On October 8, 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that Herta Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller was only the third person born in Romania to become a Nobel laureate. The first was George Emil Palade (1912–2008), who received the prize for medicine in 1974; he was residing in the United States and was affiliated with Yale University at that time. The second, and most widely known, was the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), born in Sighet, in northern Romania, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a US citizen. In 2014, a second Banat Swabian received the Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry: Stefan Hell, born in Arad, Romania, in 1962, and a German citizen since 1978. However, he, unlike Müller, had received more recognition in Romania before he received this honor; he had been a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences since 2012. In fact, the only official mention of Müller in Timişoara as of June 2022 is a plaque that adorns a wall of the German-language Lycée Nikolaus Lenau that was able to produce two Nobel laureates (fig. 6.1).

The announcement of the Swedish Academy in 2009 sent journalists and television crews into a frenzy, as many invaded Müller's birthplace—the small isolated village of Nitzkydorf— Müller's inspiration for Niederungen. Yet the most provocative reaction came from the former Securitate officer Radu Tinu, who suggested that Müller owed the Securitate half the money she had received for the Nobel Prize. Banking on his alleged insider information, Tinu delivered the last episode in the saga about the Securitate and Müller. The Romanian journalist Ştefan Both secured an exclusive interview with the former deputy chief of the Timiş Securitate and published a series of articles in the Romanian national newspaper Adevărul (The Truth) in November 2009. Tinu did not disappoint his audience and referenced aspects about the Nobel laureate's surveillance barely available by 2009. Müller's file had been recently unearthed and had been of little interest to the general public until the news about Müller's Nobel Prize created an uproar in Romania. Blunt and unapologetic, Tinu accused Müller of being psychotic and of inventing stories about her surveillance.

Over one thousand years ago, a collaborative bookmaking project was commissioned in the south of England. It was one of many to be set in motion around the time of the first millennium and it was ambitious: compilers, scribes and artists amassed material that would allow them to construct a manuscript of illustrated vernacular poetry, one that represented the cycle of salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. These particular book-crafters were innovative. They set about their work on what would be a visually arresting object that could sit on display, perhaps at the altar. Poems collected in this compilation, preserved and archived as part of a new assembly, could also be read for guidance and instruction. Poetic accounts of fallen figures and prideful tyrants failing in their endeavours would highlight the perils of poor rulership in dramatic terms, offering the potential for rumination. Those reading and viewing these poems, such as the manuscript's patrons or recipients, maybe even counsellors or ministers, would be able to trace connections across pages while reflecting on the disasters that had come to those striving to match the immensity of God.

The project was never fully realised. There are signs now that some of its production was interrupted. Yet, the work that was set down has survived and it is bound in leather and known by various titles, most commonly by its shelf-mark: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11. Despite, or perhaps because of, this manuscript's seemingly unfinished state, names, places, half-truths, legends and events have gathered around its contents over the centuries. Cædmon, the divinely inspired, illiterate cowherd that Bede tells us miraculously sang Christian poems in English, was once thought to have been the composer of the manuscript's verse. Although it is a myth now dispelled by philology, the tie with Cædmon has its strongest roots in the work of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677), the collector who gives Junius 11 its more common title. Junius entitled his edition of the manuscript (the first edition of an Old English poetic codex) Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum in 1655. In linking this early medieval book and its origins with Cædmon, Junius represents an early reader attempting to unite the poems of the manuscript as the work of one poet.

A passage in the so-called Fonthill Letter, the record of a late ninth-century legal dispute, recounts that a judicial panel found in favor of one of the litigants because his testimony convinced its members that he was “nearer the oath” (aðe ðæs ðe near) than any of the other parties. This striking phrase is not unique to this text – a Latin analogue occurs in the record of a tenth-century dispute preserved in the Liber Eliensis – suggesting that, if not necessarily common, it was nonetheless a recognizable legal formula. The panel reached its judgment after each litigant “gave his account” (reahta heora ægðer his spell) and the defendant was permitted to present (geagnigean) the charters that validated his ownership. Underlying this passage is a complex interplay of narratives: the oral testimonies delivered by the litigants, the written histories recorded in the charters, and the panel's judgment concerning whose narrative would be authorized as “true” via legal ritual – that is, which narrative brought the litigant “nearer the oath.” The phrase is a potent one, evoking a courtroom setting where the stories presented are judged according to their proximity to the central oaths taken by the participants: the oaths themselves become palpable players in the drama.

