Between Rationality and Irrationalism:
George L. Mosse, the Holocaust, and European Cultural History
by Steven E. Aschheirn

George L. Mosse. The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961. 439 pages.

George L. Mosse. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. vi, 373 pages.

GeorgeL. Mosse. Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a "Third Force" in Pre-Nazi Germany. New York: Howard Fertig, 1970. 260 pages.

George L. Mosse. The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich. New York: Howard Fertig, 1975. xii, 252 pages.

George L. Mosse. Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism. New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1978. 134 pages.

George L. Mosse. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. New York: Howard Fertig, 1978. xvi, 277 pages.

George L. Mosse. Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality. New York: Howard Fertig, 1980. 362 pages.

George L. Mosse. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Howard Fertig, 1985. 232 pages.

George L. Mosse. German Jews Beyond Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 98 pages.

George Mosse's Europe has always been peopled by strange and powerful forces threatening to engulf its precious but fragile humanist heritage. His cultural history is animated by a complex but unabashed commitment to that heritage; his work over the last thirty years has also made clear its radical precariousness.1 The twentieth century experience of totalitarianism and of mass atrocity and presumably the personal trauma of being a refugee2 have constrained Mosse to become perhaps the contemporary historian of modern irrationalism. Above all, he has concerned himself with the deeper roots of the Nazi destruction of Jewry, always lifting it out of narrow, parochial contexts and linking it to wider-and usually unperceived-modalities of the German and European experience. As he recently stated:

All my books in one way or another have dealt with the Jewish catastrophe of my time which I have always regarded as no accident, structural fault or continuity of bureaucratic habits, but seemingly built into our society and attitudes towards life. Nothing in European history is a stranger to the holocaust.3

Any appreciation of Mosse's work requires brief mention of the particular approach he brings to the study of cultural and intellectual history. With Mosse, one is not limited to abstract and rational ideas that are somehow borne autonomously aloft through the historical process as was the practice with the traditional "history of ideas" school. Rather, we enter the far broader realm of popular culture where the diffusion of myths and ideologies, symbols and stereotypes becomes of paramount importance. Mosse is essentially engaged in the history of mediated human perceptions. Material factors, Mosse would agree, are fundamental to historical life. But, as he notes in the introduction to Masses and Man:

However much they may be limited by objective reality, men and women do have choices to make. Indeed, that reality tends to be shaped by the perceptions men and women have of it.... [They] act upon reality as they perceive it, and thus they help to shape it as well.5

That approach becomes apparent in Mosse's sustained, and continuing, effort to come to grips with European Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. His first foray into the field, The Crisis of German Ideology (1964), has become a classic and continues to shape our image of Nazism to this day. This book took issue with the conventional view in the 1950s of Nazism as totalitarianism. It denied the notion that Nazism was simply the product of mass propaganda and terror, the rule of an atomized and terrified population by a ruthless elite. Nazism, rather, had to be conceived as an immanent tendency with its roots in German sociopolitical development and popular culture. Mosse did not, however, try to demonstrate this via the usual historyof-ideas approach. Nor did he accept the crude argument that Nazism was somehow inherent in German national character and that the line from Luther to Hitler was a direct and irresistible one, as one reviewer charged when the book was published.6

What he sought to identify, rather, was one particular tradition: the emergence and crystallization of a habit of thought, feeling, and perception, which he designated as Volkish ideology. This was a response caused by the perplexities of the German experience of modernization during the latter part of the nineteenth century, which was reinforced and radicalized in the twentieth century. The Crisis of German Ideology treats us to an erudite and differentiated exposition of this semimystic, organic, nationalist Weltanschauung. The work demonstrates how it was absorbed into German popular culture and transformed into a cultural resource available for appropriate political tapping.

It was through Volkish ideology, Mosse contended, that conceptions of German identity during this period became so critically linked with the "Jewish question." The central foil, the salient antitype of Volkish thought and imagery-with its metaphysic of national roots; its symbolism of blood, soil, and will; its anti-urban and antiliberal biasfocused most naturally upon the Jew. Who better fit the requisite stereotype of rootlessness and foreignness, of liberalism and restless modernity than the Jew? For Mosse, therefore, the eventual development of Nazism into an "anti-Jewish revolution" became comprehensible largely within the wider context of Volkish thinking, which had its beginnings long before the Weimar period.

