Interview with Jost Hermand

Narrator: Jost Hermand

Interviewer: John Tortorice

Date: July 1, 2020

Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen

[Begin Track 1.]

Hermand: A long time ago I gave a long talk on George--

Tortorice: Yes. Yes.

Hermand: They --.

Tortorice: Well, it's-

Hermand: I don't know anything about him, but I wanted to have the facts. It was a very interesting conversation--.

Tortorice: Good morning. It's July 1, 2020. I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, with Professor Jost Hermand, emeritus from the German department at UW Madison. Professor Hermand, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with me. So, you just mentioned that you did an interview with George for the talk- do you have a copy of that?

Hermand: It must have been in the '80s. I think Wolfgang Benz, you know Wolfgang Benz

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: He invited me to give a talk about Jews in Berlin. And I recommended Arnold Zweig, a biography of[Arnold Zweig?. He said, "Well, this is well known. Do you have any other one that's possible? Of course. And then I did this [Interview with George Mosse].

Tortorice: And then I know over the years you gave a number of talks on George and his family. You gave one--.

Hermand: Two years ago.

Tortorice: At the, yes, you also gave one, I recall, in, must have been in '92 or something at a conference on the German-Jewish dialog. Do you recall that when you gave a talk at the University Club? I recall you did that.

Hermand: I don't remember. Maybe that was the same one in English--I gave one in German.

Tortorice: Probably. Yes. Yes. And I think that has been published in the--

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: So you have really given a number of talks on [Mosse/s] you know, so let's go back. So you arrived in Madison, what year did you arrive in Madison?

Hermand: Two years after George arrived. I remember George came here in '56.

Tortorice: Yes. Correct.

Hermand: And I came in '58.

Tortorice: Did your family, your family is from Berlin, know of George's family? Where did your family live in Berlin?

Hermand: In [Lumanstrasse]

Tortorice: Okay. [Lumanstrasse]. And did your parents subscribe to any of the Mosse publications that you know of, were they--.

Hermand: No, my parents were extremely poor during the Third Reich. My father was a very intelligent man, had the German [unclear] and everything. But then 00:03:00his father died early. And therefore he was a worker and then he was a clerk, I think, in a factory. And he was an anti-fascist, the same as my mother. And therefore he didn't move up, he didn't join the party in the '30s. And therefore he stayed poor in the '30s.

Tortorice: I remember this from your memoir. And of course, many of the newspapers were very targeted to specific audiences in Berlin in those years in particular. And of course this would have been before the '33 that they would have had any access to Mosse publications.

Hermand: No.

Tortorice: And they really didn't. Yeah. So they didn't know of the family name.

Hermand: No, they didn't.

Tortorice: And you really didn't.

Hermand: They moved to Berlin in '33.

Tortorice: Oh, they did. Okay.

Hermand: And they lived in Kessel before I was born. And then I was three years old when they moved to Berlin.

Tortorice: Okay. And so then you did--

Hermand: That was a special thing because he was working for a textile factory, huge textile factory, in Kessel. And Berlin, all the textile industry was handled by the Jewish people. And they had to close of course. And therefore this company sent him as [unclear] director [unclear] Berlin in their office, in their branch.

Tortorice: Mm hmm. That is true with Italy, too, also, that the textile industry was largely Jewish. Yeah. So, you didn't know the Mosse name. Your family didn't before the war--

Hermand: No. No.

Tortorice: --even though in the Twenties they were so prominent. So when did you first hear about the Mosses? Did you read about them?

Hermand: I didn't know anything about German Jews. After the war, I studied in Marburg as a [unclear] and then I got [unclear] in '49, and then in 1950 I studied [unclear] for five years. And there was no talk about the twentieth century. I studied history and German literature. There was no talk. It all stopped at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them were former Nazis, the professors. They couldn't be replaced in the humanities because most of them were already rather conservative people before '33. Most of them joined the Nazi Party. And therefore they had to stay in, basically. Otherwise there would have been no humanities (laughs). They had to. They had to use the old Nazis. These 00:06:00people all lied to us, of course, and said they were in the resistance movement. And we didn't care. We were not interested in politics as students in the early '50s. No.

Tortorice: So essentially this whole part of your education--

Hermand: I didn't know anything about the Jews at the time. I knew very little about fascism. I was not interested in that. All the students in the philosophy or history, or in German literature, would not be interested in politics. No.

Tortorice: Well that, as you well know, has a long history in German culture.

Hermand: Because in my field in German studies, in the Weimar Republic, there was no leftist and no Jew professor in the field before '33. There was one only in Heidelberg, and he was a German nationalist. (laughs) He died, fortunately, in 32.

Tortorice: Everyone had essentially been fired and had left or went into, well, hiding.

Hermand: They didn't have to fire them in '33. There were no Jews in the field of German studies.

Tortorice: Even in the '20s.

Hermand: No.

Tortorice: That's amazing. That's quite extraordinary.

Hermand: They studied art history or things like this where they would do French and Italian art. But in German, you had to do German art. And that enforced the nationalism.

Tortorice: That's really, because when you think of the extraordinary legacy of those people in those other fields, like Kanterowicz and all of these people, it's amazing. Quite extraordinary. So you arrived in Madison in '58.

Hermand: That means I'd never seen a Jew before I came to Madison in '58. In the Nazi period, I didn't see any. And then after '45, Germany was what they called Judenfrei there were no Jews. There were no Jewish professors in universities.

Tortorice: And you really didn't know anything about them, because you didn't talk about them, and your education certainly didn't have any--

Hermand: Not a topic in the field of history, that was not a topic. So I saw the first Jews here in '58, '59, when I came to Madison. And they were all German Jews. (laughs) They were all emigrants.

Tortorice: I remember that you wrote this article about six German exiles that I met at UW.

Hermand: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there was one here in the German department. [Dana F???] was his name. Do you know about him?

Tortorice: Yes. Yes.

Hermand: Yes. He was close to George. He was gay. And they were both extremely afraid that anyone would notice.

Tortorice: And of course he was a follower of..

Hermand: Oh, Stefan George.

Tortorice: Which would have fascinated George, of course.

Hermand: Well, Stefan George was the only posh? conservative movement in Germany which was not anti-Semitic. And quite a number of members of the Stefan George circle came to this country here after '33.

Tortorice: Well, and a number of the prominent people were Jewish, such as Kanterowicz and a number of others.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: The idea that they weren't anti-Semitic-- I think kind of towards the end, well, his [Stefan George's] influence on Nazism certainly can be documented. But that's another story. Yeah, there was a new book on him that came out a few years ago that I thought was very good. Especially about those later years. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good book. So, you, yes, that's right. You had this confrontation with this, what was his name? The [Stefan] George follower that was here on the faculty?

Hermand: Werner Vordtriede?

Tortorice: Vordtriede. Yes.

Hermand: He was half Jewish. Yes, the father was a Jew therefore the name Vordtriede. His mother was a leading Marxist in the Weimar Republic. I think Kathe? was her name. She was an intellectual. She published a left wing newspaper in Germany before '33. She also went to New York later. He didn't see her too often. He hated everything on the left. He had a very complex relationship to his mother. Because that's the reason why he had to leave Germany, had to come to this country, because he was mischling. Very, very complex man. Very intelligent man. He was the only one I could talk to here when I came to the UW. My English was very limited at the time, and therefore [unclear] really became the person I could have intelligent conversations with.

