Since the foundation of the GDR in 1949 Goethe had been claimed by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) as the distinguished literary father figure of the state. This stemmed from the GDR's official claim to be the legitimate cultural successor of all progressive and humanist elements in the German tradition. The SED promoted the classical heritage (‘Erbe’) of Goethe and Schiller on the school curriculum and theatres around the GDR. As Wolfgang Emmerich writes, Goethe was emphasised as ‘“das Vorbild eines stets arbeitenden Menschen” […], dessen Wesen “von einem tätigen Humanismus erfüllt” gewesen sei’ [‘the model of a constantly working person’ whose being was fulfilled ‘by an active humanism’].

By the mid-1950s the SED's claims with regard to the ‘Erbe’ were to intensify, culminating in the belief that it was the historical mission of the GDR to become the realisation (‘Vollstrecker’) of the humanist tradition. If, as Nicholas Boyle states in ‘Wagering on Modernity’ in this volume, Goethe's Faust ‘is a modern man in the Nietzschean sense that he has left Christianity behind him’, the GDR took this one historical step further, in reinterpreting him as the prophet of a new socialist order. This was illustrated in relation to Faust's vision at the end of Faust II, when he proclaims: ‘Solch ein Gewimmel möcht’ ich sehn, / Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.’ [Such busy, teeming throngs I long to see, / Standing on freedom's soil, a people free]. For the SED the GDR work force could be interpreted as the embodiment of this vision. In March 1962 SED leader Walter Ulbricht asserted that the GDR workers had already begun to write this third part of Faust. As Vietor-Engländer points out, particularly the image of the ‘freies Volk auf freiem Grund’ was constantly referred to by GDR politicians between 1961 and 1971 and was still invoked during the commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Goethe's death in 1982.

The Faust myth has been deeply engrained in the collective European consciousness since the early Middle Ages and has invited widely different interpretations. Hundreds of literary images of the Faust myth exist, from Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) to Gotthold Lessing (1729–91), from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to Thomas Mann (1875–1955), from Paul Valéry (1871–1945) to Michel Butor (1926–2016), all of which brilliantly illuminate the personal and cultural codes of the artists. From Anton Radziwill (1775–1833) to Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), from Franz Schubert (1797–1828) to Robert Schumann (1810–56), from Carl Loewe (1796–1869) to Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), from Hector Berlioz (1803–69) to Guiseppe Verdi (1813–1901), from Franz Liszt (1811–86) to Gustav Mahler (1806–1911), from Charles Gounod (1818–93) to Henri Pousseur (1929–2009): their retelling of the Faust myth always involves personal choices, variations of a theme that the composer chooses based on his or her circumstances. Part of the reality of these readings is the way the myth becomes charged with new meanings and absorbs new interpretations that open it up to new dimensions of reality yet to be discovered or re-explored. So why has the Faust figure been so persistent in music history? What do we know about Goethe's analogue to the Faust tale? Why was he preoccupied with it over a period of sixty years? What ethics inspired it? What elements in his handling of the myth inspired its long musical history? What is the modern meaning of this mythical tale?

The motif of a ‘pact’ with the devil, which Goethe's Faust drama explores, can be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, when the myth emerged as a moral parable aimed to demonstrate a Christian's constant danger of being tempted off the path of moral righteousness and adherence to divine command, and his susceptibility to seek power and reward from other sources. The trade between man and the devil would normally imply forfeiting eternal life for gratification in the temporal and material world and thus serve as a reminder that ambitions reaching beyond man's allocated place can be achieved only at a price.

IN 1946 the British Crown Film Unit, part of the Ministry of Information, released the Humphrey Jennings documentary short A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1946) which documented the closing months of the Second World War. It contained within it a glowing depiction of Britain's wartime civilian male workers, portraying them as central to the war effort and eventual victory. The narrator, actor Michael Redgrave, declared:

The militaristic vocabulary used in describing these workers makes evident the filmmakers’ wish to present them as central components of the war effort and the equals of their counterparts in the fighting forces. Moreover, the production notes for the film confirm that the filmmakers were consciously making parallels between these civilian jobs and the armed forces. The notes portray Bill's occupation as a ‘vital war job’ and, more tellingly, Goronwy is, when injured in a mining accident, described as being in ‘permanent danger as compared with temporary as airmen.

