Beautiful Black Soul?
The Racial Matrix of White Aesthetics (Reading Kotzebue against Kleist)
Sigrid G. Köhler
Résumé
Le racisme n’est pas un phénomène moderne. L’amalgame de l’anthropologie et de l’esthétique à la fin du dix-huitième siècle inscrit cependant d’une manière très spécifique la matrice raciste dans l’épistémologie européenne. Responsable de cet acte est notamment l’imagination, c’est-à-dire la faculté qui crée précisément les images produisant et transportant les stéréotypes racistes. Partant du mouvement de l’abolition et du débat sur l’esclavage les textes de Kleist et Kotzebue prennent dans leur traitement littéraire des positions de critique très différentes. D’un côté le récit de Kleist Die
Verlobung in St. Domingo (Les fiançailles à Saint-Domingue) reflète la production mentale des images
racistes tellement radical qu’une transgression esthétique devient impossible. Il n’existe ni d’imaginaire commune ni d’imaginations partagées. De l’autre côté la pièce de théâtre de Kotzebue Die Negersclaven (Les esclaves nègres) revendique le postulat politique de l’égalité de tous les hommes pour tous leurs caractères, les Noirs ainsi que les Blancs, et elle le transfère ensuite dans l’espace esthétique. Alors, à l’encontre de Toni de Kleist, chez Kotzebue l’esclave Ada peut être une ‘belle âme’ mais seulement dans le cadre d’une esthétique théâtrale fondée sur l’affection émotionnelle, c’est-à-dire qu‘elle demeure dans l’espace fictive.
Abstract
Racism is not a modern phenomenon. The amalgamation of anthropology and aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, however, led to a very specific inscription of the racial matrix into modern European epistemology. Not least responsible for this was the power of the imagination – that is to say the faculty by which the particular images that produce and transport racist stereotypes are generated. Ensuing from the abolition movement and the debate on slavery, the texts of Kleist and Kotzebue take very different positions in their literary treatment of this context. On the one hand, Kleist’s novella Die
Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo) reflects the production of racist images
so radically that the aesthetic transgression of the racial matrix becomes impossible, as a consequence denying the possibility of a common imaginary and of common imaginations. On the other hand, with explicit reference to the arguments of the abolition debate, Kotzebue’s theatre play Die Negersclaven (The Negro slaves) assumes the postulate of equality of all people for all its characters, both black and white, even applying this postulate to aesthetic ideals with the effect that (in contrast to Kleist’s Toni) the slave Ada in Kotzebue’s play is described as a ‘beautiful soul’ – but only within the aesthetic frame of the bourgeois drama based on emotion, as such rendering a transgression which, nonetheless, remains fictional.
Keywords
race, aesthetics and anthropology around 1800, ‘Bildung’, power of imagination, beautiful soul, Heinrich von Kleist, August von Kotzebue
In his autobiographical account Die Farben unter meiner Haut (The colors under my skin), Thomas Usleber testifies that he has no ‘homeland’ (Heimat). He states this clearly and austerely at the beginning of his book, maintaining throughout large parts of the text the perspective and the experience of the child (and later teenager) who grew up with this lack. The pragmatic sobriety in his tone sets the reading of his life story at times at the edge of an almost unbearable limit. Neither Germany, his country of birth, nor Idar-Oberstein, the town of his birth, serve as a ‘home’ for him. The word itself, he notes, is already “meaningless” (11), if it is to function as the way to name a place or region that one feels related to. For the child of a black US-American and a white German, the Germany of the 1960s and 1970s appears to offer no space or place: Usleber cannot think of the word ‘home’ in spatial terms. White Germany does, however, have very exacting assumptions about Usleber. The image that it makes of him wears so-called “negroid features” (56), which is exemplified by an encounter in which a white counterpart literally draws a sketch of his face. He is told that ‘Blacks’ have such features, commentary which aligns itself with a centuries-old tradition in which these features, in the form of racist stereotypes concerning lips, noses and hair have found a place in the language and the thinking of his country of birth.
