BEFORE WRITING, THERE WERE long and widespread traditions of oral composition and aural reception … So begins the litany of textual transmission as a ‘one-way’ linear progression: from orality–aurality to manuscript, print and now digital. This ‘technologically determinist’ continuum dictates that each succeeding technology replaces its predecessor, but research is making it more and more clear that an earlier mode or modes of transmission may not be abandoned altogether but persist in parallel to their successor in a reduced or subordinate role. The dissemination of Christian literature in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a prime example of the way that different materialities and modalities of transmission could coexist to overlap and interplay. But let us begin at the other extreme, with a phenomenon that apparently propelled print to a stratospheric level of superiority.

In July 1833 The American Tract Magazine carried a communication from the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson in Myanmar lamenting the death of a Karen man and his wife ‘near the head of the Pa-tah river, who, though not baptized and never seen by any foreign missionary, both died in the faith’. The man's dying wish to his friends had been to have the printed Burmese tract entitled View of the Christian Religion ‘laid on his breast and buried with him’. Judson was so moved by this incident that he composed a poem:

In the spring of 1242, after nearly a year of occupying the Danubian plains, Batu Khan abruptly withdrew his forces from central Europe. Latin chronicles from the period express both horror and dismay around the Mongols’ mysterious departure. Ivo of Narbonne relates how the sudden retreat caused even ‘more fear for all those who witnessed it’ than the initial attacks; while a German annalist bluntly concludes that ‘only God himself knows’ the reason for it. Amidst this backdrop of fear and uncertainty, Pope Innocent IV appointed John of Plano Carpini to lead a diplomatic mission to the court of the Great Khan with the hope of finding some ‘remedy against the Tartars’. John embarked on the journey in 1245, passing first through the conquered Kyivan Rus’ principalities before reaching Guyuk Khan's court near Karakorum. When John returned to Lyon in 1247, his advice to the pope was unequivocal: the Mongols intended ‘to bring the whole world into subjection’ and Latin Europe must prepare.

The Ystoria Mongalorum compiles John's observations into a lengthy ethnographic report that covers a range of topics, including Mongol funeral rites, clothing construction, and a historiographic account of Chinggis Khan's unification of the Mongolian steppe. But because John concludes that ‘the Tartars never make peace except with those who submit to them’, the Ystoria most closely attends to Mongol military tactics. Throughout his minute depictions of Mongol warfare, John of Plano Carpini twice repeats how the Mongol military is divided ‘into groups under captains of a thousand, a hundred, and ten, and “darkness” – that is, ten thousand’. This description is, for the most part, accurate. While the Mongol army was indeed arranged by decimalization, John's description seems to confuse the Old Turkic and Mongolian word tumen (ten thousand) for duman (obscured by smoke). The error is a telling one. Each time John discusses the Mongol decimalization system, he is careful to translate tumen/duman twice; once as ‘darkness’, using the Latin tenebrae, and once as ‘ten thousand’. By providing two translations for the same word, the text insists that both meanings are significant. A ten-thousand strong troop unit, then, is always also a ‘darkness’. Given in the accusative case, tenebras further evokes the transitive verb tenebrare to which it is related.

IN JULY 1795, the Council of the Indies in Madrid revised the charges that the General-Captain of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, made against Juan Bautista Olivares, a mixed-race pardo musician from Caracas who had been sent to Spain. Carbonell accused Olivares of disturbing the tranquil-lity of the region by reading seditious materials to others and writing texts in which he supposedly referred to revolutionary ideas. After analysing Carbonell's letters, the Council decided to follow the regular legal pro-cedure, appointing members of the Justice Chamber in Cádiz to conduct Olivares's trial.

The judges in Cádiz investigated Olivares's written correspondence and reading materials. They particularly inquired about his reading habits and preferences; they asked him if he had read, copied and circulated docu-ments on the French Revolution or about republicanism. He answered that he had not read any papers regarding this issue, except for ‘the Gaceta de Madrid and the testament of the King of France’. The judges were not surprised that Olivares had read about the French Revolution in the pop-ular Gaceta de Madrid, as many readers in Spain had learned about the Revolution through the pages of this peninsular official newspaper, widely read in different corners of the kingdom. A few months later, Olivares was released and able to return to Caracas; the judges in Cádiz could not con-firm that Olivares was in fact an insurgent planning to encourage insubor-dination in Venezuela.