This small detail from the Fonthill Letter provides just one illustration of the close relationship between the legal and the literary in pre-Conquest texts, though its recognition of the symbiotic connection between these two modes of discourse was hardly a new one. Plato's critique of the literary in the Republic represents an implicit acknowledgment of the normative power of narrative, while the discussion of the cathartic importance of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics is founded on the belief that narrative release was essential to the maintenance of a civil society. The courtroom speeches of Demosthenes and, later, of Cicero demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the place of narrative and literary style in legal advocacy (and invective). Perhaps most influentially, the Novellae constitutiones, the fourth component of the Corpus juris civilis, incorporate narrative as precedent to justify additions to the laws of Justinian. Given this pedigree, there can be little surprise that similar connections between law and literature can be found in texts produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Scholars who periodize hypocrisy tend to associate it with early modern Europe; however, by examining homiletic, legal, and hagiographic rep-resentations of hypocrisy across the early English corpus, this chapter will explore how discourses on the vice underpin their authors’ visions of moral and legal behavior in public life. The nature of hypocrisy as both a moral and political ill make it a useful vehicle for covering this legal and spiritual terrain. As a social disruption, the vice forces creative reflections on the ramifications of a society's legal breaches at the essential levels of trust and truth. As the authors examined here present it, moreover, hypocrisy reveals the institutional interplay of the early English literary, legal, and homiletic traditions. Texts from each genre concern themselves (each with respect to their particular sphere of interest) with individuals’ failure to consistently align their thoughts, intentions, and actions; what emerges is a vision of the world in which the integrity of the laity depends on that of the Church, and in which both seek to establish order and achieve resolution through legal prescriptions. I leave open the extent to which the exhortations and examples found in these textual traditions translated into actual social practice, even in the case of written law. Although pre-Conquest legislators from Alfred onward prescribed how local people should behave, sheriffs, reeves, and other authorities would not necessarily have enforced these prescriptions consistently or efficiently. And one imagines that the vaguely-phrased moral crimes of the later law codes would have posed considerably greater problems for practical detection and enforcement than the usual run of local crimes.

To tease out the practicability of legislating a moral idea, I turn to two ecclesiastics whose rhetorically-rich spiritual writings envisioned a society standing on divinely-sanctioned legal ground: Ælfric (d. c. 1010) and Wulfstan (d. 1023). My focus on these figures is not intended to delineate the peculiarities of their several approaches to the moral issue here examined; rather, my interest lies more broadly in the textual channels of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The eclectic flow of sermons, sacred histories, and saints’ lives to which these men were significant and influential contributors mixed legal, spiritual, and poetic languages, and addressed a range of audiences, from royal patrons, to church masters and students, to lay audiences. On the whole, then, I present their writings as similarly sourced if contextually discrete manifestations of church concerns at the turn of the eleventh century.

Kenrick & Jefferson was a British printer and stationery manufacturer, founded in West Bromwich in 1878 and remaining there until its closure in 2000. In the first half of its life, K&J was remarkably successful, delivering consistent sales growth with impressive rates of profitability. It did so while continually investing in the business's technical capabilities and sustaining a performance culture among staff members who could be confident that consistent personal performance meant a job for life. After World War Two, K&J found circumstances more challenging. Despite managing to retain elements of its paternalistic ethos while simultaneously investing in new equipment and processes, the company struggled to sustain pre-war standards. In this chapter, we review K&J's performance between 1949 and 1979, assessing the importance of key elements of the business, most notably sales, innovation, and management. To reflect the main periods of change, and for ease of organisation, these elements are examined across three time periods: up to the mid-1950s; from 1955 to the late 1960s; and from 1970 to 1979. As we follow this timeline we will discover those strengths which sustained K&J beyond its 100th anniversary, and the weaknesses which ultimately overcame them and ensured its eventual demise twenty-one years later.

Management and Organisation to 1955

Between its foundation in 1878 and the end of the Second World War, K&J had retained a paternalistic culture in which both those who owned and led the business and those who worked in it frequently referred to their membership of the “K&J Family”. “Mr. Fred” Jefferson (members of the owning families were addressed in this style), second-generation chairman and joint managing director with his brother Edward, combined a focus on the company's perfor-mance with a commitment to its members’ wellbeing. On his death in 1940, K&J was in good financial and operational condition. It prospered through the Second World War, producing ration books and similar government-procured products in huge quantities. The immediate post-war years had been prosperous too, but there were signs that this good fortune could not last and that K&J was no longer the company it had been. On the eve of the company's 75th anniversary, the business boom of the immediate post-war years had passed; neighbouring countries, notably Germany, had begun to rebuild their economies; the future of trade with Britain's colonies was uncertain.

