Confronting the Nation brings together twelve of celebrated historian George L. Mosse’s most important essays to explore competing forms of European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mosse coins the term “civic religion” to describe how nationalism, especially in Germany and France, simultaneously inspired and disciplined the populace through the use of rituals and symbols. The definition of citizenship shaped by this nationalism, however, frequently excluded Jews, who were stereotyped as outsiders who sought to undermine the national community. With keen attention to liberal forms of nationalism, Mosse examines the clash of aspirational visions of an inclusive nation against cultural registers of nativist political ideologies. 

Mosse considers a broad range of topics, from Nazi book burnings to Americans’ search for unifying national symbols during the Great Depression, exploring how the development of particular modes of art, architecture, and mass movements served nationalist agendas by dictating who was included in the image of the nation. These essays retain their significance today in their examination of the cultural and social implications of contemporary nationalism. A new critical introduction by Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of history at Tel Aviv University, situates Mosse’s analysis within its historiographical context.

George L. Mosse (1918–99) was a legendary scholar, teacher, and mentor. A refugee from Nazi Germany, in 1955 he joined the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was both influential and popular. Mosse was an early leader in the study of modern European cultural and intellectual history, the study of fascism, and the history of sexuality and masculinity. Over his career he authored more than two dozen books.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Critical Introduction by Shulamit Volkov 

Introduction: Confronting the Nation
Part I: The Nation Displays Itself
1. National Anthems: The Nation Militant
2. National Self-Representation during the 1930s in Europe and the United States
3. Community in the Thought of Nationalism, Fascism, and the Radical Right
4. Political Style and Political Theory: Totalitarian Democracy Revisited
5. Fascism and the French Revolution
6. The Political Culture of Italian Futurism
7. Bookburning and Betrayal by the German Intellectuals

Part II: The Jews and the Modern Nation
8. The Jews and the Civic Religion of Nationalism 
9. Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability
10. German Jews and Liberalism in Retrospect
11. Max Nordau: Liberalism and the New Jew 
12. Gershom Scholem as a German Jew

Notes
Index