Interview with David James "Jimmy" Fisher

Doney: All right. This is Skye Doney with David James Fisher, Jimmy Fisher, at the Mosse Oral History Project. And we are conducting a follow-up interview to an interview that John Tortorice conducted on the fifteenth of June, 2018. That interview got into a lot of interesting details about Jimmy’s career and life, including Dow, his initial interest in psychoanalysis, his experience in Mosse’s undergraduate classes. I really loved the idea that Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was the hero of The Culture of Western Europe.

Fisher: Yes.

Doney: I think you’re right. I just read that book a bunch of times because we have a new edition coming out. Your encounters with Hilde Mosse (1912-1982), and you started to talk about life at 36 Glenway. But that interview ended before all could be told. So we’re just going to pick up where we left off. And I’ll send it over to you.

Fisher: Okay. That’s great. I’m delighted to be here, Skye. I’m honored to be interviewed. George Mosse was a very seminal influence in my life. I still hold him very dear and close to me. I think actually he taught me how to think, how to be a critical thinker, how to contextualize, how to puncture slogans and posturing. I just wish he was around now to talk to about what’s going on in the current situation. Because he always had a very good and insightful analysis of things.

Let me mention a couple of things just to pick up on what you said. I had my doctoral oral in September 1973. And it was George, Harvey Goldberg, and Germaine Brée who were on my committee. The doctoral oral was held in the living room of 36 Glenway, which had been my old home. So I was very comfortable there. George really was presiding. But he had given me earlier that year some advice on my doctoral thesis. It was very sound advice. He said, “Keep it short. Keep it concrete. And get it out.” End of quote.

I said to George, this was on, this was outside of the Union terrace, overlooking the lake.

Doney: Yeah. 00:03:00Fisher: Which is really where we had a lot of our talks. We would have lunch there a lot. I said jokingly, “George, that sounds like a bowel movement.” He laughed.

He also said to me, “I don’t want to see it until it’s done.” I think I had given him sixty pages. I submitted a doctoral thesis of 640 pages. I have to tell you that I’ve recently given advice to one of my doctoral students. I told her keep it short, keep it concrete, and she’s listening to me.

But I see George on the Union terrace. I turn in the whole thing. This must have been in like early September, 1973. There’s a lot riding on it. I asked, “What did you think?” He looks at me. He says, “It’s okay.” He says, “It’s okay.” But he said, “There’s two things.” Then I got a little bit anxious. “What are the two things?” He replied, “You mentioned two Italian Fascist intellectuals.” I can’t remember, one of the guy’s names was [Giuseppe] Prezzolini (1882-1982). I can’t remember the other one. but he says, “You didn’t use their first names. You’ve got to put in their first names.” That was his only critique.

I said to him, trying to diffuse the situation and to get a laugh, “Well, they’re Italians. I’m going to make up a first name. It’s going to be Giacomo and Giuseppe, because every Italian has those first names.” He looked at me and started to laugh. That’s exactly what I did. I didn’t have time to look them up. One of them is Giacomo and the other one is Giuseppe. That was his only critique of the doctoral thesis.

When I was in the graduate seminar, we were doing Mosse style history. At that point, I started to get a little bit hungry for something else. I think ultimately what that something else was was going to be psychoanalysis. I tried to push George to bring in more theory. To bring in critical theory, to bring in historiography, to bring in philosophy of history. But I really couldn’t budge him. He was uninterested and bored by all that stuff. He just wanted to do history. The only thing I remember him assigning us that was 00:06:00interdisciplinary and theoretical was a famous text by Claude Levi Strauss called Tristes Tropiques, (Sad Tropics, 1955). He had us read that.Because at that moment he might have been a little interested in anthropology. But he was not at all interested in theoretical questions. That was also some of his attitude toward his grad students who were doing critical theory and Frankfurt school analysis.

I talked in the first part of the interview with John about the psychoanalytic seminar we organized with Joe Kepecs. I’m pretty convinced that it was the first time that George had read anything clinical or theoretical by [Sigmund] Freud, including Freud’s writings on sexuality. We read Freud’s 1905 essay, Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality. I’m pretty sure it helped George when he wrote Nationalism and Sexuality. It also alerted him that Freud was not hostile to homosexuality. Some of his disciples were, but Freud was not. Freud did not pathologize homosexuality, which was very unusual for his time.

In late spring of 1971, I’m still living in the Glenway house. The day after the party we had for him where Harvey came over, George had cataract surgery. I took him to the surgery and I picked him up. I basically administered to him, so that for a couple of weeks George became my patient. It was a very interesting reversal of the major professor/student relationship. But it was at that moment, I began to realize aspects of George’s vulnerability.

There’s also the episode in May 1970. Fred Harvey Harrington, who was the president of the university, 00:09:00the whole University of Wisconsin, not just Madison. Harrington had been a historian and the chairman of the history department in Madison. He was someone who was very close to George. They were friends. George would give him advice and they had a lot of good dialogue. Harrington brought in Goldberg. I think he and Merle Curti had brought Mosse from Iowa. William Appleman Williams was a Fred Harvey Harrington student. And the three of them were great friends. Williams and Goldberg were very close. George and Williams, George used to refer to Williams as Billy. He had enormous respect for Williams and helped him write the book The Great Evasion (1964), on the absence of a Marxist tradition in the United States.

