State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

The programme on 25 April consisted entirely of works by Beethoven: the overture Die Weihe des Hauses (The Consecration of the House); the ‘Emperor’ Concerto [no. 5] in E-flat, played by Liszt, who followed it with a transcription of the song Adelaide; the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata in A played by Massart and Liszt; and the Pastoral Symphony conducted by Berlioz. Three lines about a singer that end the review are omitted.

This concert had a fine and noble purpose! It was a homage rendered to the greatest modern composer by the leading virtuoso of the day. Liszt is busy, as we know, putting together the sum needed to complete the Beethoven monument. He has already given several concerts in Germany for this cause, so he could not fail to invite the Parisians to add their belated offering as well; and they have responded with the best will in the world! The hall was full, the audience brilliant, full of enthusiasm and supremely intelligent.

The overture [Die Weihe des Hauses] op. 124, which opened the concert, was still unknown to the French public, but its fine qualities were immediately recognised, at least to judge by the warmth of their applause. It's one of six overtures in C by Beethoven, who had a particular affection for this key. The imposing, majestic introduction contains a theme of great beauty for the wind instruments. Then comes a trumpet fanfare whose style, despite its glitter, could be more distinguished; a very odd passage for bassoons is heard beneath, the tempo increases bit by bit to lead gradually from Andante maestoso to Allegro, as a way of passing from the first part of the work to the second without interruption.

In October 1959, the following note appeared in Der Spiegel: “Pola Negri, 62, once a diva of German silent film, now an American businesswoman and homeowner, traveled overseas again after waiting in vain in a Munich hotel for over a month for the finished screenplay of the film Herrin der Welt [Mistress of the World]. According to the wishes of director William Dieterle and producer Artur (‘Atze’) Brauner, she was to reap accolades in this new film once again. However, Negri did not like the first version of the script because the deviation from the treatment she agreed to seemed too far-reaching. After her departure, she declared she would only come back ‘when everything was in order.’”

Pola Negri was one of Weimar cinema's most internationally acclaimed stars, and Die Herrin der Welt (The Mistress of the World, Joe May, 1919/1920), which Hollywood veteran William Dieterle was slotted to remake, was one of the most monumental and expensive international adventure films of the Weimar Republic. Set against opulent domestic studio backdrops, May's eight-part silent adventure serial tested the possibilities of staging cinematic attractions by chasing an action heroine around the world from Europe to China, Africa, and the US, while showcasing a variety of technological gadgets. The Polish actress Pola Negri, daughter of a Romani tinsmith, moved to Berlin in 1917 to launch a successful career as an “exotic” vamp in early Weimar cinema, as Anjeana Hans discusses in this volume.

INTRODUCTION

Elizabeth Bathgate lived in the small coastal town of Eyemouth in Berwickshire. Her husband, Alexander Pae, was a maltman, and the couple seem to have been comfortably off, lending money and employing more than one servant. She was caught up in a local witchcraft panic in 1633, but achieved a narrow escape in her 1634 trial with the aid of a supportive husband and effective lawyers. Her case reveals much about community interactions and about sophisticated legal argument.

The Eyemouth panic began in the summer of 1633, and gathered momentum in the autumn with accusations against Agnes Allanshaw, Agnes Wilson, Alison Wilson, Elspeth Wilson and Katherine Wilson. The privy council granted a commission of justiciary for their trial on 26 November 1633, with the commissioners including John Ramsay of Edington, sheriff depute of Berwickshire. Elizabeth Bathgate's own trial record tells us that the confessions of Agnes Wilson and Alison Wilson named Isobel Sinclair, and Bathgate herself, as fellow-witches. On 9 December, the two Wilsons were made to ‘confront’ Sinclair and Bathgate, and the Wilsons declared that Sinclair and Bathgate had been with them at the sinking of George Huldie's ship by witchcraft. A commission of justiciary for the trial of Isobel Sinclair would be granted on 14 January 1634. But Elizabeth Bathgate proved to be harder to deal with.

The prosecutors imprisoned Bathgate in the tolbooth of Duns, the head burgh of Berwickshire. The leaders of her prosecution were Sir Patrick Home of Ayton and John Home, minister of Eyemouth, who were part of the team that had driven forward the prosecutions so far. Quite possibly the Homes hoped to torture her with sleep deprivation; there was mention at her trial of testimony that had been gathered during the previous ‘watching’ of Agnes Wilson. However, Bathgate's husband, Alexander Pae, acted promptly.

