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THE GERMAN INVENTION OF RACE An Interdisciplinary Conference Enter
Table of Contents Abstracts of papers to be presented at "The German Invention of
Race," Harvard University, May 4-6, 2001 KVETA BENES, "From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Comparative-Historical
Philology and the Racialization of Salvationist National Narrative,
1806-30" This paper examines the racialization of early-nineteenth-century
German notions of nationhood within the philological discourse on India
and Central Asia that evolved in response to Friedrich Schlegel's Über
die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (1806). The rise of comparative-historical
philology after 1800 marked a "linguistic turn" in German intellectual
life when language became closely associated with human communities
and cultural development. During the Napoleonic occupation, philologists
celebrated the German language as a symbol of national unity and the
site of cultural memory, composing a series of national narratives that
traced the origins of the German nation back to its supposed cultural
starting points in antiquity. This paper investigates how German Orientalists
introduced a racial understanding of physical difference to the categories
of language and culture as they searched for the primordial homeland
(Urheimat) of German speakers in Asia, thereby creating the "Aryan myth."
Friedrich Schlegel's narrative of German descent from India followed
traditional Biblical notions of the emergence of cultural difference
by which all linguistic groups originated from one sacred homeland in
the East that had also been the site of the first revelation (Uroffenbarung).
In his view, German speakers were a chosen people destined to recreate
the lost religious knowledge of this divine revelation following an
enlightened return to the paradise from which they had been expulsed. The discovery of the "Indo-Germanic" language family by Franz Bopp
in 1816 challenged the monogenetic structure of Schlegel's national
narrative and secularized the salvationist rhetoric of his Christian
tale. Bopp distinguished strictly between the point of origin of Semitic
and Indo-Germanic speakers. He also questioned whether Sanskrit was
the most ancient "mother tongue" of the family, sparking a search for
a more originary German Urheimat outside of India. German Orientalists
such as Julius Klaproth spatialized and territorialized Schlegel's Christian
metaphor of expulsion from paradise as they mapped out the likely location
of this Central Asian homeland and the migration roots the Germanic
tribes had taken through the Caucasus to Central Europe. They portrayed
the expected unification of the German states after the Wars of Liberation
in terms of the recovery of the compelling collective identities once
present in the primordial German homeland. In 1830 the Bonn Indologist
Christian Lassen recommended the term "Aryan" (Arier) as the common
name for the Indo-Germanic people (Volk) and the languages they spoke.
He racialized the Orientalist discourse on German speakers' cultural
origins through studies of Indian prehistory that tried to reconcile
the presence of dark-skinned Indians on the continent with notions of
Aryan cultural superiority. Lassen concluded that Indo-Germanic speakers
belonged to a dominant white race (Geschlecht, Race) that migrated into
India from the northwest, subduing the "black" natives. He explained
the success of Aryan territorial conquest as a result of the mental
dexterity fostered by the linguistic structures of Indo-Germanic languages
and of the physical characteristics of their speakers. In the early nineteenth century, German Orientalists did not equate
the consolidation of national unity with the recovery of the racial
purity thought to have existed in a primordial Aryan homeland. However,
the combination of a racial definition of Germanness and salvationist
national rhetoric set a troubling precedent. The discussion of westward
Aryan migration evolved out of a secularized Christian narrative of
fall and redemption that allowed for the projection of a dangerous ideal
of original racial purity that conceptually excluded those of alternate
descent from the community of a chosen people NINA BERMAN, "Is the 'civilizing
mission' a racist concept? Thoughts on German agents of development
in Africa" For the past twenty years, literary critics in the United States
who discussed colonialism in their works focused primarily on the interconnectedness
of knowledge and power. In particular, theories on race and ethnicity,
which originated in the Enlightenment period and were articulated in
scientific texts or in cultural representations, were seen as providing
the informing spirit legitimizing colonial domination. However, research on colonialism often neglected crucial dimensions
inherent to the concept of race. The modern idea of race is intricately
related to other concepts introduced concurrently during the Enlightenment
period. In particular, notions of progress and development, and later
of modernity, have contributed to defining notions of race, and respectively,
race has influenced the conceptualization of ideas of progress and other
belief systems. Although this interconnection played itself out most
visibly in the context of colonialism, critics tend to underestimate
its significance. In my talk I focus on this nexus of race, political
emancipation and economic development with regard to contacts between
Germans and Africans in Africa, specifically in situations that occurred
outside of the German colonial empire. Drawing on five representative
case studies from the last 150 years, I argue that in the African context,
the relationship between Germans and Africans was less often defined
by race than is widely assumed. Rather, the domineering position occupied
by the German engineers, doctors, pilots, soldiers and tourists I investigate
was derived primarily from a belief in economic development, political
emancipation, and secularized Christianity. However, this observation
does not entail that the relationship between Africans and Germans was
any less problematic in comparison to what is suggested by analyses
that identify race as the most consequential category. Race does play
a role in all of the cases I present, but its function can only be understood
by considering the interplay between racism and other ideologies rooted
in the Enlightenment, such as the belief in progress and the redemptive
aspect of modernity. The dynamic discussed in the various case studies
was not ended with formal decolonization, and, I argue, is still at
work today. I will conclude my presentation by raising questions regarding the
possible reasons for the current focus of scholarship in US literature
departments. In particular, I will juxtapose the discussions of colonialism
as they are conducted in the European-language departments to those
under way in African Studies Departments. ROBERT BERNASCONI, "Race as a Privilege Example in Kant's Critique
of Teleological Judgment" In this paper I argue that race plays a decisive role in Kant's
Critique of Teleological Judgment, even though the word is not used
there. I consider both the extrinsic evidence that draws on accounts
of the genesis of the book and the way it was viewed by contemporaries,
and the intrinsic evidence that relies on an interpretation of one of
its central arguments. MICHEL CHAOULI, "The Skin of Aesthetics" Lessing's reference in Laokoon to the supposedly filthy wedding
rites of the Hottentots would seem to mark the precise point at which
aesthetic and racial discourses intersect and re-enforce one another:
the 'disgusting deformations' in the bodies of the Hottentots ratify
'the disgusting' as the one exception to aesthetic representability,
while the category of disgust does its work to expel the Hottentots
from the realm not only of beautiful bodies but of representable objects
tout court. Such an identification of the racial and aesthetic boundary
-- of the racialization of aesthetics, of the aesthetization of race
-- is no doubt operative in the text, as it is elsewhere in 18th-century
writings. But what sustains this operation? How does this identification, or analogy, become possible? This
paper will argue that the metaphoric exchange of racial and aesthetic
terms is mediated by the fact that aesthetics is, in effect, a science
of the skin in two distinct and, at times, antagonistic senses. It is
concerned with the surface of things, with their appearance, with how
they appear to our senses (aisthenasthai = to perceive), how their surface
gives us information with what is, now that a surface has been recognized,
underneath it. But a concern for the skin of things implies a concern,
indeed a demand, that things have a skin, that they be bounded, that
they not be permitted to expand through tears or wounds or other openings.
