00:00:00JT: I should say first that it's April 9, 2013. And this is John Tortorice. I'm
on the campus of UCLA to interview Professor David Warren Sabean, a Mosse
doctorate. Okay. We can start.
DS: Well, we were talking about his style of writing and the [unclear] ability:
for that, two things. When I was in Germany at the Max-Planck Institute for
History, about 1971, '72, there was an intellectual historian who worked on the
Enlightenment who said that he had heard a great deal about Mosse and had tried
to read him. And so he read him and was very disappointed. I was curious about
00:01:00that because I was disappointed that he was disappointed. But the point is that
it was a whole style that this guy couldn't recognize. It wasn't Germanic. It
was clear. (laughs) And I don't think he was used to reading intellectual
history that was straightforward and clear at a certain point.
JT: Well that is one of my questions. Mosse's reception in Germany, or lack thereof--
DS: Well, up to the time I was there, he didn't have much of a reception.
JT: Yes.
DS: And when I first went there as a graduate student, he gave me some contacts,
which I didn't take up because I was in Tbingen and the contacts he gave me
were in Berlin. And it was interesting that I was at the International
00:02:00Historical Congress with George and we had dinner; some graduate students,
myself and George and Geoffrey Elton from England. And Elton was kind of
patronizing George the whole time. But George is unpatronizable.
JT: He was! (laughter)
DS: And so we bumped into one of the Mommsen brothers, I think it was Hans,
although I don't now remember, because they were twins. And I didn't know who
they were. And again, that sort of German patronizing was clearly visible. So I
00:03:00don't think George's way of writing and the things that he wrote was something
that Germans could appropriate, really. And when the first major study, The
Roots of the Nazi Mind book--.
JT: The Crisis of German Ideology--
DS: The Crisis of German Ideology came out, I don't think they really would have
known what to do with it. And it's only subsequently, -- I'm not sure which
books first were widely read in Germany. I know he went to the
Kulturwissenshaftliches Institut I believe, in Essen for a while. And I've known
friends who were there at the time and have reminisced about him and so forth.
So that must have been in the mid to late '80s when he went there. So you know,
00:04:00his real contacts in Europe for a long time were in England, not in Germany. And
they were with the Jewish migrs, like Karsten and so forth. And he was very
popular among them.
JT: Well there was a frustration with George's work on the part of this
generation of historians, obviously, because he was so creative and pioneering.
DS: Right.
JT: There's also great resistance to cultural history in general, the kind of
cultural history that George did.
DS: I think so.
JT: But I think it really it was The Nationalization of the Masses that caught
the attention of the Germans, because I think they could put their teeth into that.
00:05:00
DS: That's probably right. I really never have talked with many Germans about
George's work. And the people I worked with were doing quite different kinds of
social history.
JT: Yes.
DS: And first were very strongly influenced by Habermas then by Bordieu. I got
involved with putting together an anthropology and history group in Gttingen,
and so our [Mosse and Sabean] work went off in completely, completely different
directions: None of the people I knew were really interested in that period or
in the stuff that George did. By the time I got there, it was all internalized.
And then I would say the people that should have been interested were the
00:06:00Bielefeld School, but they were heavily into sociological history.
JT: Social history and--
DS: No, sociological history.
JT: Sociological, okay.
DS: Not even social history: the term they used was Gesellschaftsgeschichte
rather than Sozialgeschichte, although they would use Sozialgeschichte. But they
were heavily influenced by Weber, heavily influenced by modernization theory at
the time. All of that, you know, George would kind of brush off with a gesture.
And my own approach to social history was really also quite different. I did
become very good friends with Jurgen Kocka and Kocka eventually also got to know
00:07:00George quite well.
JT: He did. Yes.
DS: And appreciated George a lot. But that's all later, and it's also, by that
time I was back in the States, mostly. So I really don't know much about his reception.
JT: Okay.
DS: I just know that it began to happen much later than I would have wished,
because at the time when I was intensely involved and intensely there, people
around me weren't very interested. Now I suspect that, I don't know this, but I
suspect that as people began to pull away from the Bielefeld School, there was
an opening for cultural history. There was--oh I know, he was very good friends,
with Thomas Nipperdey.
JT: Yes, right.
DS: And Nipperdey was sort of a pull or pole to the Bielefeld school. He came to
00:08:00the Institute for Advance Study, and went back bug-eyed over Geertzian
anthropology, and pursued a kind of history that was more cultural history. And
therefore perhaps it's through people like Nipperdey that there was a great
opening for George. But not with the dominant school in late '60s, early '70s,
when the Bielefeld School was the hot thing. And I don't see how they could
easily have appropriated George. Now later on, they began, when people like
Wehler began to talk about cultural history. And it could be at that point. But
none of these people were going to give George a close read because they were so
busy promulgating whatever it was they were promulgating.
00:09:00
JT: Well, and cultural history had a lot of baggage.
DS: Right. Absolutely. No, that's quite right. And I remember I was at quite a
low point in my career. (laughs) I was at, I can't remember, I think it was the
German Historikertag I think it was in Berlin. And there was a panel with Wehler
and Kocka and Wolfgang Mommsen and Lutz Niethammer. Lutz Niethammer would have
been more open to George, much more open to George. And in fact, he was the
director of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut when George was there, an
intellectual of a completely different kind from the Bielefeld people. So I was
00:10:00on this panel and Wehler brushed off the kind of thing that I was interested in,
which was the history of everyday life, and anthropology and history as, his
term would have been Faschistoid. And his critique was of people like Alf
Luedtke who was in the Institute with me. And who was developing theoretical
understandings of Alltagsgeschichte, of everyday life. And for Wehler this was
the, you know, for him it was a recurrence of populist, volkisch history--I
don't know what he thought. But he just didn't like it at all. I gave a kind of
introduction to ways of thinking, but my German was too slow. And then Wehler
00:11:00was very funny. (laughs) .. there were about a thousand people there, or at
least eight hundred. It was a confrontation of two very different kinds of
history. I outlined a critique of Kocka, but actually I misunderstood and Kocka
was the chair of the session, so he couldn't really answer me directly--
JT: Respond.
DS: But I made a case for a kind of anthropological and historical approach to
society, and Wehler was having none of it.
JT: What year was that?
DS: I'd have to look-- it would have to be after '83. And I would already have
00:12:00been here. So about '84, '85, '86, somewhere around there. Because I flew from
here to there.
JT: Do you want to follow this script?
DS: Sure. I'll follow your script and I'll start with where I was born. (laughs)
JT: Yes. Let's go back to the birth.
DS: I was born in the thicket of Waltham, I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts
JT: Oh, okay.
DS: And Waltham probably influenced me a great deal, actually. Because I came
from a family that had emigrated rom Nova Scotia. The Sabean family had come to
00:13:00the United States in 1633, to the colonies, to Massachusetts. But in 1763, after
the British beat up the French and the French were kicked out, the Sabeans went
up and took their farms. (laughs) So they were Nova Scotians. And they came
back. And my grandfather on my mother's side was a Baptist minister. And that
sort of set the tone for the family. My father was a dyed in the wool Baptist.
The only time he ever got angry with me was when I called into question the
doctrine of total immersion baptism. (laughter) In any event, it was a
fundamentalist family, very much fundamentalist. And my mother had hoped to send
00:14:00three missionaries off into the world. She won with my older brother. He's in
Costa Rica as a missionary. Family life was very warm. It was very difficult to
rebel in that kind of family--
JT: Because of the emotional warmth and the sustaining--
DS: My mother invented all by herself Jewish guilt. (laughs) When I hear about
Jewish mothers, nothing on my mother! (laughs) And she was very, very clear that
I could do what I want, but "this is my (her) position." You know, like dancing.
00:15:00"You may go dance if you wish. But this is my position." That's why I didn't
dance. To my horror, today I still can't dance properly. But you know, there's
no smoking, no drinking, no sex, you know, all these different problems. And we
went to church a lot. Young Peoples, all kinds of things. And as a young kid I
was already an incipient historian, and incipient intellectual, whatever you
want to say. So by the time I was 14, I was reading Calvin's Institutes and
then, very interestingly, my family, my mother's family, obviously had long
00:16:00winter nights with no electricity and with kerosene lamps. And they had
developed a style of declaiming poetry, memorizing masses of poetry. So that
kind of got ingrained in me. I memorized a lot of poetry. But I also thought
that you memorized texts. So we had to memorize masses of the Bible and so
forth, and when I was about 14, I was reading Calvin. This was when I also
started reading Plato: I started with the Phaedo, which is relatively short. I
memorized it.
JT: Wow.
DS: Then I realized as the dialogues got longer and longer, you can't do this.
So I gave up on that approach to intellectual life. But in any event, what was
00:17:00really interesting is that Waltham was a place of stable, slightly older
immigrant groups. And I became extraordinarily aware of how the city functioned.
The politics were completely controlled by the Irish. The new money and very
wealthy were from immigrants, the only millionaires, I think there were seven
millionaires in Waltham at that time, and they were all Italian. They had made
their money in market gardening and in construction.. There were the Jews of two
kinds, those who had businesses in Waltham, (and I worked in a drugstore for one
of them) and the intellectuals who were tied up with the big institutions, the
00:18:00psychiatric institutions and so forth. Now, these things have collapsed and
disappeared. But at the time, they were cities with huge buildings and masses of
people in them. And the doctor's kids were in high school with me. In fact, one
of them, Louis Asekoff and me spent hours, hours cruising in my junior and
senior year, once I could drive, on Friday nights, talking about everything. And
I've reconnected with Louis, who's become a prize winning poet- I flew up to
hear him read his poetry in Waltham last October. Louis is a genuine
intellectual from the very beginning, very moral, very concerned. So it was a
00:19:00very sympathetic kind of relationship. The other group in Waltham was immigrants
from Canada, French Canadians. I think that's roughly the milieu. I can remember
working in a haberdashery one Christmas, and one of the girls from my school
came in, an Italian girl. And she bought 15 sweaters. I can't remember the
brand, but they were very expensive-fifteen for first cousins, or cousins. The
idea of on the one hand an extended kinship group and the other, a teenage girl
with that kind of money--(laughter)-that was an eye opener. So I began to pay
00:20:00very close attention to the fact that you had three Catholic groups who didn't
intermingle; whose churches were all Irish, Italian, French-Canadian,
miscellaneous whites of various kinds; Episcopalians, Baptists, whatever. And
when I say miscellaneous whites, there's a sense of, I mean, WASPs would be the
better term. So I was looking at this, the power, the political power on the one
hand, the new money. And then there were two or three old estates in Waltham,
very old money. You never knew these people. And the rumor was that their money
had been made in the illegal slave trade. But we're talking about 100 year-old
00:21:00families. You never met them. You just knew that they kind of existed. So it's a
very interesting thing--my early background was one of thinking and struggling
with ideas about Protestantism--and there George was very important as well,
later. So Protestantism--
JT: And kinship.
