Eduard Claudius's 1950 short story “Die Geburt” (TheBirth) opens in the spring of 1947 with the veteranGerman ironworker Laube crouching behind a cratewhile “Frauen in zerrissenen Schuhwerk, inverschmutzten Kleidern, mit stumpfen Augen undausgemergelten Leibern” (women in tattered footwear,in filthy clothes, with numb eyes and hag¬gardbodies) help disassemble his foundry's machinery forSoviet war reparations. Laube is plotting with thetechnician Hanke to sabotage the crane in an attemptto prevent the dismantling of this factory where hehas spent his working life “in das Getöse vonFlammen und Lärm, in den tollen Wirbel der Arbeit”(DG 422: in the roar of flames and noise, in thegreat whirl of work). When Hanke asks how long Laubewill stand by and watch “wie sie alles einpacken undnach Russland schicken” (how they are packing upeverything and sending it to Russia), Laube explodesin rage: “Unsere Fabriken? … Unser? … Was gehörteschon uns? Nichts.

The impact of endemic plague on medieval art and architecture, a subject of sustained, energetic debate among scholars of Italian art and architecture since the middle of the last century, has received less focused attention from scholars of English art. Writing about English book production and illumination specifically or architecture and the arts more broadly, Francis Wormald, Lynda Dennison, John Harvey, Philip Lindley, Paul Binski, Joanne Filippone Overty, Michael A. Michael, and Zachary Stewart are among the scholars who have considered issues of disruptions to work and to artists’ training – to the “loss,” in Binski's words, of both “talent” and “procedural memory” – and in Michael's case, that most difficult issue, the Plague's possible effects on esthetic aspects of visual expression. As this study has argued, it was the Plague that precipitated the dramatic reversals of fortune that motivated the Bible's commission, influenced the conditions of its facture, and shaped aspects of its visual program and its translation (see above, Chapter 1, 38–9, and passim). One nonetheless looks in vain in the Bible's painted histories for direct references to the Plague, which are uncommon even in the illustrations in historical chronicles.

Of Empires and Their Subjects

In an early chapter of Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Men without Mercy), the sixteen-year-old Karl is shown exploring the strange new urban environment in which his family now lives. He wonders at the tree-lined avenues, restaurants and department stores, palaces, museums, and monuments he discovers there. The city is not named, but the mention of a triumphal arch and the parkland that lies beyond the architectural splendours of the centre strongly suggests the area around the Brandenburg Gate, and that impression is reinforced by the later evocation of an old king's ceremonial entry into the city at the head of his troops (P 28–29). In that area, Karl also notices parties of schoolchildren being taken to see an exhibition that is free to the public, and when he plucks up the courage to follow them, he finds himself mounting a long staircase with marble balustrades that leads to a room full of monumental paintings commemorating battles and historic victories (P 27–29). The image that most plays on Karl's imagination, however, is that of a landscape strewn with the debris of battle, while a solitary figure, the defeated king, climbs a hill to surrender his sword to the victor. That image stays with him as a cliché to be recalled at moments in his life when he anticipates unprecedented success or comprehensive failure (P 200–201, 270).

A coup d’etat that left a Merovingian king tonsured and his ox-cart-riding dynasty impotent. A hunchbacked heir's failed rebellion and resulting monastic imprisonment. The late-eighth- and early-ninth-century Carolingian court wove compelling stories to propagate a vision of royal power that became standard for more than a millennium. Such high drama coupled with limited documentation encouraged twentieth-century American writers to transform these historical fragments into comedic political commentaries. When John Steinbeck (1902–68) wrote a satire set in France, he chose the Merovingian-Carolingian regime change in 751 CE as his inspiration. In The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), a politically chaotic twentieth-century France returns to monarchy, and a Merovingian descendant proposes a Carolingian king. The appeal of Carolingian political intrigue surfaced again one decade later, when college student Ron Straus read about Pippin, the son of King Charlemagne (r. 768–814 CE) who rebelled against his father in 792 CE and was exiled to a monastery. Straus and Stephen Schwartz wrote a musical full of court intrigue that eventually debuted on Broadway in 1972 as Pippin.

This chapter moves from the human sphere to the divine and discusses one of the most celebrated stories that rely on the notion of the mortality of gods, namely the myth of the death of Baldr. Here, we do not encounter humans wishing or attempting to vanquish gods, but rather one god annihilated by another. The Baldr story counts among the most celebrated in the corpus of Norse mythological tales, and countless studies have been devoted to the elucidation of its meaning and origin. Current interpretations of the Baldr myth generally highlight meaning over origin and see Baldr's death as the pivotal point in a great mythological narrative that outlines the history of the flawed order of Óðinn from creation to destruction. This chapter will first discuss the interpretation of the Baldr story as a murder within the family and a direct consequence of the primordial killing of Ymir. It will then consider how the grand narrative arc of mythological history in the Prose Edda may have developed.

Summing up the history of research on the Baldr story in his Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology in 1997, Lindow wrote as follows: “It may be that the search for a unified Baldr theory is ultimately too grand an endeavor and should be scaled back to a series of attempts to interpret various texts or traditions”. And this is indeed what he does throughout most of his meticulous study of the Baldr myth. Toward the end of his monograph, he nevertheless proposes a cogent overarching interpretation of the Baldr material as it was recorded in writing in thirteenthcentury Iceland. Myth offers, in his view, “a means of dealing with and sometimes working out problems of society and the human condition.”