George L. Mosse. Los Orígenes Intelectuales del Tercer Reich: Historia de una crisis ideológica. Translated by Verónica Puertollano López. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2023. 496 PP. 27,90 €. ISBN: 9788413846538.
The publication of the Spanish translation of George L. Mosse’s The Crisis of German Ideology, sixty-one years after its first 1964 edition, comes at a time when the far-right phenomenon has become a significant force across Europe and beyond. A growing concern with contemporary political events has inevitably influenced my reading, particularly as I reflected on the rise of the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which secured 152 seats in the last February 2025 Bundestag elections. This outcome prompts critical reflections on the epistemological implications of ongoing political transformations for current and future European historical scholarship while also raising important questions about the role of history-writing in confronting the resurgence of nationalist and exclusionary politics. Historians today have a responsibility to actively engage in highlighting the dangers posed by these political shifts to preserve intellectual and academic freedom.
Given the current political context, Mosse’s historical analysis of völkisch thought and its legacy as precursor of the rise of the Nazi Party evokes an eerie feeling, particularly in light of the surge in conspiratorial thinking during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This unease deepens when considering how social media has amplified the reach of these ideations, fueling populist sentiment and reshaping the European political landscape.[1] At the heart of The Crisis of German Ideology lies a reminder of the historicity of this phenomenon, urging readers to recognize how ideological constructs emerge in response to uncertainty. Through contemporary eyes, Mosse’s historical actors may seem like they are desperately trying to make sense of their changing world, constructing an entire worldview around imagined threats as a coping mechanism. His analysis encourages us not so much to evaluate the internal coherence of these beliefs but rather to understand their context and their potential to justify exclusion and violence. It highlights the dangers of nationalism as a mechanism for displacing discontent away from economic and social anxieties onto scapegoats, a dynamic that remains all too relevant.
The timeliness of these concerns is reflected in the translation by La Esfera de los Libros. For historical reasons, international academic debates on fascism and antisemitism have remained somewhat distant from the Spanish general readership. It is important to note that in Spanish schools, these topics have traditionally been framed as European phenomena, detached from Spain’s own national history. While this perspective is gradually changing, and the literature on Spanish participation and victims of the Holocaust continues to expand, Francoist Spain has long been portrayed as an outlier, insulated by its official neutrality after the Civil War. As a result, unless one holds a degree in history, engaging with international academic debates on these complex issues remains challenging. The publication of this translation helps connect Spanish readers to a broader set of discussions.
This translation also brings attention to the editorial decisions framing Mosse’s work for the Spanish-speaking readership. The editorial title choice, The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich: History of an Ideological Crisis aligns with translation trends in other European languages. In German, it was rendered as One People, one Reich, One Leader. The Völkisch Origins of National Socialism, while the French and Italian editions, much like the Spanish one, emphasized Mosse’s focus on intellectuals and ideology.[2] Beyond its title, however, the present translation distinguishes itself by taking the 2021 reprint as a reference, incorporating the critical introduction in which Steven E. Aschheim addresses the controversy The Crisis of German Ideology sparked upon its publication. By carefully engaging with the methodological and argumentative critiques raised by other historians Aschheim’s introduction provides the reader with a clearer understanding of how Mosse’s analysis of symbols, mentalities, and myths diverged from prevailing historiographical trends at the time. For those already familiar with the cultural turn in German and Anglo-American historiographies, he offers an interesting depiction of the historiographical landscape of the 1960s. Meanwhile, for neophyte readers, this introduction is a great entry point for a rich body of scholarship on the subject.
While the editorial decisions in this translation provide valuable insight into Mosse’s work, they also highlight a broader context that shaped the reception of his ideas. When the first edition of The Crisis of German Ideology appeared, the intellectual climate in Spain stood in stark contrast to the rest of Europe. The country was still under a long dictatorship, born out of a fascist victory in an internationalized civil war. For those familiar with the historiography of twentieth-century Spain, its periodization may invite some comparisons. This book was being praised and criticized in English-speaking academia, while most Spanish historians —whether by coercion or consent— worked within the regime’s historical canon, following a strong medievalist orientation. Even those in exile, such as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz (in Buenos Aires) or Américo Castro (in the US), turned to the Middle Ages to explain Spanish character and politics. In Europe, the Annales school had a significant impact on exiles in France, such as Manuel Tuñón de Lara, as well as on those who remained in Spain despite the repressive political environment. Notably, Pierre Vilar and Josep Fontana, both Jaume Vicens Vives’ disciples, continued to push for historiographical renewal, even in the face of the dictatorship’s censorship and political isolationism.
