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155 Fourteen George Mosse at 80 A Critical Laudatio 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 nearly the last 40 years has also made clear its radical precariousness.1 The twentieth-century experience of totalitarianism and of genocide and the personal circumstance of becoming a refugee2 intertwined with an emerging acknowledgment and consciousness of his own minority sexual status3 have constrained Mosse to become perhaps the contemporary historian of the manifold strategies of inclusion and exclusion, of racism and stereotypes, outsiders and respectability , war, “irrationalism,” and mass murderousness in the modern age. He has throughout concerned himself with the deeper roots of Nazism and its destruction of the Jews, always lifting this subject out of narrow, parochial contexts and linking it to wider—and usually unperceived—modalities of culture. Over the years the foci have become ever more broad, probing, and daring. Viewed in composite, his work—always evolving and covering different aspects of the European experience—represents an unfolding vision of, and ongoing concern with, that continent’s dialectic of hope and hazard, liberalism and totalitarianism, breadth and narrowness , freedom and constriction.4 Any appreciation of Mosse’s project requires brief mention of the particular approach he brings to the study of cultural and intellectual history. Here 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 a far broader realm. Culture, Mosse declared very early on, is “a state or habit of mind which is apt to become a way of life intimately linked to the challenges and dilemmas of contemporary society.”5 We have entered, above all, the political and popular culture, the mental worlds, of an 156 Historians, History, and the Holocaust industrializing nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe—mass societies —in which the diffusion of consolatory and demonizing myths and ideologies, symbols, and stereotypes becomes of paramount importance. In effect, Mosse’s project constitutes a history of mediated human perceptions , one that is concerned with the active constructions of meaning and its consequences. Material factors, Mosse would acknowledge, 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.”6 Today, even for historians, this notion of culture does not seem surprising but we should not forget that Mosse was years ahead of his times when he formulated it and, indeed, shaped our revised conceptions of it.7 In 1966 his anthology “Nazi Culture” had already appeared.8 For many readers, schooled in older conceptions of the idea of “high” culture, the title itself must have seemed shocking. Was not the very notion “Nazi Culture” an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms? Who had not heard of Goebbels’ perhaps apocryphal (but nevertheless famous) declaration that “every time I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver?”9 Documenting diverse aspects of everyday life under Hitler, it sought to discover how “National Socialism” impinged on the consciousness of those who lived under it and, in the process, sought to create an integrated racial universe. In all of Mosse’s work this understanding of culture is never represented statically or unidimensionally. History becomes a kind of updated Hegelian totality, a dialectic in which the political cannot be separated from the religious, the scientific from the aesthetic, the rational from the mythological. Although its outlines were already apparent in Mosse’s first, very successful career as an early modernist,10 it becomes central to his sustained, multi-pronged effort to come to grips with the later period, especially his studies on European Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. His first foray into the field, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), has become a classic and continues to shape our image of Nazism to this day.11 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...

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