As a genre, the education documentary has gained mainstream status at film festivals and on streaming platforms over the past twenty years. Disparate in style and aesthetics, and lacking a common set of formal and narrative conventions, feature-length films such as To Be and To Have (France, 2002), Boys of Baraka (US, 2005), Please Vote for Me (China, 2007), Girl Rising (US, 2013), Our People Will Be Healed (Canada, 2017), and docu-series such as Harrow: A Very British School (UK, 2013) are instead thematically bound by their common object of study: primary school education and its relationship to the production of social and political subjectivity. Institutions around the world are struggling to determine what core skills and values will best equip their pupils to keep pace with the massive socio-economic and political changes afoot in the twenty-first century. Education documentaries have focalized these transformations in the context of specific settings, attending to the ways in which localized human agents who inhabit the roles of student, educator, or administrator define possibilities for social relation.

In settler nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, as well as in European nations undergoing multicultural transformations, one of the central stakes in curriculum and pedagogy derives from what Charles Taylor has called “the politics of recognition.” The demand for recognition is predicated upon, in his words, “the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.” Identity, in turn, is presupposed to be partially shaped by (mis)recognition, such that individuals and groups may alternately thrive or suffer damage through the enabling or distorting images projected back upon them. Indeed, “Nonrecognition or misrecognition,” Taylor maintains, “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” Within a liberal democracy, the political recognition of cultural particularity of all members of the society is also congruent with a certain form of universalism that regards respect for diverse cultures as ultimately also serving the basic interest of society at large. Whether referencing groups or individuals, the politics of recognition have navigated between legitimizing differences of identity through the latter’s claim to something close to ontological status, and alternately, advancing claims to performativity and elective choice.

Surrealism Is All About liberation of the mind, freedom from constraints, accessing the irrational, privileging dreams, the fantastic, the marvellous, and embracing chance. André Breton is the author who is most closely associated with surrealism, as the author of the two most celebrated Surrealist Manifestos (1924, 1929) and self-appointed leader of the movement in Paris, but he drew on the ideas of many precursors, and the origins of the word ‘surrealism’ can be traced back to Guillaume Apollinaire (1890–1918).

In fact, the word first came to public attention in Apollinaire's programme note for a Ballets Russes premiere, Erik Satie's ballet Parade (1917), a collaboration with Picasso, Massine and Cocteau. This ballet was rooted in street and circus entertainment, though the American Girl character came straight out of the movies, and Picasso's oversized cardboard box costumes – a literal twist on cubism – gave it a strong contemporary edge. The Ballets Russes audience greeted the work with catcalls: they did not expect to see highly trained ballet dancers performing acrobatic moves and gestures such as using a typewriter, and the inclusion of shotgun and siren sounds in an entertainment context in 1917 was, to say the least, provocative. Writing in Vanity Fair that year, Satie himself ruefully described his music as ‘a background to throw into relief the noises which [Cocteau] considers indispensable to the surrounding of each character with his own atmosphere’.

While Cocteau described Parade as ‘un ballet réaliste’, Apollinaire described Satie's collaboration as follows:

Apollinaire's hyphenated neologism ‘sur-réalisme’ is something ‘more than real’, something that pushes boundaries and could even be termed a kind of research project. It is something that is unequivocally modern, a new way of seeing the world, which creates something new through an alliance of different art forms and the juxtaposition of different ideas.

INTRODUCTION

Discussion has thus far focused primarily on descriptions by the owner of an item or items of clothing, though the previous chapters have demonstrated that authorship was not always straightforward. However, throughout we have also encountered women whose clothing was described by someone else, whether by mistresses, mothers, family members, employees, or even strangers. To further explore this, this chapter moves beyond descriptions authored by owners to trace material literacies across the records of the old poor law. These records have been successfully mined for details about the quantity and cost of clothing issued by parishes, but there has been far less exploration of the textual and descriptive practices evident across the sources themselves. However, this chapter argues that these practices are in themselves significant. Drawing together accounts and other records across a range of parishes, it therefore looks at the description of poor women’s clothing from three perspectives: that of suppliers; that of overseers of the poor; and that of the poor themselves. This demonstrates differences across texts and in descriptive practices which highlight ambiguities surrounding the description of an individual’s clothing by someone else, shaped by the relationships involved in the provision of poor relief. As outlined in the previous chapter, records such as accounts could be both reflective and constitutive of relationships of power and authority, and this was certainly the case for those generated by the day-to-day administration of the old poor law. Description played a key role in this context, with descriptions of the clothing issued to paupers functioning as a record of their dependence on the parish. Drawing on a comparison with the descriptive languages for women’s clothing traced across Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter also demonstrates that there may have been social or financial barriers to certain forms of material literacy, even in the context of an ever-expanding descriptive landscape for clothing and textiles across the eighteenth century. This was of course intimately linked to the material reality of everyday life for those living at the margins of society, as the records of the old poor law suggest a very different world of goods to that traced in previous chapters.

