On 26 October 1858 I attended the swearing in of the country's leader, just as I did on 6 February 1850. In 1850, I attended as a deputy of the lower house and rebellious councillor third class; now I took part as a loyal councillor first class and even a possible ministerial candidate. This time the act had something uncommonly captivating. The prince spoke plainly but with a dignified voice and conveyed to the world the feeling that such an oath was truly not meaningless, that the Constitution had finally attained its true confirmation, and that we further stand on firm ground—as if the confusions of 1848 had never disturbed the path of legal development started in 1847.

Advocates for minority rights make stringent demands upon those they defend. The relationship between the persecuted and their defenders is often a minefield of conflicting agendas, made even worse by patronizing attitudes on the one side and wounded pride on the other. One example is the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (The Association for Defense Against Antisemitism), founded in Vienna in 1891 to combat the alarming rise of political antisemitism, unmistakable in the stunning electoral successes of the Christian Social Party led by Karl Lueger. Abwehrverein members came from Austria's elite of education and property (Bildung und Besitz): Liberal politicians, large-scale industrialists and merchants, members of the free professions, and artists. Most members were Austro-German liberals, and Liberal Reichsrat deputies sat on its board. Its founder and president was Baron Arthur Gunduccar von Suttner (1850–1902), a writer, and husband of Bertha von Suttner, recipient of the Noble Peace Prize in 1905. My intention is to explore the attitude of the Abwehrverein to Jewry, and to raise the question of whether it served Jewish interests well. But before that, a word or two must be said about the association.

In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

Germany's interwar Social Democratic movement was anything but the monolithic structure often presented in the literature. Indeed, the standard teleology—which portrays the movement as conservative and petit bourgeois, doing its best to fend off Nazism, but ultimately not up to the task—obscures more than it illuminates. It imposes a top-down frame on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that characterizes it and its affiliates as an undifferentiated mass, making a nuanced analysis difficult. As is true of most political movements, interwar German Social Democracy presented multiple faces to the world. While its core was a political party that worked to win elections, the SPD also formed the heart of an alternative culture, one that allowed its largely working-class membership to take part in cultural and social functions, as well as in political meetings to express class solidarity.