DS: And looking at kinship and looking at the way, but also kind of looking at
social class and social groups. I remember, you know, my mother let me dress as
I wanted to, and I would buy flashy yellow jackets and things like that. And
there was this teacher in the fourth or fifth grade who clearly differentiated
00:22:00among her students by class. And so the kids who their mothers dressed and were
properly dressed and had the right, you know, who bought all the stuff from
Harvard Square, I mean, I began to sort of understand all that, she liked them
and gave them preference. Me, I was kind of, in my yellow jackets or whatever I
was, and my loud mouth and so forth--
JT: It's amazing how these things are very early recognized by students, and yet
they're never acknowledged.
DS: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But so my sense of class, my sense of social
differentiation, ethnicity, the importance of religion in maintaining--I learned
later that the Baptist church we went to, because somebody did a book on it, a
book called Working Men of Waltham or something like that. And the church I went
00:23:00to was the working man's church. And I didn't realize that. So what was really
there were a lot of people who came down from the Maritimes or what have you and
were working at the Waltham Watch Company, which was very close by. And so they
sort of centered around this church. And I probably got a strong sense of that
as well. But you know, it's all, you know, thinking about it later. So that was,
the milieu and the structure and so forth. Now I had two brothers, older
brother, three years older. Obviously I was in conflict with him. (laughs) And
00:24:00he was the one who you know followed my mother and was the dominant figure in
the family. Now a missionary.
JT: And he is now--
DS: He is now the missionary.
JT: Okay. And he's still--
DS: Yes.
JT: --missioning. (laughs)
DS: Yes. Very much a missionary. Although I have to say that you know, with all
my later on differentiation; he's the one who now pushes family, family
relations. We spent three days with him just now. And he's actually quite
impressive. He was very much interested in teenagers and so forth. And we spent
summers at a summer camp in New Hampshire, a Christian summer camp. And he rose
00:25:00up to be director of that eventually. And that plays a big role in his ultimate
trajectory, which is he's very interested in developing institutions for
bringing teenagers together that are tied to small group interaction. He
stresses relationships, criticizes camping in the United States as more
entertainment camping. And he's written a lot of manuals, and he actually taught
at one of the universities in San Jose. He taught camping. And he was asked to
found a department of recreation, which he eventually didn't do. But he's been
very involved in Costa Rica. Plus he's very ecumenical. Some of his closest
00:26:00friends are Catholic. And when I grew up, there was a very strong conflict
between Catholic/Protestant.
JT: Yes.
DS: So coming away, I'm more impressed with him than I would have acknowledged
as a kid. (laughs) But anyway, that played a big role, I think, second kid, in
pushing against the older brother. Then a younger brother who's eleven months
younger who essentially kind of followed in my footsteps. He got a PhD and ended
up in Canada- very active in developing cultural institutions in Ottawa. He just
got a big medal from Ottawa, for his cultural activities. My father was a
grocer. Very quiet. And unfortunately he died when I was about 21, when I was
00:27:00back at Brandeis. But I think my mother still was, even when he was alive, the
dominant figure. Because she was the day-to-day influence.
Teachers: That's quite interesting. Because you always have some teachers who
encourage you and some teachers who, in a sense, try to push you back. So I read
all the time, and otherwise I was mouthing off, I think, in school. And in the
second, third and maybe fourth grades, I had teachers who just left me alone.
Let me sit in the back of the room and read. (laughs) I can't remember which
00:28:00grade it was, but this was really dumb. We had to do math every day and instead
I would pull out a book and read it. But I had to get rid of the paper, so I ate
it. (laughs) And then when the kid came to collect it, I said: "Oh, I passed it
in." And the teacher never either noticed or cared. (laughter)
JT: That's amazing!
DS: So I would sit in the back of the room and read and read and read. And the
fourth grade, I remember, the fourth grade teacher very much encouraged me in
the reading. And we had a little box of books that came from the library. And
she kind of pointed out things for me to read. So for a couple hours a day, at
00:29:00least, I wasn't paying any attention to what was going on in class and just
reading. It was the sixth grade teacher who was the real problem. She's the one
where I began to see the class differences. Don't even remember her name. But
she dressed differently. She had a style, a bourgeois style that the others
didn't have. Now remember, you know, my generation was taught by the last great
generation, I think, of women teachers. There was nothing else for women to do.
They could become nurses or teachers. So we had brilliant, well educated women
teachers. And with the feminist movement, that all broke down and they go off
into all kinds of other fields--and my suspicion is that that group of
00:30:00extraordinarily well educated women with no other place to go, is part of the
collapse of the school system. But they were really good. And then when I went
to junior high school in the ninth grade, we had a teacher who taught ancient
history who gave us real syllabi, extra reading. She was just a brilliant
teacher. And I can't say that any of these teachers really got me going in
history. Except this woman gave me a vision of what it could be.
JT: So the books you were reading were histories?
DS: Were novels. Were mostly novels. But a lot of historical novels.
JT: Right. Okay.
DS: And it turns out one of my colleagues here who's now retired, Peter Reill, I
walked into his office one day and arrayed there were all of the novels he was
00:31:00reading as a teenager. Kenneth Roberts, did these great New England colonial
novels and Revolutionary War novels.
JT: Right. Yes.
DS: And of course The Leatherstocking Tales. So I think my interest in history
was determined by these two trajectories. That is, an understanding of
Protestantism, which was historically oriented. Reading Calvin. I belonged to a
book club as a teenager that was called the Evangelical Book Club or something
like that, and we'd get a book a month. And Jonathan Edwards' great book on free
00:32:00will, or the lack of free will, was one of the books. And I got my teeth into
that, the debates about free will. So there was that sort of interest in
intellectual development. But the other thing was, historical novels. They
really perhaps determined my interest in history more than any history teacher.
I do wish I could remember the name of this history teacher. She was really
brilliant. And you know, you think of these, she would, nowadays she'd be a
university professor without a question. As several, many of the teachers I had
would now be.
JT: Do you remember if she was single or married?
DS: I think she was single. A lot of them were single. Yeah, a lot of them were
00:33:00single. Oh, yes.
JT: My teachers were, too.
DS: The Latin teacher was, and we hated our Latin teacher, but she was very
good. It's very interesting. I keep relearning my Latin in order to read certain
seventeenth-century texts. But since I don't do it on a regular basis, you know,
it fades, I have to relearn it. I bought this grammar, which turned out to be
the grammar we had in the ninth grade. And I started going through and it all
came back, it's all there, except certain chapters. And clearly those were the
chapters where I was lazy and didn't really work at. And then these others I'd
work at, and it's all exactly what I could remember and exactly what's there. It
had to do with this quite remarkable Latin teacher.
JT: I'm going to pause here.
00:34:00
DS: Oh, undergraduate work. My older brother had gone to a college called
Houghton College, which is 70 miles south of Buffalo and Rochester sort of in a
triangle. And so I followed suit. And it was a Wesleyan Methodist college. And
where its strength lay was in close reading of texts. It was very biblically
oriented. A great teacher in sophomore lit, we went through, through texts, you
know, absolutely, her name was Rickert, I think, she was called Doc Jo.
Josephine, I think her name was Rickert. And she was a Victorian. She loved
00:35:00Victorian prose. And I think, yes, I took a course from her later precisely on
Victorian prose. But you know, she had it all memorized. And we had to memorize
the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. And do it in Olde English. [recites some]
She would sort of stand back, close her eyes and so forth. Now the limitation
was absolutely no secondary literature. So you never were introduced to literary
criticism at all. And the same thing with Bible courses, we had to take Bible
courses. They weren't all that exciting, they weren't all that good, but they
were all textual-based. And I would say that was the perhaps strongest
00:36:00influence. The historian, who was there, the older historian, was terrible. And
she certainly didn't influence me to go into history. (laughs) But then there
was a young guy came named Troutman, who taught American history and did some
political theory and so forth. And he was kind of influential. He was a very
nice man. We got kind of close. And he encouraged me. I wouldn't say he was a
very strong intellectual influence on me. Although quite interesting, he was one
of the first people ever to do a dissertation, he did it at Kentucky that used
statistics. I don't think he published his dissertation. He eventually went off
00:37:00to Western Kentucky and became chair of the department or something like that.
So it was a moment of at least encouragement. But the things that I remember,
the great stuff that I remember: I took some Latin, maybe I took a French course
but the influence was in literature and texts. But not literary criticism.
JT: And not history.
DS: Not history, essentially. And philosophy. So again, the philosophy I took
was mostly the history of philosophy. So when I showed up, my brother said,
"Tell the philosophy professor," whom he knew well, that you don't want to take
the introduction to philosophy. You want to jump right into the advanced course.
And he let me do it. So we're reading, again, from Plato to Hegel or whatever.
00:38:00And so my approach to philosophy wasn't analytical or systematic, it was
historical. And it was the history of ideas. So that, perhaps, gave me a
stronger sense of the possibilities in intellectual history than any history I
took. The woman who taught history was a real disaster.
JT: So you got your undergraduate degree here?
DS: At Houghton.
JT: At Houghton.
DS: And I did it in three years. I was already bored. So I went to summer school
at Boston University. Oh, there, I took some history. In fact, I did take some
history at Boston University. And there, the history was much more exciting.
Much more interesting. The summer schools were usually taught by either fresh
00:39:00PhDs or what have you. They weren't on the regular faculty, I don't think. But
they were very exciting. And for the first time, very systematic and I could
come away quite excited by some of them. And I took some economics there. And
that one course of economics is all the economics I know, but it also helped
determine ways in which I could conceptualize things.
JT: So you graduated in--
DS: '60.
JT: In 1960. Okay. And then you got your master's at--
DS: At Wisconsin.
JT: Oh, you did?
DS: Yeah.
JT: So you came right directly--
DS: So I came right directly to Wisconsin. No, I applied to various places. But
the only place that gave me any money was Wisconsin, where they were giving
00:40:00everybody out-of-state tuition waivers, whatever they were.