ROMANTICISM, AS WE HAVE increasingly come to understand it, is a transnational and multilingual phenomenon. Striking affinities, even across divergent nationalities and languages, bind the long period of Romanticism into a recognizable and coherent body of cultural engagement, responses, and achievements. The exploration of subjectivity is one such concern that transcends those traditional boundaries. For instance, Rousseau's Julie, ou, la nouvelle Hèloïse (1761; Julie, or the New Heloise), Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) present three exemplary figures—St. Preux, Werther, and Harold—whose similar struggles with questions of selfhood are foundational for understanding Romanticism and its development across those three generations, three countries, and three languages. How does the self emerge out of a common and conventional literary past? How does it find its place against the background of nature, especially the sublime landscape of the Alps? It initially appears, with Rousseau's St. Preux, that the formation of an authentic subjectivity is dependent on an individual and unique sensibilité responsive to a world of nature free from tradition. Nevertheless, what the novel ultimately reveals is not only that Julie and St. Preux's love has a decidedly conventional character but that it also occurs against the background of a humanized landscape. Similar contradictions disturb Goethe's Werther and Byron's Harold, though with important differences.

Bryon's work especially exemplifies a trend in Romanticism that turns away from the antihistorical nature of Platonic philosophy as the method for grounding truth and, instead, seeks to rearticulate the subject and his world in the textual contingencies of history and tradition. To demonstrate that movement it will be helpful to frame it with what Ernesto Laclau calls the Platonic theory of articulation (Politics, 33ff.) and then recontextualize canto 3 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage within the more immediate literary tradition and problematics encountered in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Byron's own self-image derives from his reading, and the Weltschmerz of his fictional self, Childe Harold, finds its origin, in part, in the “melancholic soulsearching” of Werther (Vassallo, 22).

NATIONALISM and nation-building in various countries have been the focus of many books and articles in recent decades. These works show that, in modern times, the strong force of nationalism catalysed the emergence of new nations within the global landscape, providing the framework for the future growth of the nations that gained independence from Britain after the Second World War, and subsequently the fertile ground for the development of nationalism. However, nationalism is a complex concept. It can be expressed in different ways and styles, and can occur at different times before finally becoming grounded. The complexities of nationalism were intensified by the Second World War. It destabilized colonialism and left imperial states such as Britain fractured and weakened. However, in some circles, nationalism has been defined as resisting domination or the dominant beliefs of the established elites. Quite often, the growth of nationalism in the context of imperialism complicates the concept of nationalism by introducing categories of gender and race. This was the case in the Indian subcontinent, where resistance to domination and dominant beliefs was quite common. The histories of resistance impacted nation-building in India after independence from the British after the Second World War.

The nation-building that follows the success of nationalism is a vitally important phase in the growth of a nation. A sense of nationalism remains active in this phase and throughout the nation's life. The active nationalism in the nationbuilding process, at the nascent stage of the nation, is at least in part defined by the socio-cultural experiences of the people involved in its ‘grand plan’. How the nation-building process is shaped may well be traced by considering numerous contemporary published literary documents, each of which may project different lights on the constitutive organs of the body of nationalism that continue as a viable force in the development of the nation. A fruitful insight into the force of nationalism at play that shaped the very early phase of a nation's growth may be gained by examining specific writings that appeared in some regions of India immediately following independence from the British on 15 August 1947.

IN the preceeding chapters we have illuminated the fact that economic collaboration and cohabitation between widows and their children were present in the most diverse social groups. However, we have also found indications that institutional constraints were sometimes present, as in the case where the poor relief, particularly in an institution, was conditional on any teenage or adult children leaving their mother, or young children being sent to ‘suitable foster families’ or apprenticed. Where the family lacked resources, taking up posts as servants might be the only option for the children of a widow. In addition, the question of legal domicile could force widows to stay in parishes where no kin of their own was present. Despite such obstacles, working young, or teenage, children are often found in the households of widows, particularly in urban areas with job opportunities. We have also seen that where the family held property or a business, including being engaged in farming on freehold land or land held on contracts spanning generations, the likelihood of shared economy and residence was quite high.