Harrington was running into difficulties with the Republican legislators and some of the right- wing regents. In May 1970, he resigned. It’s not clear if he was forced to resign, but he resigned. George was out of town. I called him on the telephone. He was in New York City. The regents blamed Harrington for not controlling antiwar students and protests on campus. George, on some level, was very supportive of those protests. He really liked and respected Harrington. I told him about Harrington being forced out; he hadn’t heard. I think it even got into the New York Times. George was extremely upset that Harrington was gone. I saw George as someone who was very calm and composed. Always had a perspective, always had a critical analysis of things. But this rattled him.

The same thing happened when the bombing of the Army Math Research Center occurred on August 24, 1970, the Sterling Hall bombing. Effectively what that did on campus was to have a chilling effect on all kinds of politics. For the next few years, things became very quiet. There was reflection and introspection on the meaning of that event. Many of us who thought of themselves as on the left were very opposed to domestic terrorism and to violence like that. We had very intense discussions about the infantile extreme left and how those kinds of actions discredited the left and led to more reaction and repression of the responsible left and of liberalism.

In 00:12:0071, Nixon was president. We sensed that this was a very foolish and very irresponsible act that would discredit the antiwar movement and the left. There were some people, though, that supported the Armstrong brothers and the bombing. George was not one of them. I found myself largely in agreement with how he analyzed it.

After I finished my doctoral oral in September 00:15:0073, my then wife, Clarice Fisher and I, went back to Paris for another two years. George visited us in Paris in 1973. I remember us going to see the movie The Sorrow and the Pity, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, which was then not allowed to be shown on French television because it was a pretty severe indictment of those who had collaborated with the Vichy regime. Including still some people who were still in power in France. We saw it in French. It’s an incredible documentary. It’s become a classic. It’s one of the best exposés of the spectrum of resistance and collaboration during Vichy France. I remember that after we saw it, I think we must have gone to a café or had a meal. George was particularly articulate and informed about the themes of the movie. He knew about the cultural politics from inside out. But he admitted learning new things from it. It was one of the great shared moments we had with him.

He was also very pleased to visit us in Harvey Goldberg’s apartment in the Marais. It was on the Rue du Pont-aux-Choux. 00:18:00I think I’m the only person who lived both in George’s house in Madison and in Harvey’s apartment in Paris. I was someone who was very friendly with both of them. I had this fantasy that I could somehow mediate their differences, that is, their different methods, their different approaches to history. That turned out not to be true. But I did remain close to both of them. I lost touch with Harvey after I graduated. I don’t think I ever saw him again. We may have had one or two letter exchanges. But George was so happy to be invited to our place in Harvey’s apartment. He was just thrilled.

Then George was doing archival research in Munich. This is again in 00:21:0073, maybe early 00:24:0074. On our way to see Andy Rabinbach and Judy Brooks in Vienna, we stopped in Munich and we spent a few days with George. It was my first trip to Germany. My father had fought in the war and refused to buy any German products, and remained very hostile to Germany and anything German. I had never travelled to Germany or Austria, even though I had been to Europe.

George gave us a tour of Nazi Munich. He also showed us the university and some of the other sites in the city. But I’ll never forget that he took us to the beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler had his Beer Hall Putsch in November, 1923. We had a beer in that beer hall. Then he said, “Let’s go out and visit Dachau.” We rented a car. I was driving and he was reading the map. He got a little confused as we were driving. Dachau’s in the suburbs of Munich about fourteen miles away. We got lost. We never actually got to Dachau. It was a lost opportunity.

Now I’m going to pivot back to my undergraduate days. The Dow demonstrations, and after the police repression and the meetings in October 1967, 00:27:00there was a faculty meeting called to discuss and potentially censure William Sewell, who was the chancellor at the time. It was Sewell who called in the Dane County Police that led to I think sixty kids being beaten and hospitalized. Students were subsequently tear gassed to break up the demonstration. The faculty meeting was held in the union. We listened to it being piped into the great hall. There were hundreds of kids listening to the faculty meeting. The faculty failed to censure William Sewell. George spoke at the faculty meeting. George committed a slip of the tongue. Instead of making a reference to the Dow demonstrations and the violence that happened, he said “Dow Jones.” The faculty cracked up. He caught himself, being very fast on his feet. He said, “You know, this is not a time for my colleagues on the faculty to be interested in their stock portfolios. This is very, serious business.” He caught the slip and he came right back.

Yet, they did not censure Sewell. But as the faculty exited from the student union, that evening, there were two lines of students and they had to walk between us. We all had candles, and it was a silent vigil. Not a word was spoken. But there was no other way out. They had to walk between us with these candles. I remember George telling me the next day that he was moved by that particular form of protest. He thought that it was quite effective, a form of non-violent bearing of witness.

