The birth of the Enlightenment in the 18th century transformed the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While encouraging readers to “have the courage to use their own understanding,” in the words of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, it also laid out the categories of race that are so firmly entrenched in the world today. Black lives in Central Europe experienced these changing intellectual currents, as the life of Angelo Soliman attests. Educated and raised in Habsburg courts, he was a freemason who attended such intellectual debates about the Enlightenment. But after his death, his body was stuffed and placed on display, dehumanizing a figure committed to humanistic endeavors. The period 1750-1850, then, represents transition and contradiction, as White and Black Central Europeans reworked again the categories of race and identity that have come to define our lives.
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Black German experiences
Angelo Soliman (ca. 1721-1796)
Schmitz, Abbess Franziska Christine von Pfalz-Sulzbach and Ignatius Fortuna (1772)
Ignatius Fortuna lends money to a “stepbrother” (ca. 1780)
Ignatius Fortuna’s estate (1789)
Ignatius Fortuna’s white “siblings” petition for his estate (1789)
Angelo Soliman’s estate (1796)
Josephine Soliman fights to bury her father Angelo (1797)
Abbé Gregoire recounts the life and fate of Angelo Soliman (1808)
Machbuba (ca. 1825-40)
Ludwig Emil Grimm, The Moor’s Baptism (1841)
Slavery and anti-slavery
Herder’s “Negro Idylls”: The Brothers (1797)
Herder’s “Negro Idylls”: The Right Hand (1797)
Daniel Botefeur, A German slave trader (1811)
The Quakers ask Europeans to stand against slavery (1822)
Attacking American slavery (1839)
Culture
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St. Maurice becomes a savage and a caricature on a family crest (ca. 1345-present)
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The character, Monostatos, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute (1791)
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Beethoven performs with George Bridgetower, the “great mulatto composer and lunatic” (1803)
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Herder discusses folk culture
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Kleist’s impossible romance in the middle of a race war (1811)
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William der Neger (1818)
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Biernatzki, “The Brown Boy” (1839)
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A fictional interracial relationship (1839)
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A mixed-race child tries to fit in (1839)
Philosophy and racism
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J. G. Zimmermann indulges in prejudice while lampooning prejudice (1783)
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Kant on the different human races (1777)
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Christoph Meiners asserts African inferiority and defends slavery (1790)
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Kant’s critique of slavery and colonialism (1795)
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Blumenbach classifies humanity (1795)