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.

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.

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 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.

This innovative collection of essays on the upsurge of antisemitism across Europe in the decades around 1900 shifts the focus away from intellectuals and well-known incidents to less-familiar events, actors, and locations, including smaller towns and villages. This "from below" perspective offers a new look at a much-studied phenomenon: essays link provincial violence and antisemitic politics with regional, state, and even transnational trends. Featuring a diverse array of geographies that include Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Italy, Greece, and the Russian Empire, the book demonstrates the complex interplay of many factors--economic, religious, political, and personal--that led people to attack their Jewish neighbors.