1919–1999) was John C. Bascom Professor of European History
and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison. He was also Koebner Professor of History
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was selected to be
the first scholar-in-residence at the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.C. He wrote more than two dozen books, including Nationalism
and Sexuality; Toward the Final Solution; and Nazi Culture: Intellectual,
Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, also published by the UW Press. |
  
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