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.

The Adagio of Schubert's ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in C major, D 760 (1822), forms a bridge between the previous chapter and the sound(s) of the grotesque traced in what follows. Its thematic material takes the disjuncture embodied in his setting of ‘Der Wanderer’, D 489 (1816), on which the movement is based, to extremes. The music shown in Example 4.1 throws into stark relief the fusion of the silent and joyless (stanza 1) with the vision of dead ones rising (stanza 4). Ghostly whispers in the final stanza, quoted in the epigraph above, serve as a threshold between the passagework that skims the texture in bars 227–30 and the distortions that follow in its pathway. Traces of dreamt-of joy in the song source are shattered by the profusion of harsh sonorities, chromatic warping, and textural density unleashed in bars 231–35. The lack of articulation here between the diaphanous and the distorted, the one flowing seamlessly from the other, renders this process of distortion all the more disturbing. The extremity of such writing tilts the pendulum from the fusion of pain and pleasure at the heart of the sublime discussed in the previous chapter, to the prising open of boundaries that defines the grotesque. Tropes explored throughout the book – nocturnal imagery, doubles, and distortions – coincide with the disjuncture studied in this chapter. Stylistic references are destabilized, their soundworlds subject to rupture or conflation vis-a-vis the permeable nature of the gothic imagination.

Definitions of the grotesque from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries foreground themes that are central to gothic necropoetics. Pertinent here is the art historian Johann Fiorillo's attention to its ‘horror-inducing’ aspects, epitomized in his view by the fusion of incongruous elements in Henry Fuseli's ‘The Nightmare’ (Figure 4.1).

HOW FAR DOES THE production of attractive books with careful design, fine typography, quality paper and well-crafted images assist in making the incredible believable? This chapter offers a test case.

Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, published his Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie in Copenhagen in two parts in 1752 and 1753. It was translated into German as Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Nor-wegens and the first part published, also in Copenhagen, a year later in 1753, with the second part following in 1754. A year after that, both parts were translated into English and published together in London as The Natural History of Norway. The three editions, in Danish, in German and in Eng-lish, issued between 1752 and 1755, forged the reputation of the Naturlige Historie; no further editions of the full work were published, although the publications of the 1750s spawned numerous later extracts, commentaries and references. Plentiful illustrative engravings and, in the London version, a pull-out map, accompanied the different printed editions. Numerous European periodicals reviewed Pontoppidan's work. Major institutions across mainland Europe ordered the Danish- and German-language edi-tions, and, most conspicuously, the English edition was bought by dozens of institutions and significant writers and collectors around the world.

The London edition was the finest and in many ways the most authoritative version of Pontoppidan's great endeavour, even though it was not in the original language. Its success, this chapter argues, was the result of the intersection of ideas and material forms and of the appreciation and subliminal effect of that union both then and since. Comparative study of the Naturlige Historie reveals how different translations, not only in language but in format, typographical choices and designs, inserted and re-cut illustrations, and publication and promotional processes contributed to different valences of authenticity and authority, and, as this chapter details, to a legacy of debate and influence.

By focusing study on a single title, we might chart the history of an individual work from its genesis, publication, circulation and reception in different forms and in different places across generations of use and conservation.