Hilde L. Mosse was born in Berlin into one of the richest and most prominent Jewish families of Imperial Germany. During the early years of the unified German state, her grandfather Rudolf Mosse founded a publishing empire and pioneered in the newly established international advertising industry. Through their newspapers and publishing ventures, the Mosses were a voice in support of liberal values and tolerance in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany. One of the family owned newspapers The Berliner Tageblat often extolled the German Jewish belief in Bildung or “self enlightenment through education and social awareness.” Hilde Mosse’s belief in human potential and the potential of human beings to live productive and compassionate lives originates in the family and the tradition into which she was born. The tragic events that forced her into exile and destroyed the vibrant community in which she lived did not lead her to despair. Rather, she was motivated to devote her intelligence, compassion, and boundless energy to healing the bodies and psyches of children who were lost, bereft, and subject to poverty, violence or abuse.
From their earliest days of wealth and privilege, the Mosse family was known for their extensive philanthropy. Their concern for those who did not benefit from the forces of modernism resulted in an extensive network of charitable organizations funded by Rudolf Mosse and his family. However, after World War One the massive poverty caused by the political instability and economic chaos in Germany swamped charitable organizations and resulted in unemployment and desperate conditions for masses of people. As a young girl, Hilde Mosse often assisted her mother Felicia in her efforts to feed the poor and unemployed of Berlin through a network of food kitchens established near train stations. Early in her life she developed a compassionate interest in those who were less fortunate than her, and throughout her life, she maintained this focus both in her personal life and in her career.
Like many Jews, Hilde’s father Hans dangerously underestimated the appeal of the Nazis. He thought the Nazis belonged on the comic pages of the family newspaper. He did not believe that such vulgar and uneducated politicians obviously without Bildung could run a modern country in an enlightened age. The prominence of the Mosse newspapers and their critical stance towards the Nazis made Hilde and her family early targets of Nazi hatred and attacks. As young women she was protected by private security police from the Nazi thugs who often surrounded the Berlin home of her parents and threatened the family. When not away at school at the gymnasium and later at the University of Freiburg, Hilde would often escape with her friends to the comparative calm and safety of Schenkendorf the family country home outside Berlin.
It was at the University of Freiburg that Hilde Mosse developed political awareness and a commitment to the anti fascist struggle. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Mosse family was subject to immediate arrest. The day after the Nazi election victory Hilde and her parents left Germany for exile in Switzerland. She committed herself to learning Swiss German in order to broadcast the anti fascist message and counter the rising tide of pro Nazi propaganda in Switzerland. Although she never lost her political commitment and belief that society could be made more just through social action, she decided to enter the field of medicine, and to specialize in child psychiatry and the care of children. She began her medical education at the University of Basel where she received her M.D. in 1938. As war in Europe approached Hilde left Switzerland and settled in the United States. She completed her medical education with internships and residencies in various New York hospitals, and in 1944 she played a principal role in the founding of the La Farge Clinic in Harlem were she began her long association with the psychologist Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The La Farge Clinic was the first clinic to specialize in the treatment of Afro-Americans with psychiatric illness, and for the first time residents of Harlem has access to adequate psychiatric attention and treatment. It was at the La Farge Clinic that Hilde contributed to the research studies that helped make the case for the devastating effects of segregation on the education and potential of Afro-American children. These studies were part of the evidence often used in the court cases leading up to Brown vs. Board of Education.
The many distinctions and honors Hilde Mosse’s achieved in life included a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor at the New York Clinical College, teaching at the University of Marburg, Germany, and numerous awards and honors. Her research into literacy and reading culminated in the publication of her path breaking book The Complete Handbook of Children’s Reading Disorders, 1982, a book that challenged the prevailing orthodoxies, and helped change the casual attitude of the educational establishment towards students with dyslexia, and other learning and reading disabilities.
In later life, Hilde Mosse conducted research on the pernicious effects of media violence on the lives of children, an interest that grew out of her own experience of the effects of the inculcation of hatred and violence on the children of Nazi Germany. Her work was never an effort to adjust the individual to a violent and racist society. Rather, it was meant to produce men and women with critical minds who would change society-to make it more human, more responsive, a society of dialog not of violent confrontation. She led a lonely and courageous battle against the many forces in society who were skeptical of the link between media violence and the practice of violence at an early age. She knew that those who reaped great profit from exposing children to violence in comic books, in cartoons, and on television would never admit that a childhood indoctrinated in violence would inevitably result in a society were the prevalence of violence is easily practiced and accepted. She believed that those who cannot read cannot think and will submit readily to authority and to oppression. Those who are immersed in violence from an early age will take violence for granted.
At her Memorial Service in 1982, Hilde Mosse’s brother, the distinguished historian George L. Mosse said of her:
“The diaries she kept as a young woman in Germany and Switzerland are a record of a struggle with loneliness and despair without any guidance from anyone. It is because she had experienced exile and loneliness, self doubt, insecurity and lack of love and affection that she directed her life to making her profession not a profession but instead a way to serve people and especially those people who were not only deprived, but lonely and unhappy and without guidance or love as she had been during much of her youth. Hilde represented the best of that liberal legacy which put the human above the mass and which was not afraid to fight even in the teeth of conventional opinion or professional wisdom.”