About the Teaching Assistant’s Association strike, the TAA strike, which was March 1970. I mentioned picketing the Glenway house. Several days later, I was asked by Jim Marquetti, who was the vice president of the TAA, to go and join with several other people to form a picket line at 5:30 in the morning 00:30:00to stop a Union Carbide truck that was going to deliver liquid nitrogen to the Chemistry Building. The chemistry department’s TAs for some reason did not support the strike. Liquid nitrogen was essential for their research. We desired to send them a message. Marquetti found out; he was a Teamster affiliated with the local. We knew that the Teaching Assistants Association had an affiliation with the local Teamsters. He found out the Union Carbide truck was coming from Chicago and was going to make a delivery. We were going to meet that truck and turn it back. There were four of us. It was Marquetti, it was a guy called Bruce Vandervort who was a Harvey Goldberg student, a really good guy, a history TA. There was also a fearless woman whose name I regretfully forget.

Marquetti gave us baseball bats. We were out there early in the morning. It was freezing. It was March in Madison. We arrived at 5:00, 5:30. Suddenly, the Union Carbide truck came barreling in. We’re blocking the driveway, the four of us, with baseball bats. Marquetti goes up to the driver and he says, “You can’t deliver this liquid nitrogen.” The driver says, “Well, you know, I came all the way from Chicago. I have to deliver it.” Marquetti contradicts him, saying, “No, you’re not delivering it. We’re going to call my guy in the local Teamsters.” The two of them went inside and they made a telephone call. They were gone about twenty minutes. He says, “I’ll make the call. It takes me about an hour to put the hose in and start transferring the liquid nitrogen.

They come back about twenty minutes later. Marquetti’s got a big smile on his face. The driver takes the hose out, packs up the truck, and pulls out. Teamster solidarity worked to prevent the Chicago driver from crossing our picket line, persuading him to respect our union strike. This is now like 5:30, six in the morning. We felt triumphant; we’re shutting down research in the chemistry department, at least temporarily.

Marquetti says, “Let’s not stop.” He suggests, “Let’s continue.” We went over to the student union to the driveway there. We were going to stop food deliveries. We got over to the driveway around seven, 7:15. At that hour, there’s nobody around. But the trucks are starting to come in to deliver food. 00:33:00The four of us with baseball bats are blocking the driveway. A driver comes in and he wasn’t real happy with us. But he backed out. He wasn’t going to run us over or cross the picket line. We were screaming at them, “Scabs!” We were still high as kites because of the Union Carbide victory.

But this truck driver went and got in touch with Ralph Hanson, head of the University of Wisconsin campus cops, and told them that we were illegally blocking entrances and exits. One of the campus cops came over and said, “You can’t do that. That’s illegal.” We backed off.

The truck came in. But as soon as the campus cop went away, we did it again. Another truck comes in. (laughs) He threatened to call the campus cops. We backed off. At that point, we figured it was enough of a good thing. We went home.

I go home to George Mosse. George used to tease me. He had another grad student named Paul Breines. Paul was several years ahead of me. When I was a grad student, everyone thought that Paul Breines was George’s favorite. He was a very bright guy. But Paul Breines was from Scarsdale, which is a wealthy suburb in New York. I actually grew up on the border of Scarsdale and New Rochelle, even though it was really New Rochelle. But George used to say to me teasingly, “Oh, you’re just another radical from Scarsdale,” which he would sometimes say to Paul. I tell George this narrative. This is early in the morning. He’s up, he’s drinking his coffee. I said, “Let me tell you about what happened.” He was very impressed, respectful. He stopped calling me a radical from Scarsdale after that.

Those are my stories.

Doney: Those are great. Do you recall more of the substance of Mosse’s speech regarding the censure of Sewell?

Fisher: No. I think he was walking an ambiguous line. I don’t think he supported the censuring of Sewell—you know, the irony of this, Skye, is that Sewell was himself antiwar. The young man who was killed at the Army Math Research Center, Robert Fassnacht, was also antiwar. 00:36:00George was critical of Sewell. I think he thought that Sewell had lost his nerve by calling in the Dane County Police, but didn’t want him censured. There’s a way in which personal loyalty and friendship may have influenced his thinking. I think George also thought we would get worse if Sewell left. But I don’t remember the substance of his remarks, except the slip, the Dow Jones slip. (laughs) Doney: The Dow Jones. That’s great. I want to back up a little bit.

Fisher: Go ahead.

Doney: Yeah, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you got interested in history.

Fisher: Yeah.

Doney: Where that came from.

Fisher: Well, I was always a pretty good history student in junior high school and high school. I was always interested in Jewish history, which I got at my local temple. My parents were interested in history. They had books in the house; for example, they had read the William Shirer’s (1904-1993) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). They were interested in World War Two and they were interested in history. They had somewhat of a historical consciousness. But the real inspiration, I think, was being swept away by Mosse’s lectures. I found them very evocative and very provocative. I wanted to know the things he knew, and I wanted to read the books that he assigned and the things that he made reference to.