Speaking and thinking along the racial matrix is still so common and yet unbearable, a persistent scandal of thought. Racism itself is not based on biological categories, however, although the formation of the modern terminology of race certainly correlates with anthropological thought as it emerged as a new scientific discipline at the end of the eighteenth century. Neither is it merely an accumulation of prejudices and stereotypes, as the historian George L. Mosse admonishes in his history of racism in Europe. Rather, racism is a result of social and historical processes, founded in aesthetic judgments that follow a visual logic (Mosse 9), and as such deeply anchored in modern European thought. But racism is not a modern phenomenon in particular (cfr. Frederickson, Isaac). Following Mosse’s view one could argue though that due to the rise of aesthetics and the acknowledgement of imagination as a new faculty of cognition racism is inscribed in modern European epistemology in a very specific way relying on images. Aesthetic judgments are then as pertinent to the formation of the racial matrix as the anthropological discourse is. A precise analysis of the relevant texts, for example those written by Blumenbach or Herder, might demonstrate that anthropological assertions are based on aesthetic judgments. A critical reflection on modern racism then has to deal with aesthetic images – images which are intrinsically unbearable because of their racist account, but also because of the human barbarism that results from this account. The representation of the latter meets its limits rather quickly, however, when confronted with the rules of ‘nice taste’.
The examination of the fatal amalgamation of anthropology and aesthetics is not a recent development. In principle, critical reflections pointing to the atrocious consequences of racism have accompanied this fusion from its inception, also in the work of white authors of that time. August von Kotzebue and Heinrich von Kleist, two authors of German literature around 1800, both refer explicitly in their texts to the debate about the legitimacy of slavery that was mediated throughout Europe in various circulating printed materials, notably journals and newspapers. The debate at the time was centered on the discussion of the pros and cons regarding contemporary attempts to divide humankind into ‘races’. Every literary treatment of the subject of slavery, including those of Kleist and Kotzebue, thus invariably includes a reflection of and a stand towards the contemporary racial matrix. Kotzebue’s theatre play
Die Negersclaven (The Negro slaves) draws attention to the subject explicitly and boldly in the title.
The title of the Kleist novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo) alludes to the struggle for freedom of the black population in Haiti as well as to a literary motif, namely to the story of Inkle and Yarico that was often thematically treated in literary texts at that time. The diverging approach to such themes can be taken as symptomatic of the difference between these two authors: On the one hand, the very popular and extraordinarily successful author (Kotzebue), who was rejected by the literary elite of his time and who has been all but banned from the high canon by literary historiography for writing trivial literature, and on the other hand, the highly accomplished and exceptional author (Kleist), whose texts anticipate classic modernity around 1900 and who is still cherished and cultivated by literary critics.
At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and so too in the texts of Kotzebue and Kleist, the reflection of and the stand towards slavery and racism rely on the means of expression and discursive frames of the time. Of tantamount importance among these were the debate on human rights which derived its arguments from natural law, and the conceptualization of contemporary aesthetics grounded in anthropology and more particularly in the human capacity to feel. Because of the relationship to anthropology the ambivalent position of aesthetics was already pre-programmed in this context. On the one hand, aesthetics relied heavily on a discipline which participated significantly in the discursive formation of the term ‘race’. On the other hand, this relationship formed the basis of a conception of aesthetics which takes emphatically and without any constraint the human being itself as a point of departure, in so far as it is rooted in general human faculties and senses, namely in the power of imagination and the faculty of sensibility or feeling. Concurrently, however, aesthetics itself is subject to specific rules if it is to contribute to the ethical and aesthetical formation of human-kind, its ‘Bildung’ and refinement. These rules are formulated with regard to the different types of media as well as in terms of the limits of representation and notions as to what can be represented. The latter in particular rests upon the assumption that ‘Bildung’ works through positive emotion or affection. By the same token, then, negative affection created through improbability, excessive violence, immorality, or ugliness should be avoided.
It is here, in an aesthetics rooted in feeling, where Kleist and Kotzebue meet. In the above-mentioned texts both explore the correlation of feeling with ethical and aesthetic formation through the figure of the ‘beautiful soul’. But whereas in his text Kotzebue wants to move his audience emotionally and therefore relies on a dramatic aesthetics somewhat ‘antiquated’ in comparison with the newly formed Weimar Classicism, Kleist moves beyond this to a critical reflection of the humanist aesthetic ideals. Kotzebue I: The Painting of Manners vs. The Beautiful Soul
In his preface Kotzebue introduces his play Die Negersclaven as a “historical painting” (13). Kotzebue is quick to add, however, that only the written version merits this designation in the full sense of the concept, as performances often excerpt parts of the text. Apparently, contemporary theatre practice deems certain parts too “atrocious” (13) to be shown to an audience. The text, however, obeys different rules, and the most important rule that Kotzebue seems to impose on himself is the rule of authenticity.