JT: And the tuition was very modest in those years.
DS: And the tuition was very modest in those years. And I could take a little
loan out and so forth. So I went and the first year I'd never heard of George.
And the only thing I knew was that Wisconsin was the leftist university. Which
kind of made me nervous. The other thing, was my transition from being
Republican to being some kind of radical. And in this period of leaving Houghton
I transitioned away from any, any belief. And I suppose, George might in a sense
00:41:00play a role, but only passively, in the sense that it was great intellectual
history and I was thinking through all kinds of ways of thinking about history.
But George had me pegged as a WASP. George had this seminar full of every kind
of--he had two kinds of Catholics. He had Trotskyist and a Trotskyite. (laughs)
and so on.
JT: Do you think he selected them that way?
DS: No. But once he had you pegged, he kind of pegged you that way, pushing you
that way.
JT: Yes. And then he would ask you specifics, needle you.
DS: He had me pegged as the WASP. And the real Protestant and so forth and he
kept pushing me to do--(laughs)
JT: Challenging your beliefs, yes?
DS: So--
JT: Because of course that was very seductive to him.
00:42:00
DS: Well, yeah, I know.
JT: Actually was, of course.
DS: And so anyways, I came there and like there was 150 of us new graduate
students. I mean, Wisconsin was a factory. It was huge. I think there were 600
graduate students all together in history at various levels. And I went in and
the chair of the department at the moment was an English historian whose name
escapes me at the moment. He did seventeenth century England. And I went in and
he said, "Well, what are you interested in?" And I said, "I've narrowed it down
to intellectual history and the early modern period." That was all I could
say--. He said, "You go to Mosse." And that's how I got started. And I went to
see George. And he was sitting in his office with his high forehead. All of us
00:43:00remarked how over the 20 or 30 years we knew him; he was always the same age.
And he was kind of a little bit intimidating. And I asked him what his seminar
was going to be on. And he said, "I'll tell you when I get there." So then I
asked around.
JT: Amazing.
DS: He told other people it was going to be on Calvinism, of all things. Yeah,
Calvin and Calvinism. And that was right down my alley, because one of the
things I'd done as an undergraduate at a Wesleyan Methodist thing was use
Calvinism as a way of differentiating myself.
JT: He probably was testing you. He had this way of testing his potential students.
DS: Well, that's true. And it was interesting because then I asked other people
00:44:00and he had told them what it was. And Wisconsin was great because it had this
huge library. And they had this huge room with journals. And the journals were
laid out all around in this huge circle. And once I knew it was going to be on
Calvinism--You don't really know what to do. I was killing time for a week or so
before we started. So I went into the room and you just, I don't know, again,
you don't know what prompts what you do. But I simply went around that room and
picked up every single journal in that room in my hand. And in the course of
doing so found six or seven articles about Calvinism in one way or the other.
00:45:00And I discovered the journals. They had everything, like the Bulletin of French
Huguenot History, and The Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte which I couldn't
really read because I didn't speak German. And at that time, I don't think they
published in English. But I went around and I jotted down all the journals which
seemed relevant. Read the six or seven articles that introduced me to the
current scholarship. And then we got into this seminar. And it was very
intimidating because it was a series of older students and then a bunch of us
who were first-year students. And we kind of ranged around the seminar, and the
seminar at that time was in the library, the library rooms. And so George is
sitting there with his pipe. And he had another pipe ready. And he had all the
00:46:00paraphernalia. (laughs) Ashes are dropping all over his shirt and burning holes.
In those days, he smoked so much he had no feeling in his cheeks. So you could
watch a fly go across his cheek and he wouldn't notice.
JT: Oh my God!
DS: And he was, of course, extraordinarily charismatic and very funny. So he
started off, and he started with the older students and he'd say, "What are you
writing your paper on?" Well, remember, it's a semester. So the first three or
four weeks we had to read the Calvin's Institute and write a short paper on some
subject like predestination. And so he got our feet wet. And then he started
talking about the general bibliographical aids and the major works. But then he
00:47:00started with the older people. And the older people had these great topics. And
some of them were directly within Calvinism. Others were Reformation in general
or some issue. And he would talk about each one. And there was one guy whose
name escapes me (Carl Weiner) who was George's assistant and who was the older
one and the one who knew everything. And he eventually left George, did his PhD
at Columbia, and then taught at Carleton College. And was Lynn Hunt's major
influence, [for example?], so that--anyway, he, I'm trying to think of his name.
But he taught for years and years and years at Carleton and was a famous history
00:48:00teacher. But sociologically oriented. He was interested in, at that point, and I
think he eventually did it, on the spread of Calvinism in 16th century France.
And took sort of a social, sociological approach
JT: We have two of Lynn Hunt's students on our faculty. So this is, I'm going to
tell them about this. (laughs)
DS: So there's a genealogy. Anyway, so as he goes around, then he comes to the
new people. And nobody had a clue. So somebody said, "I'm kind of interested in
Calvinism and sects." And of course George misunderstood.
JT: Immediately!
DS: Misunderstood immediately. (laughter) And his eyebrows raised. And so
[unclear] And George said, "Well, there's an article on the subject with the
00:49:00journal--" And I said, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte I didn't know how to
pronounce it but because I'd just gone around all the thing, I had all these things.
JT: He noticed you.
DS: And then next kid wanted to do something on Lutheran [unclear] and he said,
"Well, there's an article in the Journal of So-and-So. Let's see, who is it by?"
And I said, "By So-and-So." (laughter) And this went, it went four or five
times. But it was just by chance that I had done this, not knowing how to get
started. (laughs) And so George's eyebrows go completely up and then because I
was- it just had to do with my own biography-I was interested in Calvinism and
00:50:00critiques of Calvinism. And I formulated them as Calvinism and skepticism. So he
looked at me, I was the last person here, and he said, "Well, what are you going
to do?" And I said, "Well, I was interested in Calvinism and skepticism." And he
said, "This is the first student I've ever had that's come up with a good idea,"
he said. (laughs)
JT: Wow.
DS: I thought, great. And he said, "Come into my office tomorrow and I'll give
you a bibliography." And George typed on this old computer (typewriter), very
fast. And I came in and he said, "Oh, Calvinism skepticism." And he types up
like seven or eight titles and rips it out and he gives it to me and says, "Go
read these." So I go up to the library and of course three or four of them don't
exist. (laughter)
00:51:00
JT: He just made up the titles?
DS: And the titles are wrong. But part of my introduction to the library was
partly trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And of course
two or three of them were completely irrelevant, they had nothing to do with the
subject. But he had told us about the great Wisconsin library, the library was
full of stuff. And they had bought a Huguenot library which was sitting in the
middle of the stacks.
JT: It's now in Special Collections, what's left of it, yes.
DS: That's the same thing here. Ripping off of 17th century texts. So I kind of
went into that. And there was another special collection, the Tank collection,
which was this incredible collection of a Dutch Calvinist library. But the
00:52:00trouble is a lot of it was in Latin. It was a wonderful library, but I didn't
know quite how to start that. But I look at the Huguenot stuff and the [unclear]
print. I ran across this guy Amyraut. It was an attempt to create a, the
particular volume was an attempt to create a rational understanding of the
Eucharist. So I thought oh, so my master's thesis was on Amyraut. But the first
paper I wrote was about this. And of course George started with the older
students first, and then I was the first of the new students.
JT: Do you recall any of the names of those older students?
DS: Yeah, Bob Souci?
JT: Oh, he was in the--
DS: Yeah. And Grendler?
JT: Okay, Grendler. So many of them went on to great careers--
00:53:00
DS: Yes, Absolutely. Now the interesting thing is my generation, nobody did.
That is, the only one who did was Dan Toft, and Dan Toft then failed to get
tenure. And I don't know what happened to him. But he came from a farm family in
Iowa with a lot of money. He had inherited a lot of money. He had three,
eventually four children; three boys in Germany. We were there at the same time.
He was at Heidelberg, I was in Tbingen. And he wasn't really very, I'm going
to say scholarly. He had liked history. He never really properly learned Latin.
He hired somebody to read the Latin texts for him and so forth. So he wrote this
thesis. He got a nice job at Washington University in Saint Louis, but he didn't
00:54:00get tenure. But none of the others really finished. It was these older, and then
the next generation of students after me. So Bob Souci wrote very much in the
Mosse mold, and looked at these right-wing French people before the war, like
Brasillach. Grendler was, in some ways, like me. He was a Catholic kid,
interested in the Renaissance. Did very well, became a great scholar at Toronto
but not so much in the George Mosse mold. He moved off in a different direction.
And when we tried to do the Mosse Festschrift both Souci and Grendler fought
00:55:00like hell over our vision of what it should look like. And Grendler eventually
didn't contribute anything. I can't remember if Souci did or not.
JT: I don't think so.
DS: I don't think so. It was the same thing. But if I remember correctly, almost
everybody in that volume is of the next generation, the post-'65 people.
JT: I believe you're right.
DS: So it was a very exciting moment, very exciting time. So anyway, I presented
my paper. And George started by saying, or usually, and I still do this with my
seminars, he would simply pick on somebody and went around the room. So
everybody had space to learn how to develop a critique. And I really liked that.
00:56:00And I still do it. Because I was always a little hesitant to jump in. And so by
having that you had to have something ready which was very useful and you learn
to formulate. So I still do that with my students.
JT: But he was tough in the way that he critiqued in front of other people.
DS: Very tough. Absolutely. And I still do the same.
JT: Really. That's great.
DS: Absolutely. I take students very seriously. I go through everything from
grammar to how they formulate, how they do footnotes, how they conceptualize.
And I do precisely what George did. He went around. But he had already typed out
his points. And then he would take the last 20 or 30 minutes and say, "Now I'm
going to summarize," but he already had it, and I always already have it, and go
through the points systematically and very, very rigorously. So when I gave my
paper, he said, "We're going to do it differently tonight. Because here's a
00:57:00paper of a first-year student that makes every mistake that a first-year student
makes." And then he proceeded for two hours to have the seminar laughing so hard
that people were falling off their chairs.
JT: About you?
DS: About me. It was, it was extraordinarily--
JT: Humiliating?
DS: Well, both humiliating but, I mean, even I was laughing so hard at his
critique. His critique was just devastating.
JT: But he gave you full attention.