The previous chapter demonstrated that, despite infant mortality in past time, most widows had at least one child, and some more than one, at the time they were widowed. This chapter will be devoted to an analysis of household data to unravel the effects of demography, economy and social stratification on the prevalence and ability of widows and children of different ages and gender to form units of cohabitation and collaboration.

Discussion of Household Structures and Cohabitation in the Past

In his studies of the family in nineteenth-century Europe, Frederic Le Play put forward the hypothesis that the industrialisation and urbanisation of society endangered the stability of the family. Le Play understood the family as being much more than a unit of procreation. To him, the function of the family was to provide security for several generations and promote co-operative strategies between family members.

‘Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?’

This is a book about the development of social relations and politics in Christian northern Spain in the three centuries after Iberia was radically transfigured by the Muslim invasion of the early eighth century. These events mark a historical and historiographical caesura of unusual clarity, for in the summer of 711, Arab-Berber armies under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, destroyed the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, and set in place the foundations of Islamic Iberia, better known to posterity as al-Andalus. Famously, for the anonymous writer of the Latin Chronicle of 754, one of the few more or less contemporary sources, the scale of ‘such grievous disasters’ was hard to accept: Spain, ‘once so delightful and now rendered so miserable’, had fallen into ruin and disgrace of the most ignominious kind. Yet this colourful description of the fall of the regnum Visigothorum is little more than a literary set-piece, and if we look beyond the predictable alarm expressed by the Christian writer of this crucial early text and draw upon insights provided by a wide range of later sources, it becomes clear that the Arab-Berber advance moved through the peninsula with surprising ease, after an initial, seemingly decisive, victory had been achieved near Medina Sidonia. Surviving accounts suggest that a combination of military superiority and negotiated settlement with prominent local powerbrokers – such as the Visigothic count, Theodomir – ensured that most of the peninsula was under nominal Muslim control as early as 720. The imposition of taxation soon followed, and Toledo lost its political centrality over the course of the next few years. Conquest and consolidation, certainly in the southern half of the peninsula, proved to be a relatively straightforward affair.

In contrast, it is not clear that the Arabs held long-term designs on either the northern reaches of the dry central plateau known as the Meseta, or the area to the north of the Cantabrian chain, a range of limestone mountains that carves its way across northern Spain; indeed, after a major Berber revolt in the 740s, the Arabs seem to have all but abandoned the vast region from the Basque Country to Galicia, having previously established garrisons at sites such as Lugo and Gijón. Quite why the northern littoral was abandoned remains a contentious issue.

The Musical is the only form of music theatre that consistently attracts audiences to theatres without public subvention. Since the 1980s there has been a global commercial ‘musical boom’ from which Germany poses no exception. With productions of new musicals (especially those by Andrew Lloyd Webber) it was possible to have venues sold out for years with one and the same piece. Towards the end of the century this boom caught up with Goethe's Faust: the German mathematician turned free-lance composer Rudolf Volz (born 1956 in Ulm) compiled the lyrics and wrote the music for Faust − Die Rockoper [Faust − The Rock Opera]: twenty-five numbers based on text from Goethe's drama. The piece was first performed in 1997 in Ulm by a ‘free group of artists from Southern Germany’ with experience of rock music and recorded on CD. Opening in 2005, a professional management company (the Berlin ‘Event and Management Agency’ Manthey Event) brought the show to different theatres. Faust − Die Rockoper is one of several early twenty-first-century musical realizations of Goethe's Faust. It has already attracted some scholarly attention, albeit only among English-language Faust scholarship. In his 2004 article on Faust as rock opera, Paul M. Malone gives an overview of the work, its musical background and compositions. In another article he places Volz's production within several adaptations of the Faust theme or ‘Faustian Rock Musicals’. The following will therefore focus on aspects of marketing, performance and reception. It is particularly in these areas that the way in which national myths are popularized for the benefit of mass audiences is revealed.

The production announcement promises a ‘Spektakel zwischen Rockkonzert, Musical und Volkstheater’ [spectacle between rock concert, musical and popular theatre]. In an attempt to reach a young audience, promotional videos on YouTube were part of the advertising. Faust II − Die Rockoper swiftly followed. It had its premiere at the Landestheater in Marburg in 2003. The music was produced as a set of Audio CDs (Part 1 1997, Part 2 2004, issued together in 2007) and Part I of the show was also released on DVD (2007).

