George Mosse - Biography

Biography

Mosse was born in Berlin into a very prominent and wealthy German Jewish family. His maternal grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, founded what became the biggest advertising agency in Germany, and his media empire included the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. His father, Hans Lachmann Mosse, commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn to redesign the Mossehaus where the Tageblatt was produced until the Nazis closed it and forced the family to emigrate. He was educated at the famous Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin, and from 1928 onwards at the elite Schule Schloss Salem. He describes himself as a rebellious child. The headmaster at Salem, Kurt Hahn imposed a demanding physical education regime upon its pupils. Although Mosse disliked the nationalistic ethos of the school, he conceded that its emphasis on character building gave him "some backbone".

In 1933, with Hitler's rise to power, the Mosse family fled and separated. His mother went to Switzerland, as did his sister. His father moved to France with his new wife. Mosse attended the Quaker Bootham School in York, England, whose teachers began to stimulate his intellectual curiosity, and where, according to his autobiography, he became aware of his homosexuality. A poor student, he failed several exams, and it was because of the financial support of his parents that he was able to attend Cambridge University. At Cambridge began to get interested in historical scholarship, attending lectures by amongst others G. M. Trevelyan and Helen Maude Cam. While at Cambridge the Spanish Civil War (although he admitted he had little idea about what was going on) awakened his hostility to fascism.

In 1939, his family relocated to the United States, and he completed his undergraduate studies at Haverford College in 1941. While at Harvard University he studied for a PhD, successfully obtaining a scholarship which was only available to students born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His 1946 dissertation on C16th & C17th English constitutional history, supervised by Charles Howard McIlwain, was subsequently published as The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950).

Mosse's first paid job as a historian was at the University of Iowa, where he focused on religion in early modern Europe, and published a brief study of the Reformation that became a widely used textbook. In 1955, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began to lecture on modern history. His The Culture of Western Europe: the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, An Introduction (1961) which summarizes these lectures, also became a widely used textbook.

Mosse taught for more than thirty years at the University of Wisconsin, where he became the John C. Bascom Professor of European History and Weinstein-Bascom of Jewish Studies, while concurrently holding the Koebner Professorship of History at Hebrew University. From 1969, Mosse spent one semester each year teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also became a visiting professor at University of Tel Aviv and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin, he taught at Cambridge University and Cornell University. Mosse was the first research historian in residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.