All the “terrible cruelties” (9) he represents in his play are based on historical fact. Kotzebue names his sources and insists that only the grouping of the events is invented and not the events themselves. His play thus transgresses the frame of the ‘melodrama’ (Rührstück) that is being evoked implicitly by the name of the author and explicitly by the preface, which names the ‘affection of the audience’ as one of its main intentions: “If the tears of the spectator mix with these of the author the efforts of the author are remunerated.” (10) Instead of the bourgeois family drama that usually defines the plot of a ‘melodrama’, slavery and the slave trade are the dominant subjects, not only of the melodrama, but also of the ‘historical painting’. This collocation of the play reveals a cynicism bordering on irony, as with his emphasis on the play as a ‘historical painting’ he claims historical accuracy and achieves a broadening of a literary genre. His ‘painting’ not only uses the tableaux already popular in melodrama but it also comes close to a ‘painting of manners’ that is supposed to elucidate the customs and practices of a nation. Nevertheless, this genre reference does not result in a specific thematic focus on culture or customs. Rather, it gives rise to a specific perspective as the customs and manners chosen for a painting of manners lead to the characterization of a nation. His play thus does not crystallize around the particular customs and manners of either Europeans or Africans, thereby avoiding the invocation of questions as to an alleged superiority of Europeans towards other nations and cultures, itself a beloved subject of a plethora of geographical lectures, anthropological studies and travel reports written by Europeans at the time. But it does give very detailed descriptions of the unimaginable atrocities of slavery. So, the specific spin that this collocation gives to his play opens up questions as to what extent the cruelties of slavery belong to the character and nature of the European/white subject. The characters of the play repeatedly reiterate this question. It is unlikely that Kotzebue’s aim is to support this perspective. So, what is the aim of the play then?
The positive reference to William Wilberforce (57), one of the protagonists of the abolition movement in England, as well as the practice of naming historical sources in the preface, among others L’Histoire philosophique written by the abolitionist Abbé Raynal (9), illustrate that the painting of manners is not to be understood as a painting beyond the grip of history, but rather as an artifact intricately linked with a precise historical situation and a very specific contemporary political debate that was led Europe-wide, namely the abolition debate and the resulting larger questions as to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of slave trade and of slavery. The position that the play takes in this debate is clearly determined. The appealing characters assume the principal arguments of the abolitionists who had taken the ideals of European Enlightenment seriously, claiming freedom and equality as fundamental principles and unalienable rights of all people. Depending on the discursive context and the addressee, the arguments of the abolitionists vary widely, taking their stand from religion, morality, and natural law, insofar as slavery contradicts divine order or human nature, but also from economic reasoning, pointing cynically to the inefficiency of the transatlantic slave trade. The religious and particularly the pietistic wing of the abolitionist movement used an emotionally charged rhetoric which appealed to the common bond of humanity and pity. Self-evidently, such a rhetoric fused well with the dramatic theory of the bourgeois theater and in particular with the aim of the ‘melodrama’ to touch the audience emotionally (see Riesche 9-28). From this perspective, a melodrama on slavery is consistent and fitting and Kotzebue’s recourse to the genre well motivated.
The play combines two storylines which are typical conflict constellations of the bourgeois theater in the eighteenth century and inscribes them into the abolition debate, namely the threat of female innocence and virtue by male sexual assaults and the fraternal strife between two brothers, one misanthropic, the other philanthropic. The main protagonist of Kotzebue’s play is Ada, a slave on a plantation in Jamaica, which belongs to the inhuman slaveholder John, who longs to ‘possess’ Ada sexually (22). Ada, however, still loves her husband Zameo, from whom she was separated when slave traders deported her and to whom she feels bound in fidelity. The male counterpart of John is his brother William, a sensitive and intellectual character, whose ‘heart’ trembles when faced with the atrocities committed by his brother. William’s visit to the plantation opens up the dramatic possibility of showing the everyday violence and brutality of slavery and allows the narration of the life stories of the black characters up until their cruel deportation and enslavement. Repeatedly William states that he cannot bear what he sees. So he takes the position of the abolitionists in his speeches, but first only argumentatively. He does not interfere in the plot until late in the play, when he buys Zameo’s freedom. In the second of the two endings that Kotzebue wrote for the play, William does the same for Ada. In the first version, however, Ada dies. Her death is caused by a knife thrust that follows a structural pattern which mirrors the constellation of Lessing’s Emilia Galloti. Confronted with the injustices that the virtuous Ada had to experience, her death proved unendurable for an audience at the end of the eighteenth century, and thus a second ‘happier’ end had to be written.
