What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe

A Provisional Dwelling: The Origin and Development ofthe Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography

A Provisional Dwelling The Origin and Development of the Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography Emilio Gentile I too wanted to be an intellectual not tied down to time and place, solely guided by his analytical mind—something of an eternal traveler, analyzing , observing, suspended above events. My view of history encouraged such an attitude, since it recognized the need for empathy even with those considered evil and dangerous. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir The “Mosse Revolution” George L. Mosse developed his interpretation of fascism over the course of a long and productive career of research and reflection that spanned nearly four decades. It is significant that the last book he published, The Fascist Revolution, is a collection of the essays that marked, between 1961 and the late 1990s, the various stages in the development of his interpretation of fascism. In its introduction, Mosse synthesized the results of his research and the criteria that had inspired and guided it, and he reasserted the validity of the cultural approach he had introduced in the study of the fascist phenomenon. With legitimate pride he indicated in his cultural interpretation of fascism one of the factors responsible for the progress achieved by historiography “in our understanding of fascism as it existed in its epoch, overturning most older interpretations and reevaluating its consequences,”1 because “the cultural interpretation of fascism opens up a means to penetrate fascist self-understanding, and such empathy is crucial in order to grasp how people saw the movement, something which cannot be ignored or evaluated merely in retrospect. . . . 41 Cultural history centers above all upon the perceptions of men and women, and how these are shaped and enlisted in politics at a particular place and time.”2 Mosse conducted his research primarily in the area of Nazism, but he always had, as frame of reference and orientation, a comprehensive view of the fascist phenomenon, for he was convinced of the existence, between the two world wars, of a European fascism made up of movements that shared many features. Mosse was equally convinced, however , that among the various fascisms there were important and substantial differences, even between its two main expressions, Italian fascism and Nazism. Specifically, Mosse felt that racism and antiSemitism were not basic elements in all fascist movements, whereas they were essential in Nazism. In the latter case, moreover, Mosse long insisted—with a certain inclination toward the theory of Sonderweg— on the specificity and uniqueness within the fascist phenomenon, due to the peculiarity of the völkisch ideology, of racism and anti-Semitism, even though he rejected the “from Luther to Hitler” formula and categorically ruled out the notion of the inevitability of Nazism determined by German history. Such was the framework within which Mosse developed his concept of fascism. To the formulation of a general theory of fascism he devoted only a few specific essays: the chapters on fascism and Nazism in The Culture of Western Europe, published in 1961 and republished in 1974, with a substantially revised chapter on fascism; the article “The Genesis of Fascism,” published in 1966 in the first issue of the Journal of Contemporary History; and, above all, in the long essay “Toward a General Theory of Fascism,” published in 1979. However, even when they do not deal directly with fascism or Nazism but rather with nationalism , racism, the myth of the war experience, sexuality, or masculinity , all of Mosse’s books and articles on contemporary history include observations that have broadened, rectified, nuanced, or finetuned his definition of fascism, without, however, modifying the basic structure of his view of the whole phenomenon as he had outlined it as early as 1961. In Mosse’s historical writings, the development of the concept of fascism can be divided into two main phases. The first belongs to the years from 1961 to 1966, during which Mosse laid out the basic principles of his interpretation, focusing primarily on the problem of ideology and culture, 42 e m i l i o g e n t i l e a problem he envisaged at the time in mainly traditional terms, that is to say, as a complex of ideas representing an interpretation of life and a solution to the problems of existence formulated by means of verbal expression . The second phase—in my view, the more innovative one—falls between 1969 and 1975...