The expression ‘Wagner's Ninth’ has become commonplace in the reception history of Beethoven's choral symphony. Nicholas Cook devotes an entire section of his Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 to this concept. A contemporary indication of the regard in which Wagner's interpretation was held by performers during much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is provided by Richard Strauss's handwritten remark at the head of his personal copy of the Eulenburg edition of the score: ‘Alles Wesentliche über diese Symphonie ist von Rich. Wagner’ [Everything significant on this symphony comes from Richard Wagner].

The main textual evidence for the concept of ‘Wagner's Ninth’ is Wagner's essay of 1873, Zum Vortrag der neunten Symphonie Beethovens [The Rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony], which offers detailed advice on the issues facing performers of the work. Wagner's approach involves an attempt to discern the composer's intentions in order to arrive at a musical interpretation that is not only accurate, but faithful to the spirit that inspired the score. Less well known, however, is the programmatic description Wagner produced in 1846 for the benefit of audiences in Dresden hearing the work for the first time. The essay was printed as a programme note without a title; we will refer to it as the Programm. This essay uses quotations from Goethe's Faust in an attempt to provide verbal illustrations of Beethoven's music and reveals the foundations on which ‘Wagner's Ninth’ – his interpretation of Beethoven's work – was built.

It is surprising that the Programm has not received detailed attention. Although there are references to it in many important secondary texts, notably Kropfinger's Wagner and Beethoven, Grey's Wagner's Musical Prose and Dahlhaus's The Idea of Absolute Music, full critical examination of the text itself has been cursory. Grey even describes the Programm as ‘relatively obscure’. This lack of critical interest presumably results from contemporary scholarship's rejection of poetic association as an acceptable methodology for the elucidation of musical works.

Only seven ninth-century charters survive in the Tumbo de Celanova. The earliest dates to 842, some fifty-two years after surviving charters begin in the Santo Toribio cartulary, and ninety-four years before the monastery of Celanova was founded in 936. The insights that these seven charters provide can be augmented by information drawn from ninth-century documents belonging to other Galician cartularies such as Sobrado, but if we are prepared to look beyond 900 in search of a more compelling turning point, the Celanova material offers new vistas. A crucial moment in the region's early medieval history was the foundation of Celanova, and it therefore makes sense to use the date of this event, 12 September 936, as a partition of convenience. Fifty-two charters from the Tumbo pre-date the monastery's foundation and many of these describe transactions undertaken by non-elite actors, allowing us to appreciate various aspects of local society in southern Galicia. In the chapters that follow, we return to the village world once again, this time looking at developments after Celanova's foundation, before elite politics and the workings of the public sphere will take precedence: this will allow us to see how and in what ways the presence of Celanova and the status of its leading family shaped the development of local society.

The social landscape

To the extent that ninth- and early tenth-century communities were bound by Christian rites and routines, the social landscape of southern Galicia – all those families, friends and neighbours visible – was also a deeply religious one. Sánchez Pardo has described a ninth-century world populated by a multitude of small local churches, each providing for the needs of the community, forming a fixed devotional locus for villagers concerned for the souls of the departed. Admittedly, a mere handful of ninth-century documents survive in the Celanova collection, but a consolidated culture of worship is presupposed by the many religious books which the priest Beatus gave to a church at Arnoya in 889. These included psalters, antiphonaries and hymn-books, as well as a copy of the Forum Iudicum and Uitas Patrum. These venerable tomes were given to a church that Beatus had recently restored, so this was not a new foundation but a replenishment of the staples needed for settled religious practice: hence the appearance of books, candles and crosses in the charter's list of provisions.

