Christa Wolf’s story Cassandra (1983) contains these notable lines: ‘One can know when the war begins, but when does the prewar begin? If there were rules for such things, one would have to pass them on.’ For years, both in research and in international politics, there has been an observable and intensive search for such rules—or, more precisely, for indicators for an early detection of imminent conflict escalation. For example, in a report written by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change for the then General Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, there were numerous suggestions about ‘early warning’ and preventive measures. Since the military conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s, efforts at ‘civil conflict processing’ have intensified at both state and non-state levels. Peace researchers had long been seeking relevant indicators; some of them are very obvious, such as the above-average increase in arms expenditure (as observed for years in the USA and more recently China), which is considered a ‘hard indicator’. It is ‘soft’ indicators, however, that are most interesting; these reflect the changes in the psychological state of a society, such as increasingly frequent and intense pejorative references to a ‘potential opponent’, who thus becomes a manifest enemy. Such a shift in publicly effective symbols is then usually documented in relevant products of elite culture as well as mass phenomena. Can one find such things in the arts too, specifically in music?