In book III of Boethius's Latin Consolatio philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), Philosophia tells Boethius that her remaining teaching will cause pain when first tasted yet grow sweet when ingested. When the Old English Boethius translates this section, however, Wisdom (Philosophia's vernacular counterpart) adds the further specification that this medicine will be ‘swide swete to belcettan’ – very sweet to belch. The metaphor of digestion extends a consideration of affective apprehension and contemplation that the text develops at some length, acknowledging that her previous, simpler teaching had been ingested swa lustlice (so eagerly) when her pupil wanted ‘mid inneweardan mode hi ongiton and smeagean’ (to perceive and examine it with the inward mind). But where the Latin warns, strikingly, that he will not be able to perceive the true felicity while his sight remains ‘occupato ad imagines’ (occupied with images), the Old English names the problem not as images themselves but only ‘ansine dissa leasena gesalda’ (the likeness of these false felicities). In both the Latin text and the Old English translation, we meet metaphors for the affective reception of instruction as well as instruction by means of such metaphors and images, and in both, sweetness is more than a mere coating on a bitter pill – rather, bitter experience must first be borne in order for lasting sweetness to come about. Elaborate, affectively engaged metaphors and narrative exempla can thus guide the weak from error, yet as Wisdom warns, their influence over the emotions has the power to lead one astray. The digestive metaphor anticipates later figures of belching that will appear in, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux. But in context, the Old English elaboration of the image suggests that both the sweetness, and certain kinds of similitude, must persist, as the Latin text increasingly leaves both of these things behind in favor of increasingly abstract philosophy. As Mary Carruthers has argued, sweetness as a medieval aesthetic category denotes not an abstract concept of beauty but a ‘definable sensory phenomenon’, a bodily one, and one that did not necessarily entail a preconceived moral judgment. This characteristic of embodied sensory experience and not abstracted, conceptual goodness made such sweetness particularly salient for the English translator of the Boethius.

THEFEDERAL REPUBLIC's new Program for Internal Security faced an extreme test just thirteen days after the revised Border Police Act took effect. Eight Palestinian terrorists from Black September attacked the Israeli team during the Olympic Games in Munich. The attackers killed weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg while holding the rest of the athletes hostage at their Olympic Village quarters. The terrorists threatened to kill the hostages unless Israel released 234 Palestinian prisoners; they also demanded that the Germans release jailed RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. In the words of ABC Sportscaster Jim McCay “The Olympics of serenity have become the one thing the Germans didn't want them to be, the Olympics of terror.” The attack caught the Federal Republic's security services and their leaders completely by surprise. Interior Minister Genscher's high hopes for a spirit of cooperative federalism were crushed by the bureaucratic gridlock reflected in the blundered rescue attempt and murder of all the Israeli athletes.

Although scholars have focused extensively on Germany's first Olympic Games since the Third Reich, and their tragic ending in particular, the involvement of border police officers in these pivotal events is missing from most of these accounts. To be sure, one of Genscher's main justifications for revising the Border Police Act in 1972 was to use the BGS as a reserve that could support the state police in national emergencies just like the attack in Munich. Border police officers had proven their usefulness during nationwide manhunts that helped state police forces capture the RAF's leaders. The violence perpetrated by the RAF in the years leading up to the Olympics convinced West Germany's politicians to support Chancellor Willy Brandt's call for more Internal Security. Yet at a time when they needed them most, Genscher and Munich Police chief Manfred Schreiber kept the BGS sidelined. Instead, they sent Munich Police officers who lacked the proper weapons and tactical training to carry out a high-stakes hostage rescue operation.

Despite the Federal Republic's reputation as a successful liberal democracy, terrorism pushed it closer than it ever had been during the postwar era to an authoritarian national security state. Its militant democ-racy became more militant.

