George L. Mosse Program in History Newsletters
Fall 2024: 1994 Mosse Lecture, Wisconsin French History conference, Program Updates
This edition features a report from the Wisconsin School of French History conference, an essay recounting the remarkable scholarship of Mosse Fellow Jen Gramer (1988-2023), an announcement of the 2024 Mosse First Book Prize winner, a recovered public access television 1994 Mosse discussion - "Gay + History," and much more.
Spring 2024
In this edition we highlight three recent Program interviews.
Do you have an opinion about the Mosse Humanities Building? If so then our then our first interviewee wants to hear from you! Local artist Doug E.L. Haynes is completing one hundred sketches of the Humanities Building (including the one above, no. 57).
Our second interview is with UW alum and Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Lowell Bergman, who recounts how his studies helped prepare him for his career.
And third, catch up with is with inaugural Mosse Undergraduate Intern, Emma Strenski, who is now practicing law in Indianapolis and using her oral history training to take depositions.
Winter 2024: Happy New Year!, Three Upcoming Lectures, New Fellows and Books
"We don’t take Prussians in the American army.”
Thus ended George L. Mosse's attempt to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1941. To learn more, read the English translation of Professor Jost Hermand's interview with Mosse from May 1992. Hermand was especially interested in Mosse's experiences of antisemitism. Mosse explains that he continued to face persecution after arriving in the United States, "you mustn’t forget what it was like here, it was truly racist in America."
Professors Carol Poore and Marc Silberman found this cassette after Hermand passed away in October 2021.
Spring 2023: Launch of WWI Digital Exhibit, First Book Prize, New Fellows
My name is Rachel Lynch and I am a current George L. Mosse Undergraduate Intern in Digital and European History. Over the past academic year, I have had the privilege to work on a newly published exhibit, 1914: Then Came Armageddon. As the lead undergraduate at the conclusion of this stage of the project, I have worked alongside Mosse scholars, UW Libraries Special Collections, and the Wisconsin Historical Society to produce this inaugural digital exhibition. From our initial web construction to the current launch, it has taken a village.
Our exhibit features materials donated to UW Libraries by Professor and Art Historian Andrew Laurie Stangel, and from other collections within the UW Libraries and Archives commemorating the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This rich collection of Great War primary source materials includes newspaper accounts, war medals, photographs, cartoons, paintings, diplomatic correspondence, death certificates, propaganda, and postcards, among other items featured in the exhibit.
Fall 2022: Houdini in Houston, upcoming Mosse Lectures
It has now been twenty years since Christopher Browning gave the first Madison Mosse Lectures in 2002. Two years later, the first Jerusalem Mosse Lectures with Jan Assmann took place. Since then, leading scholars have presented new research in both cities every two years.
This fall I am excited to invite you to attend Mosse Lectures in both Madison and in Jerusalem. In Madison from 7-9 November, Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia) will speak on “Gender and the Jewish Archive.”
And in Jerusalem from 5-7 December, Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt) will lecture on “Music and Work.” Details for both series are below – watch the Program homepage for the final Jerusalem details and publicity.
Spring 2022: Mosse Exchanges, Mosse in Munich
We are thrilled to resume the George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellowship between UW-Madison and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem this fall, for which we are welcoming seven new Fellows this year. They are engaged in a variety of important scholarly conversations including: the Jewish experience of hiding in the Netherlands during the Second World War, the history of forced labor in the USSR, how the Cold War shaped Holocaust memory, whistleblowing and big data leaks in journalism, reconciliation efforts in the Balkans, the Israeli reception of Foucault, and the role of opinion polling in East Germany.
NB: Carol Poore donated the 1992 Hermand-Mosse interview
Fall 2021: New Fellows, New Books, New Mosse Stories
This has been an exciting summer with new Fellows, new books, and even some new George L. Mosse stories! We are looking forward to the new academic year in Madison and in Jerusalem.
In response to the unprecedented challenges created by COVID-19, the Mosse Program created two new Fellowships for the coming academic year. The recipients, Amit Levy and Abigail Lewis, are both completing PhDs in European cultural history. You can read more about Lewis's study of photography during the French occupation and Levy's focus on the transmission of knowledge in Oriental Studies, as well as about our other Mosse Fellows on the Program site.
Spring 2021: George L. Mosse Humanities Building
We are still not back in the George L. Mosse Humanities Building. But we hope to return to our offices before the end of the summer. Thinking of our offices and the building, it is striking how campus and the city at large has developed a love-hate relationship with the Humanities.