In addition to the ‘authentic’ depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the play features two further perspectives: the representation of (white) female virtue as it is impersonated by Ada and the ‘emotional affection’ of William, which anticipates on stage the intended impact of the play on an audience. These two perspectives, in particular, threaten to pull the play out of the political debate and back into the frame of bourgeois theater and melodrama. The play does not deal with liberation or with the struggle for freedom of the slaves; it does not aim at political involvement or at concrete political actions,1 but
apparently ‘only’ at the change of consciousness of the white audience through emotional affection. The latter is based on that specific aesthetic and moral ideal of ‘Bildung’ typical for the eighteenth century, which takes the faculty of human sensibility as a point of departure. Conversely, it is exactly this contemporary dramatic theory, with its focus on individual feeling and psychic life, that allows for a depiction of slavery in its enormity and cruelty, showing not only its physical atrocities but also the mental destruction of people who cannot bear such an inhuman life any longer, as it is exemplified in the death of Ada.
But there are still further reasons that make Ada a remarkable character. In Kotzebue’s play she is the representative of the feminine ideal of (white) bourgeois virtue. This has the effect that the term equality is applied beyond the political postulate of freedom and the compliance of human rights as claimed by the abolition movement, to the aesthetic and moral ideals of ‘Bildung’. This extension of the term is diametrically opposed by the formation of the concept of race in the second half of the eighteenth century, which denies any notion of equality and posits instead a hierarchy of human ‘races’. A large part of the discursive effort of anthropological texts of this time was geared to disavowing the capability of 1. This focus dominates in what Barbara Riesche calls “revolutionary plays”. However, these reproduce in their depiction of the ‘black rebels’contemporary racist stereotypes (Riesche 123f.).
‘Bildung’ in other cultures and nations, and in particular in African ones, or – if their genetic disposition allowed for it – to transforming them into objects of white education projects. The latter happens frequently to African characters in theater plays of the time, even the idealized ones – but not to Ada. She is neither the ‘naïf child of nature’, nor a ‘noble savage’. Instead, she is a “beautiful soul” (98), who acts, just as her husband Zameo does, according to Schiller’s credo: morally “without thought” (“unbedacht”, 71), and thus intuitively, according to her character. Apparently, even though this is not mentioned explicitly, she has been shaped by her own culture in her own country and not by European ‘civilization’. Kotzebue’s theater play further radicalizes the rhetoric of equality and thus brings into collision two epistemological formations of knowledge that were fundamental for the eighteenth century: biological differential thinking on the one hand and the aesthetic/humanist knowledge of equality on the other. This clash is dealt with in the argumentative exchanges between the two brothers, but also in the dialogues of the slaves Lilli and Ada. John legitimizes slavery and his inhuman action referring to racist biological thinking, whereas William, who is moved himself, ‘discovers’ the hearts of the African characters. Lilli and Ada by contrast reclaim, rather bluntly, a life of dignity. Viewed in total, however, the play does not manage to transgress the racial borders between ‘black’ and ‘white’. This would have required a new societal model that the ‘plantation play’ cannot accomplish.2 The white characters remain the masters
and fathers as long as they are ‘good’. The family reunion (of husband and wife and of father and son respectively) that occurs during the play – regardless of which ending is used – remains within racially marked boundaries. Despite his emotional attachment, William witnesses the reunion only as an affected observer.
Kleist’s Interment of the ‘Beautiful Black Soul’
Initially, Gustav – the protagonist in Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St.
