Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination

Darcy Buerkle (Edited by), Skye Doney (Edited by)

9780299342401

Hardback, published 27 June 2023

352 pages, 80 b&w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.337 kg

Mosse’s pathbreaking work on fascism, masculinity, Judaism, war, and genocide still reverberates a half century after his death. The wide-ranging, topical, and persuasive essays in this volume show how the intellectual seeds Mosse planted as a scholar and teacher continue to bear fruit." - Daniel Magilow, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual historians of modern Europe. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he was an early leader in the study of fascism and the history of sexuality and masculinity, authoring more than two dozen books. In ContemporaryEurope in the Historical Imagination, an international assembly of leading scholars explore Mosse’s enduring methodologies in German studies and modern European cultural history. Considering Mosse’s life and work historically and critically, the book begins with his intellectual biography and goes on to reread his writings in light of historical developments since his death, and to use, extend, and contend with Mosse’s legacy in new contexts he may not have addressed or even foreseen.

The volume wrestles with intertwined questions that continue to emerge from Mosse’s pioneering research, including: What role do sexual and racial stereotypes play in European political culture before and after 1945? How are gender and Nazi violence bound together? And what does commemoration reveal about national culture? Importantly, the contributors pose questions that are inspired by Mosse’s work but that he did not directly examine. For example, to what extent were Nazism and Italian Fascism colonial projects? How have popular radical right parties reinforced and reimagined ethnonationalism and nativism? And how did Nazi perpetrators construct a moral system that accommodated genocide? Much like Mosse’s own work, the chapters in this book inspire new interventions into the history of gender and sexuality, Jewish identity during the rise of the Third Reich, and the many reincarnations of fascist pageantry and mass politics.

• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Mosse’
  s Berlins
• Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney
• Introduction: George L. Mosse: The Work, the Legacy, the Man
• Steven Aschheim
• Part I. George L. Mosse (1918–
  1999)
• 1 Civilizing the Nation: Can Mosse’
  s Europe Be Saved?
• Aleida Assmann
• 2 Past Subjunctive: George L. Mosse’
  s Memoir
• Darcy Buerkle
• Part II. New Politics of Exclusion
• 3 Conceptualizing Fascism: The Legacy of George L. Mosse
• Enzo Traverso
• 4 Women, Gender, and the Radical Right: Then and Now
• Mary Nolan
• 5 Behemoth Rises Again: On Twenty-First-Century Fascism
• Andreas Huyssen
• Part III. Gender, Violence, and the Everyday
• 6 Sex and Violence: Race Defilement in Nazi Germany
• Stefanie SchÜ
  ler-Springorum
• 7 People Working: Leisure, Love, and Violence in Nazi Concentration Camps
• Elissa MailÄ
  nder
• Part IV. Soldiers
• 8 Morality, Nazi Ideology, and the Individual in the Third Reich: The Example of the Wehrmacht
• David Harrisville
• 9 Reading Mosse in Jerusalem: Fallen Soldiers and Israel’
  s Culture of Commemoration
• Arie Dubnov
• Part V. German Jews beyond Berlin
• 10 Religious Commitment and Leadership among German-Jewish Women in the Early Twentieth Century
• Sarah Wobick-Segev
• 11 Who Owns the German Language? Zionism from Hochdeutsch to Kongressdeutsch
• Marc Volovici
• 12 Photography between Empire and Nation: German-Jewish Displacement and the Global Camera
• Rebekka Grossmann
• 13 Max Nordau between George L. Mosse and Benzion Netanyahu
• Adi Armon
• Part VI. Mosse and Berlin: Then and Today
• 14 “
  There’
  s Nothing Innocuous Left”
  : The Everyday Transfigured
• Robert Zwarg
• 15 Absence/Presence: The Berlin Mosse Topography
• Elisabeth Wagner
• 16 The Mosse Art Research Initiative (MARI) at Freie UniversitÄ
  t Berlin
• Meike Hoffmann
• 17 The Mosse Family in Berlin: Cultural Capital for Subsequent Generations
• Frank Mecklenburg
• Afterword: A Family Message: The Mosse Berlin Legacy
• Roger Strauch
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index