Peter Pulzer’s Writing on Political Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question in Germany and Austria: An Assessment

Abstract

Abstract I remember it well. It was in the fall of 1968-as a 20-year-old senior in Columbia University’s College-that I first encountered Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. I had never heard of Peter Pulzer but I found the title of the book not only intellectually intriguing but also profoundly compelling on a deeper, autobiographical level. This, after all, was precisely the time that I had first begun to learn in a systematic and serious way about the absolutely crucial role that anti-Semitism had played in Austria’s and Central Europe’s political history during the first half of the twentieth century.