The prime purpose of this book is to edit and publish the principal surviving group of letters written by C. R. Cockerell while he was on his travels, between 1810 and 1817. These are preserved in the archive of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), purchased from Mrs Crichton in 1984. This material includes seven letters from Cockerell to his brother John; six to his sisters; eighteen (one actually written after his return but directly relevant) to his father, Samuel Pepys Cockerell; two to Robert Smirke; one to Sandford Graham; three from Samuel to Cockerell (again one after his return), and one to Samuel from Haller von Hallerstein, which are directly related to Cockerell's travels, giving a total of thirty-eight letters. The letters each carry a pencil note giving their reference number within the sequence RIBA COC: Add/1/1–43, and this appears at the head of each edited letter. Numbers 1/8, 1/32, 1/33, 1/42 and 1/43 in the RIBA numbers are omitted, since 1/8, 1/32, 1/42 and 1/43 do not relate to Cockerell's travels, and 1/33 to him from Carl Rester is too poorly preserved.

It is clear from internal evidence in the letters, that Cockerell wrote a number which never reached England, or perhaps did so long after they were written; some of these may have come into the possession of his fellow travellers and have not yet surfaced. It seems that the Cockerell papers, including probably some of the letters, were perhaps at different times scattered and in the possession of several of his descendants, and that these groups of papers had different histories, involving long retention in family hands, loans to museums, gifts, and sales to archives, particularly RIBA. Vickers refers to ‘letters … made by Charles Cockerell … during … his sojourn in Greece and Turkey’ preserved in the Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum, and was able to quote three, written from Pera in 1810, which are not currently available in the Museum, and the texts of which do not feature in the RIBA archive. Cockerell himself seems to have made copies of his letters, probably while he was away (although not of all, or at least not all survive) and at other points also copies seem to have been made of at least some of the letters, possibly not always complete copies.

TRADITIONALLY, ROMANTICISM IN LITERATURE is recognized for its emphasis on the imagination and creativity, and therefore not on its contributions to the development of science, with its emphases on sobriety and objectivity. Yet both the literature and the science of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are inherently linked and work together to contribute to our understanding of the evolving identity of the persons practicing science. Thus in Romanticism's early nineteenth-century heydey they moved out of the traditional role of natural philosophers and became more professionalized as men of science. The purpose of this investigation is to highlight the importance of Romantic literature in the emerging identity of the scientist, as these individuals came to be called. In today's culture it is customary to assume that the great divide between science and literature, or science and the humanities, has always existed: that science and literature are not linked and that literature plays virtually no role in new and developing technologies. Yet such assumptions are shortsighted and dismiss a history of interconnectedness, in which the practitioners of science and the commentators on society and politics in literary writing were the same individuals. This is particularly true of Romantic literature and science.

One can see this process of constructing a divide between science and the humanities unfolding gradually over the past two centuries, beginning perhaps in the Victorian period with the debates regarding education between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley. By 1959, however, it had reached a level sufficiently critical to elicit a warning. In that year, C. P. Snow attempted to dissuade society from continuing down a road that divided and isolated the sciences and the humanities. Snow, a trained scientist and accomplished novelist, gave a lecture entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which was later published as a monograph. Through observations of his own interactions in the differing fields, Snow claimed that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups….

THIS book started with the story of the widow Clicquot, winemaker, businesswoman, inventor of la table de remuage, but also daughter and sister of businessmen, mother and grandmother. Few widows had the family background, funds and spirit of this lady. She is, however, a living proof that widowhood did not necessarily result in withdrawal from active life, poverty, marginalisation and lack of agency. Historians have not, however, viewed widows in the past as a group exemplified by Madame Clicquot. Assumptions have been made, often based on little evidence, about the inability of widows to hold on to property or to actively engage in production to increase their assets. It would seem that, while not articulated, assumptions about ‘the weaker sex’ have formed a shadow framework to the approach of widows and widowhood in the past.

The actors in society have traditionally been seen as men; widows are part of a marginalised group identified with poverty and loneliness. The nuclear family has been considered to be the normal unit, while a widow with her children has been described as living in an incomplete family. Because of this definition of ‘normal’, female success has often been measured in the ability to marry and, in the case of the widow, to remarry. The fact that many widows did not remarry has been interpreted and defined as unsuccessful performance in the marriage market. One has to raise the question as to whether there is a tendency among males to view themselves as essential to a satisfactory life for a woman and that her choosing not to remarry will always appear incomprehensible. While it is difficult to probe the motives of individuals in the past, it would seem that, even in difficult economic circumstances, some widows chose not to remarry and rather engage in heavy manual labour to keep their children, than replace the memory of a good husband with the reality of an inferior one.