Confronting History: A Memoir was published posthumously by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2000 (Mosse died in 1999), and it provides the autobiographical key to his scholarly work. The memoir traces Mosse’s life from his childhood in a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish family (the Mosses were newspaper publishers of considerable prominence) through his flight from Nazi Germany at fifteen, his education in England (at a Quaker boarding school) and America (at Haverford and Harvard), and his long career at the universities of Iowa and Wisconsin.
The early chapters — childhood in Berlin and the family estate in the countryside, the gradual encroachment of Nazism on daily life, the decision to flee — are vivid and emotionally charged. Mosse writes with the historian’s instinct for significant detail: the small humiliations, the growing isolation, the moment when the abstract political crisis became a personal threat.
The later chapters trace his intellectual development: how his personal experience of fascism drove his scholarly work, how his homosexuality (which he could not acknowledge publicly until late in life) informed his understanding of sexuality and politics, and how his position as a permanent outsider — Jewish in Germany, German in America, gay in a heterosexual academy — gave him the perspective that made his scholarship distinctive.
Collecting Confronting History
First edition (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2000): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Posthumous publication.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Without jacket: $5–$10