This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental health institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental health illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

German operetta of the early twentieth century was part of a transcultural entertainment industry involving cross-border financial and production networks, international rights management, and migrating musicians and performers. Collaboration networks, in which groups of people worked as a team, were the norm in operetta production. In the early 1910s and again in the 1920s, Berlin, London, and New York were competing for dominance of the musical theatre market, but these cities were also collaborating on the transfer of cultural goods. Internationalization was evident in the presence of overseas offices of major Berlin companies associated with the theatre. The buying of rights was one of the most important activities of the entrepreneur. The chapter includes a study of the financial management of Daly’s Theatre in the West End and examines the impact of the depression on the West End and Broadway.

It was, above all, the romantic melodies and rich harmonic textures of operetta that attracted British and American audiences. The music of operetta occupied a number of positions between popular musical theatre and opera. Dance rhythms formed an important part of the style of every operetta composer. American influence on German operetta had its source in the music-making of African Americans in the period just before the jazz craze of the 1920s. There was delight in mixing musical styles, and it is common to find Austro-German, Hungarian, and American styles in the same piece. While operettas with modern themes were increasingly characterized by syncopated rhythms in the 1920s, those with exotic themes were spiced up with augmented intervals, modal harmony, and ostinato rhythms. Most operetta composers in Vienna and Berlin were happy to have the help of orchestrators. Orchestrators were also on hand for New York productions.