Domingo) – occupies a similar position to that of William. Together with his Swiss compatriots he
gets entangled between the fronts of the ‘blacks’ and the ‘whites’ fighting each other during the war of liberation which the black population wages against white (French) tyranny in Haiti. Due to the historical setting of the plot and the corresponding allusions to the French Revolution (including the Declaration of Human Rights), Kleist’s novella is, in contrast to Kotzebue’s play, contextualized to a much greater degree in contemporary political history. In the typical vein of Kleist’s texts, the characters struggling for freedom act at first within the parameters of the law. However, the escalation of the fighting into acts of revenge and ambushes, as well as the determining intrigue transgress this legal frame, and his national neutrality is of no help to the protagonist. Gustav’s racial affiliation based on his skin color positions him clearly on the side of the ‘whites’. The constant threats he is exposed to during his flight from the rebels reveals this, as well as his vain attempt to transgress racial boundaries in his encounter with Toni. He meets the latter when during his flight he seeks shelter for himself and his compatriots in the house in which she is living together with her mother. Due to her mixed ‘descent’, having both European and African ancestors, Toni already occupies an intermediate position. She thus seems predestined to be the character within the dichotomously organized character constellation of the novella to reflect 2. There are other plays written by Kotzebue which generate more provocative visions in this respect, for example the play La Peyrouse, settled in the South Sea and depicting in some sense what can be called an intercultural ménage-à-trois.
critically on the racial matrix. But her placement on the border between ‘black’ and ‘white’ instead confirms the biological order, for instance when Gustav decides to trust her because he sees in the “color of her face” a “beam” of his own (Kleist 164) or because her face reflects a “shade of kinship” (165). Until this moment of recognition, his “imagination” (“Einbildung”) is described as filled entirely with
images of black people (168); Gustav is in other words restrained by suspicion. In turn, to legitimize
her support of whites Toni claims to be “white” (191). She virtually accomplishes what Bay refers to as a “racial career” (Bay 93). But her change from a ‘scheming black’ to a ‘morally sound white person’ is not so much developed in psychological terms as it is pictured through images. Her representation is superimposed little by little by figurations of white ideals of female virtue that transform her into a ‘beautiful soul’ (cfr. Gilman 670; Brittnacher 177f.), a beautiful soul which nonetheless seems to be incompatible with her black body. Only when she dies, in the moment when her soul leaves her body, does the narrative voice refer to her as a beautiful soul. In the act of dying she “exhale(s) her beautiful soul” (Kleist 193). Schiller, who contributed much to the popularization of the term, writes in his Essay
on Grace and Dignity that a “beautiful soul” can spout “compelling grace” even in a person who lacks
physical “Bildung” (469). Nevertheless, this effective power of the beautiful soul encounters its limits in Kleist’s novella when confronted with racial ascription. So, despite the initial recognition, Gustav is still not able to disregard the images in his mind, to leave his ‘imagination’ behind. For him Toni is charming and gracious, even beautiful. But her skin color is and remains “repelling” (Kleist 172).
The constellation of the characters Gustav and Toni allows Kleist’s novella to reflect the racial ascription of biological discourse not so much as an issue of ‘Bildung’ or of the ‘capability of Bildung’ but rather as one of images: Racially charged images set up the aesthetic program of ‘Bildung’. The white imagination works on the basis of a racial matrix which is continuously replicated. And even Kleist’s text cannot transgress this boundary. The place assigned for the vision of a common future beyond the racial matrix, a future where the couple could be bound together by love, is the grave: “the dwelling of perpetual peace” (Kleist 195). Notably, these words quote the title of Kant’s eponymous and epochal work in which he sketches the vision of a league of nations. So with the burial of the aesthetically founded idea of humanism (Lubkoll 131) the novella recontextualizes this conflict, this time, though, in the framework of rational law. In contrast to contractual theories that conceptualize the legal order of an individual state, a league of nations does not have a supreme sovereign because otherwise national sovereignty could no longer be retained, and the league would not be an alliance according to international law. Moreover, in Kant’s text the idea of a league of nations is accompanied by historico-philosophical reflections according to which historical processes are always organized by an antagonistic principle inherent to nature.
The allusion to Kant’s work has an impact on the reading of the end of Kleist’s novella. Gustav escapes the machination with the help of Toni. Together with his white comrades, he overpowers some of the assailing rebels. In particular, the ‘whites’ manage, with the help of Toni, to take the children of the leader Congo Hoango hostage, so that the situation is brought to a stalemate: An agreement is reached, exchanging unobstructed withdrawal for the lives of the children. Thus, the two parties face each other with diverging interests. They certainly don’t unite to form a confederation but rather declare an armistice, which nevertheless identifies them as equal – and against the background of the racial
matrix one could even say as independent, sovereign – negotiating partners, who observe the agreement until their paths separate them again.