If in many ways The Crisis of German Ideology departed from the con- ventional wisdom of the day, it did, nevertheless, contain a species of what has lately come to be known as the German Sonderweg thesis.7

Mosse, to be sure, disdained simplistic conceptions of German national character and historical determinism. Yet, in the last analysis, the Nazi experience could be grasped only as a result of longterm historical differences between Germany and other nations. German Fascism, Mosse wrote, was different from Fascism elsewhere because it ultimately reflected "the difference between German thought and that of the other western European nations." Only there was the repudiation of the heritage of the European Enlightenment "planted so deep or for such a long time."8

Mosse's recent work has substantially shifted his earlier emphasis. Although antirationalism and antiliberalism were latently present after the Wars of Liberation, they represented only marginal phenomena until World War I. That event, Mosse now insists, and its disastrous aftermath became constitutive of the German Sonderweg (if one can be identified at all). The brutalizing experience of 1914-1918 was fundamental to the rise of Fascist politics, and only war and defeat were able to propel previously unimportant trends into the center. These extreme events took fringe tendencies such as radical racist nationalism and placed them at the heart of national life."9

Further, whereas Mosse's earlier comparative perspective stressed the uniqueness of German prewar development,10 over the past few years he has been at pains to point out that prior to 1914 the most pernicious proto-Fascist, racist, and antisemitic tendencies were to be found not in Germany, but in France.11 There were no German equivalents of the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama Scandal, or the Third Republic. Nevertheless, as Mosse also points out, France did possess vital countervailing tendencies. Unlike Germany, it did have a powerful and ongoing liberal, revolutionary tradition. When Germany was defeated in World War I and the crisis erupted, there were no similar effective and popular antidotes available.12

The above contributions were all concerned with the content of the Fascist drive and the Volkish myth. Mosse's The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), however, delved into a different dimension of the problem. It sought to uncover not so much the content, as the form, of what Mosse identified as a "new politics," which began in Germany during the Napoleonic Wars and received its final, most sophisticated expression in Nazism. This almost anthropological history relates the rise of a visually oriented, participatory "counterpolitics" to liberal parliamentarianism. Characteristically fusing nationalism with democracy, the new politics had a style which, Mosse argued, could not be subsumed under the canons of traditional theory. In order to understand its driving impulse, one had to go beyond explanations (such as in J.L. Talmon's The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy) that sought to account for it in terms of the centrality of ideas and the continuity of political thought.13

What Mosse proposed instead was the emergence of an extraparliamentary, secular religion based not upon a coherent rational analysis of philosophical premises, but rather upon salient myths and symbols, concretizing its mystique through the creation of new ceremonial and liturgical forms. The origins of this were hardly German. It was the French Revolution, Mosse argues, which ushered in the new visual age of mass politics:

Political movements now had to project themselves upon the largely illiterate or semi-educated masses, whose newly roused political consciousness had to be taken into account. They were moved by what they could see and touch, by politics as a drama which gave them a feeling of political participation. We witness a change, slow to be sure, from written to iconographical language.14

George Mosse tends to conceive of culture and cultural process in terms of a dialectical relationship between center and periphery. The insider acquires identity and defines himself in terms of the outsider he creates. There can be no ideal types without antitypes: the victor cannot be understood apart from his victim. Throughout Mosse's writings, there is a clear concern with the processes of victimization, with exclusion and its modes.

Mosse's work Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978) analyzed perhaps the most lethal of all modes of exclusion by showing how Jews, and to a somewhat lesser extent Blacks, became its central victims. What distinguished Mosse's treatment of racism from other approaches was his emphasis on the centrality of aesthetics and visual stereotypes. Mosse's is a racism bent on creating a divided world according to ideal types and antitypes. Its model, Mosse argues, was based upon the deeply rooted ideal of Greek beauty. This aesthetic provided the basis for making judgments not only about external appearance but also concerning inner moral qualities. Classical beauty came to symbolize not only the perfect form, but also the form within which a "true soul" was bound to reside.

It was, inevitably, Christian Europeans who most closely corresponded to the ideal type and exemplified nobility of appearance and character. The obvious antitypes were the Blacks and the Jews. No one could claim a Greek heritage for the thick lips, flat nose, and crinkly hair of the Negro; nor was the hunched, ugly stereotype of the ghetto Jew any closer to the ideal. The "sciences" of physiognomy and phrenology buttressed this aesthetic, for they espoused notions in which external appearance was held to reflect internal moral and spiritual qualities. Black deportment only confirmed an essential inner violence and primitivism. Jewish looks merely validated inherent criminality and manipulative nature.

