Brigitte Hamann, widely known for her work on Empress Elisabeth of Austria, presents an empirically rich account of the cultural and social history of Austro-Hungary's imperial city in the last years before World War I, as well as its impact upon Adolf Hitler. Hamann's intention is to provide an interpretative frame of the sources of the racist, anti-Semitic, and totalitarian dimension of Hitler's personality and politics.

Hamann deals with Hitler's early development in three phases. She starts by delving into his childhood days in the Austrian province of Upper Austria. What is portrayed are the complex family relations - that of a doting mother and a Martinet father in the backdrop of the politico-cultural milieu of Linz, the provincial capital. In the next phase, the backdrop shifts to Vienna, the hub of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In the last phase, she describes Hitler's immediate encounters with the city, his misfortune at making an educational and professional career as an artist, and his miserable life in the grey army of migrants, casual labourers, and migrants who desperately fought for a minimal income to meet the basic needs of food and housing. She also investigates Hitler's attitudes towards Jews, which seem to have lacked any of the brutish anti-Semitism that Hitler became notorious for later on.

Not many now would ever believe that young Adolf was frail and gentle. Fewer still would believe that Hitler actually had Jewish friends. Hamann's book is different from all other Hitler books. In "Hitler's Vienna", there is more of Vienna and less of Hitler. Hitler is more of a product of Vienna than of Berlin, Bonn or Munich.

Arthur Drews, a German sceptic and philosopher of the early twentieth century, is mainly known for his magisterial opus, "The Christ Myth", which argued forcefully for the non-historicity of Jesus. In "The Legend of Saint Peter", Drews does the same for a character who came to occupy a central position in Catholic Christianity.

"The Peter of the Acts and of the later literature is a legendary person; of this there can be no doubt. His portrait is so shot-through with mythical features that it is quite impossible now to isolate any 'historical kernel' from the surviving reports."

The evolution of Simon Peter from his predecessors Janus and Mithra (both of whom carried the keys to the gates of heaven) and the Tyrian Hercules (Melkart) is carefully detailed in this unjustly forgotten work of German Enlightenment scholarship.

Because Drews' argument draws heavily upon biblical data and upon the writings of Greek and Latin authors - areas where the modern reader may not feel quite at home - the translator has created a full-text appendix of references cited, which he has keyed to the pages of Drews' text. Readers thus are spared of the bother of having to run out and get a bible or learn Greek. Reading the appended sources - many of which (such as Lucian's account of the phallic furnishings of the temple of the Syrian goddess) are interesting in their own right - not only will make Drews' argument more compelling, it will help one to see familiar biblical passages in a new light.