This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill their Rechtsstaat ideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.

The development of social interaction between Jews and Gentiles offers a fertile area of research to historians of modern Central Europe. Examining the place of Jews in Gentile society, of course, furthers understanding of both the proponents and victims of political anti-Semitism. Yet such study is also needed to deepen our knowledge of the values and social structures that characterized German and Austrian liberal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Too often in recent years historians have studied Central Europe in the half century before World War I merely to seek the roots of the traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, the rise of the radical right and left has been examined in some detail, and historians have generally emphasized the fragility of liberal culture. One tends to assume that in the late nineteenth century few among the Central European middle classes took liberalism seriously enough to accept extensive or sustained Jewish participation in Gentile society, but in fact little systematic work has been done on the actual social relations between Jews and Gentiles.

On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial authority over the young National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP). There were at this point in the party's history some twenty-five local groups of the NSDAP scattered throughout Germany, but the party's base, its nerve center, and its strength lay in the Munich group. This parent cell from which so much was to develop should certainly be of interest to the historian and to the sociologist and political scientist as well. Yet little has been done in the way of a careful analysis of the membership of that group.