In one of his classes, it was in the cultural history class, he made a reference to Bruno Bettelheim’s (1903-1990) book The Informed Heart (1960), which is a book on the concentration camps that had recently been published. It had come out in the early 00:39:0060s. I didn’t know who Bettelheim was. Subsequently, I wrote a book on Bettelheim. Bettelheim became a friend of mine. But it was Mosse’s lectures and then my personal relationship with him. It was also Harvey’s lectures. Harvey spoke without notes. Harvey was an exceptionally brilliant orator, lecturing to five, six hundred people, and he would get applause after every lecture. It was a performance. It was theater. I also got swept away 00:42:00by Harvey’s narrative. Harvey combined narrative and critical analysis. It was a pretty straightforward Marxist analysis mingled with some humor and also some deep affection. Like when he talked about the death of Jaurès. He had written a book on the life of Jaures, Jean Jaures the French Socialist; he cried when telling the story of Jaurès’ assassination on the eve of the First World War. [Interview interrupted] Doney: Are you still there?

Fisher: Harvey had a hilarious sense of humor, telling stories deadpan and with the timing of the Jewish comics from the Catskills. Harvey once said, “I just got a ticket, a citation for jaywalking.” He’s saying this in a very somber way. “I just got a ticket for jaywalking.” Everyone cracks up in the audience. He says, the officer stopped him and said, “Did you know you were jaywalking?” Harvey said no. He asked, “Where are you going?” He said, “I’m about to teach a class at the university. I’m a little bit late. Just write the citation.” The officer writes the citation. Harvey says to him: “Sir, your task is mean and petty.” The whole class cracked up.

But to answer your question, I think that the lectures combined with the seriousness of their reading lists and the degree to which they carried this knowledge and erudition made me want to know more. 00:45:00And to think historically. That stayed with me for over sixty years. It’s very vital. Including when you study great ideas or great literature or great poetry or great movies, you want to be able to contextualize it and to think about influences and impact. And in particular George’s way of thinking about politics and culture and ideology, that for me had an enormous impact.

Doney: That’s great. Also in John’s interview, you started to talk about the confluence of these interests in psychoanalysis and in history.

Fisher: Yeah.

Doney: I wondered if you might just think about how the two have reinforced one another throughout your career. What that relationship is or how you see it [unclear] Fisher: That’s a great question. As I mentioned to you, we took this seminar with Joe Kepecs, which was the first time I had read Freud systematically. We read his seminal books. We studied The Interpretation of Dreams. We read Three Essays. We read The Ego and the Id. I think we also read some of his case studies. Then we attempted to apply Freud to the novels of Thomas Mann. That to me was the beginning of thinking it could be applied to history, literature, philosophy. At the same time, there was an interest in psychohistory and psychobiography.

I had studied for a year in New York when I had major problems with the draft. I took my master’s degree at New York University with Frank Manuel. Like George, Frank Manuel was also a Harvard PhD. He was Crane Brinton’s (1898-1968) first PhD. Manuel had written a psychobiography of Isaac Newton called A Portrait of Isaac Newton, which is a psychoanalytic study of Isaac Newton attempting to understand not only his genius and his breakthroughs, but also some of his difficulties in relationships, why he never married, some of his homoeroticism, some of his more crazy ideas, and his relationship with his mother. It’s still a beautiful biography. It’s one of the most magnificent of psychobiographies I think that’s ever been published. It is on the deepest level a study of the varieties of Newton’s narcissism. It made me think 00:48:00that there could be a way in which history can inform psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis can inform history. Particularly in terms of looking at motivation and looking at why people do not always act in a rational or self-interested way. As you know, George had opened me up to the study of the irrational in his work on nationalism and racism and on völkisch ideologies and antisemitism. And maybe also in terms of irrational crowd behavior. There’s a way in which I felt that psychoanalysis added another dimension.

As I got further into it and began my training and clinical work with patients, I began to realize that there were also the possibilities of an incredible degree of intimacy and closeness that you could not have elsewhere. Even with students, or even with a girlfriend or a wife. I found that degree of intimacy very appealing. I was looking for that.

The other throughline, Skye, is I always had a passion to be understood. I wanted to be understood. I wanted to be seen, heard, made visible, be recognized and accepted. And to me, being understood meant understanding one’s own history and one’s life history. But it also meant understanding one’s own psychological dynamics, dimensions. What’s going on in the inner life. That became more and more appealing to me, as did self-reflection.

What I have done in my career is attempt to combine the two, particularly in some work I’ve done in the history of psychoanalysis, and in my writings. I wrote a book on Bettelheim. When I addressed Bettelheim’s suicide, I make a great deal of the fact that he committed suicide on the exact day, the fiftieth anniversary, of the Nazis marching into Vienna. Which ultimately landed him in two concentration camps. I tried to make the historical and personal connections, seeing how they modify one another, understanding their dialectical interrelationships.

When I work with patients, I’m also interested in their history, their ethnic history, their class history, and their family history. I’m fascinated by family systems and family dynamics. It was also in psychoanalysis that I felt that I could be understood and 00:51:00maybe also understand others. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Doney: No, I think it does. It definitely speaks to, I mean, how those two things come together for you.

Fisher: Yes.