We both, the first time we met, very interesting. He looked at me. He saw that I was a leftist, which he hated. And I immediately saw that he was a [Swiftenborger?] arch conservative German nationalist. And [unclear] We didn't 00:12:00talk about it. But it was obviously-- if you don't tell them that you are leftist, I will not tell them that you are gay. (laughs) It was basically that. (laughs)

Tortorice: Well, and you know, I didn't realize that he and George had--

Hermand: Because both of these things were kind of dangerous.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: The department didn't know that I was a leftist. Didn't know anything about Germany. These old American professors here, they didn't even know that Berlin was a divided city or something. No. And they'd never been to Germany Nobody in the German department, their German was bad. And there was nobody in the German department, among the professors, it was a much smaller department because German was not one of the big departments at that time. (laughs) [The totalitarian??] almost no graduate students.

Tortorice: I didn't realize that he and George were friends. I remember George talking--

Hermand: They once even went to Germany together. They traveled in Germany. He told me that both of them had visited Salem. That is [unclear] remember.

Tortorice: There are so many parts of George's life that he--

Hermand: This [unclear] while he was a full professor. But he wanted to go back to Germany. He hated the United States. Therefore he saved every cent. He lived in the attic of the Faculty Club in a very small room and saved every cent. After three or four years here, after I came, that's in the early '60s, one day at the departmental meeting he got up and said, "I will leave this country. I am going back to Germany, to the land of culture." And they were all shocked. He even said this in German.

Tortorice: They probably didn't understand him. (laughter)

Hermand: Yeah. No, they were shocked. He also came then to my office and said, "Mr. Hermand," at that time, we didn't use first names, the '50s, '60s, it was still "Mr." He said, "From now on, from this day on, we are as enemies." Left and didn't say goodbye. Left and I've never seen him again.

Tortorice: All based on politics.

Hermand: And went back to Munich to the city of culture.

Tortorice: I remember George saying that he had these long, filed fingernails. (laughs) He made George nervous.

Hermand: He was intelligent. He was extremely intelligent. I could talk to him about German music, about everything, I suppose. He was extremely intelligent. But I also found out that when he was nineteen years old, he already had a 00:15:00correspondence in French with Andre Gide, the leading gay author in France. As a nineteen year-old young man. Extremely intelligent man. But on this very high level of culture, aesthetics. And he was a translator. He translated all of the original, what was his name? It's escaped me. Well, he also translated English poetry and John Donne and [Marvel?] and all that. He was a translator. Yeats, he did an entire translation.

Tortorice: You would think after Nazism, that approach to aesthetics and culture would have been somewhat suspect. But in America, they would have just thought this was wonderful.

Hermand: He was into high modernism.

Tortorice: Yeah. Yeah. So you really didn't know anything about the Mosses, or about George, his work really had been [road noise obscures words] modern history.

Hermand: No, I didn't know anything.

Tortorice: So, when did you first meet George?

Hermand: I met him in the spring of 1960. The German department asked me to do the German play that year. They always had the German play. French, Spanish and German, in the original language, in the Play Circle. [unclear] German. They said, "Do Schiller." I said, "No, I hate Schiller." And I did one play by Brecht, the Mother Courage. They said do it, because they didn't know who Brecht is. (laughs) Brecht was the leading communist author.

And after the premiere, I remember, [unclear] I spent for the entire semester rehearsing it. I think it was a great performance. And I came down and there were kind of four or five émigré professors standing in the [unclear]. And they said, "Mr. Hermand, good to know you, you are one of us. You are a member of [unclear]." George was among them. That's the first time I met him. And they all spoke German.

Tortorice: Did you and George always speak German together?

Hermand: Only German. Only German. Oh, yeah. At parties, when everybody was speaking English, then of course. But in all the private meetings, we only spoke German. With a slight Berlin intonation sometimes, and then we laughed about it. (laughs)

Tortorice: I remember being with George in Berlin once and he was speaking in German. And people would be just so impressed that he had this old accent. 00:18:00(laughs) You know, the 1920s.

Hermand: Childhood language.

Tortorice: Yeah. They'd be, "Oh my gosh!" And then you and George and Elizabeth would speak German.

Hermand: Yeah, and then we met and we invited him. And he met Elizabeth and he--well, you know, he didn't like all women. But he liked her, because her father was a leading anti-fascist. Elizabeth's father was in Buchenwald, you know, he was in the concentration camps. She had a horrible youth under fascism. She was five years older than I. She was twenty at the end, and she didn't see her father, first in '33 he was in prison, and then afterwards he was in Buchenwald. That impressed him, that she was coming from a family like this. It also impressed him that she was kind of from an upper middle-class family, much like he himself.

Tortorice: Well and he enjoyed being with her because he loved her cooking--

Hermand: That, too.

Tortorice: --which was the kind of cooking that he really--

Hermand: [unclear]

Tortorice: And he thought she was great.

Hermand: That's what we had at Christmas.

Tortorice: And I recall that he was very impressed with her work on the environment.

Hermand: Yeah. That comes later, in the '80s.

Tortorice: In the '80s.

Hermand: She was a friend of Kathy Falk and they worked at the Environmental Decade. She joined them when they founded. It was Anderson and [Figer?] at the time, the two young lawyers. And she would, as an idealist, not being paid for it, she worked in the Decade office.

Tortorice: That's great. So you met in '60. The German department was not a nationally known department at that point.

Hermand: No.

Tortorice: It sounds as if it took a number of years to really build the faculty up there and hire some good people.

Hermand: It did. It took ten years.

Tortorice: Ten years.

Hermand: Basically, late '60s, of course, and [unclear] in '70, and supported the German question, also. They [unclear] little bit more. And then the anti-Vietnam demonstrations. The students were very interested in things German at that time. Suddenly we had a flood of graduate students who didn't want to study Italian or French or something, but German, they were interested. Marcuse, of course, was the one. And they discovered the Frankfurt school, and Marx, yeah. That was basically. And then they said okay, they have two German states 00:21:00with two different social system. That's interesting. And they found something, they found Germans at the extreme, politically extreme, to be interesting.

Tortorice: And you and George then started a friendship in early, starting in '60.

Hermand: But it was still Mr. Hermand, Mr. Mosse then it was. Well, he was an old school and I was an old school. It took about ten years that we said Jost and George to each other. (laughs)

Tortorice: Amazing. So in those early--

Hermand: And it was not common, first, talking on first name basis. But basically also as a of the student movement at the time. Suddenly we all addressed each other by first names.

Tortorice: Well, and the power of respectability, you know. I don't think we have any idea the power of that ideology and the remnants of that, which of course is still here. But it was very potent still in those years.

Hermand: Yeah. Exactly.

Tortorice: In those years in the '60s, as you got to know each other, did you bounce ideas off each other? Did you influence each other?