ONAPRIL 22, 1967, A PLATOON of heavily armed border police officers from West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Guard— BGS) arrived at Konrad Adenauer's home in the village of Rhöndorf on the Rhine. Three days earlier, the Federal Republic's ageing first chancellor had died in his sleep, and the men were there to escort his body in what would be the beloved old man's final journey to his former office at Bonn's Palais Schaumburg. The men, clad in military uniforms and steel helmets, looked more like members of Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht than law enforcement officers. As the bells of the local church tolled, nine officers solemnly emerged from Adenauer's home carrying his coffin on their shoulders. The crowd of spectators and reporters who gathered in the quiet neighborhood watched as the pallbearers carefully secured his flag-draped coffin to the open bed of an olive drab-colored BGS utility truck. A massive convoy of military trucks loaded with hundreds of rifle-wielding police officers escorted the makeshift hearse bearing Adenauer's remains. When the motorcade arrived in Bonn, the officers carried his coffin into the Palais Schaumburg's large cabinet room, where it was guarded by an “honor watch” consisting of the chief officers from each of six BGS regional command centers.

All of these senior officers were veterans of the Nazi Wehrmacht and its security forces. Standing prominently at the head of Adenauer's coffin was BGS Brigadier General Otto Dippelhofer, a veteran SS and Field Gendarmerie officer who led police battalions on the Eastern Front. Next to Dippelhofer stood BGS Inspector Heinrich Müller, a veteran of Rommel's Africa Corps and an instructor at the Third Reich's War Academy. Behind them stood Brigadier Generals Willy Langkeit and Detlev von Platen. Langkeit was a tank officer who commanded the Grossdeutschland and Kurmark divisions on the Eastern Front; von Platen was a member of the Nazi General Staff and commanded Army Group Center in Russia. The Interior Ministry had planned to limit displays of militarism during the funeral services, preferring instead to emphasize the Federal Republic's place among the Western democracies that made up the postwar Transatlantic Alliance.

Contemporary debates about the politics of migration, asylum, and exile witness a wide range of conspiracy theories, evidence-free arguments, and post-truth distortions. Social media are quick to present refugees as agents of sexual assault, even serious media outlets can’t help to wonder whether migrants are terrorists in disguise, and massproduced television shows cast immigrant communities in Germany and elsewhere as hotbeds of international drug trafficking and crime. The reasons for installing the immigrant’s body as a screen of often paranoid and unfounded projections are manifold; the rise of populist agitation is as much at its roots as the withering of nuanced perspectives—right and often left—amid the bubbles of post-neoliberal, internet-based communication. What might matter more, however, is that in the end free-floating claims about the figure of the migrant tend to untether the very possibility of public discourse and political debate in general: if evidence- free conjecture and blatant lies reign triumphant, then we lose— as Hannah Arendt already argued in the postwar period—the very base of political dialogue and of pluralistic conceptions of democratic life. In representing a feared loss or lack of spatial groundedness, of moored identity, the figure of the migrant thus increasingly turns into what the champions of populist and mostly right-wing identity politics demonize so as to pursue their anti-pluralistic attack on the foundations of democratic institutions altogether.

The same period that has produced the figure of the migrant as a screen of free-floating anxieties and post-truth speculation has also unmoored contemporary art from whatever it still could take for granted after the demise of dominant traditions and normative concepts of art in the twentieth century. As evidenced in recent art events such as Kassel’s Documenta 15 (2022), in its timely embrace of discourses of inclusivity, diversity, and decolonization, contemporary art has shed whatever previously remained of the normative frameworks of autonomous art: it prioritizes collaborative practices over the myth of the individual artist, open-ended process over self-contained work, social engagement over aesthetic self-referentiality, gestures of sharing over the reifying power of the market. Amid this, as critics such as Wolfgang Ulrich and Hanno Rauterberg argue, efforts to delimit the concept, domains, and borders of art no longer prove adequate.

ON APRIL 19, 1967, after years of declining health, Konrad Adenauer passed away at his home in Rhöndorf on the Rhine River. The chancellor's death struck a chord with senior BGS commanders, who fondly recalled his tireless advocacy and promotion of their organization. But as the chancellor was laid to rest, the Federal Republic, and the BGS in particular, which the press began calling Bonn's “problem child,” faced new challenges. In 1966, the booming economic miracle that came to define the Adenauer era finally came to a grinding halt during West Germany's first postwar recession. As a result of the economic crisis, Adenauer's successor Ludwig Erhard resigned and his government collapsed. Facing significant budget cuts, the BGS struggled to overcome staffing shortages still lingering after many of its personnel transferred to the army in 1956. Despite spending millions on recruitment, the organization never reached its authorized strength of 20,000 men. Moreover, the federal government was mired in an ongoing political debate over emergency legislation that contributed to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) crisis and student protests that rocked West Germany in the late 1960s. State and local police forces were pushed to their limits dealing with the crowds, and many of them responded violently against the demonstrators.