Doney: You’ve mentioned the book on Bettelheim. I wondered if you might also talk about your publications. Like the questions that guided them and— Fisher: My doctoral thesis was called “Romain Rolland and the Question of the Intellectual” (1973). It was a quintessentially Mosse style work. [Jean-Paul] Sartre (1905-1980) had written a book called The Question of Method. Translated into English as In Search of a Method (1957). I went back to Paris for another two years and I did more archival work— both Mosse and Goldberg pushed archival research. In some ways, being in the archives, it can be very exciting, especially if you’re finding rich and compelling material; it can be lonely and dull, also. I don’t want to romanticize it too much.

My first book was the expansion of the thesis. It’s called Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (1988). It’s the study of the intellectual and commitment with a focus on Romain Rolland, who’s a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, antiwar activist during World War One. He introduced Gandhi to the West, knew Gandhi, and was friendly with Gandhi. Then Rolland became a leading antifascist intellectual and finally a fellow traveler of Soviet communism. I studied his work between the wars, the 00:54:0020s and 00:57:0030s. I find the interwar period very fascinating.

When I was living in Paris and doing archival work at the Archive Romain Rolland on Boulevard Montparnasse, I would sometimes have lunch at the Café Select, which is where the writers, the American writers and the artists in the 01:00:0020s and 01:03:0030s would meet. It’s where Hemingway went. It’s where Picasso and Modigliani went. I had a fantasy that I was living their lives, living a bohemian life in the Parisian Latin Quarter.

Doney: That’s cool.

Fisher: My first book is called Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement. I did a second one, which is a collection of my writings, called Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition. (1991). Those are essays. In that, there’s an essay that I did on the relationship and debates between 01:06:00Freud and Romain Rolland. It’s followed by an essay on Civilization and its Discontents. George had us read Civilization and its Discontents. There’s a way in which there’s a great indebtedness to him. It’s one that I continue to value. In that book, there’s also an essay that is Mosse-style. It’s an essay on crowd psychology. There was a book written on the psychology of crowds, beginning with Le Bon. Mosse always assigned us The Crowd. The Crowd was very kind of critical. You know, he really felt that Le Bon and Georges Sorel were onto something about mass psychology and the psychology of crowds and the dynamics of leadership and followers, including the degree to which the collectivity could overpower reason and overpower any kind of critical thinking or the enlightenment. Bettelheim Living and Dying (2008) is my third book. I continue to experiment with applied psychoanalysis, using a method drawing on the convergence of analytic perspectives with cultural criticism. I’ve recently written a piece about serving on a jury. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but I served and it was an intense and traumatic case, including issues of grotesque violence and race.

Doney: That’s funny. I just actually got summoned on Friday.

Fisher: I tried to get out of it. There’s no way to get out of it. In the past, I would say I treat sick patients, I have suicidal patients, which I do. That doesn’t work anymore. So I just served on a jury, and I wrote an essay called “The Psychoanalyst Serves on a Jury” (2018). It was very gruesome. It lasted nine days. It was a case revolving around a rape, sodomy, theft, kidnaping. It was racial, because the perpetrator was a Black homosexual prostitute that lived on the streets. It was charged on many levels. I had to write this essay to process it. I was somewhat traumatized by the experience of being on this jury. I wrote this essay trying to work through my issues. I was not as traumatized as the rape victim. But it was difficult. I continue to write, and I continue to think in these ways. I try to make sense of what’s happening in the world by using some of this methodology.

Doney: Yeah. That’s a better approach than many have.

Fisher: Yeah. (laughs) Doney: We’re going to jump around just a little bit.

Fisher: Okay, sure.

Doney: I wondered what was it like to live at Glenway? You had mentioned in your interview with John that you and your wife were responsible for cooking. You did some of the gardening.

Fisher: Also shopping for food.

Doney: Okay.

Fisher: It was kind of delightful once I understood that we were not going to be having high-powered discussions of Nietzsche and Wagner. George liked bad television. He liked to watch The Flying Nun. (laughter) He said he loved The Honeymooners because it provided an insight into the American working class. I liked The Honeymooners, 01:09:00too, but I don’t think it accurately described the working class.

It was a lot of fun. Very interesting people came through there. He was starting to do Jewish history and going to Israel. Shlomo Avineri came to the house; he’s a famous scholar who’s written on Marx, the left Hegelians, Zionism. Avineri lectured on Marx at the university, but he visited us at home. Avineri told a great story. This was 1970, 01:12:0071. Avineri told this story about the Six Days’ War. He said he was asked to continue to lecture on Marx on the radio because the Israelis wanted to keep up a semblance of normality. He continued to lecture.

He said the next day after he lectured on the radio, he ran into his milkman. The milkman came up to him, saying, “Avineri? I heard your lecture last night. It was very good, but there was one error in it.” Avineri says, “Well, what was that?” The milkman said, “Well, you were making this point. And if you check Marx’ Kapital Volume III, chapter 26, footnote by Engels, you’ll see that you were in error.” Avineri checked volume III, chapter 26, footnote by Engels and he said: “The milkman was right.” 01:15:00Then he says to us, “That’s the old Israel.” But, regretfully, “It’s not like that anymore.” Even the milkman knew, was cultivated, cared about learning, and about scholarly accuracy.