DS: Well, oh, yeah. But as I walked out, I said to this guy who ended up in
Carleton [Carl Weiner] I said, "I guess I better quit." And he said, "What?" I
said, "Well, look what he did." He said, "He would never have done that if he
didn't think highly of it." So that was that, but George would never, George
00:58:00never, ever told a student he was good or bad. So if a student gave an awful
paper or blew him off, he would start the seminar by just changing the subject.
He never discussed the student's paper. He did that two or three times in the
time I was there.
JT: He would completely ignore the student?
DS: He would ignore the student, essentially.
JT: Write them off.
DS: Yes.
JT: You couldn't do that now, but anyways, we won't go into that.
DS: No. In fact the worst of it is that I have developed a highly critical style
but I will tell a student right straight that you shouldn't continue. And this
creates for the students in the seminar a very devastating moment. But I don't
know how else to do it.
JT: Do you tell them that in front of other people?
00:59:00
DS: Yeah.
JT: Okay.
DS: And if they really blow me off, you know, as several have done over the
years-- But you can do very poor work that is and not know how to do it and
screw up. That doesn't bother me. It's if you just don't try or don't even pay
attention-and this happens, you know, happens every couple of years there's
somebody like that. In the seminar I just did, everybody tried. Some of them did
a disastrous job. But I tell them why and how they should go about correcting
it. So I'm very rigorous precisely in the way George was. And I learned that
from George. And I take them very seriously. And by the time they get to writing
their dissertations, they have a much better idea. But some still can't write. I
01:00:00mean, it's amazing how poor some people are with writing.
JT: Well, not to digress too much, but the New York Times now is so poorly written--
DS: Oh, yeah.
JT: --that I, you know, I feel sometimes I'm learning bad things from reading
this paper. It's so bad.
DS: That's absolutely right. And all kinds of ways that are oral ways of
thinking, have crept in, in which, like the definite article is missing or what
have you. But I have these students who really- their sentences make no sense
and so forth, and even at the PhD level. And I put a lot of time into basic
grammar and structure. Which George would never have done. But he would
01:01:00thoroughly critique how you formulated something.
JT: Were some of the students just devastated and left the seminar?
DS: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. And he blew off women, as fast as he could blew them
off. So it was pretty much a male bund: Later on he changed his whole way of
doing it.
JT: He did. But although he had that one early student that he thought was one
of his best.
DS: Oh, Margaret. Margaret Donovan. And he always talked about Margaret
JT: Yes, his great exception.
DS: It was a great exception. But she was a nun.
JT: Oh, was she? I didn't know that.
DS: I think she had stopped being a nun. But she had been a nun.
JT: Okay.
DS: So George, I think, was scared of her. (laughs)
JT: She was going to put--
DS: All the other women--
JT: George was fascinated by a nun--.
DS: And then he was so disappointed because she went to take care of her mother
01:02:00instead of going to Harvard.
JT: Right. He had gotten her a job (at Vassar) and she decided--
DS: To take care of her mother.
JT: Yes. And ended up at Whitewater, I think. Something like that.
DS: And George always used her as a great example of a great mind. And we all
knew about Margaret. And so forth. But there were several women showed up in
each of his seminars while I was there. And they were pretty quickly gone.
JT: Really.
DS: And they weren't any worse than some of the guys--
JT: Isn't that incredible.
DS: And I once caught George and some other faculty member who I can't remember
in the hall saying, "I got rid of her." And so forth.
JT: Oh, man.
DS: Now that was a different period back then--now, the woman he idolized while
I was there was Joan Scott.
01:03:00
JT: Yes.
DS: And Joan Scott wasn't in his seminar. But he got her as his teaching
assistant and eventually read her dissertation. And you know the story about her--
JT: Signed for her, yes.
DS: --making what's his face read it.
JT: Harvey Goldberg, right.
DS: Harvey Goldberg read it, and so forth. Because Harvey, yeah.
JT: They remained good friends.
DS: Oh, yeah.
JT: And I think Joan always had a feeling of, well, I shouldn't really be this
close to George given his reputation with some other women, you know.
DS: Well, but that all changed. That all changed.
JT: Yes, right, it did.
DS: Nikke Kedie claims, (who was my colleague here for a long time, and a great
Iran scholar) she was up for a job at Wisconsin. And that was in the days when I
01:04:00don't think there was any woman in the department. And she claims that she was
poorly dealt with. Now that has all changed--I mean, George became very close
with Itsi (Isabel) Hull.
JT: Oh, with a lot of younger women historians
DS: And a whole lot of women.
JT: And very, very supportive. In the time that I knew him, he was extremely
supportive of younger women scholars--
DS: Yes.
JT: And more interested, actually, in their work, than he was in other work.
DS: Absolutely. And he also changed, you see, I was in a transition period. He'd
come out of Haverford, which was an all-male school. Went to Harvard, which was
all male.
JT: Had gone to all male boarding schools and had very little--
DS: Hadn't a clue what women--
JT: --interaction with women.
DS: Yes, right. Except his mother and his stepmother.
JT: His mother, who was hysterical--.
01:05:00
DS: And his stepmother who he was in love with--
JT: And his sister, but that relationship--
DS: And his sister and so forth.
JT: But very few women in his life.
DS: Yeah. Right.
JT: And it was possible to be that way in that generation, of course.
DS: Yes. Yes. And then he had this very close relationship with what's her name
in England.
JT: Paula Quirk.
DS: Paula. In any event, I never met [her husband} Roger. I only met Paula. I
met her there in the house. And that was a close relationship. And George always
stayed with them [in London].
JT: By the way, when did you and Ruth get married? Were you married before you
came to Madison?
DS: No, I came to Madison first. Ruth was still an undergraduate.
JT: Okay.
DS: Then as soon as she finished -- and she was two years behind me. She was a
year younger--
JT: So she went to Wisconsin, also.
DS: No, no. She went to Houghton.
JT: Oh, she went, you met at Houghton.
DS: Yeah.
JT: Okay. All right.
DS: Yeah. So she was a year and several months younger than I. But I went
01:06:00through in three years and she didn't.
JT: Okay.
DS: She also came from a missionary family and was born in Nigeria. And her
father was the head of, eventually, of the mission, and then head of an
interdenominational mission. And anyway, so she was there in Madison. I did my
master's with George, and George encouraged me, so I got it done in one year.
And nobody else did in those days. But I had gone through undergrad in three
years. .. I did my master's so quickly. And I, I don't know, I was still torn, I
wasn't quite, didn't quite understand what I was getting in Wisconsin. So I went
to Brandeis. And I wanted to study with Marcuse. And so I went to Brandeis--
JT: Did George introduce you to Marcuse?
01:07:00
DS: No.
JT: This was something that came from the atmosphere.
DS: It came from reading Marcuse's book on Hegel. And I knew they had this
history of ideas department. And I was really somehow drawn to that.
JT: Was this before Marcuse became this cult figure and had, you know, the following?
DS: Well for me, it was already with the Hegel book.
JT: I see. Okay.
DS: But I went to Brandeis. He accepted me. He liked my application. But he was
gone that year writing One Dimensional Man. He was in Europe. I then spent the
year at Brandeis, and realized that Wisconsin had a really clear program.
Brandeis didn't. The only faculty member that I remember well--. there were two
faculty members, there. But the one that I was very influenced by,
01:08:00extraordinarily influenced by, was Frank Manuel. Now, Frank Manuel-his entire
teaching was explication de texte. You look at a text, you--
JT: Just rip it apart.
DS: George was the opposite. You know, George was the big, broad, intellectual
historical thing. It took me 25 years to deal with that. On the one hand,
wanting to look close, and on the other hand, wanting to give broad
understandings of things. So George was my model at one level of teaching. And I
certainly adapted to his whole model of graduate teaching. And Frank Manuel was
the other intellectual model. And I couldn't figure out a synthesis. So I go to
Brandeis and Marcuse was gone. And I began to see that when you look at Marcuse,
01:09:00you know, he would teach Aristotle, he would teach Hegel and so forth. And I'd
think, how can this person do this? And I began to realize that essentially what
he was was a product of the Germany Gymnasium, with Greek and Latin and all of
those texts. And then he does Hegel and it's tied up with Marcuse as a younger
member of the Frankfurt School. So that in a sense, despite the fact that I
never really met him, I had this vision of a kind of education that I could
never have, I'd already had--and realized that this is a product of the German
Gymnasium. As in a sense George was and wasn't. That is, George went to the
01:10:00Salem and so forth. And came up out of a milieu that would have been a Gymnasium
milieu, but ended up in these--
JT: English
DS: Both English schools. So he would have had that partly classical training.
But he was also a kid who sat around and read all this crap. And it's that
feeling for the second-rate but widely read--
JT: Popular
DS: --popular stuff, which George developed as a kid. Which if he'd gone to a
real classical gymnasium, he wouldn't have had the time to do it. He would have
been learning Greek and Latin. And the only way you learn Greek and Latin is
having it beaten into you. So this was very attractive. So with Frank Manuel, we
01:11:00went systematically through Hume and Montesquieu and Diderot and Rousseau and so
forth. And it was great stuff. So for one year, I redid my education. I took
three courses each term, each semester, in some form of history of ideas. And I
took a seminar on Hegel with a guy named Heinz Lubasz or Harry Lubasz who
eventually went and taught in England as well, and was one of the founding
members of the department of history at Essex. And I met him there a couple of
times. He was a very nice man. But again we read sentence by sentence, we read
the phenomenology. It was a great experience since none of us understood it. And
01:12:00each of us was trying to figure out--he had written this really very interesting
stuff on Aristotle. And either Hegel and Aristotle or Marx and Aristotle- might
have done both. So those were the two people at Brandeis, as I said, I read, you
know, and also took a course on ancient thought. So we read a book a week. And
then medieval thought- a book a week.
JT: So at Wisconsin, you didn't have that kind of immersion.
DS: No. No.
JT: There weren't other professors that filled in the gaps that perhaps--
DS: No. Because they were much more, George was systematic. Now George taught,
one year he taught early modern intellectual history and the next year modern
intellectual. So I took the whole series. And he gave us a lot to read,
01:13:00including Hegel. But it was in the context of a big lecture. Where the courses
at Brandeis were very small, most of them, and oriented toward reading original
sources with some secondary stuff as well. So it was very good for me. It was a
good year. But I realized I had to get back to Wisconsin, and I realized what
I'd had with George. So I went back.
JT: And then decided to do your dissertation?