Kotzebue II: The Sphere of Emotional Affection
A common territory beyond isolated legal negotiations does not exist for Kleist’s characters in the narrated world, neither as a geographical space nor as a common sphere of experience or emotion or as a shared imaginary. Kotzebue’s play appears somewhat different. Certainly Ada’s ‘beautiful soul’ is the product of a specific white aesthetic that transfers with a universalizing gesture its ideals to ‘Africa’ and in this way undoes the tentative efforts to include through the biographies of the characters authentic ‘African’ details into the play. This alleged ‘local color’ belongs to the category of exotic kitsch and a convincing performance of cultural difference is surely not one of the strengths of the play. Then again, this (quite precarious) universalizing gesture reveals an opening and extension of aesthetic concepts that allows the inclusion of black characters. Although this Eurocentric attitude needs to be looked upon very critically, it is fairly unusual for German speaking literature and dramatic theory around 1800. The idealization of black female figures occurs frequently in German literature around 1800, but arguably without the consistency that can be found in Kotzebue’s play. If they are depicted as not only ‘dear’ or ‘good’ but indeed as ‘beautiful’, they find their limits in the topos of the noble savage or the naïf child of nature, who are objects of European educational projects (Riesche 147), in the need to accomplish a ‘racial career’ (as Kleist’s Toni has done), and in their black bodies that are ‘repellent’ according to the regime of white aesthetics. Ada – and the same is true for Zameo and the other characters of Kotzebue’s play – is not just a beautiful soul, she is also physically beautiful. (In Kotzebue’s play the skin color of the characters is, astoundingly, seldom actually mentioned.) It is hard to imagine that this constellation could have caused representational problems in German literature. But it did, and not only in literature. The performance of the play proved precarious, too. The conception of the black figures didn’t meet the contemporaneous dramatic and aesthetic expectations as to how a black character should be staged. Reviews of the play repeatedly quoted August Wilhelm Schlegel’s commentaries on Shakespeare’s play
Othello, in which the figure of Othello is interpreted as turning into a ‘true Black’, i.e. becoming a
crude and wild character with an animalistic nature and so on (Schlegel 244f., cfr. Röttger 106f.). Even more tangible is the objection of the director of the theatre in Berlin, who at the time argued that the staging would presumably fail because of the large number of black characters in the play, as such a great quantity of blacks, he felt, would almost certainly be rejected by both spectators and actors (cfr. Röttger 106). Kotzebue’s play was nevertheless staged, albeit with more success on English stages than on German ones, whose audiences apparently preferred not to be confronted with the atrocities of the play. Kotzebue’s play transgresses the norms of theater practice. With its account on the cruelties of slavery, it reveals the limits of ‘taste’ regarding the question of how much violence and of how many black figures were bearable on German stages, and with this the very limited possibility of the contemporaneous theater to reflect on the racial matrix of societal acting. Against this background, Kotzebue’s creation of a beautiful soul (which is in some sense ‘color blind’) appears even more clearly as an aesthetic transgression. It is remarkable that in this context Kotzebue points repeatedly to the difference in mediums between the text and the performance of the theater play and that he reclaims, this
time at the height of the new aesthetics of the theater around 1800, a performance which draws strongly on the peculiar effects of the visual and not so much on the strength of the word as dramatic theory in the second half of the eighteenth century did (Fragmente 69ff., cfr. Röttger 115f., Ruppert 156-170). In other words, by staging Ada and the other black characters he projects somewhat ‘new’ images.
