Kaspar von Graffenried, the Landvogt or administrator in this polemic from ca. 1617, was a Bernese patrician serving for two years as highest authority in the Swiss subject territory known as the County (Grafschaft) of Baden. He acted as an agent not of the Bernese city-state that had appointed him, but of all eight of the cantons that shared possession of Baden and its surroundings; his tenure fit into a rotation of administrators from the other cantons according to a precisely determined two-year cycle that had been in place since the early fifteenth century. In many respects the Swiss Landvogt of Baden therefore looked far different from the local feudal nobles who had served the Habsburgs as administrators back when William Tell was supposed to have lived—though this evidently contributed nothing to Graffenried's standing with the author of the verses above.

This observation, registered by Marianne Enigl and Herbert Lackner, points to an incontestable and compelling feature of contemporary Austrian political culture: during the 1980s and 1990s, the first meaningful steps toward an Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung developed out of a discussion of Austrians' military service during the Nazi era and its highly problematic association with wartime atrocities and genocide. Exploration of this important theme had been avoided throughout the period of the Second Republic by a carefully cultivated expression of public memory. The inherent tension between the internationally sanctioned notion of Austrian victimization during the Nazi years and the pride of many Austrian veterans in having performed their soldierly duties (Wehrpflichterfüllung) had been a taboo subject.

In February 1872, little more than a year after the founding of the new Reich, the National Zeitung, a leading National-Liberal newspaper, argued that Germans could no longer accept suppression at the Catholic Church. The German, the paper explained, will not tolerate a spirit that comes from Rome either among his people or in any of his churches. He does not want clerical rule and Volksverdummung. He wants, rather, enlightemnent, honest conscience [ehrlidzes Gewissen], and work.Attaining a new, as yet never achieved level of moral freedom, a morality arising from the people [eine volkstümliche Sittlichkeit] that is shared by Germany's churches and confessions, that is the task for this founding period of the new Reich.