Mosse is aware that such "sciences" did not necessarily have either racist or antisernitic intentions. Nor, he recognizes, is it possible to draw a straight line from eugenics to racial genocide. Nevertheless, the beliefs did feed into the world view of those committed to racist positions, a world view found in all European countries. Its adherents forged what Mosse strikingly terms a "scavenger ideology," one that annexed all the virtues of the modern age and condemned those regarded as deficient in such virtues as inferior and "degenerate" (a category which fused the biological with the social).

Beyond this, however, racism represents for Mosse the most stark case of the modern inversion of the relationship between myth and reality.

The world racism created was realized because racism willed it so, despite the fact that it lacked any basis in historical, social, or political reality.

Mosse has consistently argued for the centrality of the Jewish dimension in Nazi ideology and practice. It is important, however, to distinguish his interpretation of antisemitism from the view of those who place the emphasis on continuity, on the sustained influence of traditional Christian Jew-hatred within the modern world. Mosse would not deny that this is a crucial background factor; but for him nineteenth and twentieth century manifestations of antisemitism are qualitatively different in form and substance, comprehensible only within the specific configurations of modernity that produced them. As the convenient foil for a host of ideologies- racist, Volkish, nationalist-antisemitism must be placed against the conditioning background of the dynamics of postemancipation bourgeois society. Mosse's insistence on the historical contingency of antisemitism provides a salutary corrective to the tendency-still surprisingly widespread-to regard antisemitism as somehow above history, an eternal metaphysical phenomenon quite beyond change. By linking Jewish fate to central currents of the European experience, Mosse connects issues that too often have remained compartmentalized.

This approach similarly animates his overall conception of modern Jewish history. Jewish existence is, as it were, deghettoized, its relation to the surrounding society, and the mutual interplay, always paramount. Mosse's analyses of the appropriation of pietism and middle-class values into Jewish theology,16 the Jewish internalization of Christian symbols (albeit in secularized form) attendant upon participation in the national state,17 and the influence of Volkish ideology on Jewish self-definition18 define the connections in mischievously unorthodox, yet highly illuminating, ways. At the same time, however, he calls attention to the unresolved contradictions of this experience and points to the positive reappropriation of non-Jewish modes to maintain a distinctive Jewish identity along modern lines.

Mosse's new book Nationalism and Sexuality is, in many ways, a landmark, the culmination of a process of rethinking, in which the continuity of Mosse's concern is matched by a strikingly new perspective. The victimization of the Jew remains both central and unique, but the scope of analysis is considerably broadened: Jews as victims form part of a continuum and dynamic affecting other victims, comprehensible only alongside other outsiders. Similarly, the emphasis upon peculiarly Germanic modes of thought and action (an emphasis that characterized The Crisis of German Ideology, as we have noted) is no longer there. The stage is increasingly European, and the central categories are no longer national, but class. Most crucial, the book states explicitly Mosse's long-developing, critical reassessment and evaluation of the role of the bourgeoisie and its ethic in the modern world. As Arthur Mitzman has incisively observed, The Crisis of German Ideology replicated the prevailing liberal conventional wisdom that Nazism represented the pure, irrational antithesis of rational, liberal bourgeois modernity.19 In this new work, the role of the bourgeoisie and its world view is almost inverted: The bourgeoisie is viewed not so much as the mirror opposite, the victim of Nazi ideology, but as an essential expressionof it.20

How does Mosse reach this view? He argues that from the late eighteenth century onward, nationalism and middle-class morality entered into a powerful alliance, together defining modern standards of respectability (sexual and otherwise) in such a way that an ever tightening distinction between normality and abnormality was created and enforced. Nationalism and Sexuality is a history of manners and morals that, unlike many histories of sexuality, does not penetrate the privacy of the bedroom but seeks, rather, to grasp the collective dimensions of sexuality and unmask its hidden connections to public ideologies. According to Mosse, manliness and virility became essential parts of normal national and bourgeois self-definition. Anyone perceived as lacking in those characteristics was necessarily consigned to abnormal, outsider status. This alliance, Mosse holds, became increasingly totalized, insistent on assigning everyone a fixed place: man and woman, sane and insane, native and foreigner. An ordered and safe "inside" could be created and maintained only by extending the net of exclusion. A rigid code of manners and morals, Sittlichkeit, was invoked to control the reality that the alliance had itself created.

