Introduction

Abstract

Fear is omnipresent in the human experience and as routinely noted by writers-either directly or, more commonly, obliquely-it has been an elemental emotion in many important developments through history. This is of course true for the German-speaking world, which we have defined here as roughly analogous to the Holy Roman Empire. As Kirsten Cooper notes in Chapter 2 of this book, this area was neither purely German, ethnically or linguistically, nor were all the "Germanic peoples" within it. It nonetheless serves as a useful geographic heuristic for the space we are examining and it nearly goes without saying that fear has been a defining emotion of this area's history. Fear-and the fantasies it embodied and with which it intersected-for example, infamously drove the pernicious search for witches, and the perceived links between them and diabolic power, the ritual murder of Christian children, and Jews. Over the approximately four hundred years that this book examines, real and imagined fears of foreign invasion guided many native and official responses to the Ottomans in the south, the French to the west, Poles to the east, and other non-German ethnic groups that pressed at the borders or internally appeared to threaten a certain-albeit at times loose-ethnolinguistic Germanic culture.