I consider the complete retranslation of Thomas Mann's fifty-eight Deutsche Hörer! radio addresses (1940 to 1945; fifty-nine if we include the “Address to Americans of German Descent”)––undertaken by three experts in comparative literature from California State University, Long Beach, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts––to be a matter of particular urgency in our present international political and societal crisis. Perhaps the most important question regards what attention this translation will attract in the United States today: this plea, ultimately more humanistic than political, from a German author who had emigrated to the USA to his former countrymen who had stayed at home in the Nazi Reich.

Will the significance of the new translations be limited to fresh research projects by a few literary scholars, or perhaps to the interest of a handful of private Thomas Mann admirers? I do not think so. No doubt, the grave social and political wounds that the United States in particular has suffered in the course of recent decades, both in terms of foreign and domestic policy, cannot be compared in any way with the utter moral collapse that was the Nazi empire, which is the subject of Thomas Mann's speeches. But our nation––I was after all born in and am a citizen of the United States––which has fallen into a lamentable, strife-torn, and imperiled state, faces an extremely unsettled and precarious future.

INTRODUCTION

In Shetland, 31 persons were accused of witchcraft during the period 1602–1725: 23 women and eight men. The percentage of accused men in Shetland was 26 per cent, which is higher than for Scotland in general, and also higher than for Orkney. In the group of men, six were accused early, during the period 1602–16. Then there was a long pause until Magnus Laurenson was accused in 1674. Some of the records of his pre-trial investigation are preserved. The interrogators were all major landowners: Gilbert Neven of Windhouse, a justice of the peace; Robert Hunter of Lunna, chamberlain of Shetland; John Mitchell of Berrie, a collector of excise; and John Forrester, another chamberlain. The document below is their petition demanding that Laurenson should be tried. There is however no record of a formal trial for him.

Most of the witchcraft trials in Shetland deal with traditional witchcraft, maleficium, causing human illness and death or animal illness and death. In the earliest witchcraft trials in Shetland, neither the Devil nor the Devil’s pact are mentioned. There was a change in 1616, when new and learned demonological ideas came to the fore in a triple trial. A range of demonological ideas were confessed, all known from cases on the Scottish mainland: the Devil's pact, the Devil's mark, the Devil's child, a promise from the Devil, and sex with the Devil. However, in Shetland such notions did not last for a long time. Ideas related to demonology did not get a foothold there.

Magnus Laurenson is mentioned twice in court records, first in 1674 – a year when there were no other witchcraft trials in Shetland – and again in 1677. He lived in Gonfirth, in the north-west of Mainland, and was a practising healer.

Chapter 2 assesses what stereotypes are and explains what makes them both wrongful and harmful. The chapter begins by defining stereotypes, explaining their relationship to prejudice and implicit bias, and showing how they are maintained due to cognitive biases. I examine factors that go into making the judgments involved with stereotyping. Then I analyze what makes stereotypes wrongful, including their rigidity, their falsity, and the way they overgeneralize about a person’s experience so as to erase its nuance and complexity. I look at descriptive and normative components of stereotypes and show that negative stereotypes always make a normative judgment about the badness and inferiority of a person who fits the stereotype.

This chapter is on the production of African literature at the intersection of colonialism, colonial institutions, and the African subjects conscripted into modernity. The key argument is that, irrespective of the languages used, the emergence of creative writing on the continent was determined by systems and processes of colonization and colonial institutions including the Christian missions and schools and European ideas about modernity. In addition to providing a critical account of the overdetermining power of colonial institutions in the invention of African literature, the chapter examines the self-fashioning of Africans as writers and intellectuals and how the task of writing and the forms that it generated changed as the desire to master colonial ideas and institutions was transcended by decolonial aspirations.