Hermand: Oh, yes. We both, at the same time, we both were working on a big book. The origins of the ideology is the major book about origins of fascism. And I wrote the book, the cultural history of the Wilhelminian Reich. And I also worked on pre-fascism in the [Wilhelminian Reich. That established kind of the intellectual interest as an image of, we're both working on the same, on the same topics.

Tortorice: And so this initiated a real intellectual engagement--

Hermand: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Very strong. Very strong. He influenced me. I influenced him. We also had debates about fascism, everything. But no, that was extremely important.

Tortorice: And, well, in some ways, essential to have a colleague like that.

Hermand: Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: That you could bounce ideas off.

Hermand: I didn't have, in the '60s, I didn't have any people, well, my English was still limited. At that time, I still thought I would go back to Germany.

Tortorice: Really?

Hermand: Yeah, I didn't plan to stay in this country. And I got the first offers from Germany also in the middle of the '60s. But I didn't accept that. Because I got the offer from Harvard, and therefore they gave me the Vilas professorship. And then I said okay, I'll stay here for the Vilas professorship.

Tortorice: Pretty good deal.

Hermand: Yeah. And not to go back to Germany. I think George was also influential in that, that I could get the Vilas professor. He and Fred 00:24:00Harrington who was the chair of the history of the department, [President of UW] they, I think, managed it. I was very young. I was thirty-seven. All the other Vilas professors were in their sixties.

Tortorice: Well, I think in those years, because of Harrington in particular, and George's close friendship with Harrington, he had a lot of influence on those questions. Because I know he got Birute. The second Bascom. He was the first Bascom. And she became, and that really was not welcomed in her department. Because she was quite young then, too. But he recognized that she was really--

Hermand: Who?

Tortorice: Birute. Did you know Birute? She was in Spanish. She was a close friend of George. I think you may have met her. But that's really interesting. And then, of course, he himself got outside offers and decided to stay here. I think he liked the idea of a public university, and he liked the kind of students that he could mold.

Hermand: He had certainly lots of graduate students and I had certainly lots of graduate students.

Tortorice: Yes, yes.

Hermand: All the new graduate students in the German department, in those days they all did their dissertation with me.

Tortorice: He really didn't want to go back to, he didn't want to go to Harvard. He didn't like the elitist, he didn't like the--

Hermand: I didn't like the elitism, either.

Tortorice: Exactly.

Hermand: I went there and left again.

Tortorice: Yes. So you both--

Hermand: That was 1966.

Tortorice: Sixty-six, okay. So you both started to attract graduate students, and you had, you built up the German department. The history department already had a reputation--

Hermand: That was a good department. The German department was a bad department. Basically I brought over to it Reinholt Grimm, German professor at the end of the '60s. Klaus Berghahn and then I hired David Bathrick and Evelyn Beck in Women and German and [unclear] German and the two journals, they did Women in German and New German Critique, department next to, after five years, (laughs) these five yearbooks and journals.

Tortorice: And your national reputation, national reputation went way up just by that kind of strategic hiring, and smart hiring. And you started to attract some great students. And then George, of course, in the German department, well, in the history department, had a number of professors that worked in central European history. They had George and--

Hermand: Yes, they had Ted Hammerow

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: I was quite close, in a strange way, to Ted, he lived here.

Tortorice: That's right.

Hermand: At the end of his life. He married Diane Franzen.

Tortorice: I remember that. Yes. I used to see them walking with their kayak. Then they would drive, they'd go out in the kayak.

Hermand: He was interested in me. I even gave him my book, A Hitler Youth In Poland, since the family was from Poland, he was interested in that. And he wrote me a very moving letter about that. He thought it was a very interesting book. But I had a very strange and difficult relationship with Ted Hamerow. He was an arch-conservative, of course. George and Ted didn't like each other. (laughs)

Tortorice: They really clashed, didn't they? It was--

Hermand: I know. I've been on oral defenses of dissertations in the History Dept., the two of them, they were always like--

Tortorice: Well, and I gather, George told me, that Ted used to give his students Fs. He gave Steve Aschheim an F. He gave Paul Brienes, all of George's students that would take a course with Hamerow would get Fs.

Hermand: Ted saw in George a journalist. And he was a real scholar working in archives and all that.

Tortorice: Exactly. I think that kind of what George would call antiquarian history. As if facts actually mattered all that much in the kind of history that--(laughs)

Hermand: He was an interesting man. For instance, he was well known in East Germany because of his social, well, he had an approach of social history. He wrote about different classes and their attitudes for [unclear] and all these things. He was more liked in East Germany than George Mosse.

Tortorice: Oh, I'm sure. In Germany in general.

Hermand: He was kind of the dubious liberal for them. But Hammerow was for them the real scholar.

Tortorice: Real history, yes.

Hermand: He once asked, he said, "Do you have any good relationships with the DDR? Do you know people there? Could you perhaps see to it that I could teach at Leipzig for one semester?" Very strange. But also, the Jewish question came out between him and me. I remember once we met and he said, "Well, are you going to Germany for a conference?" I said yes. I was very close to my best friend, German-Jewish Julius Schoeps. And I attended many, and I gave lectures at many of these German-Jewish conferences [unclear] And he said, "Well, where are you 00:30:00going?" [unclear] He said, "Don't go." I said, why not? He said, "Everything between German and Jews are all lies! And I know," he said. "My wife is German." (laughs) I think he hated his wife. I think when they married her as a soldier, in Germany shortly after the war.

Tortorice: (laughs) Well I know that, also with Ted, this whole, the fact that George came from such an elite German Jewish background. And he was Ostjuden, I mean, I think--

Hermand: [unclear] Yeah.

Tortorice: But then Ted wrote a very complimentary article about George once that I read. I think he did in a sense make a bit of amends towards George. And then--

Hermand: He was a very complex man.

Tortorice: Yes. Very smart.

Hermand: He was smart. And he was a good scholar in his field.

Tortorice: Oh, yes, he was.

Hermand: Absolutely.

Tortorice: So you and George started to attract excellent graduate students. And did you collaborate on training students? I mean, would you be on some of the committees in the history department, and George would be on committees in your department? I mean, was there an interaction on that level?

Hermand: Well, all defenses I have been in the history department, with students from George and from Ted. Because I was the historian of Germany, I was the cultural historian. [unclear]

Tortorice: So you did work together on training students and mentoring students and--

Hermand: I invited, when we started the Wisconsin Workshop, I immediately invited George. He gave two or three lectures on fascism and [unclear].

Tortorice: Well I remember how collaborative you and him were--

Hermand: Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: --and others on shaping those and bringing in people like--

Hermand: Oh, it was very inclusive in the German department.

Tortorice: Yes, it was. So, was he influential in some of the hiring decisions that you--

Hermand: No.

Tortorice: He didn't. So how was Steakley identified as a potential? Did he apply?

Hermand: He applied. Yeah.

Tortorice: Okay. The reason I ask is because Chris George was very friendly with 00:33:00Sander Gilman.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: And their work includes each other.

Hermand: I know. I know.

Tortorice: And Jim was really one of the first to write on that, the subject of--

Hermand: Yeah, on gay history.

