Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination ed. by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination ed. by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney Stephen J. Whitfield Buerkle, Darcy, and Skye Doney, eds. – Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. 418 p. This impressive volume does not bear the label of a Festschrift, though it constitutes a tribute to the scholarly importance and influence of George L. Mosse (1918–1999). That the arc of his career has inspired this book makes it something of a rarity in an era when publishers can foresee little advantage or purpose in thus honouring even the most accomplished of academicians. But what is amazing about Mosse's flair for stimulating admiration and loyalty is the queue into which Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination falls. This anthology isn't unprecedented. The list already includes Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin, eds. (1982); The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse, Klaus Berghahn, ed. (1996); and What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, Stanley Payne, David Sorkin, and John Tortorice, eds. (2004). A special issue of German Politics and Society (2000) was entitled "George L. Mosse Memorial Symposium." Then add Emilio Gentile's Il fascino del persecutore (2007); Donatello Aramini's George L. Mosse, l'Italia e gli storici (2010); and Karel Plessini's The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (2014). They do not even exhaust the number of works that are devoted to specifying how this German-Jewish refugee shaped the scrutiny of the past. What claim can this latest volume make to attract serious readers? Ably co-edited by Darcy Buerkle (Smith College) and Skye Doney (University of Wisconsin-Madison), can Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination justify itself as another appreciation of Mosse's prodigious oeuvre? Three rationales can be proposed. After an early phase consecrated to the Reformation (especially in England), Mosse decided to uncover and explain the terrifying ideological forces that disrupted his own privileged life under the Weimar Republic. His studies of Nazism and Fascism pioneered in exploring the images and symbols that mass movements projected, making them so fanatically powerful. They endangered not only Jewish families like his own, but more generally the [End Page 171] democracies that were once commonly assumed to be the imperishable legacies of the fraternal and egalitarian ideals of 1789. Mosse did not explicitly repudiate the effort to understand Nazism and Fascism as stemming from economic and social conditions gone awry. But he was much more interested in the subterranean impact of myths than in the anxieties of the middle classes. Mosse thus helped inaugurate the close connection of politics to culture in producing the continental dislocations of the first half of the twentieth century. To depict them, he believed that "empathy" was essential—even to the point of a rapport that he established with Albert Speer in the 1970s. Mosse also specialized in what came to be called gender studies. How were masculine ideals and norms of bourgeois respectability projected? Which events and circumstances subjected these values to pressure? Such questions were undoubtedly pertinent to Mosse's own homosexuality, which he concealed until the final decades of his life. His experiences helped form the insights and innovativeness that continue to merit a volume like this one. That is the second rationale—the connection that Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination deepens between biography and historiography. For example, there are chapters on Mosse's ancestry and on his family's distinguished art collection (which the Nazis plundered and which is slowly being restored). His grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, founded a publishing dynasty and created the family's wealth during the Second Reich. As the publisher of Germany's most prominent newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, as an art collector, and as a philanthropist, Rudolf Mosse is barely less remarkable than his scholarly grandson, who, incidentally, lived modestly throughout his career in Madison. Rudolf Mosse had given Mussolini financial assistance when he left the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1914. A little more than two decades later, when...