This book, with its hint of delicious subversion, typical of Mosse's thinking, is itself a challenge to the respectability it exposes. Indeed, it is as much contemporary social criticism as it is history, part of Mosse's ongoing concern with the submersion of individuality and tolerance in an increasingly homogenized world. From this point of view, bourgeois morality becomes a historical villain whose constrictive and intolerant moral sense gradually radicalized to the point that, in its Nazi version, it became an essential ingredient of genocidal motivation. The new man of National Socialism, Mosse tells us, "was the ideal bourgeois.21 In terms of conventional historiography, this is perhaps the most startling of all of Mosse's theses: Nazism as the incarnation, the most extreme defender of bourgeois respectability.

This picture is far removed from Rauschning's Nazi nihilists breaking all limits in a kind of Nietzschean ecstasy or Thomas Mann's covenant with the demonic, or Ernst Nolte's portrayal of Nazism as the ultimate naturalistic revolt against bourgeois transcendence.22 Mosse's Nazi is a corrupted middle-class man intent on cleansing his world and preserving it against what he perceives to be anti-bourgeois forces of degeneration. The so-called euthanasia program against the handicapped, the insane, and the criminal; the persecution and murder of homosexuals, gypsies, and communists; and the "final solution"-all represent not so much a challenge to or the antithesis of the bourgeois experience but, rather, an extreme, corrupted version of it. Here were middle-class men attempting to maintain the values of manliness, orderliness, cleanliness, honesty, hard work, and family life against those outsider groups who, in their eyes, seemed morally and aesthetically to desecrate the basic tenets of respectability.

During the Nazi period, that morality proved most fatal to the Jews and gypsies precisely because, as separate peoples, they seemed radically different; all other categories of outsiders were at least partial insiders, deviants with some sort of a claim. Mosse would hold, however, that bourgeois morality in general is debilitating to outsidersand potentially murderous. This thesis contains a suggestive insight,23 but a more detailed discussion relating middle-class morality to murderous Nazi modes would be helpful. Bourgeois Sittlichkeit, after all, while often illiberal, was seldom genocidal; and it is surely in the processes of corruption and radicalization that such a transformation was engendered. It would be useful to flesh out further the nature of these processes. Such an analysis, moreover, would bring out the dual moment within Nazism itself: its combination of bourgeois and antibourgeois elements (as Mosse himself brilliantly demonstrated in The Crisis of German Ideology). Precisely in the combination of and tension between these elements and in the fusion of conventional and radical modes, could Nazism radically transcend middle-class morality at the same time that it embodied that morality. By alerting us to the important middle-class dimensions of the Nazi experience, Mosse has opened up the way for more intensive research into and debate about the bourgeois and anti-bourgeois combination and the ways in which it represented both continuity and discontinuity.

In the way that it takes on fundamental human issues, Nationalism and Sexuality exemplifies the development of Mosse's thought. He is essentially concerned with the history of predisposing mentalities, with mapping the processes by which common cultural resources are variously absorbed and co- opted into differing political ideologies and stereotypes. He deals with the broader canvas, the large shaping context from which divergent choices of thought and action proceed. That kind of cultural and intellectual history, we all know, has been distinctly unfashionable of late. Critics point to what they consider to be its endemic and excessive preoccupation with origins and its consequently vague, even aprioristic, conception of historical causality. The concentration on ideas and ideologies, it is claimed, tends to obscure the specific and contingent workings of historical events and introduces a kind of linear fatalism, as if the movement from the conception of ideas to their implementation was always direct and auto matic.24 More "materialistically" oriented historians have provided what they regard as necessary correctives to the deficiencies of this approach.

In the field of Nazism and the "final solution," for example, the reaction is presently expressed in "functionalist" and other related approaches. These studies are far removed from what one critic has labeled as Mosse's "heavily teleological" method.25 They stress the non-ideational, polycratic, even chaotic nature of the Nazi regime and the groping, largely nonicleological evolution of policy toward genocide.26 Such highly detailed analyses of the dynamics of Nazi power and decision making at all levels certainly add an important dimension to our knowledge. (To be sure, even at this level of interpretation, there are serious differences dividing historians. For some, the "final solution" is the result of irrational bureaucratic procedures, the almost accidental outcome of low-placed functionaries responding to immediate field problems and uncertain signals from above; for others, it is the relentless, systematic product of rational bureaucratic procedures coordinated from top to bottom.)