Through the judicial investigation, Olivares showed that the sources of information he had consulted to learn about Atlantic politics were much the same sources that everyone in both Spain and Spanish America used and knew well. He also demonstrated that reading Spanish official news-papers was not a crime and not even an act of defiance towards colonial authority. However, local authorities in Venezuela felt threatened by Oli-vares's readings and knowledge and, as a result, officials fabricated all kinds of accusations to call the attention of imperial officials to a situation that was getting out of control: the increasing circulation of news about the French Revolution and the Saint-Domingue rebellions and the danger that the spread of this information represented for the tranquillity and peace of the Spanish possessions in America.

Introduction: The “Missing People” in the New German Discourse Comedy

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze famously observed that “the people are missing” in postwar Western cinema. This is in contrast to “classical cinema”: in the earlier twentieth century, the modern medium of film had been closely associated with the modern phenomenon of the crowd on more than one level. Film and cultural theory circled around the moral dangers and political potentials of collective reception, and on-screen crowds featured prominently in the political aesthetics of socialism as well as fascism and nation-building Hollywood. In the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin, however, these crowds all but disappeared in Western political cinema: visually imagining the masses as a collective actor became exceedingly difficult. As indicated by several contributions across this volume, the rupture diagnosed by Deleuze continues to reverberate until today. In the 2010s, to be sure, the crowd had a major comeback in cultural theory, sparked by circulating media images of emerging forms of transnational collective activism: Tahrir square, Gezi Park, Occupy. But even as scholars ranging from Judith Butler to Brian Massumi, Jodi Dean, Joshua Clover, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri newly set out to theorize the “political potential” of collective assembly, this resurgence of interest in a progressive crowd aesthetics has remained overshadowed by the parallel rise of right-wing claims to embody the people. With an eye to the German anti-immigrant organization Pegida, Butler repeatedly reminds us that a “surging multitude” of publicly assembled bodies would “include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations.” Now in the 2020s, we may think of a new generation of activist movements, prominently including Black Lives Matter, while events such as the Capitol Riot in the U.S. seem to have further cemented the spectral superimposition of the activist people with the fascist mob.

Julian Radlmaier’s Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, 2017) tackles the question of how to cinematically reimagine activist, potentially revolutionary assembly against the backdrop of these concerns. On the plot level, Selbstkritik probes the possibilities of worker organization on the “apple plantation OKLAHOMA,” located somewhere between contemporary East Germany and Franz Kafka’s and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s ambiguously heterotopic America. Radlmaier’s film quotes these two intertexts with a poster on a street corner as well as an extradiegetic intertitle culminating in the promise that fascinated Kafka’s protagonist: “Jeder ist willkommen!” (All are welcome!).

Envisioning the Night

Schubert's songs of the night are poised between gothic and Romantic tropes. The gothic looms large in the graveyard settings discussed in chapter 1, notably ‘Leichenfantasie’, where darkness spotlights spectral presences in the moon's faint rays: ‘with dim light the moon shines over the death-still groves; / sighing, the night spirit skims through the air – / mist-clouds lament, pale stars shine down mournfully / like lamps in a vault.’ The idea of night revealing things beyond the realm of the living, implied in ‘Leichenfantasie’ through the ‘Nachtgeist’, is rendered explicit in the opening stanza of Schubert's ‘Die Nacht’, D 534, the last of his Ossian settings: ‘Night is dull and dark. / The clouds rest on the hills. / No star with green trembling beam; / no moon looks from the sky. / I hear the blast in the wood; but I hear it distant far. / The stream of the valley murmurs; but its murmur is sullen and sad.’ Such features – distant tremors and sudden blasts of sound – extend to a view of the night as not only revealing but also concealing supernatural beings, as in ‘Erlkönig’, D 328, where the son experiences the Erlking as all too real, the father dismissing his presence as a ‘streak of mist’. Night as a mix of the supernatural and the corporeal is pronounced in the opening stanza of ‘Schwestergruss’, with traces of the moon's rays but no sound: ‘In the moonlight / I wander up and down / Seeing dead bones / And a silent grave.’ These songs – distant in chronology, close in spirit – all point to the night as a backdrop to strange happenings brought about by darkness: ghostly presences, funeral processions, and eeriness as sound and silence combined. Death lingers in the shadows – ‘It is a ghost! It fades, it flies’, to quote from Ossian's ‘Die Nacht’.

