George Mosse and the Academic Closet By Jeet Heer National Post (September 30, 2004) Our understanding of fascism became much richer when George Mosse came to terms with his gayness. Although I had long admired Mosse as a superb historians of modern Europe, I had never guessed at the connection between his sexuality and his scholarship until reading Confronting History, a quietly moving memoir published a year after Mosse died in 1999. Posthumous revelations of sexuality always change our view of the past. Now that we’re in a tell-all era, we can see how great lives were shaped by the literary closet (E.M. Forster, A.E. Housman, Virginia Woolf, for example) and the celluloid closet (Rock Hudson, Charles Laughton, Lawrence Olivier). But there is also such a thing as an academic closet, the claustrophobic constraints of which are well illustrated by Mosse’s career. Mosse didn’t just study European history, he was born into it. He entered the world in 1918 as the youngest child of the Lachmann-Mosse family, who were the German equivalent of such North America press empires as the Pulitzers or the Hearsts. As both outspoken liberals and Jews, the Luchmann-Mosses were early targets for the Nazis. As Hitler ascended to power, they were strong-armed into giving up their publishing firm and going into exile, moving from France to England to the United States. It was at an English boarding school in the mid 1930s that the teenage Mosse found himself attracted to other boys. Although outsiders see such schools as havens of pederasty, Mosse own experience was that there was little room for sexual expression. “Boys are very proud of their manhood and fear any intimacy which could be regarded as effeminate, an attitude which was encouraged by the role which sports and athletic competition played in school life,” he remembered. “I shared this attitude in spite of my dislike of sport, and never even thought of what today is called coming out. Conformity is the rule not only in society at large, but especially among teenagers living together.” The power of conformity would rule over Mosse’s life for decades to come. As a Jew and a homosexual, he felt himself to be a double outsider, even in relatively liberal societies such as England and the United States. Living chastely, he cultivated “a rich and highly romantic fantasy life.” He had a tendency to moon over his straight male friends, admiring what he saw as their “normality” in painfully unrequited relationships. Perhaps because of the powers of sublimation, Mosse became a remarkably productive scholar in these loveless years, quickly earning a doctorate at Harvard, and becoming a hugely popular professor (first at Iowa and then in Wisconsin). As a lecturer he was theatrical and mesmerizing; so much so that his classrooms were often overflowing with students. Yet he was also equally effective as a graduate supervisor. It is hard to think of a good university that doesn’t have at least one former Mosse student carrying on his legacy. At first, his writing was less successful than his teaching. He was always a prolific writer, but his early books tended to be on dry topics, such as English constitutional history and the evolution of Protestant theology. As he confesses in his memoirs, the impulse to conformity led him to choose topics that were safely and boringly Anglo-Saxon. A friend once asked Mosse, “How come that you yourself are so interesting and your books are so dull?” Starting in the 1960s, however, Mosse began focusing on a topic much closer to his own experience, the rise of fascism. He became a pioneering scholar in the study of right wing nationalism. Prior to Mosse, fascism had been studied as an intellectual movement, similar to liberalism and Marxism in form if not in content. Thus historians looked for major intellectuals who might have been precursors to fascism: Hegel, Gobineau, Nietzsche. It was Mosse’s brilliance to realize that this approach was fundamentally flawed: fascism had little to do with high-minded thinkers. It was in fact an outgrowth of popular culture and its origins could be located in the gutter products at the margins of society. Mosse studied fascism by looking at the fringes: racist graffiti in subway washrooms, sub-literate novels about Jewish conspiracies, and the wretchedly grandiose architectural designs of Albert Speer. Mosse’s work on the culture of fascism, what we might call killer kitsch, has been amazingly fruitful and suggestive. All future studies have to take Mosse into account. Mosse’s emergence as a major scholar was closely tied up with his increasing comfort with his identity as a gay Jew. Mosse was all too aware that as part of its cultural project, fascism upheld an ideal of masculinity that defined both gays and Jews as abnormal. Rather than shying away from this painful topic, he made it the center of his scholarly research. His greater courage as a scholar paralleled his increasing personal confidence. In the early 1970s he slowly emerged from the closet and entered into the first long-term relationship in his life. By 1985, he was confident enough to write Nationalism and Sexuality, which he calls “my coming-out book.” In his best books, Mosse draws a powerful linkage between norms of sexuality and the “new politics” of modern nationalism. If we watch the Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl, we notice that they are filled with the rippling flesh of Nordic bodies. This aesthetic has a political implication. “The image of the Jew or the homosexual cannot be properly understood without the image of the All-American boy or the blond Nordic man,” Mosse once noted. “Type and antitype are a part of the new politics, living and familiar symbols of nationalism and respectability and of their enemies.” Fascist culture was a powerful brew of both homo-eroticism and sexual repression. It conjured up desires but then channeled them into violence. Even in our own day, we can see how rigid macho sexuality is closely linked to militarism. It is no accident that the Khadr family criticized tolerance for homosexuality when justifying sending their son to join bin Laden in Afghanistan. Or consider the fact that the fiercely homophobic conservative writer Midge Decter has written an admiring biography of Donald Rumsfeld, a man often described as a “stud” in the right-wing press. Like the best historians, Mosse shed light on the present as well as the past. It was his courage in coming out that allowed him to confront the poisonous legacy of linking “normal” manhood with nationalism.