The 1960s marked the emergence of critical scholarship that challenged regime-controlled narratives, with historians such as Herbert R. Southworth, Raymond Carr, and Gabriel Jackson leading the way. Meanwhile, scholarship on Spain’s fascist party Falange was being pioneered by Stanley Payne. By this time, the breakdown of the Francoist historiographic monopoly had just begun, prompting the dictatorship to respond with an argumentative synthesis that sought to distance the Falange from fascism as both a political concept and movement.[3] This argument has outlived by far the dictatorship’s end in the 1970s and continues to shape the historiography to this day. In contrast to Mosse’s intellectual and personal influence on Italian historians, the scholarship on the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship during the 1960s and 1970s, though increasingly international, remained resistant to cultural historical approaches— at least in the way Mosse had proposed. Conversely, in Italy, Mosse’s work arrived alongside the first wave of works on Italian Fascism, where historians engaged in intense discussions and were questioning the anti-Fascist civic and epistemological stance in the midst of social and political turmoil.[4]
None of what took place in Italy was echoed in Spain, but Mosse’s influence, although belated, would eventually play a crucial role in the development of the historiography of fascism in Spain. The contrast between the immediate reception of his work in Italy and its later engagement in Spain highlights the unique environment of Francoist Spain. Despite its limited impact, the Spanish translation of Mosse’s Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich in 1973 deserves credit as the first of its kind in the Spanish book market. This was an initiative of the transatlantic publishing house founded by Juan Grijalbo, a Catalan exile who became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Its unexpected printing in Grijalbo’s Barcelona headquarters makes it one of the first works on German Nazism to be released in the Spanish market at a time when evading the regime’s censorship was a subversive act.[5] While it is difficult to gauge its reception, this marked the beginning of an erratic and incomplete path for Mosse’s translations into Spanish shaped by political developments after Franco passed away in 1975.
The transition to democracy in Spain was accompanied by fears of a potential coup d’état. The political climate on the streets was just as volatile as in its Italian neighbor, with both left- and right-wing armed groups, as well as Spanish nationalists and separatists, viewing this moment as an opportunity to advance their political agendas. Student and mass demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the police. This was a period of social effervescence, yet its transformative potential was somehow stifled from above with the so-called ‘pact of forgiveness’. The Amnesty Law in 1977, which refused to prosecute the crimes of the dictatorship that had recently ended, denied justice and reparation to the victims of Francoist political repression. This further deepened the social fracture created by the 1936 fascist uprising and established a climate of tension that complicated the publication of books on potentially divisive topics such as Nazism, dictatorship, or nationalism. Nevertheless, historian Manuel Tuñón de Lara began laying the foundations for future inquiry into the Francoist regime from France, proposing an interpretation of Spain’s fascism as a rural fascism.[6]
Throughout the 1980s, regional and local studies focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary people began to gain prominence. The anti-Francoist resistance and women’s history played key roles in dismantling the Francoist canon and enriching the diversity of historical approaches. At the same time, Juan José Linz’s conceptualization of the Spanish dictatorship as an authoritarianism of limited pluralism, along with the emergence of studies building on the history of Falange by Sheelagh M. Ellwood, helped break new ground in the field. The historical community began to confront the recent past through conferences and workshops, leading to the development of two main lines of interpretation emerged regarding the fascist phenomenon in Spain. One emphasized the ideological plurality within the dictatorship to isolate its “unique” fascist element, the Falange party. The other focused on the dictator, the fascist inspirations behind his policies, and the construction of the anti-national “other”—the regime’s victims.