As useful as these studies are, they tend to render the problem of motivation increasingly remote. Cultural and ideological factors are mentioned in passing, and attention is increasingly given to bureaucratic procedures. But, as Mosse has pointed out, bureaucracies and decision makers, like the societies of which they are a part, never operate in a void.27 The emphasis on mechanism-important as it is-carries the danger of reducing everything to a question of technique. Although we are treated to highly differentiated analyses of the machine at work, we are left largely uninformed as to what activated it in the first place, unable to perceive the larger structures that inform its functioning and provide the contextual atmosphere for its operations.28

Good history, Mosse would agree, is inevitably multicausal. No single approach can claim a monopoly on historical wisdom. Mosse would certainly not deny the critical role of the modern state and its bureaucratic arm in the process of mass exterminations. As a cultural historian, however, he would insist upon mapping out its ideational and atmospheric context, always linking these to the broader ideologies and perceptions with which people navigate their way through the world. His work is a sustained and varied attempt to provide some kind of understanding of the underlying motivating structures, to grasp the relationship between perceptions of reality and the acts consequent upon them. Of course, the search for motivation, like that of historical truth itself, is never ending. Its complexity, however, is no excuse for avoiding the challenge.

George Mosse is a historian who analyzes phenomena that go against his grain-a rational man and a humanist pushed into the study of the irrational and the inhumane. But, like Benedetto Croce, who has greatly influenced Mosse,29 he accepts the notion that this is an unavoidable task, for outside of history there is no reality. The only way, therefore, of confronting that reality is by coming to grips with history from the inside and in a committed, rather than a positivistic and descriptive, manner. Like Croce, Mosse insists that the mind of the historian is central to historical analysis; as a result, only history relevant to one's present situation is worthy of its name. Like Croce's work, too, Mosse's writings are animated by a commitment to individual liberty in a world threatened by the forces of mass irrationality and mass politics.

In a Europe poised between rationality and irrationalism, Mosse sees not only points of darkness; muted potentials for redemption are always present. His legendary lectures at the University of Wisconsin on "The Culture of Western Europe" (presented in his textbook of the same name) presented many young American audiences with unknown, almost magical areas of European culture. Here were liberal, libertarian, Freudian, existentialist, Kantian socialist, and Hegelian Marxist answers to the contemporary dilemmas of European society. These answers, to be sure, failed in the interwar period in Europe; yet long after the demise of Nazism and Fascism, in Mosse's presentation they retained their vitality, their possibilities apparently far from exhausted. Of course, Mosse has always kept a critical distance from these options. Nevertheless, as one student of his has pointed out, he retains a deep empathy for the ethical utopian impulse.30 His writings and lectures unfailingly encourage examination of these unorthodox alternatives.

There is, however, another source that, I believe, gets us closer to the core of Mosse's positive commitments. In order to grasp this, we must first examine his analysis of the ideal of Bildung. For, as Mosse puts it, if Sittlichkeit, or respectability, represents constrictiveness, the contraction of tolerance and human expression, then the German Enlightenment ideal of Bildung embodies the ideal of the expansion of human possibilities and stands for tolerance, cultured self-cultivation, and the primacy of individual autonomy.31 It is important to note that this view goes well beyond a naive liberal Enlightenment position. Over the years Mosse has become increasingly sensitive to the darker side of Aufklarung.32 More specifically, he has recently spelled out an important critique of the liberalism to which he himself is attached. Liberalism, he argues, has always equated liberty as such with political freedom. As a result, it also sanctioned the rigid rules of personal behavior as laid down by the precepts of respectability, and legitimized the restrictions upon the individual by society, if not by parliaments. His critique of bourgeois morality (of Sittlichkeit as opposed to Bildung) is, in the last resort, a plea "to extend the liberal definition of freedom even to those moral and behavioural restraints which liberalism has sanctioned.33

In his recently published German Jews Beyond Judaism, Mosse brilliantly analyzes the historical process whereby German Jewry slowly, but irrevocably, became virtually the sole carriers of that humanizing Bildung sensibility, and witnesses to the gradual desertion by the nonJewish German educated middle class of a doctrine that they had originally shared with their emancipated Jewish co-citizens. For him, the German-Jewish heritage is the heritage of Bildung, which becomes transformed into a kind of new Jewish tradition. Indeed, for Mosse, it becomes the defining ingredient of post-emancipation Jewish identity. For traditionalists, of course, there is something profoundly shocking, even subversive, in the notion that nineteenth and twentieth century (intellectual) Jewishness is synonymous with a particular strand of German culture (albeit its most tolerant, progressive side). They would likely not join Walter Benjamin in praise of the statement by Ludwig Strauss that "in a study of Goethe one finds one's Jewish substance."34