Tortorice: Yes, and on gay history and German--

Hermand: And he published the book on the German gay liberation movement.

Tortorice: Yes. Which was something he was very focused on and involved with.

Hermand: That was his audience.

Tortorice: Yeah, really. In Germany, he, he had an influence there. Because he was very involved, as you know, in the protests, in the gay liberation movement.

Hermand: In the department, he did the conventional courses.

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: He didn't do any courses on gay literature.

Tortorice: Right, he did, yeah. Although he was the first openly gay person, professor hired in the US. It was very bold for your department to hire him. And so my question is, George's work was moving in that direction of gender history, where he became a great pioneer in gender history, really. And Jim greatly influenced George's direction there. I mean--

Hermand: I don't know--

Tortorice: He did.

Hermand: I didn't know.

Tortorice: Well, if--

Hermand: I didn't know how close they were.

Tortorice: Oh, very close. You know.

Hermand: Okay.

Tortorice: And Jim, well, he's fulsomely acknowledged as the key person that worked with George on Nationalism and Sexuality, in the acknowledgements. As you know, Jim was always very behind the scenes. He was a great networker. And he's helped so many people, and never got the credit, frankly, I think that he deserved. And this was a case of this.

Hermand: George really liked him. He had such a tremendous knowledge of history in Germany. Which he didn't have [George], Jim. Whenever I had a problem with things like this, I always asked Jim and he knew everything.

Tortorice: Exactly!

Hermand: Because I worked on Arnold Schweig's interest in gay studies, I talked to Jim and he had everything. He had the most obscure journals [unclear] (laughs)

Tortorice: I know. It's just extraordinary. He had this ability, he has this ability to just collect all of this information--

Hermand: Exactly.

Tortorice: --and get his hands on it.

Hermand: I remember when Jim got tenure. I had a conversation about that with George. He said, "Well, is he a real teacher?" He said, "He should be a bibliographer in the Kinsey Institute in Indiana." He said, "That would be the 00:36:00best place for him. He has this tremendous knowledge. I don't know how good he is as a teacher."

Tortorice: You know, I think he was a good, from what I've heard from students, he turned out to be a very good teacher.

Hermand: No, no, but George admired the tremendous knowledge Jim had. Not just Magnus Hirschfeld, but everything. And he said, "He should be the bibliographer in the Kinsey Institute."

Tortorice: Well, when they would meet, Jim was very engaged. They became very engaged with each other. And I always felt that George picked Jim's brain. Like he would say, "Tell me about this, and tell me about that. What's going on here?" And it really did, I think, have a huge influence on George that isn't really known, I think.

Hermand: I never talked to George about gay problems. I talked to Jim often about gay problems. I translated his book into German.

Tortorice: Really? I didn't realize that.

Hermand: Yeah. "The Friends of the Kaiser".

Tortorice: Yes. That little book. Yeah.

Hermand: This is my translation. I am the translator. I was still planning on going back to Germany. And my wife, Elizabeth, she also wanted to go back. He translated for me and I translated for him. It was a very nice relationship, [unclear] on this level.

Tortorice: Oh, yes, yes. I recall that. You worked on books together. The one on Mozart, on music. I think that there was--

Hermand: I was also interested in [unclear] I remember one of my birthday celebrations, George and Jim were both sitting there next to each other and both gave talks. And Jim gave a talk about Franz Schuler, "Absolutely Gay?" George was sitting next to him. He didn't like that, that Jim was so open about it. He was not that open in those years.

Tortorice: Yeah, I think it was probably, also the fact that he didn't talk to you about gay questions was that--

Hermand: It was obvious he knew that I knew.

Tortorice: Oh, yeah.

Hermand: And that was it. That wasn't a topic of our conversations.

Tortorice: Again, that respectability. And he came, you know, that German Jewish, they had to be uber, ultra-respectable to protect themselves. And I 00:39:00think that he came from that background. He had that kind of strait jacket of respectability. And of course, he was fingered to the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he came to this country and realized that antisemitism, racism, was just such a palpable issue. Immediately. They went to a resort and they weren't allowed in. He realized that this was a huge problem here. And on top of that, being gay. So you had these two issues at a time that probably was the, in terms of being gay, the most persecuted time in human history, you know? So I think that would have made him very reticent in those years.

And I think Jim played a big role in really helping George emerge from the closet, because he was an example.

Hermand: In '50s, '60s, he was afraid to lose his job.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: If they would have found out, you know, how the situation was.

Tortorice: Right. He did things like he got this Dean Zillman fired who was so anti-gay, and who used to have these purges at Wisconsin. And the early '60s was the last one. And he got him fired. That was part of his retention package with Harrington. He said, "I'll stay, but you've got to fire Zillman." Which he did.

Hermand: Didn't Harrington also hire Harvey Goldberg?

Tortorice: He was very, yeah. And I think George was, too.

Hermand: It was a strange relationship, George with Harvey Goldberg.

Tortorice: Oh, God, yes.

Hermand: It was the competition of the two very popular professors. (laughs)

Tortorice: Yeah, that's a whole other, yes. And both gay, both Jewish.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: And that's a question of these two gay Jewish men having an incredible influence on the next generation.

Hermand: Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: And with charisma and a kind of--

Hermand: Harvey Goldberg had a tremendous influence.

Tortorice: Yes. Oh, yeah. George, too.

Hermand: All my students were all Harvey, he's more fun?, than for George.

Tortorice: Well, yes. Because that was a kind of history that was more like, well, I shouldn't say, but it was more like a satisfying story. He could just make history so satisfying.

Hermand: I [unclear] brought that to him.

Tortorice: I knew Harvey and admired him. He was a very complex person and a damaged person in many ways. He had been enormously fat as a young man. And then just shrank down to a kind of just wisp of a man. And very difficult to be in 00:42:00that position that he was in, too, as a kind of guru. A guru that George said would sneak in the back door of the humanities building so nobody-- (laughs) But we shouldn't go into Harvey. But, yes. So, but with Jim, I think that he did have this amazing influence on George, and also on--

Hermand: I didn't know [too well?] Jim never mentioned George to me when we met.

Tortorice: That's quite extraordinary. Because the fact that you and Jim would speak about gay issues, but then you and George didn't.

Hermand: And all the gay graduate students all did their dissertations with me. That was also important.

Tortorice: That's very interesting.

Hermand: They all did their dissertations with me.

Tortorice: Do you think it was because they were attracted to a kind of--

Hermand: They knew that I was extremely liberal in this respect. Others in the department were not. Reinholt Grimm, the other major professor in the department was absolutely anti-feminist and anti-gay.

Tortorice: Well and I know I did an interview with Jim and he talked about some of these, the challenges that he had in that department, and some of the people that he clashed with. He was a survivor. And he had heavy wounds.