Thus the famous presentation of circumstantial evidence to the modern imagination in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Silver Blaze. Following this exchange, Holmes deduces from the circumstance of the dog's nocturnal silence the fact that it must have known whomever entered the stables when a prized horse went missing; he is therefore able to narrow his field of suspects. His less perspicacious foil Detective Gregory fails to appreciate the full consequence of this curious circumstance – for Gregory, as Holmes laments, is not “gifted with imagination.” As is typical of circumstantial evidence, the issue here turns on the discernment of acts no longer to be seen: the truth of what happened can only be constructed from inferences made after the event. The problem posed by the fate of the horse with the silver blaze is one that the Old English law-writers would have appreciated, concerned as their codes are with animals stolen, straying, or disappearing only to re-appear in the form of their butch-ered and hidden remains. But (in the absence of a reliable witness to the moment of disappearance) how would the pre-Conquest English subject and legal process have gone about solving this or an equivalent crime? Were public oaths or recourse to oath-helpers, and submission to the hot iron or boiling water, their only practical methods of arriving at the truth? Or might they have made use of our modern detective's methods – the application of reasoning, logic and imagination to what material evidence remains (or is significantly absent)? This chapter makes an argument for the importance of the role of circumstantial evidence in the truth-seeking endeavors of the Old English legal system, and finds traces even in the decrees of the law codes to suggest that this approach to discovery was a widespread and accepted one in the legal field, adapted to a range of criminal and legal circumstances. The same interest in deliberate observation and telling inference emerges too in Old English poetry, which reveals in some of its narratives a dramatic reliance upon analogous truth-finding processes – Beowulf is the chosen exemplar here.

In Britain, the Second World War began on a Sunday. On 3 September 1939 Neville Chamberlain announced the government's declaration of war against Nazi Germany in a BBC radio broadcast to the nation at 11.15 a.m., while many people were attending divine worship and large numbers of children were at Sunday school. In numerous cathedrals, churches and chapels, the news was reported from pulpits; in others, radios had been installed so that the prime minister's words could be heard directly by their congregations. The war began amid prayers. Chamberlain's broadcast contained a religious appeal: ‘May God bless you all. May He defend the right.’ King George VI, broadcasting in the evening, called on the peoples of Britain and its empire to ‘reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then, with God's help, we shall prevail.’ The king's words had been composed by the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, who delivered a broadcast address of his own two hours later. On the following day, Lang asked Chamberlain for government support in arranging a national day of prayer. With the king's public approval, this was observed a main British churches, through broadcast services on all BBC channels, and in many churches in the overseas dominions and colonies, huge numbers of people joined in special appeals for God's assistance in the war.

The use of religious language by British leaders, the close co-operation between the state, the churches and the BBC, and the organization of special acts of worship all increased as the war proceeded. Together, these amounted to a ‘spiritual mobilization’ of the nation and empire, and a call for spiritual solidarity from the governments and peoples of other nations. Wartime recruitment of religion and the churches was hardly new. During the wars of previous centuries, sovereigns, governments and the established churches had claimed God's special favour for the kingdom and its allies, ordered special prayers and religious fast and thanksgiving days, and aimed to convince their own people and other nations of the righteousness of their cause, the spiritual resources for endurance and hope, and a providential assurance of eventual victory and a better future. Yet the extent and effects of the state's mobilization of religion and the churches during the Second World War await systematic investigation.

The Second World War ended differently from previous wars. When the German forces surrendered in May 1945, there was no longer any recognized authority with whom a state of peace could be established. British troops were in Germany because they had been fighting there and, although known as the ‘British Liberation Army’ elsewhere in Northwest Europe, in Germany it would be the ‘British Occupation Army’. The army could not immediately return to Britain as it now needed to ensure that the Military Government, and subsequently the civilian ‘Control Commission Germany’, could carry out their tasks in safety. One major goal was to re-establish a state organized along democratic lines. The role of the German churches in assisting this would be important and meant that relationships between the British and German churches and faith groups were crucial. One group that was to become involved, at least initially, with this task were British army chaplains. Among the British Occupation Army were some 300 members of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD). Since 1920, these were organized into two administrative groups – Catholics in one group and all the remaining chaplains in the other. This system of dual administration would remain among the chaplains serving in Germany. Chaplains were priests and ministers serving with the blessing of the faith group which they represented, being recruited on a ratio of 1:1000 to the adherents of their faith community churches. By the time they arrived in Germany most were well embedded with the headquarters or unit to which they were attached. As no detailed study of army chaplains in the Second World War covers this period, this chapter will discuss the challenges faced by members of the RAChD in the summer of 1945 as they settled into a strange land in a unique situation. It will look first at a specific instruction that banned chaplains from having any other than formal relations with the German population in general and, specifically, with German churchmen. It will then examine the tensions that developed as chaplains carried out their ministry as part of the forces of occupation. Finally, it will consider the uncertainty that existed over the role of chaplains in the long-term relationship between the British and German churches.