The turn of the 1990s solidified these two schools of thought, which then began to evolve in distinct directions, further enriched by significant contributions from international scholars. The reception of the works by historians Paul Preston and Stanley Payne in Spain exemplified these two approaches.[7] Their arguments aligned with ongoing debates, in Spain and internationally, on fascism and its political nature. It was precisely during this period that Mosse’s argument about fascism as a revolutionary movement began to influence the emerging literature on Falange. In this context, a strand of research led by the Valencian historian Ismael Saz emphasized the exceptionality of Spain’s fascism, focusing on the distinctive character of Falange compared to other nationalist groups within the Francoist dictatorship.[8] This line of inquiry was further shaped by Italian scholarship engaging with Mosse’s work. However, it largely overlooked the concept of clerical fascism, an idea that resembled Tuñón de Lara’s 1977 concept of rural fascism and that had also had support among Italian historians such as Enzo Collotti, who proposed it in 1990.[9]
Like Collotti and Tuñón de Lara, Mosse also alluded to the existence of a clerical fascism in his earlier work, The Culture of Western Europe, which was the first of his books to be translated into Spanish after the dictatorship.[10] It came out in 1997 as a two-volume edition, accompanied by a preface that introduced readers to Mosse’s cultural history and its differences with the history of ideas, Geitesgeschichte. Except for the literature historian José Carlos Mainer, cultural histories of the fascist phenomenon had yet to strike their blows in Spain.[11] The turn of the millennium inaugurated a new trend with the flourishing of studies on memory, the Civil War, and the Francoist concentration camps. Two Mosse titles appeared in Spanish at that time. First, The Image of Man came out in 2000, the closest translation to an original publication date, shortly after Mosse’s passing in 1999.[12] By then, historians were turning their attention to the women’s section of Falange as an object of inquiry, aligning the field with the work of international scholars on fascism’s treatment of women and progressively paying attention to the role of gender.[13]
Secondly, The Nationalization of the Masses was translated and published in 2005, probably becoming Mosse’s most impactful work in Spain.[14] Its method inspired historian Zira Box Varela, who pioneered the development of cultural approaches to the Francoist regime à la Mosse. Besides translating Mosse’s autobiography Confronting History three years later, in 2008, Box pioneered the analysis of Francoist festivals, ceremonies, and cult of the nation in her España, año cero (2010).[15] Tapping on the established literature on the Spanish case, her work connected with the political religion literature and the definition-oriented school while renovating historical approaches to the Spanish dictatorship. At the turn of the 2010s, the study of fascism in Spain seemed to establish the pluralistic argument as a canon, reinforced by the thesis of Falange Española y de las JONS as an example of a fascism that failed to seize power.[16] Yet, as in the international sphere, this apparent consensus did not hold for long. Inspired by José-Carlos Mainer’s work, historian Ferran Gallego argued the opposite in his exhaustive El Evangelio Fascista: Francoism was a form of fascism coherently aligned with the European political milieu. In his analysis dealing with myths, intellectuals, and cultural practices, the Falange doctrine remained central to the construction of the regime and its idea of nation, state, and leadership. And it did so for its entire existence.[17]
The debate on the political nature of Francoism remains inconclusive, which is a sign of its integration into equally unsatisfying debates in English-speaking academic circles. The long-lasting hermeticism of the Francoist dictatorship and the endurance of its self-narrative have set the tone of academic discussions and marked the boundaries of our interpretations. In a way, Spanish historiography has matured drastically and in a shorter timespan compared to other European historiographies. However, for comparative historians, the Spanish case has generally functioned as an example of conservative authoritarian dictatorship, which has been the reason for their attention on the Iberian Peninsula. This stance, as shown above, does not emerge out of a wide consensus but demonstrates the difficulty of explaining a forty-year-long dictatorship in neat, categorical terms.
The delayed translation of much of Mosse’s work responded to domestic dynamics driven by the need to make sense of the recent past from a national perspective before engaging in broader international debates. Once it became clear that Spain’s complex relationship with its past was not unique but shared with the rest of Europe, the debate over the nature of the Francoist regime reached its exhaustion, timely coinciding with the end of the definitional phase in fascist studies. The swing of the transnational turn over the last decade has helped move beyond the confines of the nation-state in the study of fascism, Francoism, and the Spanish Civil War.[18] While this shift has been pioneered by other historiographies, it has opened new avenues for engaging with Mosse’s work in Spain. A prime example is historian Ángel Alcalde with his transnational study of First World War veterans.[19] As the translator of Fallen Soldiers into Spanish, published in 2016, Alcalde’s study is a great starting point for the non-specialist reader, thoroughly exploring the various receptions of Mosse’s contributions.
The recent translations of The Crisis of the German Ideology and Toward the Final Solution mark another step in the ongoing, but still incomplete, effort of bringing Mosse’s work to Spanish-speaking readers. Academic discussions on the Francoist experience in Spain have benefited from dialogue with other historiographies, and the publication of these Mosse works signals an attempt to extend this engagement to civil society. Making these classic works accessible to a Spanish-speaking audience expands access to the historiography of fascism and political extremism with valuable educational potential. Concepts such as ‘fascism’ and ‘extreme right’ are no longer topics confined to scholarly monographs but have firmly entered public debates. These translations not only inform the general public about the long history of these phenomena, but they also serve a deeper purpose. The specialized reader, in turn, will surely find in it a way to critically approach the scholarship on Spanish fascism and dictatorship in the twentieth century, equipped with a critical view of exceptionalism narratives and their role in history writing.
[1] Maik Herold, “The Impact of Conspiracy Belief on Democratic Culture: Evidence from Europe,” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 12 December 2024, https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-165.
[2] See in chronological order, George L. Mosse, Le Origini Culturali Del Terzo Reich, trans. Francesco Saba Sardi (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1968); George L. Mosse, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer. Die Völkischen Ursprünge des Nationalsozialismus. (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1979); George L. Mosse, Les Racines Intellectuelles Du Troisième Reich: La Crise de l’idéologie Allemande, trans. Claire Darmon (Paris: Calmann-Lévy/Mémorial de la Shoah, 2006).
