On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.

April 21, 1771, brought unusual weather conditions, namely a springtime blizzard, to the Swabian town of Göppingen. We know this because the worsted-wool weaver Ernst Jacob Vayhinger wrote about it in a chronicle that he kept from 1756 to 1784. His exact words were, “The weather is also quite something. I have a barometer, which indicates the clearest weather today, and yet it is snowing so badly. The same thing happened a year ago. As the upper wind brought rain, it [the barometer] was instead showing nice conditions, and the rain was freezing cold.” While the vivid description of inclement weather certainly catches the eye, the presence of a barometer in this weaver's household in 1771 stands out even more. In fact, this weather-based technology was barely a century old in the latter half of the eighteenth century, having been invented by Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian mathematician, in 1643. To be sure, Vayhinger's malfunctioning barometer was almost certainly a water-filled glass instrument rather than the more precise mercury-based instruments of early-modern natural philosophers, but what matters here is that Vayhinger had a relatively new, ornamental wall hanging that indicated an awareness of new scientific principles. And, as this article will show, he was not at all the only one to acquire such novelties in this hometown full of Handwerker (artisans).

Writing in 1957, Leonard Krieger famously argued that Lutheranism was “not itself central” to what he called the “problem of political liberty” in the German lands during the nineteenth century. By downplaying the influence of Luther's teachings on German political thought, Krieger tacitly aimed to refute the controversial “from Luther to Hitler thesis” proposed by some historians in an effort to identify the ideological roots of National Socialism. Contrary to these scholars, Krieger blamed the emergence of Germany's “peculiar 19th century version of political freedom” not on religious doctrine, but on a complex of political and socioeconomic circumstances that, he argued, were unique to central Europe. Scholars have almost universally followed Krieger's line of interpretation. Recent debate focuses not on whether he was correct to argue that political and socioeconomic factors were primarily responsible for engendering a distinctively German species of liberalism, but rather on the question of which of these factors was paramount. As a consequence, religion's role in the making of early German liberalism seldom receives serious consideration today.

When asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location.” While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation. Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.” Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.

In 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing: