Gerd Kroske is probably best known for his East German documentary about the anti-regime protests in Leipzig in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall, 1989), co-directed with Andreas Voigt. This historically important film was made on the streets, contemporaneous to the movement. Maintaining a commitment to radical political and social topics in his documentary filmmaking, Kroske has more recently turned to West German activist history and the anti-psychiatric Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). His film titled SPK Komplex (2018) documents the collective’s emergence in the early 1970s in Heidelberg through the experimental therapeutic practices of Wolfgang Huber, its politicization of the stigmatized perception of illness, and its subsequent dissolution with the imprisonment of Huber and other members.

Influenced by both the historically parallel student and anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s, the SPK challenged the practice and philosophy of psychiatric determination of mental illness as an individual problem. Such a diagnosis not only stigmatized and institutionalized patients but also criminalized them. In the West German context, the SPK also confronted the practices of the Nazis and their T4 Aktion, which prompted the euthanasia of tens of thousands of people deemed intellectually and physically unfit for life. But the anti-psychiatry movement stretched well beyond national borders. From the publication of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking critique of psychiatry, Madness and Civilization, in 1961 to the wide-spread theories and practices of the likes of psychiatrists Franco Basaglia and David Cooper, the SPK contributed to a broad international discourse. Taking a Marxist approach, the collective understood mental illness as the consequence of capitalist society and its unequal power relations of production. Brief but significant, the history of this collective has long been overshadowed by that of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Even the film’s title evokes this connection. We are immediately reminded of Uli Edel’s 2008 fiction film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

What does it mean in our neoliberal present to bring such a radical history at long last to the screen through documentary? First, the politics of the SPK clash with the reality of our ever-diminishing public sphere, the increased relegation of feelings and affective life to the confines of the private realm and the family, and the cultural attack on nurture, human dependency, and care.

Introduction

When Alfred Döblin wrote Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, by creating a protagonist (Franz Biberkopf) who was both a war veteran and a former convict, he intentionally focused on a subject on the margins of society: someone whom society had failed. Furthermore, by making gendered violence such an important part of the narrative, Döblin demonstrated that, due to the misogynist nature of ethnonationalism, even those men on the margins could still justify exploiting others to improve their status in society, rather than fighting for real equality. Rather than transferring this ethnonationalism to his recent adaptation of Döblin’s novel, the German director of Iranian descent, Burhan Qurbani, interrogates the entitlement attached to white, male, German identity by placing Franz B. even further on the margins of society. Qurbani updates the narrative to better situate it in a late-capitalist, neoliberal and multicultural Germany: Franz B. is now Francis, a Black, undocumented refugee from Bissau.

By choosing to make Francis both Black and undocumented, Qurbani continues a trend he has established in his previous films of centering narratives on vulnerable people existing on the margins of white, mainstream German society, such as the queer Muslim protagonists in his film Schahada (Faith, 2010) and the Vietnamese immigrants experiencing the violence of reunification in Rostock in Wir sind jung, wir sind stark (We are Young, We are Strong, 2014). Qurbani, himself the child of Iranian immigrants, was born in 1980 in North-Rhine Westphalia, then in West Germany. Arguably, Qurbani’s films demonstrate his interest in allyship that unites different groups of racialized people in Germany. Berlin Alexanderplatz draws viewers’ attention not only to the problem of anti-Black racism in Germany, but also to the unique experience of Black noncitizens. While Black people in Germany experience differing degrees of anti-Black racism, Black German citizens and Black people with legal residency have certain protections under the law ranging from the right to vote (in the case of citizens) to the right to education, legal employment, and housing. For the undocumented, however, there are no such protections or possibilities to legally participate in society. While Francis’s biography in Qurbani’s adaptation allows the director to make a poignant critique of Germany’s current migration politics, critics were not always convinced by his execution. In fact, some argued that the film itself is guilty of exploiting Black bodies and reducing African men to their physicality and sexuality.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books as well as those belonging to family members, and then offers an in-depth exploration of how women’s clothing was described in these sources. These books, like many surviving account books, can be found in collections of family papers belonging overwhelmingly to men and women of the middling and gentry classes, and so speak principally to their experiences. While detailed description in accounts has sometimes been interpreted as unnecessary for the accurate keeping of accounts, largely as a result of an emphasis on rationality in histories of accounting, this chapter demonstrates that the very frequency with which it was used demands reconsideration of this. By drawing on a comparison with the language used to describe clothing and textiles in bills issued by retailers, it also demonstrates how descriptions might be moved across and between texts during the accounting process, which has important implications for our understanding of description, authorship, and meaning. Indeed, it shows how the issue, payment, and recording of bills contributed significantly to the broader circulation of descriptive terms and material literacy surrounding clothing and textiles.

Accounting became increasingly widespread after 1650, and there is ample evidence to suggest that many eighteenth-century women were competent accountants. Indeed, Kenneth Charlton and Margaret Spufford have suggested that early modern women’s training in ‘ciphering’ may have been given little space in sources like journals precisely because ‘it was so necessary and obvious that it was assumed’. Amy Froide has conducted a more thorough investigation into levels of female numeracy, showing that it was a discipline cultivated across the social hierarchy. How and when women acquired these skills, however, is more difficult to determine, though it has been suggested that it was a skill acquired primarily in the home. As Beverly Lemire has suggested, surviving accounts show that women’s shift to ‘numeric record-keeping’ was a gradual process which took place at a slower pace than men’s, but the very fact that eighteenth-century women’s manuscript accounts exist in as-yet uncounted numbers in archives across England demonstrates that many were able to acquire competency in accounting from somewhere.

ON A COLD, DAMP April morning, BGS Major Kurt Andersen was star-ing through his field glasses scanning forest trails near the town of Simmerath on the German-Belgian border. Andersen was the command-ing officer of “Operation Martha” codename for the deployment of BGS units against smugglers peddling coffee, butter, and stolen prop-erty through the Eifel Forest near Aachen. “Operation Martha,” the first major deployment for the new BGS, must have revived a certain sense of familiarity for Andersen and the men under his command now back in the field carrying weapons less than six years after many of them had fought in the war. At fifty-four years of age, Andersen had extensive expe-rience leading men in field operations. The Federal Republic represented the fourth German political regime to which he had sworn an oath of allegiance. In 1915, he enlisted in the Kaiser's army and fought with a machine-gun company. When Germany's armed forces surrendered in 1918, he joined the Iron Brigade, an ultra-nationalist Freikorps (free corps) paramilitary unit that continued to fight communist forces in the Baltic states. In 1919, he became a member of the Prussian Schutzpolizei and served the Weimar Republic as a law enforcement officer in the cities of Elbing-Marienburg, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. In 1935 he enlisted in the Nazi Wehrmacht and led a Luftwaffe anti-tank unit in combat on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. Captured by the British in 1945, he spent three years as a POW at the maximum-security Island Farm Camp Number 11 outside Bridgend, South Wales before being repatriated to Germany in 1948.

Major Andersen's notable service record was not exceptional. Known in organizational lore as “men of the first hour,” he and his colleagues were the veteran soldiers and police officers who founded and led the BGS in 1951. The organization they made, however, was not the civilian law enforcement agency Adenauer, Lehr, and others at the Interior Ministry had promised the Bundestag. Instead, they created a militarized force steeped in the doctrines of counterinsurgency warfare and into which they imported their years of experience fighting Germany's wars.3 Many of these men had recently fought in Wehrmacht and SS anti-partisan units or served at the front with militarized Ordnungspolizei (Order Police— OrPo) battalions.

The grave is at once silent and sonorous in Schubert's songs. Early manifestations extend back to the dance of the spirits in his settings of Friedrich von Matthisson's ‘Der Geistertanz’, discussed in the Introduction: ‘Quickly we airy spirits / Strike up a whirling dance / Around graves / And rotting bones’ (‘Rasch tanzen um Gräber / Und morsches Gebein / Wir luftigen Schweber / Den sausenden Reih’n’). Here, the grave gives rise to supernatural presences, not yet fully formed, whirling around in the spirit of danse macabre (a theme taken up in chapter 4). Death, seemingly unburdened by morbid thoughts, is tinged with a cheerful ‘farewell’: ‘You have buried our grief / Deep in the gloomy Chamber; / Happy we, who whisper you / A cheerful farewell!’ (‘Tief bargst du im düstern / Gemach unser Weh; / Wir Glücklichen flüstern / Dir fröhlich Ade!’). The ghostliness of the night spirit is juxtaposed with critical distancing from the grave as a site of the supernatural through imagery all too real (rotten bones, whimpering dogs). Such tensions play out in varied ways across Schubert's graveyard settings – sometimes affirming supernatural presences, while other times questioning or shifting away from such phenomena entirely.

Later songs revolving around graveyard diggers, such as his setting of his friend Franz von Schober's ‘Schatzgräbers Begehr’, D 761 (1822), weigh down the airiness of the night spirits with the weariness of lived experience: ‘So leave me in peace with my endeavour. / Surely a grave is gladly given to every man; / Will you then not grant me one, friends?’ (‘Drum lasset Ruhe mir in meinem Streben! / Ein Grab mag man wohl jedem gerne geben, / Wollt ihr es denn nicht mir, ihr Lieben, gönnen?’). Here the grave offers a desirable escape from life, as apostrophized in the penultimate stanza: ‘If I am digging my own grave with this hope, / Yet I will gladly climb down, / for then my longing will be stilled’ (‘Sollt’ ich mein Grab mit dieser Hoffnung graben: / Ich steige gern hinab, / gestillt ist dann mein Sehnen’).

Boulez's Extraordinary Formative Phase was followed by a period when he completed very few works. After the Second Piano Sonata – explicitly an annihilation of the classical sonata model – and his Char settings, which Paul Griffiths so aptly describes as ‘confirmation that this last destruction proceeded through love’, how was Boulez to emerge from the wreckage? What would remain?

It is perhaps not surprising that this extremely intense compositional phase should have been followed by one of consolidation, though there are missing pieces in this jigsaw; for instance, Boulez started sketching a Symphonie-concertante for piano and orchestra in 1947 but lost the score. And even in the earliest stages of his career, Boulez's penchant for revising works was evident, and both Le Visage nuptial and Le Soleil des eaux would not reach their final forms for many years. What is more interesting is that Boulez's works of the 1940s served as repositories of musical ideas for new compositions almost until the end of his life. For Susan Bradshaw, ‘it is from the mid-1970s that he seems more and more to have opted for the art of recomposition at the expense of composition’, and the Notations in particular were reimagined in multiple guises, from the reuse of an individual theme to the recasting of some of these tiny piano pieces as much longer works for huge orchestra. His frequent reuse of the seven-note motif from the seventh Notation, as well as his subsequent recycling of a six-note motif based on the name of the philanthropist and conductor Paul Sacher, show that these ideas had the function of a fetish for Boulez. His continual obsession with these found objects is the main focus of this chapter.

Boulez's relative lack of musical productivity immediately after his Second Piano Sonata also had roots in his work as musical director of the Renaud–Barrault company, not only because these duties left him with less time to focus on composition, but also because his tours with the company prompted him to reassess his earlier enthusiasms. His shifting attitude to Artaud's ‘collective hysteria’ is exhibited in a letter written in 1950 to Pierre Souvtchinsky from Buenos Aires at the end of a tour with the Renaud–Barrault company.

In the opening scene of Susanne Heinrich’s 2019 film Das melancholische Mädchen (The melancholy girl; released in the Anglosphere as Aren’t You Happy?), a young woman is framed in profile against a patently artificial backdrop, a tropical scene of palm trees, sandy beach, and turquoise-blue ocean. Naked under a fluffy white coat, she stands in a rigid pose, smoking a cigarette, as she begins to recite a monologue. A cut frames the woman in medium close-up, and she rotates to look directly into the camera as her metacommentary turns to questions of cinematic representation:

As her monologue concludes, the woman suddenly asks, “Schläfst du?” (Are you asleep?), and a reverse shot reveals the diegetic audience of her speech in the form of a naked man. Filmed from a high angle, he lies in repose on a futon, occupying a position typically reserved for women in western visual culture. Underscoring the sequence’s exaggerated attention to gendered cinematic conventions, he proceeds to pick up a Polaroid camera, train its lens directly on the eye of the film camera, and snap a picture, creating a relay of images and looks between the diegetic characters and the audience of the film.