Hermand: It was very difficult. It was very difficult to hire him. I remember this executive meeting very well. There were two finalists. One was Dorothy Rosenberg, a very bright, intelligent young Jewish woman. And there was Jim. The two. The graduate students, after having conversations with them, favored Jim, pretty much. And therefore I also favored him. I was not against Jewish feminists at the time. No, I favored him. And there were two members of the German department sitting there smoking. Smokey Zeifert and also Thomas Oschman? so arch-consevative. They didn't even know what gay means. They were that old-fashioned. His book was on the table. And I think Smokey Zeifert thought that was a literary movement. They didn't even recognize that. Rosenberg is a woman and let's hire Dorothy Rosenberg because she is a member of a minority. There were very few women at the time as professors.

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: [unclear] no but he said, "No, Jim Steakley's also a member of a minority." And then [Thomas?] said, "No, he is a man." She didn't even understand that.

Hermand: Not here in the department in these early years of the department. I and David Bathrick were all for him.

Tortorice: Yeah. Yeah.

Hermand: And no real enemies in the department, except for these people who didn't know what gay is.

Tortorice: Right. Yeah. And I'm sure George was supportive and got to know him right away. Because I think that it must have been, it just seems to me that this kind of consilience of George moving into this field and Jim being here and George knowing Sander Gilman so well, you know, that it seems, your department really moved in a very groundbreaking direction with that hire. And it sounds like you were--

Hermand: Supporting feminism too.

Tortorice: Yeah. Right, you really--

Hermand: Supporting left studies and everything.

Tortorice: Yes, a really great history. Very much--

Hermand: It became the most progressive German department in this country in the early '70s.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. And really very much in keeping with the, well, reputation of Wisconsin as a university, you know. Because the history department always had that kind of radical reputation, you know.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: So that's fascinating.

Hermand: The German department, for almost one hundred years, was the leading German department in this country, and therefore the biggest. Because of the Wisconsin tradition of many Germans in this state.

Tortorice: Yes. Yes. And very traditional before that time. So, getting back to your friendship with George, now you've said that he was your best friend.

Hermand: I had two good friends. But they didn't like each other. It was George and it was Felix Pollak.

Tortorice: Oh, Felix. Yes.

Hermand: Felix Pollak was the other good friend. He was kind of more in the field of literature. Felix was kind of a [MSD?], I would say. Well, he was a liberal, kind of a soft liberal.

Tortorice: A poet.

Hermand: Yeah. And always talking about Auschwitz. George didn't like that.

Tortorice: He really didn't.

Hermand: No, he didn't. But he was always involved very much about Vienna and on 00:48:00and on. And Auschwitz.

Tortorice: This would bore George.

Hermand: Yeah, yeah. No, he didn't like it. No, he expected to, all my friends were Jewish at that time. The best friend I had was in Tel Aviv. And Hans Mayer was the other one.

Tortorice: I've heard of him.

Hermand: Yeah, the last book is now in production is dedicated to George Mosse and Hans Mayer.

Tortorice: That's great.

Hermand: I introduced Hans Mayer to George Mosse.

Tortorice: Really?

Hermand: Yeah. He was here. The University of Milwaukee gave him an honorary PhD. He was in the institute there for two or three semesters. And he gave two talks at the Wisconsin Workshop and came over to Madison often. I was always driving him here to there. And I introduced him to George. It was one of the most memorable days I remember. On a Sunday morning, Hans Mayer was a most famous man at the time. Possibly gay as you know. Published his book The Outsiders, gays, and Jews.

Tortorice: Which probably influenced George, too.

Hermand: Oh, yeah. That was a very successful, very successful book. The most successfully book Hans Mayer ever published. And he published a lot.

Tortorice: What year was that, that that came out?

Hermand: --He wrote that book in Milwaukee, I know.

Tortorice: He did?

Hermand: Yeah. During that time. It was now when the two met. And I introduced them in the morning at nine. And at four in the afternoon, they were still sitting together with a cup of coffee. Because it was so fascinating. They didn't talk about gayness, but they talked about fascism.

Tortorice: And about The Outsider and history.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: Because of course, George's work really went in that direction, also was very resonant.

Hermand: Mayer talked about his exile experience and all that and mentioned his best friend. Oh, that was a story. He mentioned his best friend in Paris. Moritz Rapaport was the leading foreign correspondent for [unclear] And gay too. I think he had a gay relationship with Rapaport. He didn't say it but it was obvious how much he loved Rapaport, and Goldberg was just writing a biography of 00:51:00Moritz Rapaport. They should call him. They called him. And Harvey Goldberg came. And then they talked in French, English, German.

Tortorice: That must have been a conversation.

Hermand: For hours. And Harvey asked Mayer how was he as a human being? And Mayer said, "Well, like all these dirty East European Jews," he said, "you couldn't touch him, he was so dirty. But intelligent! Intelligent." (laughs)

Tortorice: Oh my God.

Hermand: The same attitude toward these East European Jews.

Tortorice: Which Harvey was. So I mean, he must have been really shocked by that.

Hermand: So dirty that you couldn't touch them. But intelligent! (laughs)

Tortorice: Oh my goodness. I wonder if there's any correspondence between him and George.

Hermand: I don't think so.

Tortorice: No? By the way, where is your archive? Do you have your correspondence? Do you have all your--

Hermand: Yes, I still have them. I don't know what to do with them.

Tortorice: That should go to the university.

Hermand: To the university? Or to the Marburg archive?

Tortorice: Well, you should decide. I could help you if you want it to go here.

Hermand: No, that's okay.

Tortorice: I mean, you really should do that, because--

Hermand: There is an archive of me already at UW.

Tortorice: Oh, there is?

Hermand: Yeah. The UW Archives.

Tortorice: Well, somebody will--

Hermand: And they filmed some of my lecture courses [unclear]

Tortorice: Oh, I'll have to look. I didn't realize that.

Hermand: Yeah, I didn't have to teach that semester, because they showed the films.

Tortorice: Oh, that's great. That's great. But this material you have here, you have someone that will make sure it goes to--

Hermand: I don't have too many letters by George. When he went to Jerusalem, I suppose he sent me postcards. But that was it.

Tortorice: You know, he really didn't correspond about ideas generally, unless somebody asked him a specific question.

Hermand: My long correspondence is with Hans Mayer, also and others. And German authors. But not really too much with George.

Tortorice: Well, you saw each other here and talked.

Hermand: We saw each other so often.

Tortorice: And he loved that conversation. Gossip. You know, he loved gossiping about the German department and about the university and the history department.

Hermand: There was one great moment, at this one conference I mentioned where Jim talked about the gay trooper and leader. And George? He talked about fascism. And George [unclear] well, we only disagreed on the Wars of Liberation. George saw in that a pre-fascist movement. [unclear] and all that. And I told 00:54:00him no, that it wasn't Social Democratic but a movement for freedom in Germany and unity of Germany. No, he said, it's pre-fascism. And then in his portraits, the democratic spirit, the paintings of this period, Kaspar David Friedrich which was the most important German painter of the early 19th century. He was one of those nationalists. And George then in his lecture, said Jost, "You're right. I stand corrected. I'll change." That was a great statement. You're right, it was not a pre-fascist movement.

Tortorice: Well, he had the ability to change his mind. Unlike many academics. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Because he did. He would accept the fact that his ideas changed. And he liked being challenged.

Hermand: [unclear] "I stand corrected."

Tortorice: That must have been very--a moment to remember.