Mosse had Jack Hexter visit. Jack Hexter was a historian at Washington University in Saint Louis. Lovely guy. Hexter said to us—I think George subscribed to this theory— “The great thing about being a historian is you’re allowed to have a half hour of gossip every day with your colleagues.” (laughter) George thought that was hilarious. I think George did that.

Doney: Yeah. Yeah, that’s funny.

Fisher: George once had an Anglican nun visit the house.

Doney: Whoa.

Fisher: He was extremely deferential and respectful to her. They were talking about theology. He knew his theology. The early books on England and the church and his text on The Reformation made him aware of doctrinal issues. He was very polite, very thoughtful, and welcoming of her.

Then, she left. He says to me, “Did you hear the shit she was saying?” (laughter). He thought all of that was ideology and hypocritical rhetoric. He could be demystifying and irreverent. I loved that about him.

Doney: Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Fisher: He was friendly with the former governor of Wisconsin. Patrick Lucey (1918-2014). He came over to the house. He told me that he was a Social Democrat, not a carbon copy of the liberal democrat. He couldn’t say that in public. George was connected also with the Democratic Party. He had fascinating people that came through. It was really a delight.

We watched the Forsythe Saga together on Public TV. We were listening to some classical music on TV, Beethoven symphonies. That rendered us all silent. We watched the news. But we had dinner every night. He introduced us to everybody. Do you know who Paula Quirk was? Through George, we meet her in London. Also Jane Degras who was an editor of The Journal of Contemporary History.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: I don’t know if they are still alive. Two of his friends from London. It was a rare delight. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Doney: Yeah. That’s really interesting.

Fisher: He had a fabulous collection of books. Did his library go to the University of Wisconsin?

Doney: A lot of it. 01:18:00A lot of it is in this room.

Fisher: He had a magnificent collection of books.

Doney: Yeah. Yeah. It really is.

Fisher: Georges Haupt told me that he also had a sexology collection, maybe material bordering on pornography that he kept hidden. I never saw that. (laughs) Maybe you have that, too.

Doney: No, I haven’t come across anything that interesting. Yeah. That’s great. And then I wonder just like the grad cohort you were with.

Fisher: Yeah.

Doney: You mentioned Bob Nye. And I just wondered who were the students you were with. And Andy, you mentioned.

Fisher: Andy Rabinbach was a year ahead of me. I think we graduated, almost at the same time, but he was not in my grad seminar. There’s a guy who’s still a very good friend of mine called Laurie Baron who taught at San Diego State. Laurie has done a lot of excellent work on the Holocaust in film. If you haven’t interviewed him, he would be someone really good to interview. I can connect you, if you’d like.

Doney: That would be great. He also had like a sort of a funny column, didn’t he? In the San Diego, in the paper?

Fisher: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. He’s also gotten heavily into Jewish history and Jewish themes. He writes on Hollywood and the Holocaust. He’s seen every Holocaust movie. He suffers from insomnia. He watches two or three movies a night. But he really knows his stuff. He put me onto this sensational TV series, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, called The French Village.

Doney: I’ve not.

Fisher: It’s great TV. It’s about a small village in Vichy France under the occupation. Laurie recommended that. It’s fabulous. It also covers the full spectrum of collaboration and resistance.

There was another guy called Kent Taylor. I don’t know if he finished. There was Bob Abrams, a very brilliant individual, who got his master’s and dropped out and went to law school. There’s Al Kelly who taught history at Hamilton. I don’t know if you’re in touch with him. Kelly was the most conservative and conventional of us. I think his father was a historian. Kelly has written some books in German intellectual history. I think he’s had a nice career. I haven’t seen him in years.

There was another person called Peter Gordy. He moved to Europe. So not all of us continued, not all of us completed our doctorates. I think Kelly 01:21:00and Laurie have had the most traditional academic careers.

Doney: Cool.

Fisher: It was a nice cohort.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: There was a woman in it that George called her Miss Miller. Nancy Miller. I don’t think she finished. I’m pretty sure she didn’t.

Doney: Okay. And that was the seminar that you were in.

Fisher: That was the seminar.

Doney: And did you guys meet at 36 Glenway as well?

Fisher: Yes. We met in his office. In the back. It started with Georges Haupt from 1969-1970 and then it continued with George. It met at Glenway.

Doney: All right. And then the last, well I guess I just have a couple more questions.

Fisher: Go ahead.

Doney: The first was, you mentioned a little bit about staying in touch with Mosse after you finished seeing him in Paris, going to Munich. Was there a particular moment—I guess you mentioned this with his cataract surgery where— Fisher: Yeah, but that was when we were living at the house.

Doney: Still at the house. But you became friends. I wondered if you could talk about— Fisher: Oh, yeah.

Doney: —that transition from being a student?

Fisher: I think the transition happened when I passed my prelims. Then I no longer called him Professor Mosse. I called him George.

Doney: Okay. That’s great. (laughs) Fisher: But we had a party for George and for John at my home in Los Angeles in January 1995. That was a great party. He was so pleased. A lot of his friends from LA came. Eugen Weber (1925-2007) came and my friend Peter Loewenberg and Robert Wohl, George was going to be lecturing at The Skirball Center, one of the Jewish conference centers in L.A. He gave a lecture on racism and nationalism. But the party for him made him glow. He loved being the honored guest.