An apt prologue to the episodic narrative that follows, this scene introduces the film’s remediation of feminist film theory and women’s cinema as well as its engagement with the ideologies and effects of neoliberal culture. Das melancholische Mädchen self-reflexively attends to the perennial questions taken up by cinefeminism, including the disruption of viewer identification; the subversion of classical narrative; and the critique of woman’s status as image and object of the male gaze.

The transfer of knowledge and martial power, translatio studii et imperii, was a celebrated theme in medieval Europe that was recurrently employed to legitimate regnal authority. According to the myth of translatio, intellectual and martial superiority were entwined and together moving ever-westwards, from Athens, to Rome, and on to Paris. In the late Middle Ages, the myth of translatio fueled the belief among French scholars and aristocrats that the renowned University of Paris symbolized France's cultural superiority over England. Despite the wealth of scholarship on French evocations of the translatio topos, medievalists have not yet given serious consideration to the possibility that late medieval English courtiers and intellectuals were similarly invested in the myth of translatio studii et imperii, the consonance between knowledge and power, and universities as sources of cultural capital. This essay examines a variety of texts composed or copied in fourteenth-century England that explicitly evoke the myth of translatio to claim that English learning at the University of Oxford had surpassed the French scholarship of Paris. Moving outward from literary analysis toward cultural history, I explore how these works functioned as textual agents shaping their age's linguistic and political worlds. Without reducing Anglo-French cultural politics to a single topos, this essay therefore aims to contribute to an understanding of how late medieval English scholars and courtiers comprehended and legitimized their cultural competition with France.

In order to make sense of English evocations of translatio in the late Middle Ages, we must first understand the historiographical implications of this myth as well as the French tradition of translatio to which the English were responding. As Tullio Gregory, Enrico Fenzi, and Lorenzo DiTommaso, among others, have demonstrated, the myth of a succession of earthly empires was an ancient (if not primordial) conception of history that became Christianized in the Book of Daniel. In this foundational Judaeo-Christian text, Daniel explains to King Nebuchadnezzar that his dream of the awesome statue with its head of fine gold, the chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay represents the degeneration of his kingdom.

ON 27 NOVEMBER 1695, James Petiver (c.1663–1718) surely revelled in self-congratulation when he numbered among three members of the medical professions who newly ‘subscrib’d their Names and were admitted fellows’ at the annual meeting of the prestigious Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. A flourishing urban apothecary with substantial ambitions in natural history, this was for Petiver an intellectual and social achievement. To commemorate the privilege, he issued his first substantial venture in print, proudly supplementing his name on the title page with the qualifications ‘Pharmacop[ola] Londinen[sis] & Regiae Societatis Socio’ (‘Apothecary of London & Fellow of the Royal Society’). He also dated a postscript ‘Advertisement’ to 30 November 1695, the institutional anniversary on ‘the feast of St Andrew’ stipulated in the Society's royal charter. The title of Petiver's text was Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima, Rariora Naturæ Continens: viz. animalia, fossilia, plantas, ex variis mundi plagis advecta, ordine digesta, et nominibus propriis signata: ‘The first century of Petiver's museum, containing rarities of nature: namely animals, fossils, plants, imported out of the various places of the world, classified by rank and distinguished by their proper names’. As its name portentously signals, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima lists 100 objects from Petiver's collection of natural curiosities. Heralding the inception of a serial publication that ran to ten ‘centuries’ by 1703, Musei Petiveriani is at once singular and heterogeneous in its authorship, local and global in its means of knowledge production, the metropolitan scientist choreographing natural objects that have been ‘ex variis mundi plagis advecta’ by a wide range of actors.

This chapter analyses the material, geographical and social features of Musei Petiveriani in order to exemplify the generative (if also potentially exploitative) cultures of global transaction with which Global Exchanges of Knowledge is concerned. The first section outlines Petiver's purposes and priorities in authoring and distributing his publication, above all his commitment to acknowledging the many contributors to his ‘museum’ by name. The metaphor of ‘crowd-sourcing’ is adopted from the contemporary digital world to supply one means for conceiving the networked multiplicity of these collaborators.

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.