In her graphic novels Huck Finn (2013), Antoinette kehrt zurück (Antoinette Returns, 2014), and Endzeit (Ever After, 2018), Olivia Vieweg addresses the traumatic effects of global neoliberalism. By far outpacing similar developments in the West, neo-liberalization in post-1990 East Germany, where Vieweg grew up and continues to live and work, had particularly harsh consequences. In contradistinction to other artists, Vieweg openly identifies as an “Ossi,” and even tries to create an understanding of what East Germans experienced post-1990—and what they lost—in highly visible interventions, such as contributions to public television: socialized with firm expectations of social stability, egality, and the relevance of each individual, as well as the materialization of a more equitable society within their lifetime, East Germans had been affected all the more by deindustrialization, ghettoization, and the exclusion from the Western-dominated public sphere and politics. Post-1990 protests outnumbered those of 1989 but went unreported in the global press. As a result, psychological disorders spread like an epidemic. Vieweg works through the trauma caused by the Western takeover in what can be understood as her East German trilogy, Huck Finn, Antoinette kehrt zurück, and Endzeit, whose two versions bracket the other two texts.

In 1672, an unmarried servant woman, Sarah Peele, was accused of infanticide in York. In her deposition, Peele told the Justices of the Assize Court that, while she had ‘been begotten with child’ by one William Tennant, she had miscarried a shapeless matter. Peele stated that she had experienced ‘a miscarriage of a mention of a child not formed as it should be’. Nearly one hundred years later, another woman, Margaret Baker, from Saxhow in Yorkshire, was charged with infanticide after four women from the same town accused her. Like Peele, Baker admitted to experiencing pregnancy, but told the Justices that it had occurred three years earlier. She explained her recent pregnant appearance as the result of an illness which had stopped her menstruation, until eventually ‘something like a false conception came from her’. Across England ‒ and indeed Europe ‒ women like Peele and Baker who were accused of infanticide or abortion sometimes told authorities that they had not given birth to a human foetus, but mere shapeless flesh and blood. Sometimes, women used the language of ‘false conception’, as Baker did here, at other times words like ‘mole’, or more ambiguous phrases such as ‘shapeless’ or “formless’, were used to describe what had come from their bodies. In doing so, women under suspicion of infanticide sought to demonstrate to authorities that they were not guilty of such a crime; infanticide applied only to ‘children’ under criminal law in England.

Providing a liberating escape for a generation of Romantics, musical ciphers became a familiar pursuit within the circle of Robert Schumann. Sometimes the ‘recipient’ tasked with deciphering the ‘plaintext’ was identified, as in the FAE Sonata for violin and piano, which Robert, Albert Dietrich and Johannes Brahms created for Joseph Joachim, who performed it with Clara Schumann on 28 October 1853 and not only decrypted the plaintexts – ‘frei aber einsam’ (‘free but alone’) and ‘Gisela’ – but also identified the authors of the four movements.

To authenticate a cipher generally requires documentation from the composer, though this chapter also considers speculative ciphers for their revealing insights into music as Beziehungskunst, an art form intimately tied to relationships.Indeed, within the Schumann circle most ciphers did operate within this context, whether reflecting collegiality, romantic love, multi-amory, opportunities for playful games, or posthumous remembrance.

Clara and Robert Schumann formed the centre of a group of musicians and composers intrigued with ciphers, including Albert Dietrich (1829–1908), a student of Robert in Düsseldorf; Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), the violinist-composer whose acquaintance with the Schumanns began in the 1840s in Leipzig; and Johannes Brahms, whose early piano works Robert famously described in 1853 as verschleierte Sinfonien (‘veiled symphonies’). In addition, there was the Danish composer Niels Gade and lastly, Franz Liszt, who found his way to the BACH tetrachord, and may have experimented with other ciphers as well.

The Sonata in G, Op. 96, always seems to have inspired a special reverence from its interpreters, in a manner that emphasises the spiritual, rather than the more extrovert aspects of performance. Czerny writes of the first movement that, ‘this piece, which is written in a calm, noble, melodious, but also humorous character, must be played with tenderness and feeling, in a moderate time (almost Tempo di Menuetto), as it is neither in a brilliant, nor at all in a bravura style.’ The Sonata was later taken up as a favourite by Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim (‘the two were particularly noted for their playing of Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano’), which leads to discussion later in this chapter of Op. 96 in the light of its numerous intertextual relationships with the G major Violin Sonata by their close friend Brahms.

In 1927, Joachim's great-niece, the eminent violinist Jelly d’Aranyi, was moved to these words, which open her essay on the Beethoven Sonatas:

In this 1943 letter to Leslie Howard of the City of Birmingham Orchestra, pianist Harriet Cohen (1895–1967) outlines the mutually beneficial intersections between her British and Jewish identities in her piano career. For this concert in Liverpool, she explicitly links her musical success to engagement with her Jewish community and their associated politics. Yet, despite extensive archival material indicating the centrality of this positioning to Cohen's career, she has instead too often been relegated to a footnote in histories of composer Arnold Bax and the infamous story of their love affair. These male-centric narratives, though filled with titillating intrigue and aligned with Cohen's self-fashioning as muse, do little to represent her own remarkable musical achievement or political life.

Were medieval people obsessed with ‘type’? Ruminations on the seven sins, four elements, twelve zodiac signs, and countless other lists abound in what survives from the period, leading some historians to draw connections between medieval scholasticism and the medieval perception of personhood. To these critics, classification, hierarchy, and distinction were central to conceptions of self: ‘to conform to a pattern is to be somebody. Not to conform is to be nobody’, concludes John A. Alford; Judson Boyce Allen has meanwhile argued that ‘medieval classifications were made, apparently, in the faith that any given entity – act, person, or fact – was enhanced by being so classed. One's label, one's context, was properly a part of one's essence and definition, and one could not do without it’. Although a preoccupation with adequately distinguishing is evident in texts such as the widespread distinctiones (which offered scholastic explication and exegesis from the second half of the twelfth century; ‘in them, meanings were broken down, divided into their constituent parts, so that the senses or aspects of key words were easier to grasp’, A. J. Minnis describes), there is of course a difference between establishing the components of the trivium and the quadrivium, and the construction of personhood – or the creation of literary character, the subject of this chapter and this book more generally.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, interlacustrine Africa was reshaped on the ruins of ancient empires like those of the Babito and later of Bunyoro-Kitara. From these ruins, however, emerged a new kind of political organisation: the kingdom ruled by a ruler who mediated the great aristocratic families. The main place of this mediation was the king's court, which was a new arena of political struggle and representation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, royal courts shaped much of the political landscape of the region. It had been mainly the desire of conquest that motivated the elites to accept one of their rivals as the primus inter pares. Only a federal coalition of the powerful aristocrats was able to provide the necessary strength to expand and to thwart contenders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the court, however, rose to be a political force on its own. Not so much as a powerful player itself, but as a power centre, where the elites vied for influence and power. Interlacustrine politics were highly competitive, and this was foremost expressed in struggles for the succession of a new ruler. The establishment of the court as a centre of gravity was not new, the region had a long history of ceremonial politics bound to the residence of the ruler. But in the nineteenth century, the court became an important political, economic, and cultural centre, and that combination was clearly an innovation.