Mosse demonstrates that the internalization of the ethos of Bildung derived from the specific historical circumstances of the struggle for Jewish emancipation in Germany. For a community emerging from the ghetto and seeking integration within German life, the prevalent ideal of Bildung seemed tailor-made "because it transcended all differences of nationality and religion through the unfolding of the individual personality."35 Thus, Mosse holds, cultural humanism became integrally interwoven into the fabric of modern German-Jewish being. He is characteristically critical of much of this internalization. He argues, for instance, that Bildung modes of thought encouraged an almost automatic belief in the primacy of culture over politics, which tended to distort contemporary perceptions and blind one to the imperatives of an ever strengthened mass politics. Bildung Jews engaged in the politics of delusion, projecting their ideals of a tolerant Germany onto a quite different, far more brutal reality. Jews clung to a heritage that by 1933 was overwhelmed and rendered irrelevant.

For all that, Mosse insists, the heritage lives on. It was kept alive originally by liberal and left-wing intellectuals in exile and later "by new generations eager to take up a heritage thought long dead and forgotten." It is in this heritage, indeed, that Mosse the man and his work most profoundly meet, that the battle between rationality and irrationalism is most keenly joined. Here Mosse himself closely resembles the Jewish intellectuals he describes. In them, as he put it, Jewishness became a metaphor for the critical, yet always humanizing and autonomous, mind. His analysis of the German-Jewish intellectual enterprise (ranging from Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig to Ernst Cassirer and the Frankfurt School) perfectly fits his own work: "To bend the irrational into the rational; to tame it into a framework of rational thought." Mosse envisages his role in much the same way as the intellectuals he describes. In a postliberal age, the task of the liberal intellectual is to comprehend the irrational and in so doing to exorcise it.

Mosse is a historian whose essential task has been that of a critic of culture and politics. Throughout his life he has studied religion, nationalism, and Marxism-the three major ideological forces of the modern world-and he has always been critical of them. Yet there is a complexity here that we should not overlook. For all the criticism, the revolt against stultifying orthodoxies of any kind, Mosse is aware of the necessity, even the desirability, of order in society. He recognizes that the conflicting demands between cohesion and tolerance require a delicate balance.36 He is aware, too, that criticism without Bildung, devoid of constructive vision, has historically led to both impotence and alienation.37 Moreover, he often has a certain sympathy for some of the myths and symbols he studies; they answer deep needs for human community and meaning. They will not be wished away in terms of mindless negation.

Because religion, nationalism, and Marxism are a part of the modern experience, because they correspond to real human desires, the crucial question for Mosse is not how to abolish and dismantle these structures, but how to humanize them. The challenge for him is to maintain the values of Enlightenment-Bildung, of autonomy, reason, tolerance, and the free play of mind and human action, in a world of mass politics and mass brutalization. Mosse does not accept total solutions. His is rather a meliorating response based always on the compassionate, personalizing mode. It is no accident that the value he most admires in both the Enlightenment and German-Jewish heritage is their conception of friendship, the attempt at all times to personalize relation ships.38 The task he sets before us is to reassert the positive potentials of these forms of community and the primacy of solidarity and humanization over domination and superiority.

NOTES

1. See Mosse's introduction to his The Culture of Western Europe, pp. 1-10.

2. Mosse was born in 1918 into the upper-middle class of acculturated Berlin Jewry. His maternal grandfather was the founder of the prestigious liberal newspaper the Berliner Tageblatt. Mosse fled Germany soon after the Nazi assumption of power, and received his education in England and the United States. See the interview with Michael Ledeen, in Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, Chap. 1, pp. 21-31. See also Sterling Fishman, "GLM: An Appreciation," in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allen Sharlin (New Brunswick and London, 1982), pp. 275ff.

3. See Mosse's response in George Mosse: On the Occasion of His Retirement (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, The Koebner Chair of German History, n.d.), p. xxviii. This book also contains a full bibliography of Mosse's work until mid-1985.

4. For a review of Mosse's work, see Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, pp. lff., and Ledeen's introduction in Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, pp. 7-20.