Hermand: Yes. Yeah.

Tortorice: Yeah, there were a number of subjects that he wrote on earlier in his career that he changed his ideas about. So would you and George, if you wrote some, like if you had a draft of a book, would you send it to him and vice versa?

Hermand: No.

Tortorice: Or you would just send the published book.

Hermand: I'd send the published. We talked about it, but we didn't exchange manuscripts.

Tortorice: But you feel that you both influenced each other in your ideas?

Hermand: A little bit.

Tortorice: Or was it more like a give and take?

Hermand: Very much at the beginning. The Crisis of German Ideology. I did the Wilhelminian culture, and I had an introduction of 120 pages on the pre-fascist kind of tendencies during the period. That is, of course, something we discussed. And we talked about the youth movement. Of course he was always interested in the youth movement.

Tortorice: He was.

Hermand: Yes. And the Wandewogel, and all that. He was very interested. And he was interested in my work of course.

Tortorice: Well then, I know you gave him that one Fidus illustration.

Hermand: Oh, oh, I did.

Tortorice: Yes. Right. That he appreciated.

Hermand: I thought that, I published it in [Petersburg?]. Yeah, we both worked on [unclear] Rubenstein, which is the archive of the German Wandewogel. I worked 00:57:00a few years that and he came in and said, "Oh, you're from Madison? Do you know George Mosse? He also was sitting here [unclear]." (laughter)

Tortorice: Were the two of you ever in Berlin together at the same time?

Hermand: Not really, no. No.

Tortorice: That's too bad.

Hermand: We met once, and that was a very memorable day. When he had his eightieth birthday. I was teaching at Munich that semester. If I couldn't be here, they had the banquet here, and the University Club. And then I heard, or and I heard that he got this honorary PhD from the University of Seigen. And that was an historian by the name of Rutige something who wrote a book on German youth movements. And he sent me a letter and said he was writing something about George and he want a statement about him, how he acted. He is a great scholar and so on. And I recommended him for the PhD [unclear]. And I came from [unclear] in Munich and we met in Seigen on that day when he wrote that. It was a big affair. They had a string quartet, everything. An entire afternoon of lectures about Germans and Jews. Yeah. [Chelterson?] was who he liked, one of the younger men who was working on [unclear]. He knew all these younger Germans who [writing on??]. And then at the end of that, he was kind of disturbed. He went up to the podium in German and he said, "Don't ever use the word 'Jews' again." We were all shocked: He said, "There are no Jews. Jew is the term the Nazis use. We're not a [unclear], we're not a race." There are Israelis, there are German Jews and there are American Jews. And I'm proud to be a German Jew."

Tortorice: Extraordinary.

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: He liked being provocative.

Hermand: Of course he loved being provocative.

Tortorice: But you know, that was just a couple of months before he died. He was already very ill, I'm sure. He wasn't feeling--

Hermand: I didn't know that he was that sick. He didn't say anything.

Tortorice: You know, it was amazing. He had this ability to really have, well, physical pain and challenges, but he had this fortitude, which I think came from Salem, perhaps.

Hermand: He wanted to be strong.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: I once tried to help him in his overcoat, No.

Tortorice: I know. He had that. He once told me that his arms had hurt since he was a boy at Hermansburg. He'd always had, you know, he had these physical 01:00:00ailments. But he was so much a person of the mind, you know. (laughs) The body, you might as well forget about the body.

Hermand: His strengths. Oh, absolutely.

Tortorice: Right. And that is very German. It's very much a, because I think he did absorb a lot of the prejudices and stereotypes.

Hermand: And it was extremely important for him, whenever.

Tortorice: Oh, yeah.

Hermand: I once invited him to the German department in the afternoon to give a talk to our graduate students. And, well, he talked and talked. And at the end, one of the graduate students said, "Oh, I'm really sorry. We're all Americans. We have a high heimat. You don't have a high heimat."

He said, "What?! I have a high heimat Salem is my heimat!" He always liked these provocative statements.

Tortorice: He did.

Hermand: And one of [unclear] well he talked so loudly, as you know. He said, "I'm the Hitler of Wisconsin!" Statements like that. (laughs) Hans Meyer was shocked.

Tortorice: Oh my god.

Hermand: "Wait till this afternoon, you will hear," I think it was after my talk when I talked about [unclear], "you will hear a different story! I'm the Hitler of Wisconsin!" (laughs)

Tortorice: Oh, gosh. Yes, he had that, you know, teaching by provocation.

Hermand: Absolutely.

Tortorice: And also irony. Of course, he always had a kind of irony about history in general

Hermand: He never provoked me, you know, we had a very good relationship.

Tortorice: Oh, yeah. It sounds like it.

Hermand: He liked me, I liked him.

Tortorice: He could be aggressive. I think as he got older, he mellowed. But he was a tough teacher to his graduate students.

Hermand: Oh, I can imagine.

Tortorice: He really put them through the wringer. And this was, I think, one of the reasons. You know, one of his first students was a woman, one of his best students, he always said. Margaret Dunleavy, [Donovan] I think her name was. Or Donovan. Margaret Donovan. And she got a job at Vassar. But she decided not to take it because her mother lived here in Whitewater. So she spent her life at Whitewater. And I think this really was, for George, a kind of indication that the kind of teaching that he did, and what he expected from his students, was directed toward only a few students. So he would only--although he had thirty-eight students, he really picked very few, you know. He put them through 01:03:00the wringer to see if they would--

Hermand: I don't remember too many of them. Of course I remember Rabinbach.

Tortorice: Aschheim?

Hermand: Aschheim, of course.

Tortorice: Yes. Right. So, yes. And then he always had all those students that lived with him and kind of were built-in--yes.

Hermand: Steinberg.

Tortorice: Yeah, his couple. They took care of him. Because, as you know, he really didn't exist in the day to day world. George didn't care so much about his surroundings. And he didn't know how to do things. You know, he knew nothing about the daily, I mean, he could never have done what you've done.

Hermand: The best couple I ever had was where the woman Folks? was German and on Sundays she did German food. He was much more German than I.

Tortorice: Well, I think he was very German. Yes. Yes.

Hermand: He was very German. It was also shocking. I remember one thing. Sterling Fishman and Nancy Feingold visited him. I was over there. They came in. And it was shortly before their wedding and they wanted to invite him to attend at the synagogue. And he said no to it.

Tortorice: Really?

Hermand: He said, "No, I'm not going there." And then he said in this very provocative way, he said, "Well, if you really think about it, I'm not American. I'm not Jewish. I'm really German." And they were shocked. Especially Nancy Feingold, who was an orthodox Jew.

Tortorice: I think, yes. I think they always had a bit of a, she was not one to put up with that kind of thing, and she pushed back.

Hermand: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: And then as you know in his later years, Sterling became quite conservative and religious, under, I think under Nancy's influence. And he became very close friends with Ted. And he and George, who had been so close, they kind of drifted a little bit. Now that was, I think, for George, difficult. But you know he, to some extent, he provoked it by doing those kind of things. Not going to their wedding.

Hermand: Oh, that was really very provocative. He said, "I will not attend your wedding."