At this lecture the next day, there are five, six psychoanalysts sitting in the front row. And he opens up the talk by saying, “I think the psychiatrists here are going to have something to say about this.” He says, “I only write books about people I despise.” The audience finds that hilarious. (laughter) He adds, “I’ll leave that to the psychiatrists to decipher.

Doney: That’s great.

Fisher: Have you heard that line?

Doney: No. I love it, though. 01:24:00That’s great. Did you see him again after that? After ‘95?

Fisher: Yeah. I saw him in Madison when he had that retirement party. I think that must have been the late [19[90s. He died in 01:27:00 99?

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: I spoke to him a day or two before he died. I knew from John that he was very sick and that he had liver cancer. We both knew it was a goodbye conversation. He seemed a little weak. He has a niece who lives in LA who’s a little bit off.

Doney: Joy?

Fisher: Joy Mosse. I said that I had recently been contacted by Joy. I said to George, “I don’t really know what to do about her.” He said, “Neither do I.” (laughter) That was my last conversation with him.

I expressed my gratitude to him. I don’t think George liked too much sentimentality or direct emotion. He said he was surprised that he had that much of an influence on me. I told him, I’ve also put it in writing, that he was an extremely strong influence. He continues to be. We had our differences. But he kept coming up with new and imaginative stuff. He really did.

Doney: Yeah. Yeah.

Fisher: Did you ever hear the line where he said that all of intellectual history was an inter-Jewish dialogue?

Doney: No. (laughter) That’s great, too.

Fisher: He had the same thing about psychoanalysis being “the new Jewish religion.” Doney: New Jewish religion. Yes.

Fisher: He came up with brilliant, witty, somewhat debunking formulas. The one on intellectual history, he was talking about getting inside of history, addressing the colleagues past and present that he found worthy of conversation. It also spoke to his identification with Jewish intellectuality, perhaps German-Jewish intellectuality.

Doney: Yeah, that’s good. It’s sort of funny because he has a lot of great slogans for someone who wants to break up slogans.

Fisher: That’s exactly right. He was very serious about his scholarship and writing. He was very disciplined. But he also knew how to have fun. When he was having fun, he was delightful. But there was always a time where he 01:30:00would get back to the reading, back to the writing, back to the scholarship. Perhaps the work anchored him, helped him to find deeper meaning in his life and his various identities as historian, Jew, and homosexual.

I didn’t know John that well. I have the feeling that his relationship with John mellowed George a lot. That the relationship was probably very expansive for him. They were probably good for each other.

At that party when he retired, when he was saying goodbye, this is before he got sick, he very much acknowledged John. That was an incredible evening. I’ll never forget that evening. A lot of his former doctoral students showed up. He outlived some of them.

There’s this strange dynamic he always had with Harvey. I don’t know if the two of them at the end of their lives reconciled. I just wasn’t in Madison. They’re buried very close to each other.

Doney: Yes. Yeah.

Fisher: So maybe that dialogue and rivalry continues.

Doney: Yeah. That was my understanding. So they could continue the conversation. Yeah.

Fisher: Sometimes it was mediated by grad students. When I attended George’s cultural history, my TA was Chips [Charles] Sowerwine. Chips was a Goldberg student. Chips was giving a Goldbergian interpretation of Mosse’s lectures. It was very stimulating.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: I don’t know if Harvey did the same. You know the story of Joan Scott.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: I didn’t know about that until recently. She was a couple of years ahead of me.

Doney: Yeah, that’s a pretty— Fisher: Have you interviewed Paul Breines?

Doney: Yeah, Paul. Yeah, John went out to Boston and interviewed him, I think in 2017.

Fisher: Okay. Yeah. When I was a student, we all thought that Breines was his most brilliant student. There’s another guy called Russell Jacoby.

Doney: I’ve not, yeah, I’ve not interviewed Russell.

Fisher: Russell Jacoby was an undergraduate student of George’s. Jacoby is Breines’ brother-in-law.

Doney: Oh, wow.

Fisher: Breines married his sister. But Russell became a Frankfurt School person and has written a lot of books. Russell came to the party I had for George in L.A. They hadn’t seen each other in years. But Russell told me that George put him on to [Herbert] Marcuse (1898-1979), to [Theodor W.] Adorno (1903-1969) 01:33:00and—I think both George and Harvey introduced those thinkers to us. In some ways, it was foundational for a lot of us, Russell, who’s a very radical guy, still has nothing but affection for George Mosse. He is kind of awed by how productive, what was it, sixteen books? So am I.

Doney: Yeah. Yeah.

Fisher: You know, and half of them are really great, aren’t they? (laughter) A few more?

Doney: I’d say more.

Fisher: I would say more, too. Yeah. You know, I’ve written a piece on his autobiography, which I’m hoping to publish. It’s called “Confronting George Mosse.” Doney: Oh, cool. There’s a— Fisher: If I publish that, I will send you a copy.

Doney: Yeah, please do. We have a book coming out next year based on a conference we had in Berlin in 2019. And there’s a great essay by Darcy Buerkle from Smith College.

Fisher: I don’t know that name.

