To understand the 20th century, we must know the 19th. It was then that an ancient prejudice was forged into a modern political weapon. How and why this happened is shown in this classic study by Peter Pulzer, first published in 1964 and now reprinted with a new Introduction by the author.

Book contains extracts from memoirs, essays on the contributions of Jews to Austrian civilization and on the rise of political antisemitism in Austria.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, "I think the good in Austria is particularly difficult to understand. In a certain sense it is more subtle than all the rest, and its truth is never on the side of probability." For forty years official Austria, christened by the Allies as Hitler's first "victim," wagered that the sedulously cultivated visions of cherubic choir boys, Lippizaner horses, and Mozartkugels could seduce the world into ignoring another truth about Austria, that of Wehrmacht soldiers, antisemitic slurs, and cheering crowds on Heldenplatz. The debate surrounding Kurt Waldheim dashed such "improbable" illusions permanently. Richard Mitten seeks to discover the "truth" behind the Waldheim controversy in its historical and political context. Whereas other books have focused on Waldheim's personal biography, Mitten argues that the essential point in the Waldheim affair is not Waldheim himself but the political and cultural climate that made his election possible. Mitten examines Waldheim's 1986 presidential election campaign, which both elicited and profited from profound chauvinistic and antisemitic resentments. The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice is also the first book in English to study the dynamics of the Waldheim affair in the Austrian and American media. The author demonstrates how mistaken perceptions led both Waldheim's supporters and his critics to press their nearly diametrically opposed convictions with an identical moral vocabulary. Finally, Mitten re-examines the debate over Waldheim's criminality and suggests that the former UN Secretary General has come to stand as the symbol of a more general postwar unwillingness or inability to adequately confront the implications of the Nazi abomination.

The surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945 marked the end of an epoch during which anti-Semitism escalated into genocide. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi racist ideology was discredited morally and politically, and the Allied occupation forces prohibited its dissemination in public. However, there was no overnight transformation of individual anti-Semitic attitudes among the public at large. Most surveys conducted since 1946 have confirmed the persistence of massive anti-Semitism in Germany both in the democratic West and the communist East. Based on all empirical survey data available up to now, this volume offers a thorough comparative analysis of anti-Semitism in Germany, and in particular its resurgence with the rise of right-wing extremism since unification.Anti-Semitism in Germany reflects a historically unique opportunity to compare the attitudes of two population groups that shared a common history up to 1945 and then lived under differing political conditions until 1989. The authors find distinct generational patterns in the survival and development of anti-Semitic attitudes. In the Federal Republic hostility towards Jews was more manifest among those who had been socialized to it under the Weimar Republic and Third Reich but less prevalent in subsequent generations. In contrast the authors show younger East Germans as more susceptible to anti-Semitism. The economic and cultural crises of reunification underwrote the strident anti-Zionism of the former communist regime. The authors also explore the anti-Semitic component of the recent wave of xenophobic violence and the disturbing rise of neo-Nazi political activity.This volume is especially noteworthy in its examination of a "secondary" anti-Semitism closely tied to the issue of coming to terms with the Nazi past. The motives behind persisting anti-Semitism can no longer be attributed to ethnic conflict, but go to the core discrepancy between wanting to forget and being reminded. The authors consider this phenomenon within the framework of current German political culture. In its comprehensiveness and methodological sophistication, Anti-Semitism in Germany is a major contribution to the literature on modern anti-Semitism and ethnic prejudice. It will be read by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and Jewish studies specialists.

A New Forum for International Holocaust Research. European Holocaust Studies (EHS) publishes key international research results on the murder of the European Jews and its wider contexts. This new English-language yearbook primarily aims to bring together and provide higher visibility to research contributions produced across different countries and institutions. It also strives to promote international exchange, especially among scholars from North America, Europe, and Israel. The EHS issues are thematic. Each issue features a selection of peer-reviewed research articles, which offer novel perspectives on the main theme. Further sections include a discussion of key documents and a selection of research project descriptions related to the overall topic, as well as a literature review or essay dealing with historiographical debates on the subject.

Similarly, Jew-hatred was not as mysterious or incomprehensible as often presented; its strength in some countries and weakness in others may be related to the fluctuating and sometimes quite different perceptions in those countries of the meaning of the rise of the Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The study of modern racism has tended to treat anti-Semitism and anti-black racism as separate and unconnected phenomena. This innovative study argues that a full understanding of the origins and development of racism in Europe after 1870 needs to examine the structure and interrelationships between the two dominant forms of prejudice. Contrary to expectation. anti-black racism was not confined to the colonial maritime nations of western Europe, but pepetrated even the rural societies of central and eastern Europe. Likewise, anti-Semitism could flourish even in the almost total absence of Jews. MacMaster explores the conditions under which modern political movements, faced with the crisis of modernity, began to draw upon and mobilise the negative stereotypes that, through the development of the mass media, had become almost universal features of popular culture. By weaving together the changing spatial and temporal dimensions of anti-Semitic and anti-black prejudice the study provides a fresh and more global framework for understanding modern racism.