The presence of a specific ‘proto-melodramatic’ culture prior to the arrival of melodrama in German-speaking countries should invite us to reconsider the argument according to which the Benda model brought to perfection Rousseau's rudimentary integration of music, while its poetic aspect remained specifically exemplary of the Sturm und Drang. Certainly, the rhetorical treatment of these librettos was in tune with the Sturm und Drang, but solely ascribing it to this German trend is only half of the answer. The expansion of the French style entrecoupé into the Sturm und Drang drama, allowing for a unique combination of pantomime, declamation, and music, was also a consequence of the theatrical culture that had developed around Lessing in Hamburg in the 1760s. In Goethe's Clavigo (1774), the hero's desperate final monologue applies a rhetoric that can be described as melodramatic, its many interjections interwoven with musical ritornelli: ‘Marie! Marie! Take me with you! Take me with you! Grim music is heard from inside. They are starting to walk to the tomb! – Stop! Stop! Don't close the casket! Let me see her one last time! […] The music continues. She's calling! I’m coming! – What fear grips me! What trembling holds me back! The music starts up for the third time and continues.’2 These outbursts and short sentences create a stylised texture for the fragmentary, the incomplete, powerfully triggering the Darstellung.

This poetics of incompletion was dictated by a conception of declamation in which the myth of immediacy, of the spontaneity of inspiration, could be fully acted out.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

This chapter seeks to examine intellectual streams that have shaped Ngugi’s poetics and what such contexts mean for Ngugi’s radical poetics. Is there a linear relationship and how has Ngugi shaped radical poetics on the continent when it comes to issues such the language of publishing and the decolonisation project? It argues that some of the shifts in Ngugi’s aesthetic and political ideology are linked to Ngugi’s tenure at Leeds University. His exposure to the works of Marx and Fanon and the influence of a group of African scholars at Leeds, and exposure to the radical scholar Arnold Kettle, marked a major shift in Ngugi’s aesthetic and ideological practices. Reading Fanon, in particular, must have transformed Ngugi’s views on a number of issues, ranging from violence for liberation to the nature of neo-colonialism. Fanon’s ideas on the nature and role of the national bourgeoisie, and his notion of the ‘native poet’ as the custodian of national culture, find echoes in Ngugi’s fiction and essays.

This first French performance of the tragedy with Mendelssohn's incidental music was on 21 May. As this is a play, not an opera, the characters spoke their lines, sometimes accompanied by the orchestra; the music is almost entirely for double chorus and orchestra.

It was an excellent occasion, whose literary value I leave to a more expert pen than mine to assess. I will allow myself merely to say that I was, like all the artists in the audience, profoundly moved by the powerful ideas of this Shakespeare of antiquity. I found it beautiful, noble, and touching and wept as much as is permitted without making oneself ridiculous. I applauded Bocage and Mlle Bourbier with all my might, as well as Mendelssohn's music, the choir, and the innovative, imposing stage production. Certainly the director of the Odéon, by giving new life to Sophocles, has done our culture a favour by demonstrating, by way of this famous example, that those men of today gifted with dramatic genius have simply been following the path of the classical playwrights in portraying nature and truth. This upsets certain people, it's true, who had different views about Sophocles and who now find him as vulgar as Shakespeare because he uses the right words. But why worry? Most audiences these days are quite happy that Tiresias should talk of ‘dogs’ and ‘crows’, and that when Creon learns of Eurydice's death he responds simply ‘O my poor wife!’, instead of following classical practice, as janitors do, with ‘O my unfortunate spouse!’

What shocks most people over this production is the intervention by the chorus, singing in response to the actors’ dialogues.

Fresh from King Edward IV's (r.1461–70/1471–83) victory over Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, at Barnet on 14 April 1471, a paean of celebratory verses encouraged the Yorkists’ former foes to change sides for the decisive battle that was to follow at Tewkesbury. ‘Turn again [Conuertimini], ye comyns, & drede your kyng’ ran the refrain:

The commons were urged to revert to their former allegiance. Edward IV's triumph flouted public opinion which, in the previous year, had been so decisively opposed to him. In 1470 Warwick's invasion had attracted overwhelming support and most of Edward's supporters deserted his cause. The king, along with key allies, fled into exile. Edward's recovery owed nothing to public backing. Similarly, a decade before in 1460 and two decades before in 1450, the populace had swept Lancastrian governments out of London and the south-east. Each time the commons were aroused by publicity that focused on their particular grievances and aspirations, as well as articulating the remedies. The people took to politics during the Wars of the Roses, sometimes decisively. A series of kings in 1475, 1483 and in 1489 were wary of them. How the people were mobilised by effective propaganda is the theme of this essay.