DS: Yes. I mean, I went back to study with George. No question about anybody
else or anything. And that was really very interesting, because George had a, in
general, a way of opening things up and leaving you to do what you wanted to do.
And providing the context for doing it. Now the other model, and the only other
01:14:00people I practically knew there, with some exceptions, which I'll mention in a
minute, was, I'm trying to remember what his name was. But he taught
seventeenth-century England. And he taught a seminar year in, year out, on
seventeenth century England. [Sachse]
JT: Never changing? (laughs)
DS: Never changing. And all of the students came in. And he assigned them, "All
right, you're doing Bishop So-and-So. That's your master's degree." So they were
doing master's degree on an obscure bishop. And they knew all the sources and
they knew everything. And none of them ever amounted to anything. I mean, they
got jobs. But there was no creativity. There was no openness. And with George,
you'd come in one time and you'd say, as I did, "I want to do my dissertation on
the French Libertines, early, first half of the seventeenth century. And I'm
interested in the fact that they all went to study in Italy. And they went and
01:15:00were in the households of bishops and so forth." And so I said, "I'd like to
study these Libertines in Italy and their education and so forth." He said,
"Great topic! Terrific!" But, you know, later on, I'd come up with another
topic. He said, "Great topic!" Now the key thing when I came back, I was now
studying for prelims. And one of the people I studied with, apart from someone
like Dan Toft, who was also studying for them, was Chris Johnson. Chris Johnson
was studying with the French historian--
JT: Was Gargan there in those years?
DS: No, Gargan came later, see, a lot of these people came after--
01:16:00
JT: Okay.
DS: While I was essentially gone. Or came while I was finished or finishing. So
the person I studied closely with was Domenico Sella. And Domenico Sella was
very important, because he filled in all the stuff that George didn't go over.
And I did a lot of economic history with him. As I also did medieval, we had to
do a minor.
JT: Right, right.
DS: And I did medieval history. In those days, Robert, um--
JT: Was it Reynolds still? Was he still there?
DS: Reynolds was dying. But teaching. And I did some economic history with him
and with one of his students. And it was great because we read all these
contracts and sources and so forth. So I got a good feel for medieval economic
01:17:00history. And with Domenico-I did a reading course with Domenico Sella. And I
have great fondness for Sella. He was very serious. We took thousands of notes.
JT: Very nice person.
DS: He was really, really important. And a good complement to George. And so as
I was essentially doing early modern, he was also developing his courses. But
that's pretty much the history department as I knew it: George and Domenico Sella.
JT: Ok.
DS: I started doing a course that George and oh, I can't remember the name,
American historian did on Marx--
JT: William--
DS: William Appleman Williams. But George said, "I don't want you to take
this-sign up for it, but I want you to finish your master's thesis." I think
01:18:00that was the second semester. Or whatever. And so, when I came back, I was
studying for prelims and Chris Johnson and I read books together and discussed
them in great detail. Chris eventually had a very good career at Wayne State.
JT: Okay. And is he a Mosse student?
DS: No. He was a Hill student.
JT: Henry Hill.
DS: But he taught for George. He was one of his TAs. And he took all the courses
from George as well. And he and I have edited a number of books together, the
latest thing we co-edited, let's see-I've done four books on kinship, which I've
01:19:00edited, co-edited, and he and I did the one on siblings together. And then he
was part of the international family book, and part of the latest one that just
came out on kinship and blood. So we reconnected and we worked very closely
together. But as we were working through everything- and again, here was George
who was really, as many people have remarked, always like a decade ahead of
everybody. And he was the one who discovered Aries for example. And I believe
Aries came to Wisconsin for a visit. And George, I can remember George--
01:20:00
JT: Sponsored him?
DS: Well, I don't know. I think he just came through or something. And I think
it was Aries but I'm not sure. But in any event, he introduced us to Aries and Thompson.
JT: E.P. Thompson?
DS: And I think we discovered Tilly, Charles Tilly's book on our own, but I'm
not sure. So we were reading Tilly, oh, and the person who was making a big
splash at the time, Jack Hexter, Reappraisals in History. And between that kind
of mixture--okay, so back up. George's approach to cultural history was the
thing we were all talking about and worrying about. We were dissatisfied in many
ways because he was leading us to a taste in popular literature, a sense of
01:21:00which ideas actually had effect. Not necessarily Hegel, but, you know,
[Marlet?]-some second-rate writer like Julius Langbehn. When I think of the
lectures he gave, and I bump into people now who are studying, say, Dinter's
Sins Against the Blood, or something like that, George gave whole lectures on
these things.
JT: It's amazing.
DS: And people are discovering Artur Dinter now. And I bought a book at a,
antiquariat, at a used book store recently and was reading it. And George gave
these great lectures on everything. Haeckel and so forth- all of these things
which became texts that people are learning about much later.
01:22:00
JT: Yes.
DS: But we were concerned with the issues of ideas having effect. Ideas and
politics. And he would sort of say, "Well, thousands of people read this book,"
or, "Everybody read this book." There was a, you know, deep in Gymnasium, or
whatever. And that was kind of unsatisfactory.
JT: In what way?
DS: Because it was "seat of the pants" in the sense of- we wanted to know how
many, numbers sometimes. Or we wanted to know more--I can't--
JT: Numbers of people that had read it or how--
DS: Or editions and so forth, and he never did that sort of thing. He just said,
"Everybody read it," whatever.
JT: In the transcript of the Stanford Seminar, he tries to quantify, because
01:23:00they kept pressuring him about that. And he claims that he did in fact have
these numbers.
DS: Yeah, well, he didn't have numbers. (laughter) But he knew that there were
big editions, or many editions, and so forth. And he was right on. Because he
grew up in that culture. Several of the people who also grew up in Germany in
that seminar, you know, are real Gymnasium. They didn't read any crap. And they
keep trying to say, "But there's this crap literature and this great literature
and you have to differentiate." Well, in the next generation it's the '70s where
you know, in Germany and all these literature departments in Germany started
reading the crap. And they start saying precisely what George was saying, the
differentiation, the creation of the cannon, and so forth, which becomes a big
01:24:00issue in the '70s and '80s and '90s.
JT: I've been reading this biography of Himmler. He was reading all of that crap.
DS: Right.
JT: It's amazing. He was reading those books that George mentions.
DS: Yes. And that's in the sense that George had a real insight into a lot of
these people --it's very interesting, and this comes up- he both read it, and he
loved it. For example, when he went to South Africa, he goes to the German areas
and , he'd read all the novels and knew precisely what he was looking for and
had a great sense of this place, because he already read all these novels as a
kid, and had them in his imagination. And he had a real, real sense for how
these things worked. But it wasn't replicable in the same way. So we are reading
01:25:00these other, these new texts. And Chris and I, I can remember sitting at lunch
together and saying, "Let's become social historians." "Yes, what is it?"
(laughter) And we don't know anything about it. And we began to catalog and
think through what social history could be. And it was around that time that I
then realized that if I was going to be an early modernist, I had to have German
and I didn't have it. Secondly, that I wanted to do social history. And the
model was Tilly's Vende study. So I still was thinking of social history in
terms of an event. So I said to George, "I want to do the German Peasant War."
He said, "Great. Bring me the book and don't bother me in between." Which was
also great. He encouraged me. He helped me get fellowships. I went off to go to
01:26:00the archives. And of course he gave us no training in paleography or anything
like that. As I don't, either. As I tell the students, you've got to deal with
it. And here are things you can learn, and so forth. And occasionally I'll sit
with a student who's been to the archives and has a transcript and I'll teach
him how to read it and so forth. But, you know, it was a shock. I didn't know
what the hell I was doing. I couldn't read the stuff. That took a long while to
get, but the great thing was that George just let me do it. And I had, some of
the things I had learned from Domenico Sella-how to study. Lots of the questions
that grew out of English economic history. In a sense I came with those
questions to study. And I decided by myself I would study Upper Swabia because
01:27:00that's where things started.
JT: So you found George's method, or the direction that he was going,
unsatisfactory as a model for you to pursue. And you realized that as he was
moving in this new direction.
DS: But it was also extraordinarily interesting. And in a sense I rejected it
for a long time, came back and was much more impressed. And I assign the stuff
to my students all the time. And I read a lot of the stuff he produced later,
and I read it later. So I was, at that transition period where he's going from
that classical early modern stuff, which he learned from McElwain at Harvard and
Lunt and so forth, to his ideological critique and interests. And so that book
01:28:00came out about, '62, Roots of the Nazi Mind?[Crisis of German Ideology].
JT: '64, I think.
DS: '64, okay, sort of after I had him as an undergraduate, as a graduate
student. So it's really a great deal about the next generation, Robert Nye and
Andy Rabinbach and all of those people. Also David Gross, I think Gross came
just as I was finishing. All of those people have a completely different George.
The other thing was that George was going from being a kind of quasi-Protestant
to becoming a Jew-and that was also taking place. And then he went off to take
the chair in Jerusalem (1969) , which was much later-all of that-in the early
01:29:00sixties, he claimed that he went to the Episcopal services every week in Harvard
(in the early forties).
JT: Mm hmm. I'm sure he did.
DS: And he probably, he probably did. And then the Quaker schooling and, and his
Reformation work, his little Reformation book, which was a runaway bestseller-
so all of that- he was going from that to studying his youth, the Nazi thing,
the things that he went through. And he's discovering more and more his Jewish identity--
JT: He was a moving target as a historian.
DS: Absolutely. So people like Andy Rabinbach know him completely differently
from how I knew him. And as I say, his first seminar was on Calvinism. And then
he did totalitarianism. Then he did the Radical Reformation. Then he went back
01:30:00and forth like that. And he really, when Bob Kingdon came, who came after I,
when I was writing my dissertation, when he brought in Bob Kingdon, then he
abandoned all of the Reformation to Kingdon. Up till then, he had all the
Reformation students scholars as well.
JT: And in those years, I mean, there were about ten years, and that's when the
vast majority of his graduate students studied with him.
DS: Yes.
JT: Because after about '72, he didn't take any more graduate students.
DS: Yes.
JT: And he had 38.
DS: Yes. So he had a few from--
JT: Iowa, right?
DS: Iowa. Then he had the generation of Sterling Fishman and Sy Drescher. And I
got to know Sy very well. I got to know Sterling fairly well, because Sterling
came on the faculty while we were there. But he was also a little distanced.
JT: Reserved.