Tortorice: That is, yeah. Well, I remember him saying that, George loved, of course, stories. And sometimes they weren't necessarily, you know, there was always truth in them, but they weren't necessarily accurate. Which is true to of memory, of course, to some extent. But he said that at Salem, you know, they 01:06:00were only allowed one glass of water a day, because if not they would get the [beer bauch]. And so he said they were all constipated all the time because--

Hermand: They should be good in sports.

Tortorice: Yeah. They had to go out and run every morning in the cold. Did he ever talk about this Kurt Hahn to you? Kurt Hahn?

Hermand: Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, I know all about the Hahn story. Who left Germany then, and was Jewish.

Tortorice: He was Jewish, yes.

Hermand: He was Jewish, He set up a kind of national conservative school, but he was an extreme German, German conservative Jew, this Hahn. Yeah. He went to England and established a new school.

Tortorice: Gordonstone.

Hermand: Yeah. Yeah. Do you know about that?

Tortorice: Which, yes, which Prince Philip--

Hermand: Prince Philip sent his son Charles to it. They're both disciples of Hahn. Both him and Prince Charles.

Tortorice: Well, you know, and then Hahn started that whole Outward Bound thing. You know about that Outward Bound, where they take troubled young men, and they make men out of them by pushing them to the extremes of challenges. And this was all Hahn, who was, as you know--

Hermand: Well, Prince Philip was a bit older, I think, than George, wasn't he?

Tortorice: Hahn?

Hermand: No, no. Prince Philip.

Tortorice: He's a bit younger.

Hermand: Oh, a bit younger.

Tortorice: Just only a few years. George would be like 102 now.

Hermand: Yeah, I think he's 99 now, Prince Philip. But they knew each other. He told me that he visited him in London and talked to him in German.

Tortorice: Yes. They went to a reunion, a Salem reunion. And you know, Prince Philip knew some of those people that George knew in London. Probably through a--

Hermand: Yeah. Paula, Paula, Paula.

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: Did I visit him, in London? Yes. And Paula and George We, went out and looked at London and said London was nice.

Tortorice: Yes. I mean, that was a big part of his life, that London part.

Hermand: Oh, absolutely.

Tortorice: Because he had--

Hermand: Smoking and the pipe and it was all this kind of British attitude he tried to recreate himself.

Tortorice: Yes. And you know there was, David Sabean told me that he thought that George and Paula's husband had an affair. I don't know that that, I never heard of this. But he then after her husband passed, he became kind of, in many 01:09:00ways, the father of her children. He helped them financially a great deal.

Hermand: Yeah, he was very close to Paula.

Tortorice: Yeah. And he had a whole life there, of course, with--

Hermand: And he always told about my friend Paula.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: So that people wouldn't immediately recognize that he was gay.

Tortorice: Yeah. Exactly. And he, you know, he dedicated this book to her. But they were good friends. And they were very funny together. She was very German. She came from--

Hermand: I remember her well.

Tortorice: And her father was a politician in Germany. Weber. Last time I visited with her, she had gotten back this Liebermann portrait of her father from a Dutch museum. And it had taken her ten years to get that back. And there it was. It was huge! It was above her fireplace, you know? (laughs) It's a great painting.

Hermand: I once almost bought one.

Tortorice: Really?

Hermand: One Liebermann portrait. It was hidden in the [unclear] gallery. And they showed it to me. It was Liebermann's portrait of Paul Ehrlich. It was a very important, you know Paul Ehrlich?

Tortorice: Sure, sure.

Hermand: Next to Pasteur? the most important man in this field.

Tortorice: Of course, he knew the Mosses. And George had a sign above his toilet, he had this photo of [Ehrlich?] signed him, to his father or something. (laughs)

Hermand: I think [unclear] family [unclear] to this country. And I think they died out, the family, and it was their commission. And [unclear] I had a very good relationship with this man. He said, "Do you want it?" I think you would [unclear] ten thousand dollars. Which at that time was--

Tortorice: Quite a bit of money.

Hermand: Quite a bit of money. And I was there [unclear] Liebermann and it was no [unclear] it was kind of the German professional looking down (growling) like this, probably. And Elizabeth said, "Don't buy it. I don't want it in my living room. This man looking down on me all of the time." (laughs)

Tortorice: And you have an art collection of things that you've written about?

Hermand: I've regretted now that I didn't buy it. You know, it's a very important, this Liebermann portraits from this period, shortly before World War One and so forth. Then I went to Russell Panchenko here in the [Chazen] museum and I said, "Well there is this, why don't you buy it here for the museum?" Because it's the Elvehjem Museum, [Elvehjem] the man working in the same field as Paul Ehrlich. It would be great to have this as a painting here. And that man was stupid.

Tortorice: Oh, he was so stupid.

Hermand: And he said, "Portraits are not art." And I told him, "Go to 01:12:00biochemistry. They will certainly have enough money to buy it." And there's a portrait of Elvehjem there and he could have been next to it. No, he was opposed to it. And I was so angry that I gave up.

Tortorice: Yeah. He just alienated so many scholars on campus, including George and Gerda Lerner. Gerda wanted an exhibit of her mother's work, which I think would have been a real contribution. And he turned, you can imagine, turning down Gerda was not something she was going to accept. (laughs) But she never got her way. He was, I didn't like him, either.

Hermand: [unclear] I don't know where the painting is now. Maybe it's lost somewhere. But I regretted it later.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: But Elizabeth said, "He looks down on me like my father."

Tortorice: Uh huh. She didn't want that in your house.

Hermand: She was in a feminist phase at the time. (laughs)

Tortorice: Well, I could see her point.

Hermand: In the '70s.

Tortorice: Well you know that George was related to the Liebermann's.

Hermand: I know.

Tortorice: Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. And his, Felix Liebermann, who's the great scholar of English constitutional law, still a noted figure in that field, was married to one of the, Lachmann's. They didn't have any children. She died in Auschwitz in '42. But they had a huge collection of Liebermann's.

Hermand: Ah, yeah. One of my friends in Germany, you perhaps know him, Klaus Scherpe?

Tortorice: Oh, yes. Of course.

Hermand: His wife Elisabeth?

Tortorice: Great people.

Hermand: They just married. They lived together for 25 years. Because he was still married.

Tortorice: Oh, I didn't realize that.

Hermand: And then his wife died. And then he married her. She is working on a project supported by the Thyssen Foundation now on women of the Mosse family.

Tortorice: Right. Yes.

Hermand: I called him yesterday and he said, "Well, in two days we're going to Theresienstadt

because there's also an archive." She can't go to this country here at the moment. She wants to--

Tortorice: I know.

Hermand: She wants to go to the American archive.

Tortorice: We wanted to bring her to Madison.

Hermand: Yeah, yeah. He said, "We are going to Theresienstadt, she wants to find out about Martha Mosse." Who was there.

Tortorice: Yes. Right. We just published this book on Eva Noack-Mosse who wrote this diary of Theresienstadt.

Hermand: She has now for two years been working on Mosse women.

Tortorice: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great topic.

Hermand: She is originally an art historian.