Distribution of inventories by parish and decade

A dreamer sits in darkness, head bowed, hands resting in front of him. All is hushed, no words, little movement. A male voice hums the last seven bars of Schubert's ‘Nacht und Träume’, D 827 – ‘sweet dreams, come back!’ (‘Holde Träume, kehret wieder!’). Haunting in its fragmentation, the music is repeated, this time with words, the man's head sinking deeper into his hands. At the words ‘Holde Träume’, the light reveals the man's own reflection, his dreamt self, gazing down on him from a podium suspended in mid-air: a mirror image of his waking self.

This scene from Samuel Beckett's last television play, ‘Nacht und Träume’, broadcast on 19 May 1983, provides a springboard for thinking about the prominence of death (whether real or imagined) in Schubert's music. Central to the discussion is the relationship between biography and art – or, more specifically, the relationship between depictions of death and Schubert's confrontation with his own mortality, as intimated in his oft-quoted letter to Leopold Kupelwieser:

ONE OF THE MOST obvious forms of textual transformation in all parts of the world is linguistic translation. Yet such translation is almost always accompanied by paratextual and material variation. Translations and other textual mediations have been interpreted as independent cultural forms with contexts and consequences stretching far beyond their original language editions. Moreover, as a result of growing interest in the dynamics of the circulation of ideas across the Enlightenment world and the ‘historical turn’ in translation studies, translators, much like printers, editors, booksellers, engravers and other intermediaries involved in the production and exchange of books, have been recovered as agents in their own right, whose actions bore direct, lasting and often significant effects on the forms, accessibility and reception of ideas. Accordingly, the study of eighteenth-century translations, translators and the satellite persons and processes orbiting translations has offered new avenues in thinking about the ideas, audiences and both material and human agents of Enlightenment.

Building on this approach, this chapter explores the role of the Milanese printer and bookseller, Giuseppe Galeazzi (1694–1779), in the circulation of ideas in the Milanese Enlightenment. The translations pursued and printed by Galeazzi, which ranged from works of natural history like Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle to core cameralist textbooks such as Joseph von Sonnenfels's Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, were vital in transporting diverse Enlightenment cur-rents to Habsburg Milan in a period of complex censorship and political upheaval. However, these vernacular translations also served a social and arguably ideological purpose. Not only were works selected for translation based on their perceived ‘utility’ for Lombardy – be it economic, political, or social – but the translations were variously and explicitly adapted to the Lombard context and to align with the political and philosophical ambi-tions of the Milanese reforming class, through the inclusion of prefaces, letters to the reader and other paratextual additions, as well as degrees of interpretative translation. In this combination of selection and adaptation, Galeazzi encapsulates what Peter Burke argues are the two opposing, yet compatible, early modern rationales determining translation: firstly, to ‘fill the gaps in the host culture’, and secondly, ‘the principle of confirmation, according to which people in a given culture translate works that support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present in the culture.

Julian Radlmaier’s 2021 political comedy, Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers), is set in the late summer of 1928 in an unnamed Baltic Sea coastal village in Germany. Communism, capitalism, and fascism are in the sultry sea air, and vampires occupy the upper echelons of society. Indeed, entry into capitalism, specifically through the purchasing of stocks, is predicated on sucking the blood of an unsuspecting proletarian. In this freighted historical setting, we already know how the tale of political parody will end. In the diegetic world of Radlmaier’s film, a local Chinese man, known simply as “der Algensammler” (algae collector), becomes a scapegoat for hate against the capitalists: the proletarian crowd turns into a fascist lynch mob. The capitalists perceive the communists as a much greater threat than the fascists because, as Corinna Harfouch’s character Tante Erkentrud unapologetically declares, “Mit denen kann man wenigstens reden” (One can at least talk to them).

We evoke Radlmaier’s most recent feature to open our discussion about contemporary transnational German film and the futures it points to, because Blutsauger’s portrayal of capitalists not only as vampires but as facilitators of fascism in a historical setting also appears to speak to our era of neoliberal crises and the sweeping embrace of authoritarianism across the globe. Through the diegetic employment of an array of old and new objects and styles, the film’s anachronistic portrait of the Weimar period indirectly locates it in contemporary Germany and foregrounds the link between past and present. Despite its comedic mode and playfulness, Radlmaier’s potentially historical projection of neoliberalism’s trajectory is unmistakably bleak: the film dramatically concludes with murder by a fascist lynch mob. Beginning with a reading circle of volume one of Marx’s Capital, however, the film also reminds us of the collective possibilities that open up at any moment of political instability, including the present late neoliberal moment.

Already in the early 2000s, Lisa Duggan declared that “if the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s, and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling—if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall.”