01:31:00
DS: Reserved. I knew him in Germany when we went there. And then I bumped into
him from time to time. But Seymour and I became very close, as you know. But
that was early first generation. My generation, practically nobody finished.
Then he had all the--
JT: The final burst. Right. Right.
DS: And a lot of people who worked closely with him who essentially did their
dissertations with him but weren't formally, like the guy at North Carolina who
did the study--
JT: Chris Browning.
DS: Browning.
JT: Just retired.
DS: Browning was essentially--
JT: George's student.
DS: George's student.
JT: Because Koehl by that time was--. You know, I think George, obviously, was
very influential.
DS: So there's a whole bunch of people like Joan Scott were very close to George
that were not his dissertation students.
JT: Yes.
DS: Chris Johnson was very influenced by him. I kind of jotted down a few people
01:32:00who were there at the time. Oh, Joan (Scott) talking with Joan a lot was also
very important at the time.
JT: For you?
DS: Yeah.
JT: Okay.
DS: We weren't terribly close, but she was very important. Andy (Rabinbach), I
only knew later, of course. Bob Nye much later. Bob Souci was important, but he
went off to do his work at the time while we were studying for exams. So early
on, he was kind of influential. David Gross came just as I was leaving. Bob Pois
who died, went to Colorado, was a very strange person, but very interesting. And
we talked a lot. And he also studied for exams at the same time: Very quirky.
Very much more attuned to George's, ultimately to George's approach, and
eventually very interested in psychology and psychoanalysis. And he went off
01:33:00more in that direction using more formally Freud and so forth. Paul Lachance was
an undergraduate at the time when I was there, and became a graduate student.
Paul was interesting because I talked with him a lot about good writing. And
then I lost touch with him. He also did his dissertation with George, but he was
younger. And of course then Paul Breines was an undergraduate.
JT: Then he came back to get his master's and doctorate
DS: And I only got to know Paul uch, much, much later, and not very well.
JT: And Steve? Did you know Steve Aschheim?
DS: No, Aschheim of course, came well after I was gone. And I only know him from
afar and I've met him a couple of times: Extraordinarily impressive mind. And I
01:34:00think in some ways one of George's best students. But fully developed before he
came, you know. And also with a great presence, you know.
JT: Charisma.
DS: Charisma.
JT: He has that Mosse charisma as a teacher.
DS: Yeah. So and when we, after George died and we did that book--
JT: What History Tells.
DS: What History Tells. Almost all of the people there came later. I think Sy
Drescher might have been there.
JT: That's true. You and Sy I think, were the two from the earlier period.
DS: But then Sy and I didn't overlap.
JT: But for George's eightieth, there were some people there from your period.
01:35:00
DS: That's right.
JT: Yes, Grendler and some other ones.
DS: Paul Grendler, right, he came. And Robert Souci came.
JT: Right. Right.
DS: Grendler and Souci were a year or two ahead of me. And then there was a guy,
Irish, big Irish guy, huge guy, who sort of disappeared, but was one of Mosse's,
students-same generation as Grendler. He and Grendler were very impressive
figures in the seminar. I can't remember his name, but he went off to--
JT: Not Thayer.
DS: No, Thayer is much older. Thayer is the generation of Sy Drescher and--
JT: Okay. He's part of that generation.
DS: And he may even have started in Iowa.
JT: Okay. With Dick Saloway?
DS: And Thayer was there with Saloway.
JT: Right.
DS: Thayer was always very distanced and critical of George.
JT: Mm hmm. He was, yes.
DS: And trying to get him to take part in the- festschrift..
01:36:00
JT: I read those letters. He was very critical of George, yes. He found George's
methods highly frustrating.
DS: So Thayer-we couldn't get Thayer to write. And it was very frustrating:
There was that earlier bunch, and then my generation, which mostly didn't
finish. And then, but this new generation were all into the New Left politics.
They were all into the Frankfurt school. And George introduced them to a lot of
that stuff.
JT: Mm hmm. He really (helped) introduce that history of the Frankfurt School in
the U.S. along with the fellow at Berkeley.
DS: Yes.
JT: Karl Schorske?
DS: It could, well it might have been Schorske, but probably it was what's his
name. You know, who wrote about the Frankfurt School
JT: Not Martin Jay?
DS: Yes, Martin Jay
JT: Well, George (helped) introduce him to it.
01:37:00
DS: Oh, he did?
JT: When Marty gave the Mosse Lectures at the Hebrew University, he said that.
DS: Oh, really? That's interesting.
JT: Because George knew some of these figures, you know.
DS: Yeah.
JT: And he also an interest in these people.
DS: That's right. But this is all later. George didn't mention the Frankfurt
school to any of us.
JT: Right. It was later that he--
DS: It's all later. So that whole influence--and then George gets interested in sexuality.
JT: Right.
DS: He gets interested in Jewish history.
JT: Right.
DS: And starts doing undergraduate seminars in these things. He never mentioned
Jewish history to us. And that was my great, ultimate criticism when I started
to then teach German history, which I only did much later, when I came here:
Actually only after I got the chair. So when I came back the second time, the
01:38:00fact that I didn't know any Jewish history I blamed on George. And then I tried
to figure how to catch up and put it into German history.
JT: But he taught the first seminar, his first seminar on Jewish history, or his
first course in1970. He had taught, I think, a seminar, or course, when he went
to Hebrew University.
DS: Yes
JT: And we have those lectures on our website, but the audio isn't very good.
I'm trying to get that improved. But all of the summaries are there. And it's
basically German Jewish history.
DS: Yes. Oh, very good.
JT: And whenever it was about Eastern European, George brought someone in,
because he didn't know anything about it, you know.
DS: And he was contemptuous of all that. (laughs) Very funny time when George
was lecturing on either the Baltic or the Balkans or whatever, and he was
calling it the wrong thing, so if it was the Balkans he was talking about the
Baltic. With the Baltic, he was talking about the Balkans. And some kid raised
01:39:00his hand and said, "Don't you mean the Baltic?" or something. And it was 500
students. He was very funny, he'd say, "Baltic Schmaltic. They're just a bunch
of short little people running around that nobody cares about." (laughter)
JT: Terrible. Terrible. Yes, George and facts. He was very, very skeptical about
facts in history. It was not one of his strengths. Let's put it that way.
DS: Well it was funny. When he introduced Aries, he would work these things into
his lectures, whatever he was reading. So he always had his five pages that he
had in front of him. But then he would riff on stuff. So he starts talking about
Aries, and he's talking about the non-differentiation of, of girls and boys
until they're seven or eight. So they all wore the same thing. They all wore, he
01:40:00said, he wanted to say "smock." But he said, "They all wore little schmucks."
And the entire place burst into laughter. And of course George is trying to
figure it out: what did I say funny? Because he wants to milk it. And so he goes
back over it again, and he says, "And they wore a little schmuck" and they'd
laugh again. So afterwards he said to me, "What are they laughing at?" Because
he didn't know any Yiddish. That was the other thing.
JT: Or Hebrew.
DS: "Schmuck, George. You said schmuck." He said, "What does that mean?" And I
say, "You know, it's Yiddish." We're talking about, and I explain it to him. And
his face falls. He's just, "How did they know that?" (laughter) He said, "How
terrible that they know these things!"
JT: Oh, that's funny.
DS: And I said, "It's just Yiddish, George. Even I know it."
JT: In Wisconsin. Right. But the students would know that.
DS: It was very, very funny.
JT: Oh, that's hilarious.
01:41:00
DS: And that has to do with his put-on accent. He would always refer to
Milvaukee (instead of Milwaukee).
JT: He did that on purpose. VowSaw (Wausau) and all that.
DS: Yeah. Volkyshaw (Waukesha).
JT: Yes: He had his own language. Well maybe we should go on and we can come
back to this, and you can talk about--
DS: Okay. Go ahead. We talked about how George directed my dissertation on the
German Peasant War. But one great moment- I wrote the manuscript, I did the
research. Oh, and then I'm getting a job, George was crucial, of course. But his
cousin Werner was the professor of history at the University of East Anglia.
JT: Werner the absolute opposite of George.
DS: Totally opposite.
JT: He perhaps George would have been like that if he had gone to England. Who knows?
DS: Well, no, the key thing, the key thing is the kind of school they went to
01:42:00and exactly what age they hit school. Because here's Werner in an English school
and he is the quintessential outsider. George played with his outsider status--
JT: That's true.
DS: Werner was awkward, and very straightforward.
JT: Very German.
DS: And German. And the kids must have been merciless with him.
JT: Mm hmm. He was probably gay also?
DS: That could also be, yes, yes.
JT: He probably was.
DS: Yes, yes, yes.
JT: And of course he had seen his father killed right in front of his eyes.
DS: Oh, I didn't know that.
JT: His father was a politician and he was shot. And Werner was there.
DS: Oh, I didn't know that.
JT: Yes
DS: I didn't know that. So he was completely, he was verklempt and he was just a
completely different--
JT: Yes. But a great historian in his own way from what I've been told: A German
Jewish historian.
01:43:00
DS: Yes. That came later. He was writing a three-volume history of the Russian
Revolution when I knew him. And he sent it off and Wicktower said it was a piece
of crap and he abandoned it. And he started off with a book on diplomatic
history and so forth. And then he started writing on German Jewish history and
did a very fine job.
DS: He was totally alienated and isolated at East Anglia.
JT: And George got you the position there?
DS: And George said to his cousin, "Hire David." And I went and gave a miserable
interview. Because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And Werner took me
and they hired me. And I had a great four years there. It was swinging England.
I went through '68. And it was really interesting: Great teaching. It was
seminar teaching, though I essentially did George's seminars. And I had to give
01:44:00three lectures a year. It was essentially a seminar situation. Not tutorials. So
I easily slid into it. A lot of the English faculty who had been raised on
tutorials in Cambridge and Oxford couldn't figure out how to run seminars and
they had great problems. So sometimes they broke up their seminars into
tutorials and so forth. But I was very influenced there by some anthropologists.
And I had written some stuff--oh, let me come back to the point about George. I
wrote, I did the research and then the first year and maybe even the second year
I figured out I had to learn how to do statistics. I had to learn how to think
about this material. And it was this time that Le Roy Ladurie's great book on
01:45:00Languedoc came out and that was very influential. I began to read the French
Annales School a lot. I began to read about issues of population change and all
those kinds of things which were all new to me. And trying to figure out how to
utilize them and think about them for the background to the German Peasant War.