Doney: Yeah, she wrote about the different drafts of the memoir.

Fisher: Yeah. Did John help her on that?

Doney: Yes. She also worked with Michael Simonson at the Leo Baeck Institute.

Fisher: There are various earlier drafts?

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: My suspicion is that he deleted or left some material out about his mother.

Doney: Yes. That’s part of it. Yeah, absolutely. And there are also interesting language changes between like what Mosse— Fisher: I’m not sure he completely finished it. I think he got sick toward the end. What other changes did she pick up?

Doney: I’ll send you the article. One of them is like changing gay to homosexual. Where Mosse would write gay, then the editors at UW Press changed that.

Fisher: Yeah. I’m surprised they touched it. Why wouldn’t they leave it the way he wrote it?

Doney: I could only speculate, I think.

Fisher: Yeah. The editors at the University of Wisconsin Press?

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: Yeah. I actually gave the Mosse paper in Madison. It did not go over well. It was a very close reading of George’s memoir, Confronting History and a study of shifts in his image and concept of self.

Doney: Oh, really?

Fisher: Yeah.

Doney: When was that?

Fisher: I don’t know, it may have been a Festschrift, or celebration of Mosse’s work. Haven’t there been two Festschrifts published in his honor?

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: This was one with Steve Aschheim. It was not well received. (laughter) Doney: Okay. All right.

Fisher: Friedländer was at that one, also.

Doney: Oh, okay. 01:36:00Fisher: Yeah. It was in Madison.

Doney: Yeah, that’s probably the second one. Maybe What History Tells.

Fisher: What History Tells, that’s it.

Doney: Okay. In many ways, this Berlin book is a third Festschrift.

Fisher: Yeah. Is it out or will it be coming out?

Doney: Next year.

Fisher: It’s University of Wisconsin Press?

Doney: Yep. Part of the Mosse series again. Also, my last question is just if there, we’ve covered a lot of ground. But is there anything else that you wanted to say or any stories that you wanted to tell? Or any aspect of your professional life or biography that you would like us to capture that we haven’t gotten to?

Fisher: You know the way memory works, how slippery memory can be. When I’m in a quandary, when I’m puzzled by something, particularly if it’s something that’s political or historical, I always say to myself how would George analyze this? In that sense, he stays with me, he lives with me. There’s a way in which his reading lists and his culture was such a gift. During the pandemic, I reread The Plague. I mean, George introduced me to Camus. He put me onto Sartre.

George personified for me the use of empathy in understanding history, of gathering and interpreting the facts of history. He had a skill, combining imagination and intellect, broad knowledge and intuitive asking the right questions. He knew what questions really mattered. He also conveyed that there were limits to choices that individuals faced in specific historical frameworks, that not everything was possible. In his deployment of historical empathy, he illustrated how important it was to understand the options of historical actors in specific historical contexts. That continues to be a powerful example for me. Because of his identification as a Jew and as a homosexual, he also demonstrated an empathy and compassion for those marginalized, reified, and pathologized in history.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: George alerted me to Sartre. He put me on to Freud. He put me on to Robert Musil, to Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), to André Gide (1869-1951), to André Malraux (1901-1976), to Romain Rolland. There’s a way in which my whole thinking process is indebted to him, even if I don’t always come to the same conclusions or analysis. I often think to myself, how would he assess this situation? In that sense, he’s a living presence.

He was much more of a practical person than I was, or that I am. He was much better at academic politics than I was. I should have listened to him more. But in that sense, he puts a smile on my face. There’s a way in which there was a father transference to him. He was to me a kind of benign father. We could have been fired or expelled for that TAA strike. I was picketing his house, which was my house. (laughter) He was extremely kind, tolerant, and compassionate about it. 01:39:00He did the best he could do.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: He cared deeply about his students. I would say as a qualifier, mostly male students. I don’t think that his female grad students were ever as successful or could ever get as close to him. He wanted us to be successful. That’s a contrast with Harvey. Harvey may have been more competitive and more envious of his students that were publishing and that maybe were surpassing him. But George wanted us to be successful and tried to promote us.

My great friend Bob Nye, he’s one of my dearest, if not my dearest friend. George really wanted Bob Nye to succeed him in Madison. Do you know that?

Doney: No.

Fisher: He would have been a very good choice.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: I don’t think George was on that search committee, though, to choose his replacement.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: Bob Nye would have been an excellent choice.

Doney: Yeah, absolutely.

Fisher: Bob Nye was not officially a Mosse student. He was a Henry Hill (1907-1990) student. But in some ways, the two of them got much closer after Bob got his doctorate. A lot of their interests on the history of sexuality dovetailed.

Doney: Yeah.

Fisher: Bob has written on masculinity and gender.

Doney: Yeah. And the crowd. Yeah.

Fisher: I would say that George was a significant influence and I’m still thinking about him and talking to him. I wish he was still around.

Doney: Yeah. That’s great. Well, I’m going to stop the recording now. This is the 23rd of November 2022. This is interview two of two with David James Fisher, aka Jimmy Fisher, for the Mosse Oral History Project. Thank you for participating.

Fisher: Skye, thank you. 01:42:00End Interview.