The photograph on the cover of this scholarly essai was taken in 1954. As you can see, the couple are dressed in premodern garb, handmade to resemble the clothes worn by nobles and well-to-do citizens in the Bavarian city of Amberg on the occasion of the lavish wedding festivities for Margarete, daughter of Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria, with Philip the Upright, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, in 1474. A historical pageant of the wedding was written in 1934 as part of the celebrations, spearheaded by Josef Filbig, the Nazi mayor of Amberg, on the 900th anniversary of the first recorded mention of the city. The 1954 performance featured an apparently revised version of the original 1934 pageant, and once again Josef Filbig was mayor of Amberg, this time democratically elected with 64 per cent of the vote as candidate for the right-wing party Deutsche Gemeinschaft. The man in the picture, a music teacher, served as the choir director for the performance. More on this in chapter 3.

One year before the picture was taken, the woman and the man had married in the Baroque Mariahilf Pilgrimage church, built during the Thirty Years’ War because Christians in the region believed the Virgin Mary had saved their city from one of the many occurrences of the plague. The couple, like most Amberg Catholics, participated in the annual pilgrimage to the miraculous image of the Madonna, created as a copy of painter Lukas Cranach's 1537 image of the Virgin in Innsbruck Cathedral.

When the man in the picture was seventeen, the woman was eleven, brownshirts with pickaxes entered the city's synagogue and set fire to the furniture and ritual objects. Authorities would justify these actions as well as the subsequent deportation of many of the city's Jews by retelling stories of alleged Jewish ritual murder, host desecration, and usury, all three constitutive elements of the medieval Christian identity virulent until and even beyond the Second Vatican Council in 1962–65.