Given this aesthetic vision a glance at the end of the play is rather sobering. The first version, closing as it does with Ada’s death, allows for the conclusion that in a racially stratified society there is no space for a beautiful soul in a beautiful black body even when aesthetics seeks to project this. The second, more conciliatory ending seems to allow room for this soul. The ransoming represents a very ambivalent end, however. Following the contemporary concept of human rights based on natural law it is held that through ransom nothing is given back because human freedom is inalienable in the first place (Kotzebue 74-75). But still the concrete action of buying one’s freedom remains an economic and arbitrary act of civil law between two whites which does not give rise to a reorganization of societal order at all. Thus the play banks optimistically on the possibility of a gradual change of consciousness that could bring about a change in individuals and their actions – this is even thematized, albeit not realized, regarding the case of John the slaveholder. Instead of larger political frames the play emphasizes private action. As a consequence, the debate about slavery and its abolition is maintained within the frame of the bourgeois tragedy and the melodrama. One might discern a ‘political dimension’ in the play if one takes into account the by now very common differentiation between politics and the political, and precisely because of the aesthetic theoretical frame of the melodrama which the play uses relying on affection: With Ada, a black character is incorporated into the aesthetic sphere of (white) ideals of virtue, a sphere that in a theater play relying on an aesthetics of effect (‘Wirkungsästhetik’) is not only a concrete stage area and theatrical space, but moreover a sphere of experience and emotion which arises performatively, not least through the role model of Ada. The dramatic theory of bourgeois tragedy (‘bürgerliche Trauerspiel’) based on emotion and pity assumes that through the performance on stage an osmotic exchange between the actors and the spectators can be provoked in which art “melts the heart” and the “passionate stream writhes” through the interior emotional world of the spectator (Lessing 58). In Schiller’s essay “The Theater as a Moral Institution”, this stream with its source in the theater becomes in a sense a “common channel” (828), evoking the picture of a process embracing the whole nation and producing thereby not only the feeling of ‘national’ relatedness but also of being ‘truly human’ as is noted emphatically at the end of the essay. As it transgresses boundaries of class and status, this stream is supposed to reach every single individual. Regardless of social position, every person is included in this sphere because of his or her common and shared humanity. With a play that aims explicitly at ‘touching hearts’ Kotzebue extends this sphere beyond racially marked boundaries. He presents the prospect of a space preceding the “partition of the sensible” (Rancière), preceding the division of black and white, master and slave, free and unfree etc., a space where humans with different cultural backgrounds and different skin colors affect each other’s hearts reciprocally. This is of course a fiction, a part of the white imagination which follows the principles of white aesthetics, and a fiction that whites perform only reluctantly when they have to take over the roles of the ‘blacks’. So, Kotzebue’s prospect is fairly limited. His remark in the preface of the play reserving the designation ‘historical painting’ in the full sense of the meaning only to the written version proves that he was very well aware of these aesthetic rules limiting its representation.
So, because of the unbearable that it wants to show the historical painting that was written to be performed on stage can only be accomplished in the medium of the text. In other words, it is not accomplished ... 1800/2000
And roughly two hundred years later? In his autobiographical account mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, Thomas Usleber draws a rather disillusioned picture. After all, the idea of a Germany without racism and discrimination no longer preoccupies him, because social changes cannot be achieved by general claims, or so he holds. On the contrary, he condenses his experiences in a dictum borrowed from Ika Hügel-Marshall, which gives utterance to all the uncountable psychological and emotional injuries: “They can hurt me more deeply than I will ever be able to return” (22). The only possibility that Usleber perceives is the change of the individual mindset (60). It is surprising and disturbing that in this context his autobiographical remarks structurally resemble in many ways the individualist course of ‘Bildung’ that is so typical for the autobiographical genres of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: from birth through childhood and adolescence into adulthood and the concomitant societal integration which accompanies this development. The literary forms of the modern autobiography and of the Bildungsroman which emerged in the eighteenth century depend on the concept of a strong subject which molds itself through interaction with society and which finally finds, despite all obstacles, its place in that society. With the critique of modernity, this narrative mode has become obsolete, or so holds the well-established position of literary criticism which has led to corresponding consequences in literary history and the canonization of literature and which, of course, relates to specific aesthetic und discursive (white) positions of knowledge.
The literary form that Usleber has chosen for his story holds out the prospect of a success that, according to the dominant contemporary perspective, is in principle no longer possible. His text also denies this on its propositional level, albeit for different motives. Possibly this is the reason why Usleber’s text takes this form. He would not have written his life story, he notes, if his “German half had received the same amount of attention as his American half had.” (140).3
Works Cited
Bay, Hansjörg. “Als die Schwarzen die Weißen ermordeten. Nachbeben einer Erschütterung des europäischen Diskurses in Kleists Verlobung in St. Domingo”. Kleist-Jahrbuch (1998): 80-108.
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Sigrid G. Köhler is a Dilthey Fellow at the German Department of the University of Münster. Her research interests range from ‘Law and Literature’ to ‘Discourses and Concepts of Matter’ and ‘Race Theory, Postcolonial Studies, and National Identities’. Her most recent publications include: Materie. Grundlagentexte zur Theoriegeschichte. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013 (ed., with H. Siebenpfeiffer, M. Wagner-Egelhaaf); Das Imaginäre der Nation. Zur
Persistenz einer politischen Kategorie in Literatur und Film. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012 (ed., with K. Grabbe, M.
Wagner-Egelhaaf).
