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Book Review
Methods and Theory
| Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice, editors. What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe. Foreword by Walter Laqueur. (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History.) Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 292. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95.
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| Even before he wrote what some scholars regard as his most important studies (Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe [1985] and Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars [1990]), appreciative essays were published on the influence of George L. Mosse (1918–1999), arguably the greatest university history teacher of his time. It is not surprising that a sophisticated, well-crafted volume analyzing his impact has appeared only five years after his death. Mosse is best known for a pioneering approach to cultural history in which he sought to discern how perceptions shaped consciousness, and consequently, politics, primarily in Germany. He used popular literature and visual imagery to a much greater extent than previous academic historians, especially compared to those who styled themselves "historians of ideas" and "intellectual historians." As opposed to constituting a collective biography, the thrust of this book is historiographic, examining how Mosse challenged, changed, and stimulated the writing of British, European, German, and Jewish history, and particularly the history of nationalism, sexuality, fascism, and the Holocaust. |
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The book is divided into four sections—"Mosse on Early Modern Europe," "Mosse and Fascism," "Comparative History, Nationalism, and Memory;" and "Mosse and Jewish History"—comprising fourteen essays, a penetrating, succinct introduction by Steven Aschheim, and a bibliography compiled by John Tortorice. Unusually coherent for a volume that originated in a conference, the segments are unified by a number of themes. Each contributor concurs that Mosse made a tremendous impression on the study and writing of history, sometimes in ways that were not immediately apparent; that his insights have frequently been proven to be well founded, even if they were initially disparaged; and that in many respects he ran ahead of his field. |
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From the 1950s to the 1990s, Mosse's scholarship was not, however, always considered fashionable or cutting edge. Shulamit Volkov writes that when she was a graduate student in Berkeley in the late 1960s, when "social history" was all the rage, Mosse's Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich was not highly valued among her cohort. Likewise, Saul Friedländer recounts Mosse's fitful early reception in Germany (p. 136), and provides keen insight into the relationship between Mosse's German-Jewish background and his scholarship. Along with the overwhelmingly warm and positive appraisal of Mosse's oeuvre in total, there are several strong doses of criticism—most of which Mosse would have relished and possibly accepted. Some points, such as Roger Griffin's assertion that Mosse embodied a distinctly "Jewish" way of thinking (pp. 113–14), he might have strenuously rebutted. However, Griffin, unique among the contributors for not knowing Mosse personally, supplies one of the book's most illuminating chapters on the subject of "Mosse's Anthropological View of Fascism." |
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