And then I was also using English economic historical ideas of changes in rent,
changes in land tenure and that sort of thing. And then I wrote it out and
George came to London and I went down and handed him the dissertation- I went to
the British Museum and worked in the library and met him there. Handed it to
01:46:00him. By the end of the day, he'd read the first half and gave it to me. By noon
the next day he'd read the rest of it with his comments.
JT: Amazing.
DS: His comments were in some ways useful and in some ways frustrating. He just
said, you know, "Finish going through the revisions." Which I did. And then he
accepted it. But it was that sense of immediately dealing with graduate student
work. He always did that. No matter what he was doing, he turned graduate
student work around immediately.
JT: Which is so helpful, to say the least. And not currently the way things are done.
01:47:00
DS: Absolutely. And that has just always been my model.
JT: That's great.
DS: I always turn graduate student work right around. Except as I'm getting
older, it's more difficult. (laughs) But I always do that. And his sense of
professionalism: I now have to give students lectures on professionalism. His
example as a professional simply taught us all a great deal about
professionalism. Because you know, at one level, he didn't care about the facts
so much, and he's always bullshitting and so forth around you, yet you have this
sense, you know, he's very Prussian, very organized.
JT: Oh, yes: Very disciplined.
DS: Very disciplined. And that you learned with time, and with his interaction
with you: Because he always took your work seriously. He always critiqued it. He
didn't praise you. No patting on the head, but full support. And that you
01:48:00learned; that the support was there, and so forth.
JT: That he valued you and your work.
DS: Yes. Yes. So he turned it right around and did it right away. And then we
were earning miserable pay in England, and I couldn't afford for a whole year to
come to Madison to defend my doctorate: in those days we had committees of--..
JT: Who was on the committee?
DS: The committee was people I hadn't worked with: Domenico Sella was on it. Bob
Kingdon and David Herlihy
JT: Ok.
DS: And Herlihy didn't read it. He kind of thumbed it through and told me what
my tables should have, you should have a little thing under that saying what the
01:49:00table was. Kingdon read it, though, and liked it a lot. Sella read it, of
course. And he was the one that posed the most challenging question. George
asked the wrong question at the beginning. He said, "This is a very innovative
dissertation: Could you discuss your innovation?" And, you know, I'm seat of the
pants, learning how to do this, really, and I couldn't, at that point, stand
back and talk in general. And I actually learned how to do that from that very
question. But we were all sicker than hell. We all had the flu.
JT: Oh my God. (laughs)
DS: And I flew all the way from England and the whole thing lasted 45 minutes.
(laughs) but George was extraordinarily supportive He got me the job. We had a
01:50:00problem later.
JT: You and George?
DS: Yes, because in those days George would only write a letter for one person
per job. Now that may have changed later. So I came from East Anglia to
Pittsburgh, and then I got an offer to go for a year on my sabbatical to the Max
Planck Institute for History in Gottingen and misunderstanding what a sabbatical
was, I stayed for seven years. (laughter) Anyway, so when I was finished and had
01:51:00to come back, and get my kids back in the schools, I applied for two jobs: Iowa
and here (UCLA)--those were the only two jobs. And George had already written
for Andy [Rabinbach] and he wouldn't write a letter for me.
JT: For here, UCLA?
DS: For here.
JT: Okay.
DS: And Peter Reill, who was chairing the committee, wrote to me and said,
"You've got to have a letter from Mosse." So I called George and said, "You've
got to write me a letter." So there was a great deal of tension between us at
that point.
JT: Did he finally write one, or--
DS: Yes, he did. But he wanted Andy to have the job. And Andy interviewed and I
interviewed, and a woman named Neuschel who went to Duke. And I got the job. I
mean, I think Andy's a great historian and probably deserved it more than I. But
01:52:00I got the job, partly because it was an early modern; they wanted an early
modern historian.
JT: Right.
DS: And then I stayed here for five years, and I hated Los Angeles. And didn't
quite know what I had. I was beginning to develop a seminar situation like
George's, which was always my model for teaching: I never was able to deal with
students one-on-one properly. I don't like that. I really like the seminar
situation, and that's what I encourage. I developed: We have a quarter system
here, and so I invented the two-quarter research seminar. First quarter was the
introduction into a topic, and the second quarter they could a topic. So it was
exactly George's seminar. When I first came, all of the seminars were
01:53:00monopolized by two older faculty, and a bunch of us got together and
restructured the nature of graduate education. And like George I tried to create
big structures. And one of the things that had struck me when I came back was
how different the German discourse about selfhood and the American discourse
about selfhood were. So the first seminar I gave was on the history of
individualism. And it's in that seminar that I put in history of the body,
history of memory, history of identity, subjectivity, conscience, sexuality.
None of which had taken off yet. Gender was the only one that was beginning. And
01:54:00all of these became whole subjects and vast literature in the next years.
DS: The next seminar I gave was on the history of the body. And then I got a
call from Cornell, and was asked if I was interested in teaching there. I
thought this would be great! Great teaching. And I went off to Cornell and
regretted it the moment I got there. It's the middle of freaking nowhere, and
all of the faculty had come in the '60s. And the hates and loves were all set.
It took me a while, took me five years, but I came back to the chair here [UCLA].
JT: And George used to come out every year to Cornell.
01:55:00
DS: George came every year as a visiting professor, and I was part of the group
that brought George. It was interesting; I think he came two or three years.
That was the idea.
JT: Yes, and then he was A.D. White Prof. at Cornell, but you had left by then,
I think. He was A.D. White professor there for four years, and he had a couple
years when he passed away still left.
DS: Yes, well that was, that was the thing.
JT: Okay.
DS: I was part of bringing him for the A.D. White Professorship.
JT: He went, I think for four years he visited Cornell for six weeks.
DS: And La Capra played a role and so forth. There was a big fight no one knows
quite what happened. But Najemy claimed that George, I can't remember. Made some
insult about Middle East being a hell hole or something like that.
01:56:00
JT: Right.
DS: And Najemy--
JT: Sand jockeys or something like that?
DS: Oh, whatever. And then Najemy fought bitterly not to allow George to come back.
JT: Najemy, who's that--
DS: John Najemy
JT: Oh, John Najemy, okay.
DS: He's a renaissance scholar. And La Capra and I and several others fought to
have George. And then our question was, I was talking with Joan Scott, and the
two of us were laughing about it all. And she said, "Well, he probably did say
that." I said, "I know he probably did say it. Of course he did." (laughter)
JT: Yes, of course he did.
DS: And so forth. But he was very successful. Everybody liked him at Cornell.
JT: And then you ended up coming back here [UCLA]?
DS: And then I came back here: there was a chair in German history that Wehler
01:57:00had turned down. And they were looking for somebody who would actually come.
(laughs) So I was able to come back. And then I became a German historian.
JT: Oh, so not until--
DS: It's really, I mean, I taught courses in European history. I taught, as I
say, these big seminars from which I always had four or five books first in
anthropology. And then we would read historical works on, let's say, the history
of individualism in some way with student reports. And that first group was a
really good group of graduate students, terrific group. My student Ann Goldberg,
who just got a prize for her second book, is at UC Riverside; Matt Matsuda,
01:58:00who's at Rutgers- a very inventive and very interesting historian.
JT: And these are your doctoral students?
DS: Yes So Matt wrote on--you asked me how many graduates I had. I've had seventeen.
JT: Seventeen.
DS: And I'm chairing ten committees at the moment.
JT: My God.
DS: So I may eventually have 25 or so.
JT: And you're still really enjoying it and still engaged in teaching?
DS: Yes. Yes, yes. I was very close to, and worked very closely with eleven
students who eventually did their PhD. I did a dissertation reading group at home.
JT: Like George's seminars in his home?
DS: Yes And also, I've had a lot of students who came I wasn't chairing. And one
01:59:00of the most brilliant and, I think, one of the best students we've ever had, was
Claudia Verhoeven who is at Cornell and teaches Russian history. But she was
first going to do a dissertation with me on the German peace movement, but she
decided to work on the first attempt to assassinate Alexander II-she wrote a
brilliant book that's published by Cornell. She started off at George Mason and
went to Cornell- she's now at Cornell. And she's quite brilliant. And I worked
with several others, a guy named Robert Batchelor who does very inventive and
very obscure global history: He wrote an article in a book I edited on space and
self in which he took a Japanese character that deals with space and it's almost
02:00:00like a riffing on this. He's in England here, he's in Japan there, he's in China
here. Anyway, Bob actually did his undergraduate honor's thesis at Cornell, and
then he came here. And by the time I came back, the professor he's working with,
John Brewer, had left. And I think technically I was the chair in the end for
him. I may not have, but I think so. I saw it through. So Batchelor, I think, is
really very interesting.
I wrote down the names of a number of them. Oh, yes, and the interesting thing
is, I've had early modern and modern, I've got French and German. So when Lynn
02:01:00Hunt came, I didn't get any more French students. Jarred Polley, I worked
essentially on the Weimar Republic: Very intellectual history. Very much like
George's work, but self-invented. Then I've had two really good early modernists
working in German history. Ben Marschke and Jason Coy who are extraordinarily
active and play a big role, as has Jared Polley in the German Studies
Association: They run the program, they're on the general committee. So they are
very good and very inventive young historians. Britta McEwen did her
dissertation on sexual knowledge in Red Vienna, the whole development of sexual
02:02:00advice centers. And then one of my most successful was John Mangum, who is now
running the San Francisco Philharmonic, but for a while, was vice president of
the New York Philharmonic. He wrote his dissertation on the building and
development of the opera house in Berlin-Very inventive. Another student I
worked closely with is Ritika Prasad, who worked on railroad construction and
the meaning of the railroad in India: A cultural historian who I pushed in the
direction of social history. Another very fine historian that I worked closely
02:03:00with was Bill Clark, who wrote a book on the development of the German
university and the seminar. It's been translated into about ten languages: A
very important book. And one who's going to develop and become very famous is
Teresa Barnett, who came to all my seminars. She's older, she had already
abandoned a PhD in literature. But she was the associate director of the oral
history program here. She eventually became director. And she did her PhD in
history in American history, looking at the whole development of artifact in
19th century America. She's really smart. And her dissertation has been
02:04:00rewritten and coming out with Chicago. There's been some really smart and
interesting students here.
