<i>Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man</i>. Emilio Gentile

I never had the pleasure of meeting George Mosse, and yet, Emilio Gentile’s fascinating exploration of his incredibly productive academic career produces an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. It is the great contribution of Gentile’s book to reveal just how much Mosse’s interpretations of National Socialism shifted the discussion in the late twentieth century, turning our attention away from an exclusive focus on terror and political organization to a much more expansive description of the ideological motivations of the perpetrator. Mosse insisted on a definition of ideology that was not confined to the political sphere, and he called on historians to explain not only how the Nazis instrumentalized fear, but also how they promised Germans new forms of political participation and integration into a system of belonging that relied on the strategies of a secular religion to justify its racial policies. While underplaying broader trends in the social sciences and humanities in the United States—such as the influence of anthropological and gender theory on historical practice—Gentile convincingly demonstrates that Mosse’s insistence on the importance of myth, symbols, and emotion in both dictatorship and democracy was an initially courageous and ultimately consequential intervention into debates about totalitarianism and fascism. As Gentile notes, Mosse’s status as “a victim of Nazism who … wanted to know his persecutor” (p. 4) likely saved him from charges of being labeled an apologist for fascism during a time, particularly in the 1960s, when historians were unlikely to accept that words like “culture” or “democracy” could be applied to fascism (p. 185).

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