During the crisis of the late 1960s, many border police officers lost faith in the organization and complained to their unions that it needed to be modernized. In 1962 the revised compulsory service law enabled men to waive mandatory military service if they elected to serve at least eighteen months in the police instead. The change, however, only offered a short-term solution to the staffing issues, since most of the men that took advantage of it left when their terms expired or transferred to the state police, which offered better career and promotional opportunities. Candidates had no incentive to remain in the BGS, because the state police or other civil service professions did not give credit or offer incen-tives for their experiences guarding borders. By the end of the 1960s, the BGS continued to struggle against complaints that it was really just an army posing as a police force.

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1965, BGS Lieutenant Colonel Hans-Jürgen Pantenius delivered a lecture on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising to a group of his fellow commanding and junior officers in Bonn. The Bundestag had recently passed controversial legislation that designated border police officers as military combatants in the event of an attack on the Federal Republic. The lecture was supposed to provide its leadership cadre with a case study for urban combat in conjunction with the pub-lication of a new “street fighting” manual. Pantenius, a decorated vet-eran of Nazi Germany's motorized infantry units who also held a PhD in history, fought in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. At Warsaw he commanded Infantry Regiment 690 of the 337 Volksgrenadier Division attached to General Smilo Freiherr von Luttwitz's 9th Army. Although he arrived in the city after the main resistance ended, he remained as an instructor at the Wehrmacht's “Combat School for Street and Fortress Fighting” established in Warsaw's Mokotów district. He trained the Wehrmacht and SS units stationed there that hunted down and massa-cred the remaining Polish resistance and then destroyed what was left of Warsaw. He told his audience that Warsaw suffered during the orig-inal German invasion of 1939, but “compared with the destruction of German cities in 1943 and 1944, this damage was not significant.”

A discussion about Nazi Germany's brutal suppression of Polish resistance and criminal destruction of Warsaw as some sort of tactical model for democratic civilian police officers is troubling on many levels. In the twenty years since the Third Reich collapsed, several high-profile criminal cases such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem highlighted the crimes Germany's armed forces perpetrated during the war. So why revive such a terrible example of Nazi violence as some form of lesson, unless as an instruction for what not to do in a democracy? What could the Federal Republic's border police officers possibly glean from a discussion about the wanton destruction of an entire city? To be sure, the 1960s ushered in a paradigm shift in postwar mem-ory culture, where West Germans began focusing more on Holocaust victims rather than their own wartime suffering.

ON THE EVE OF the American War of Independence, an incident in the history of the oceanic exchange of knowledge and ideas in the eighteenth century, in this case between an American customer and a British bookseller, reveals how sentimental literature, erotica and even humour intersected in a single bulk book purchase. A fictive identification of a parallel or even hypocritical notion of enslavement linked the materiality of the purchase and a putative book-borrowing collection to a complex social and political critique.

The documentation of this transaction is a book list dated 7 February 1772 found in the papers of Timothy Pickering, later the third US Secretary of State between 1795 and 1800, but at the time a lawyer and an officer in the Massachusetts militia. Entitled ‘Catalogue Books Ship’d on Board the Vesuvious. Ichabud Lovelace Commander’, this list immediately raises the eyebrows of a scholar of the eighteenth century.

The Commander is given the names Ichabud and Lovelace. Lovelace is the love interest of the heroine of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and generally regarded as a libertine villain because he rapes her. Indeed, it is clear that Pickering is being identified accusatorily as Lovelace because of the novel's rape theme and Pickering's reading of it. In Kathleen Lubey's words, ‘Clarissa endlessly talks about rape’ and ‘the novel begins in medias res with unstoppable rape already under way’. Taken together with ‘Ichabud’ being a term that Boston mothers as recently as this author's own Massachusetts childhood used to describe masturbation (‘Itchy-bod’), the names are clearly both a joke and a libel that linked rapist intent to the consumption of sentimental fictions like Richardson’s. Given some of the erotic titles in the list, this catalogue must be taken as a satirical one with the possible design of blackmail, as the list is not written in Pickering's own hand.

Why Pickering, or one of his family members, preserved this document in his papers is another question entirely, but it is of significance to our understanding of his role in the Revolution, given that it is dated at a moment of increasing tension in Massachusetts between patriots and loyalists. Pickering at this time was not as thoroughly convinced of the necessity of armed insurgence as one might expect a Massachusetts Minuteman to be.