JT: You know, David, it seems in many ways, with huge exceptions, you've
replicated George's career in the sense that--
DS: He's a model, he's a model. And I became more German than I expected. But
it's, you know, no disciples. Nobody does what I do.
JT: You know, this is typical of George, too, in that sense. That there isn't
this kind of theoretical approach that you can bounce off of and play with. And
yet in another way, when you think of your students and George's students, and
the tremendous influence they've had in various universities in Europe, and the
02:05:00U.S., Israel, it's not a school of history, but--
DS: [phone ringing] Where's my phone?
JT: (laughs) Well, that's a good question. That's my phone.
DS: Oh, that's your phone.
JT: Yeah.
DS: Oh, no, it's in here.
JT: Oh, it is your phone.
DS: It's in my jacket.
JT: But also your peripatetic career, and the fact that you still have such a
passion for history and for teaching--
DS: [unclear] (laughs)
JT: I mean that you still spend large amounts of time on the road and away and
on sabbatical, that you're still very passionate about your work. You still love teaching.
DS: Right.
JT: That this is more a calling than a job. Is there, I mean, perhaps there
isn't a school, but there's maybe--
DS: No, but that influence was, there were several structural influences. The
range, early modern and modern--
JT: Right.
DS: Now when I moved to social history, when I first tried to teach social
02:06:00history, I was never able to synthesize in the way that George had synthesized
intellectual history. So I never, never was successful at quite doing that and
doing good social history from early modern to modern. And I was always moving
around social history, and cultural history. So one of my books is--well, the
chief thing I wrote- it took 30 years to do, was this village study. Hardcore
social history.
JT: Yes. Right.
DS: But as I was doing it, I did Power in the Blood, which is much more a
discourse. Now the key difference is I did this village study, which I did
family reconstitution and put in a lot of the data about every court appearance,
02:07:00inventory, land sales What George did, which is really very different and
intellectual history, is he's reading all these texts. So each book builds on
this group of texts. And every time he has to give a lecture, he can
spontaneously talk about Fichte, or whatever he wants to do, and so forth. Where
I put together a little biography of Hans Hensler. (laughs) and while I could
write these two thick volumes on the village, and perhaps there was another
volume to be written, I don't have this huge literature behind me. And most of
what I have behind me is what I read in graduate school. Now I've read a lot
since then, I read a lot of anthropology. And for a number of years, I only read
02:08:00anthropology until it got too self-reflective, and reflexive. But I read a lot
of monographs, a lot of anthropology. I did do a year with Jack Goody at
Cambridge studying anthropology systematically. And always for a long time saw
myself as much an anthropologist as a historian. Now as I'm coming back, I still
see myself as a social historian. The last seminar I gave was on the
epistemological foundations of social history. Trying to figure out what it is
that I'd been doing all these years. And constitute a group with an Israeli
scholar, Gadi Algazi who was chair of the Tel Aviv History Department. He is a
02:09:00medievalist. And then a scholar at Zurich, Simon Teuscher, who I've edited books
with. The three of us are putting together a compact group of twelve or thirteen
people to meet regularly and discuss social history. That's one thing. But the
book I'm doing now, I've been working for many years on, without much success so
far, is on the history of incest discourse from 1600 to the present in Europe
and America. It's very complex and I'm trying to figure it all out. But
sometimes I'm writing up a whole bunch of texts and I find myself writing like
George. And it's very unsatisfactory because I don't do it as well. But it's
02:10:00reading through this, that or the other----one of the periods I'm dealing with
is the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout the
West, but particularly in Germany, there's an enormous amount of stuff written
about mothers and motherhood. And mother is highly sexualized. And so I read
every, every book in the Staats Biblioteck in Berlin with the word Weib or
female in the title. And I have a massive amount of material and I have begun to
write it through. I'm writing more like George. And what I'm trying to do is
nail down, and this is then goes back to that original problem- nail down this
02:11:00discourse in social relations. And trying to figure out how, what the context
really is, how families are structured, how bourgeois society is structured and
why mother and motherhood is such a topic. So trying to get that other level of
dimension without doing that simple structure and superstructure thing. Or all
the other models. But I think of culture and society as indissoluble and trying
to figure out how they're related is very complex. But it's back to the original
problematic issue that I found in George's work and in his seminars. And it's
very difficult. But again, as I take one after the other of these women and men
02:12:00that are writing, and I am interested, as George is, in both the popular and the
scientific, and I want to see them as a continuum, not as a, so some cell
biologist, I want to see them as a, you know, as a Bildungsbuerger, as a kid who
grows up and he's a cell biologist but all that stuff he studies is within him.
And his relationships and thinking about gender and so forth. And then I want to
look at a popular novelists and try to treat and think of European society in
this period as an anthropologist would look at it. And I think George's eye was
02:13:00very much an anthropologist's eye before the fact. And that, perhaps when I
reflect on it, that plays a big role in how I think about things and how he
tried to do it. But writing it up the first time is not satisfactory. And I've
got to find a different way of writing it. But George had a good way of weaving
his way in and making a judicious comment about how this fits, text fits. And
then go on and so forth. So it's that huge set of things that he'd read that he
always can call on. And frequently it's associative. He has this associative way.
02:14:00
JT: It is. Yes.
DS: And I can't, I'm not skilled enough to pull that off.
JT: Very few historians are allowed to pull that off. (laughs) Or satisfied with
it. But George, because he had both the reputation, but also his style of
writing was expected, you know. He was allowed to do that in a way. And he was
so good at it, as you said-so many insights.
DS: But it was also the problematic that we were dealing with. Let's see, let me
see if I can pick up on some of the questions you asked.
JT: Yes
DS: Do you [Mosse students] constitute a school or an approach to history? I
think the cohesiveness of that next generation was much greater. I interrelate
02:15:00with the ones that I see often was of course Sy Dresher and Andy Rabinbach so
those are the ones I see most often. Andy used to get together with us at the AHA.
JT: Right. Yes.
DS: But when I listen to Andy, it's a different George. And Sy and I probably a
little more. But I pick up on a lot of things about George. George is
Protestant, George is-- and so forth, that other people wouldn't have unless
they were attuned to what he knew and what he could talk about. Let's see. But,
on the other hand, we did see ourselves almost as a Bund, as a bunch of men,
02:16:00young men, with a leader. And when he talked about all this volkisch stuff about
leadership and so forth, we were all enthralled by it all and we loved the fact
that we were a special group. Because we thought we were the most exciting, the
best group at Wisconsin. And we kind of hung around together, we didn't know, at
least, I didn't know a lot of people outside the group. Except when we were
studying for exams, then people like Chris Johnson and so forth. And so, you
know, I did not keep a close relationship with George's students over the years,
except when I come back to--again to Sy was very important. You asked a few
things about--we'll have to break off soon.
JT: Yes
DS: Get something to eat.
JT: I just want to ask you a bit more about George's legacy and reputation--
02:17:00George always said everything is politics. Everything is political.
DS: Yes. That's another great insight. I have--
JT: And then Foucault came along. Everything is power. Ten, twelve years later,
which is essentially the same thing.
DS: It's similar. But Mosse has a greater feel for social reality. I mean,
Foucault is very abstract.
JT: Yes, indeed.
DS: I mean, Foucault, you know, dug out stuff about the prison, about the
psychiatric profession and stuff.
JT: But a real disdain for facts, also.
DS: Yeah, also (laughter)
JT: Even worse, because he extrapolated in a much more theoretical manner--
DS: Well, the thing about Foucault, and the thing about Bourdieu and so forth is
they came up out of the Lycee. They all did explication de texte. This whole set
02:18:00of people read exactly the same things, exactly the same hour every day. So when
Foucault takes and turns something around and twists it, it's out of that, out
of that precise set of texts which they all read: Pascal, Descartes, Proust, and
so forth. And he's playing with that. And in a sense, it's a series of texts.
And in that way, George has got a different set of texts, but he's playing with
those texts. The difference is, George is decentered. He moves from Germany to
here. Nobody here has those texts. And this is a little bit like Marcuse,
Marcuse is bringing the Gymnasium, and nobody has that set of texts or that
range. And the same thing- Foucault is often misunderstood in the United States
02:19:00because he's working through a tradition which he doesn't necessarily always
mention. And it's very much that. I've had graduate students who were
Foucauldians, but they don't know Descartes, they don't know Pascal. They don't
know the texts. And they think they know--
JT: Foucault
DS: Foucault. But they don't know what he's talking about.
JT: Well, and I think George's, the basis of George's work was a moral and ethical--
DS: Absolutely.
JT: And he also was a great human being.
DS: Yes.
JT: And that's very different from Foucault.
DS: No. The moral commitment, the understanding of politics at a kind of
visceral level and everyday level--
JT: Yes. Right.
DS: That has remained. And that has influenced how I think of things a lot. And
regrets. Because you know, for example, when I started doing the kinship study,
02:20:00I was reading around in development studies. And the idea that the nuclear
family was the product of Western civilization. And without the nuclear family,
you can't have development. So Ford money and all these big people in the '60s
and '70s were pouring money into talking people into developing the nuclear
family and getting rid of kinship. So my simple question was, a very simple one,
"is it true, the history of the family as the development of the nuclear
family?" And if once in the past Europe had kinship and then it developed the
nuclear family, how could we model and talk about kinship? And that was the
influence of these anthropologists in East Anglia on me. And then, to solve the
02:21:00problem, I entered into looking at one small little place to see if you could
really look at kinship. It took me 30 years to do a simple question and so
forth. But the push was a political ethical issue. But solving it and dealing
with it was a different kind of thing. Teaching is different. Teaching allows me
to open up issues about selfhood, history of the self, how to think about it, a
critique. And that ethical idea remains. But I can't, like George integrate the
two, his research and his teaching. And I've split it. I can't do that. Because
02:22:00I chose the social historical route. I thought it was going to take me seven or
eight years to do the Neckarhausen studies. And it really took exactly 30 years.
And once I was in it, I couldn't abandon it. So I kind of was schizophrenic in
both the teaching and the research. And in a sense, the kind of thing I'm doing
now is much more integrated. It still is all about social relations and what the
implications of certain forms of social interaction are.
JT: Well we probably, given it's 12:30 and I know you have an appointment at one--
DS: Yeah. I can run and get something to eat.
JT: Yeah. We probably should wrap it up.
02:23:00
DS: Okay. Let me tell you how to get to my house.
JT: Okay. Yes. Let me turn this off, though. Thank you so much. It's--