Indeed, the only thing Madisonians agree about the Mosse Humanities Building is that everyone should have a developed opinion of the place. The local publications on the building’s history, aesthetics, and myths are legion and often hyperbolic: “How the Humanities Building Went Wrong,” “The Building We Love to Hate,” “Oh! the Humanities Building!,” “Mosse Humanities Building ‘is like Dracula,” “Embracing the Brute,” and a couple of years ago the somewhat misleading: “Even George L. Mosse Didn’t Like the Humanities Building.”
Fall 2020: Returning to Berlin- George L. Mosse Schenkendorf Bell
This year few of us can travel. The Mosse Program had to cut short the Graduate Exchange program last March. Fortunately, all of our Fellows returned back to Madison and to Jerusalem safely. Below you can find links to blog posts about their experiences in Israel and in Madison during the initial stages of the pandemic.
Though we cannot safely board airplanes and trains, I invite you to once again join us in the Mosse Mobile in Berlin last summer. If you recall, four of us spent several days documenting Mosse sites in greater Berlin before “Mosse’s Europe.” After we explored the ruined Mosse villa at Schenkendorf we set out for the village in Robert’s grey Peugeot 206.
The Mosse family developed close ties to the greater Schenkendorf community after Rudolf Mosse purchased the estate in 1896.
Spring 2020: Mosse Program 20th Anniversary
We prepared this twentieth anniversary newsletter before COVID-19 disrupted our campuses and lives. Like all of you, the Mosse Program has been affected by the virus. Our Madison and Jerusalem Fellows have returned home. Professor Amos Bitzan, on exchange to the Hebrew University, has written about his experience in Jerusalem during the ongoing pandemic on the blog. We are thinking about everyone in the Mosse network and hope that this message finds you safe and well.
In the midst of this unsettling time, we thought it would be encouraging to share with you the remarkable successes of our Fellows. We hope that the enthusiasm in the letter will help us resume our regular work with renewed energy as soon as we are able. While there is much uncertainty at the moment, I am proud to share the work of the Program and its fellows with you.
Fall 2019: Mosse Family Traces in Berlin
Before our “Mosse’s Europe” conference opened this June, I set out with four friends of the Mosse Program - John Tortorice, Chad Gibbs, Bill Tishler, and Robert Mueller-Stahl - to document the Mosse family sites in greater Berlin. Robert acted as the fearless captain of the “Mosse Mobile” - a gray Peugeot 206. Our Mosse Mobile journey was a memorable and powerful experience.
Over four days, Robert drove us, our cameras, and recording gear across Berlin and Brandenburg. In our search for traces of the Mosse family, we visited the former Mosse Tageblatt headquarters on the corner of Jerusalemer and Schützenstrasse; the Emilie und Rudolf Mosse Stift, where the couple sponsored the education of disadvantaged Berlin youth; the Mosse Palais on Leipzigerplatz; and Mosse graves in the Weissensee Cemetery.
Spring 2019: Join the Mosse Program in Berlin
Please join us in Berlin this June for our conference, "Mosse's Europe: New Perspectives in the History of German Judaism, Fascism, and Sexuality." You can read the latest draft program here. On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Professor George L. Mosse three generations of historians will gather to commemorate and analyze his ongoing influence in European, Jewish, and Gender history, as well as the continued resonance of the Mosse family legacy in Berlin. Scholars from Germany, Israel, and the United States will meet in Mosse’s childhood city of Berlin, to discuss the questions that continue to emerge from his research, including: How does gender as a category of analysis continue to modify our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe? What are the limits of liberalism? What role do racial stereotypes play in political culture before and after 1945? And how have historians expanded Mosse’s analysis of Nazi ideology to better understand the Holocaust and the history of modern Europe.
Fall 2018: Inaugural Mosse Program Newsletter
I write on the threshold of two momentous anniversaries: this September will be George L. Mosse’s 100th birthday and next spring will be the twentieth anniversary of the program he endowed, the George L. Mosse Program in History. In addition to a full program of ongoing activities, we have coordinated two conferences to celebrate these important milestones. The first focused on the crisis of liberal democracy and took place this past March in Rome. Here I was struck by how Mosse's writings continue to resonate in Italy among a new generation of historians. The second, "Mosse's Europe," will be held in Berlin this June, 2019. In addition to these conferences, the Mosse Program remains highly active. One example of this is our online course, "Racism, Antisemitism, and the Fate of Liberalism, 1890-1945." This course utilizes lectures delivered by Mosse between the 1970s and 1990s. This past year, students and alumni from Europe, Asia, the U.S., and the Middle East took the class, and enjoyed sitting in on lectures given by one of the great teachers of his generation. I hope you will join me this January for what is sure to be a memorable experience.