One day when I was about 15 as I sat in my high school history class someone asked the teacher what the difference was between an Austrian and a German. “Nothing!” he snapped, “Austrians are just Germans. It’s the same thing.” I was aghast. I felt my whole world shift. How could anyone think an Austrian was a German? They were completely different, everyone knew that. Years later, after I had spent some time in Austria and got to know my family, I began to read academic books written in English about Austrian history and was astonished at how completely at variance they were with my own family’s experiences. All the books were written from an American or English academic perspective, many with a faint but perceptible undercurrent of hostility. I felt a lot of it to be factually wrong and misleading, and in some cases found the proof that that was so. I decided I had to tell Austria’s story as I saw it so I went back to original sources and started from scratch. And here it is.

"William McCagg has done a great service for scholarship—and for Habsburg scholarship in particular—through his book. Scholars are in his debt." —History of European Ideas " . . . strongly recommended to those interested in either Jewish or Habsburg history." —American Historical Review " . . . McCagg tells a fascinating story with expert knowledge, with the sure eye and sound judgment of the experienced historian . . . " —Midstream " . . . exceptionally fine research and the time frame of the study which make it quite remarkable and original." —German Politics & Society "William McCagg brings out the extent to which Jews were divided not only as Jews, but also as citizens of Austro-Hungary . . . McCagg writes perceptively of Kafka's predicament as a German-speaking Jew in Prague, living through the Czech nationalist revival . . . " —New York Review of Books Drawing on a wide variety of European sources, McCagg has produced the first history of this important but often forgotten community to be written since the nineteenth century.