The Mosse Family
For more detailed biographies of the Mosse family, visit the Mosse Foundation site.
Rudolf Mosse was a famed German-Jewish businessman and philanthropist who led a massive publishing empire in the late 19th and early 20th century. Born as the sixth of fourteen children in a small town in Prussia, he moved to Berlin as a young man to pursue advertising and publishing. His pioneering ideas and industry foresight quickly led to phenomenal success, and by the early 20th century he was the publisher of over 130 newspapers and journals throughout Germany. Rudolf’s many notable publications included the Berliner Tageblatt, known as “the New York Times of Germany,” and the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, a Jewish newspaper that kept him connected to his heritage.
During his lifetime, Rudolf and his wife Emilie were patrons of the arts and led a wide array of charitable endeavours. They founded a home for children of impoverished families, the Emilie und Rudolf Mosse-Stiftung, and financed several hospitals and educational institutions throughout Germany. For their efforts, Emilie was awarded the Wilhelmsorden (Wilhelm Medal) and Rudolf was given an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg. Rudolf and Emilie took care of their employees as well, establishing a social security insurance fund to support them. The Mosse family were also recognized as leaders of the Berlin Jewish Reform Community, and Rudolf backed the Deutsche Freisinnige Partei (German Freethinking Party), which advocated for the establishment of a constitutional democracy.
Rudolf and Emilie’s home in Berlin, the Mosse-Palais in Potsdamer Platz, was erected between 1881 and 1885 and housed the distinguished Mosse Art Collection. An avid art collector, Rudolf was passionate about supporting contemporary German artists, and he opened his collection to the public so they could experience all of the beauty that German art culture had to offer. The Nazis seized the collection in 1933, and the Mosse-Palais was destroyed by an air raid in 1945. A new Mosse Palais was constructed in 1998, designed by American architect Hans Strauch (HDS Architecture), a Mosse descendent by marriage.
Following Rudolf’s death in 1920, his estate passed to his daughter, Felicia, and her husband, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, assumed management of the Rudolf Mosse Company. Hans continued the family’s dedication to philanthropy and patronage of the arts, supporting charities throughout the nation and adding to the Mosse Art Collection. He also carried on his father-in-law’s dedication to a democratic Germany, and his newspapers took a strong stance against the rise of Hitler and National Socialism.
Hans went into exile after Hitler came to power, forced out of the nation after the Nazis seized control of his company, his estate, and his art collection. He and Felicia had three children, Rudolf, Hilde, and George (formerly named Gerhard), and they all left Berlin to settle in Switzerland. Hans and Felicia divorced soon after and he moved to Paris, where he married Karola Stauch (the daughter of German writer Alfred Bock), who had a child, Karl, from her first marriage. All of the family eventually emigrated to the United States, where the children continued the commitment to education and social progress that had epitomized the Mosse legacy in Berlin.
Dr. Hilde L. Mosse studied medicine at the University of Basel in Switzerland and immigrated to New York in 1938, where she spent over thirty years treating children with learning issues and psychiatric maladies. She was well known in both North America and Europe for her clinical and published work on childhood depression, the effects of mass media on children, violent behavior in children, and reading disabilities. Hilde was a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatry Association, The American Orthopsychiatric Association, and the New York Academy of Medicine. In 1964, she returned to Germany as a Fulbright Professor in Child Psychiatry at the University of Marburg.
In 1946, Hilde co-founded the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, the first mental health clinic for the neighborhood’s underserved Black population. She was Physician-in-Charge of the all-volunteer staff, seeing patients two nights a week. Her work there went far beyond psychiatry, and she worked with nurses and social workers to tackle the larger systemic inequality that plagued her patients. In 1951, she and her colleague Dr. Fredric Wertham brought several young students from Delaware to the clinic to do a psychiatric study on the effects of segregated schooling for the Belton/Bulah v. Gebhart case challenging the practice. Their research was pivotal to ending segregation in Delaware, and Belton was combined with several other cases for Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ultimately ended segregation throughout America.
Hilde published many articles on childhood behavioral disorders, and her most notable publication, The Complete Handbook of Children’s Reading Disorders, put forth an interdisciplinary approach to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of reading disorders. In 1980, she received the Watson Washburn Memorial Award for Excellence in Education from The Reading Reform Foundation. Hilde’s commitment to serving the economically disadvantaged and the emotionally troubled in Harlem continues through the work of the Northside Center for Child Development in New York City. Her nephew, Roger Strauch, is a board member of Northside, and the title for Northside’s CEO is now known as The Hilde L. Mosse President & CEO.
After the Mosse family’s exile to Switzerland, George L. Mosse went to England to study history at the University of Cambridge. He then emigrated to the United States and earned his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1946. George first taught at the University of Iowa, then moved to the University of Wisconsin in 1955, where he became one of the world’s most prominent historians of Nazism, fascism, and mass movements. He published more than 25 books on these subjects, including The Culture of Western Europe, The Nationalization of the Masses, and Nationalism and Sexuality. He was named the first Bascom Professor of European History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and he also held the Koebner Professorship of History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem beginning in 1969.
