Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany was published by Howard Fertig in 1970, and it collects Mosse’s essays on what he considered the central tragedy of modern German history: the relationship between Germans and Jews in the century before the Holocaust.
Mosse examines this relationship from multiple angles: the efforts of Jewish intellectuals (particularly during the Weimar period) to find a political and cultural position that was neither socialist nor nationalist but something else — a “third force” that would transcend the left-right divide; the cultural function of antisemitism as a unifying symbol for the German right; and the paradox of German-Jewish identity — the fact that Jews were simultaneously among the most assimilated and most excluded members of German society.
The essays are informed by Mosse’s own biography: born into a prominent German-Jewish family (the Mosses owned the Berliner Tageblatt), he fled Germany in 1933 at age fifteen and spent his career trying to understand how the civilization that produced his family also produced its destroyers. The personal dimension gives the scholarship an emotional intensity that purely academic work often lacks.
Collecting Germans and Jews
First edition (Howard Fertig, New York, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15