[3] Gustavo Alares López, Las Políticas Del Pasado En La España Franquista (1939-1964). Historia, Nacionalismo y Dictadura (Madrid: Marcial Pons Ediciones de Historia, 2019), 372.
[4] Mosse, Le Origini Culturali Del Terzo Reich; Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso, 2019), 89–95.
[5] George L. Mosse, La Cultura Nazi: La Vida Intelectual, Cultural y Social En El Tercer Reich (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1973).
[6] Glicerio Sánchez Recio, “Dictadura franquista e historiografía del franquismo,” Bulletin d’histoire contemporaine de l’Espagne, no. 52 (1 December 2017): 71–82.
[7] Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge Fascism and the Military in Twentieth-Century Spain (London; New York: Routledge, 1990); Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1993); Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923-1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
[8] Ismael Saz, “¿Revolución o contrarevolución?: el fascismo como problema,” Estudis D’Historia Contemporania del Pais Valencia, no. 4 (1983): 305–26; Javier Tusell Gómez and Ismael Saz Campos, “Mussolini y Primo de Rivera: Las Relaciones Políticas y Diplomaticas de Dos Dictaduras Mediterráneas,” Boletín de La Real Academia de La Historia 179, no. 3 (1982): 413–83.
[9] Sánchez Recio, “Dictadura franquista e historiografía del franquismo”; Enzo Collotti, “Cinque Forme Di Fascismo Europeo. Austria, Germania, Italia, Spagna, Portogallo,” in Per Una Definizione Della Dittatura Franchista, ed. Luciano Casali, vol. Annale 6 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1990), 41–56.
[10] George L. Mosse, La cultura europea del siglo XIX & XX, trans. Jose Manuel Álvarez Flores, II Vol. 1. ed (Barcelona: Ariel, 1997), 145–61.
[11] José-Carlos Mainer, Falange y Literatura (Barcelona: Labor, 1971).
[12] George L. Mosse, La Imagen Del Hombre: La Creación de La Masculinidad Moderna (Madrid: Talasa, 2000); It was published at a burgeoning moment for women’s history while gender historical analyses started gaining traction. See Pamela Beth Radcliff and Victoria Lorée Enders, eds., Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999).
[13] Carme Molinero, “Mujer, franquismo, fascismo. La clausura forzada en un ‘mundo pequeño,’” Historia Social, no. 30, Franquismo (1998): 97–117; Victoria L. Enders, “Nationalism and Feminism: The Seccion Femenina of the Falange,” History of European Ideas 15, no. 4–6 (December 1992): 673–80; Mary Nash and Marisa Ferrandis Garrayo, “Dos décadas de historia de las mujeres en España: una reconsideración,” Historia Social, no. 9 (1991): 137–61.
[14] Francisco Javier Caspistegui, “La nacionalización de las masas y la historia del nacionalismo español,” Ayer 2, no. 94 (2014): 257–270.
[15] Zira Box Varela, España, Año Cero La Construcción Simbólica Del Franquismo (Madrid: Alianza, 2010); George L. Mosse, Haciendo Frente a La Historia: Una Autobiografía, trans. Zira Box (València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2008).
[16] Joan Maria Thomàs, Los Fascismos Españoles (Madrid: Planeta, 2011); Mercedes Peñalba Sotorrío, Falange Española, Historia de Un Fracaso (1933-1945) (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2009).
[17] Ferran Gallego, El Evangelio Fascista. La formación de la cultura política del franquismo (1930-1950) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2014).
[18] Giuliana Chamedes, “Transnationalising the Spanish Civil War,” Contemporary European History 29, no. 3 (August 2020): 261–263.
[19] Ángel Alcalde, War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Note also that Alcalde was translator of Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers: George L. Mosse, Soldados Caídos. La Transformación de La Memoria de Las Guerras Mundiales, trans. Ángel Alcalde (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2016).
Julià Gómez Reig (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. He received an M.A. in Contemporary History from the University of Sussex, in England (UK), and a B.A. in History from the University Rovira i Virgili of Tarragona, in Catalonia (Spain). His research interests include the history of internationalisms and nationalisms, migrations, colonialism, and empire. His dissertation – “Transnational Fascism and Internationalism: Political Culture, Cooperation and Governance between Italy and Spain, 1917-1929” – examines how fascist politics became a transnational phenomenon to fill the vacuum of counter-revolutionary internationalism, while providing Italy and Spain with a renewed imperial legitimacy in the post-war world. He coordinates the EUI’s Interwar Histories Working Group.