Tortorice: Yes. Right. Yeah. I always, I hope I get back to Berlin one day. And I always see them when I go there. They're just really wonderful.

Hermand: They've both supported the Mosse lectures [in Berlin] for twenty years. Wow.

Tortorice: Yeah. What an incredible lineup they've had.

Hermand: George was the first Mosse lecturer and I was the second Mosse lecturer.

Tortorice: Yes. And you were there when the Mosse-Zentrum was dedicated, I believe. I think, when the mayor of Berlin was there.

Hermand: There's a Mosse-Zentrum? I didn't know that.

Tortorice: The former Mosse publishing house. And you know, they--

Hermand: I know where it is.

Tortorice: Yeah.

Hermand: Schützenstrasse.

Tortorice: Yeah. Or maybe you were there when the Mosse Palais building opened. But I remember George said you were there.

Hermand: I was there when they opened. And they opened Schützenstrasse.

Tortorice: Okay.

Hermand: Well, that was also an affair. I was there with, we were the only invited cronies of the Mayor Deapkin at the time, [unclear] the sitting mayor. And George told them no, I was teaching at that school at that time. He wrote to the organizers I should be there, too. And if I was allowed to be there. And then Deapkin gave an arch-conservative speech. He said, Bismark and Adenauer are the two greatest Germans that reunited as Germany. And he talked about [unclear] and then he jumped to [unclear] without mentioning Jewishness or Nazis or anything. I wanted to make a scandal. I wanted to walk out. And it was on television. And George sitting in the middle of the first row. I wanted to create scandal. And he said, "Sit down. What do you expect from idiots like that," He said. (laughs) And then he was not even introduced.

Tortorice: Extraordinary.

Hermand: Yeah. It was really. And then he gave a speech there in German.

Tortorice: Gosh. What a terrible--

Hermand: And then there was a talk that they invited the daughter of Springer, of the Springer family of publishers, the leading family. And then I had a cup of coffee with Mrs. Springer and George afterwards. And George said, well, we 01:18:00did the politics of the Weimar Republic, you did the politics of the Bundesrepublic of the 1950's. They boasted (laughs) We did. It was our Jewish republic. And I said George, please don't say that, that it was a Jewish, that's exactly what the Nazis said, that the Weimar Republic was a Jewish republic. It was not a Jewish republic. Please don't ever say that again.

Tortorice: That's fascinating. Didn't Springer also--

Hermand: Well, they restored the [architect] Mendelsohn façade there. It was sliding, the damage, it was damage from war down in there [it was built originally] to create an expressionist kind of addition.

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: And then it was damaged in '45 again.

Tortorice: And it was half there during the East Germany, right? They took off half of it, and half of it was left? Yes, I recall that.

Hermand: And he brought the two paintings, [portraits of George's grandparents by Werner]. And he wanted to dedicate them. He wanted to leave them there in this kind of anteroom. But he took them back. He was shocked he didn't like them at all. [building owner?]

Tortorice: Right now [lobby of Mosse Zentrum] it's in terrible condition, too, because most of the items have been removed.

Hermand: And he gave them to the Jewish Museum.

Tortorice: Yes. Those portraits are in the Jewish Museum, most of them.

Hermand: Right. I saw them in the Jewish Museum.

Tortorice: Yeah. So, which is going through a big [renovation]

Hermand: Yeah [unclear] of course--

Tortorice: They're going through a big upheaval over there now, too.

Hermand: The most expensive [unclear] The Mosses, of course, had [unclear]

Tortorice: Yeah. Yeah. Well that art collection, as you know, is a very unique one. Because it's really shaped by Rudolf Mosse's--

Hermand: I think you gave me the catalog, but--

Tortorice: Oh, yes.

Hermand: I think it was the first talk on this collection that I gave in Berlin. In the Liebermann Haus.

Tortorice: Oh, really?

Hermand: Yeah. The one in, next to the Brandenburg Gate.

Tortorice: Yes. Yeah.

Hermand: That was Julius Schoeps.

Tortorice: Because he really didn't have expert opinion that much on the shaping of that. [Rudolf Mosse on the shaping of the Mosse art collection].

Hermand: George was not that interested in painting.

Tortorice: No, no. And he didn't, he frankly wasn't all that interested in that collection.

Hermand: No, no.

Tortorice: And I had encouraged him, you know, to make a restitution claim. And he just, you know, because he was dealing with the property issues, he really didn't want to take that on at the end of his life.

Hermand: Yeah, we had talked about the property issues. I think he got a letter from the, after 89' refused from the Springer family, they wanted to expand a 01:21:00little bit on the other side of the wall. And then I think George told me, "I want them back where they had their building that also belonged to us anyway." (laughter)

Tortorice: But didn't the Springers buy the Mosse publishing enterprises after the war? I know George's father wanted to go back, and there was an attempt--

Hermand: Oh. I didn't know that.

Tortorice: Yes. And I think in the end it was the Springers that bought a lot of that--

Hermand: No, the Springer is right next to the other side of the wall, yeah.

Tortorice: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Hermand: [unclear]

Tortorice: Right. Not the properties, of course, which were in the east. But anyway, well, we could go on and on. We could do it again. But is there anything else you'd like to say?

Hermand: And [unclear] Mosse told me lots about Schenkendorf.

Tortorice: Oh, yeah?

Hermand: [unclear] the bell in the tower, and his name on it. (laughs)

Tortorice: You know that's all rundown now. [Schenkendorf].

Hermand: Yeah.

Tortorice: It's totally abandoned. We visited and snuck in.

Hermand: I've never been to Schenkendorf. But it's all, it's causing me a [man who bought Schenkendorf from the Mosse family] he had the antique shop in Berlin next to the KaDeWe.

Tortorice: Really?

Hermand: [unclear]

Tortorice: Yes. He claimed he was a descendant of Count Dracula.

Hermand: Yes. He was adopted by a Dracula Princess of [unclear] or something.

Tortorice: Yes. And you know, we went out there when he owned it. And he was beginning to really try to bring it back to the state he was in. And the walls had been painted with this thick dark green paint over all of the lapis lazuli pillars. And he had removed that. So you had these beautiful blue pillars in the dining room. And he put on this wonderful lunch. And you know, George said, "He is rather pale." (laughter) But we then went down and toured the house. And George said, "Oh, this is Mute's boudoir!" And we went in the basement, there was this big old stove.

Hermand: Oh, thats extremely important. He always talked about it. After '89, the first time he went back to Berlin, he immediately went to Schenkendorf.

Tortorice: Yes. I don't know what ever happened to Irene [Runge].

Hermand: Yeah, do you know about her?

Tortorice: Oh, yes. Yes.

Hermand: She was Jewish and was born in New York or something. And became a professor of philosophy at the East Berlin University. And then was expelled. 01:24:00She did this interview with him.[George].

Tortorice: Yes.

Hermand: Now he, she came to Madison once. I remember that.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. I remember it, too.

Hermand: Irene Runge and her husband. He was working for the Comischer Oper in Berlin. Yeah. They both came. Being German, he immediately caught me, he said, "The Runge's are coming. What should I do with these Germans?"

[End Interview.]