Preparation for the occupation: non-fraternization

After the break-out from Normandy in August 1944, there had seemed to be a possibility that the war would be over before the end of the year.

The poem known as Genesis B is an important intrusion in the sequence we find in Junius 11. As discussed in the previous chapter, the beginning of Genesis A resituated biblical history by describing the building of hell as God's first creation. Genesis B disturbs the linear narrative of this history further by returning manuscript readers and viewers to the events of Lucifer's rebellion and contributing, as Janet Schrunk Ericksen writes, to the make-up of Junius 11 as ‘both a continuous whole and a collection with ruptures, discontinuities, and functionally independent pieces’. Interpolated into the longer Genesis A at lines 235–851, the poetry of Genesis B provides further insights into Lucifer's disastrous attempt to rule the heavenly kingdom and therefore expands on the tragedy that structured the first pages of the manuscript. This flashback means that some of the preoccupations and warnings of Genesis A's prologue, such as those concerning the destructiveness of ill counsel, re-emerge and are reiterated. But Genesis B also deepens the tale of the angelic rebellion and the warnings both implicit and explicit in those first 235 lines of Genesis A: this is poetry that provides another perspective on the rebellion as a political failure by tracing its fallout and by having Satan boast about his desire for compensation in long, grandiose speeches. This is a poem that is also interested in the dire consequences of poorly counselled pursuits of amends by those engaged in futile struggles for dominance. Despite Satan's bad politics, his ideal of revenge does result in immense suffering and Adam and Eve are led astray by the devil's ‘boda’ (messenger), a servant of hell, forcing the inhabitants of Eden to abandon the divine teaching and guidance gifted to them. Through this re-casting of the fall of Adam and Eve, Genesis B evokes the destruction wrought by the madness of those viewing themselves as greater than God.

On page 13 of Junius 11, where Genesis B enters the fray and begins at the top, there is no capitalisation or decorated initial, suggesting that compilers did not see the poem as out of sync with the cycle of history they sought to portray in poetry (see Fig. 4).

As they began to rebuild their businesses after the Second World War, company owners and managers in the West Midlands and Baden-Württemberg faced multiple challenges. Some were close to home and personal: how to manage the relationship between family and family firm, how to plan for succession, how personal values would impact the conduct of company affairs, whether one's standing within the local community would boost business – or vice versa. Other challenges depended on what we might call the external ecosystem and were consequently harder to control: how to find the most capable staff, how to fund a growing – or struggling – business, whether it was located in the most appropriate place for business success. In Part One we consider these challenges in relation to the companies examined in the following case studies, to help us understand one fundamental question: which mattered more for business success, the ability of individual entrepreneurs, or the advantages of the ecosystem in which they conducted their business? We begin with a brief overview of each region's situation at the beginning of our period.

Post-war Circumstances

Both countries faced extraordinarily challenging conditions after the end of the war in 1945. Britain had suffered 358,950 war dead, 63,635 of them civilians. Some 75,000 shops, 42,000 commercial properties, 25,000 factories and 450,000 homes had been destroyed or made unusable by German bombing. Material and labour shortages constrained rebuilding efforts, and Government policies focused less on local needs than on external challenges such as ongoing military commitments and the generation of income from exports, all made more difficult by the “almost indecent swiftness” with which the American Government ceased its Lend-Lease financial support programme at the war's end. Ministers believed they could plan the country's way out of its economic difficulties, failing to respond to the public's desire for more material goods and fewer restrictions; wide-ranging restrictions on consumption were still in place in 1951. Business leaders were frustrated throughout the late 1940s and 1950s by Government demand-management policies, the manifestation of the difficulty of achieving both sustainable domestic growth and external stability during the Cold War.