From the end of the 18th century, society in the Habsburg Monarchy was confronted with political, social and cultural tensions strikingly relevant for the contemporary world: Social and cultural differentiation, heterogeneity, multilingualism, competing and controversial identities, cultural plurality, and problems of migration. Consequently, contemporaries analyzing the political, social and cultural situation of Central Europe saw themselves confronted with questions of paramount importance for today’s culture studies: Serving the construction of homogeneous national cultures, ethnogenesis and the social fabrication of common heritage entailed dissociations from the “other” in intercultural exchange.