As a historian, George felt he was called upon to explain the fate of the Jews in Germany, specifically why it was that the more Jews assimilated into German society the more they were rejected. He was a self described “eternal emigrant”, a man who was driven to analyze the culture into which he was born and the forces that had compelled him into exile. With his students, George gave advice and counsel above and beyond traditional teaching, imparting not just his own critical methods but his openness and tolerance of diverse political, religious, and social points of view.
George frequently returned to Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, overseeing the restituted property of the Mosse family and the preservation of the family’s legacy in the reunited Germany. George gave many interviews in Berlin, where he discussed past and present Mosse undertakings, and one of his most extensive was eventually published under the title I Remain An Emigrant (Ich bleibe Emigrant). Upon his death in 1999, George bequeathed his portion of the Mosse estate to the University of Wisconsin to continue the conversations he had been apart of on the history of exclusionary politics and the history of sexuality. His posthumous autobiography, Confronting History, provided a retrospective view on his private and professional life, including his research, his Judaism, and his homosexuality.
Karl Strauch was born in Giessen, Germany, where his father, George Strauch, was a Lutheran minister and his mother, Karola, was a divinity school graduate and the daughter of famed German writer Alfred Bock. George died of an infection only weeks after Karl was born, and after Karola married Hans Lachmann-Mosse, Karl moved with them to Paris and earned his baccalaureate. In 1939, the family immigrated to Lafayette, California. Karl served in the American Navy from 1944 to 1946, then earned a degree in chemistry and a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950. That year, he was elected to Harvard’s Society of Fellows and was appointed to the Harvard Faculty as Assistant Professor. He became the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics in 1975 and served as Chairman of the Harvard Physics Department from 1978-1982.
Karl was an experimental physicist whose research focused on the fundamental structure of matter in an attempt to discover the basic building blocks of nature. He conducted his research using giant accelerators, first at Harvard’s Cyclotron, then at Brookhaven’s Cosmotron, and later at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA), a joint venture between Harvard and MIT. Karl became the director of the CEA, and also undertook experiments at accelerators in Europe to investigate electron-positron collisions and interactions. He co-authored over 145 scientific papers over the course of his career, and was a highly influential member of the US-USSR Joint Coordinating Committee on Fundamental Properties of Matter, which was the chief conduit between the American and Soviet scientific communities during the Cold War.
Beyond his teaching and research in particle physics, Karl was involved in two major developments that significantly impacted the culture of Harvard. In 1975, he chaired the committee that recommended the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe’s admissions offices and the institution of an admissions policy of equal access for women, which ultimately began in 1980. He also chaired the committee effort to build and establish the Science Center, the first multi-disciplinary science building in the College, and continued as the chair of the Faculty Executive Committee that oversaw the operation of the Science Center from its opening in 1972 until 1975. Karl and his wife, Maria, had two children, Roger and Hans Strauch. Roger and Hans are co-presidents of the Mosse Foundation, a charitable organization that carries on the family’s philanthropic legacy. Hans is an architect in the Boston area, and Roger is a high tech venture capitalist who splits his time between Boston and the San Francisco Bay area.
Roger Strauch is chair of The Roda Group, an early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded with Dan Miller in 1997. Roda invests in people, technologies, and companies that address the transition to low-carbon energy and the consequences of natural resource contamination or scarcity. Notable investments include carbon capture, advanced silicon batteries, and PFAS eradication. Roger is also on the board of Chart Industries (NYSE:GTLS), which was recently acquired by Baker Hughes (NYSE: BKR) for $13.6 billion. He was formerly chair and/or CEO of Cool Systems, Ask Jeeves, Symmetricom, and TCSI Corp.
In addition to his business achievements, Roger is deeply involved in supporting academic, artistic, and philanthropic institutions and initiatives. He was an executive board member of the Tony Award winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre for over 20 years, including service as board president, where he funded the Roda Theatre and received the Helen C. Barber Award for serving the theatre with unique distinction. For 25 years, Roger was an executive board member of The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath, formerly MSRI), a premier collaborative and privately funded research institution supported by the National Science Foundation, serving as board chair and funding the Strauch Postdoctoral Fellows. He is a member of the Engineering Dean’s College Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley, where he endowed the Roger A. Strauch Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Roger and his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian were named “Builders of Berkeley,” and he is the recipient of the school’s Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award. He also serves on the board of trustees of the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, NYC. With his brother Hans, Roger is the co-Trustee of The Mosse Foundation, which supports humanitarian, educational, and cultural enhancement initiatives worldwide, including the Mosse Global Lecture Series and academic positions that span a variety of disciplines. The Mosse Foundation has partnered with the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley for the Strauch Cleantech to Market Program, a collaboration between graduate students, startups, and industry professionals that accelerates the commercialization of leading cleantech solutions. Roger is also the leader of the Mosse Art Restitution Project, a global search for his step-family’s Nazi-looted artifacts, the largest and most successful project of its kind.
Roger is a licensed amateur radio operator who holds two patents in wireless communications, and earned degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell (BS) and Stanford (MS).