5. Masses and Man, pp. 14-15.

6. Klemens von Klemperer, in American Historical Review 71 (1966): 608-10.

7. For a critical review of the Sonderweg thesis and a report on the surrounding debate, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984).

8. The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 315.

9. See George L. Mosse, "Der erste Weltkrieg und die Brutalisierung der Politik: Betrachtungen iiber die politische Rechte, den Rassismus, und den deutschen Sonderweg," in Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt politischer Herrschaft in Deutschland und Europa, ed. Manfred Funke and others (Dilsseldorf, 1987), pp. 127-39.

10. The conclusion of The Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 312-17, is devoted to this question.

11. Toward the Final Solution, p. 168. For an example of his more recent comparative work, see Mosse's "Toward a General Theory of Fascism, " in Masses and Man, pp. 159-96.

12. Mosse, "Der erste Weltkrieg und die Brutalisierung der Politik," pp. 13536.

13. For his criticism of Talmon, see Mosse, "Political Style and Political Theory- Totalitarian Democracy Revisited," in Totalitarian Democracy and After (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 167-76.

14. Ibid., p. 168.

15. Toward the Final Solution, pp. xiii-xiv.

16. See "The Secularization of Jewish Theology," in Masses and Man, pp. 24962.

17. See "The Jews and the German War Experience," in Masses and Man, pp. 263-83.

18. "The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry, " in Germans and Jews, pp. 77-115, is one of Mosse's most original, influential, and provocative essays.

19. Arthur Mitzman, "Fascism and Anti-Sex," Stichting Theoretische Geschiedenis 12 (1986): 339-43, esp. 340.

20. This critique of the bourgeoisie and this analysis of its place within the Nazi scheme must be firmly distinguished from Marxist and neo-Marxist interpretations. Although both approaches indict the bourgeoisie, Mosse's analysis stresses perceptual and ideological factors, not material ones. He does not argue that Nazism was a tool of or served the interests of finance capitalism, as do the Marxists. His analysis is pitched at a different level. For some of the relationships and dissonances between these analyses, see Steven E. Aschheim, "Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4 (1987).

21. Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, p. 43.

22. See Mosse's review, "E. Nolte on Three Faces on Fascism," Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 621-26.

23. For a critical but sympathetic review of Nationalism and Sexuality, see Peter N. Stearns, in Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 256-58.

24. See, for example, Geoffrey Barraclough's discussion of German history, in The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct., 2 and 16 Nov. 1972. For a similar, more recent, criticism, see Geoff Eley, "The German Right, 1860-1945," in his From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the Nazi Past (Boston, 1986), pp. 231-53.

25. See Geoff Eley's review of Roderick Stackelberg's Idealism Debased, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): 544.

26. For an analysis sympathetic to these interpretations, see Tim Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in The Fuehrer State: Myth and Reality, ed. G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker (Stuttgart, 1981). For a different perspective, see Saul Friedlander, "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation, " Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 1-50.

27. Interview with George L. Mosse, Jerusalem, 20 June 1985.

28. For a more positive evaluation of these trends, see Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover and London, 1987).

29. Mosse discusses Croce in The Culture of Western Europe, esp. pp. 302-7. See also Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, pp. 28-29.

30. Paul Breines has published two splendidly evocative articles chronicling Mosse's influence as a man and as a teacher: "Germans, journals, and Jews-Madison, Men, Marxism, and Mosse: A Tale of Jewish-Leftist Iden- tity Confusion in America," New German Critique 20 (1980): 81-103; and "With George Mosse in the 1960s," in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, pp. 285-99. For similar influence in Jerusalem, see Ze'ev Mankowitz, "George Mosse and Jewish History," in GcorgeMosse: On the Occasion of His Retirement, pp. xxiiff.

31. George L. Mosse, "Jewish Emancipation Between Bildung and Respectabil- ity," in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Wal- ter Schatzberg (Hanover and London, 1985), pp. 1-16.

32. See Towards the Final Solution, Chap. 1, pp. 1-16, and Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, esp. pp. 94-95.

33. Mosse, "Political Style and Political Theory," p. 176, also pp. 170-71.

34. German Jews Beyond Judaism, p. 14.

35. Ibid., p. 3.

36. Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 191.

37. See Germans and Jews, pp. 214-15.

38. See George L. Mosse, "Friendship and Nationhood: About the Promise and Failure of German Nationalism," Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 351-67; and German Jews Beyond Judaism, esp. p. 32.