Aesthetics is a dermatology that must think of the skin as both a medium
of display and as a boundary to the world. Thus Laokoon opens with Laocoon's
open mouth, with the wounds that the snake's fangs have inflicted on
him and his sons, and concludes with skin as appearance, as color. Where
in this movement disgust is to be located and where beauty is more difficult
to determine that Lessing would have us believe. SARA PAULSON EIGEN, "Medical Police" PETER FENVES, "What 'Progress' Has Been Made in Race Theory Since
the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? According to the general outlines of Leibniz's thought, each individual
substance is a "lowest species." Its only "real" relation to others
substances is the relation of each finite one to its infinite creator;
otherwise, as the famous image of windowless monads indicates, substances
have nothing to do with one another. From this logico-metaphysical perspective,
it makes no sense to speak of individual members of a common (human)
species, much less members of diverse subspecies, includes races and
nations. From the perspective of well-founded phenomena, however, talk
of species not only makes sense but is even required for natural-scientific
investigation. And from still another perspective -- that of legal-political
orders (Leibniz was trained as a jurist) -- talk of nations is both
acceptable and welcome. As a universalist, who believed that justice
is everywhere the same (human and divine justice are equivalent), Leibniz
sought to end the disastrous political arrangements that led to the
30 years war; but his internationalism was almost entirely confined
to European nations (the exception was China). In this paper I pursue
the question whether there is any perspective from which talk of race
is similarly motivated -- especially as something like a point of interference
among the other three. This question becomes particularly important
with regard to certain "fictions‰ that Leibniz contrives for both logico-metaphysical
and legal-political purposes. Two texts guide my discussion. (1) In
an early work (around 1667), which was written alongside the Consilium
Aegyptiacum (Leibniz's plan for French-led European invasion of Egypt,
which was meant to draw Louis XIV's attention away from Holland), Leibniz
sketches out a plan to produce an "invincible army through which the
earth can be dominated" by taking possession of an island (like Madagascar),
expelling its inhabitants, bringing slaves "barbarian" regions like
Africa and New Guinea, keep only the young males, suppress any independent
will, and then train them into expert, terrifying soldiers, who will
blindly obey their European masters. (2) The Nouveaux Essais, a much
later and far more famous work (first published in the 1760s), imagines
something like the ferocious counterpart to this early (and little discussed)
plan: "imaginary Australians‚ ... swarm into our latitude: it is likely
that some way would be found of distinguishing them from us; but if
not, and if God had forbidden the mingling of these races, and if Jesus
Christ had redeemed only our own, then we should have to try to introduce
artificial marks to distinguish the races from one another." Leibniz
quickly adds, however, "This is all fiction; since we are the only rational
animals on this globe." The question posed in this paper concerns the
status and function of such "fictions" in Leibniz's work. GABRIEL FINKELSTEIN, "Henrik Steffens, Naturphilosophie, and the
German Invention of Race" The early nineteenth century geologist, anthropologist, and philosopher
Henrik Steffens has not enjoyed the best press. Emil du Bois-Reymond
described Steffens' university lectures as "beginning with metals and
ending with dinner." Karl Varnhagen von Ense remarked that listening
to Steffens read his autobiography aloud at the Prussian court was little
better than "torture." Heinrich Heine, the most astute of commentators,
characterized Steffens thus: "Among his ideas, however, there is one
no one has appropriated, and it is his chief idea, his sublime idea:
'Henrik Steffens, born May 2. 1773, in Stavangar near Drohntheim in
Norway, is the greatest man of the century.'" Little wonder the name
of Henrik Steffens has sunk into oblivion. I have no intention of resurrecting the reputation of this pompous
and absurd figure. No one liked Steffens in his day, and I see no reason
why we should like him now. Anyone who writes a ten-volume autobiography-and
moreover, one titled What I Experienced-deserves everything he gets.
Rather, in this paper, my aim is to use Steffens as a window onto the
lost world of Naturphilosophie. I want to demonstrate two things: first,
the strange complexion of motives and values that gave rise to Romantic
ideas of race in Germany, and second, how these ideas came to find mainstream
institutional expression over the course of the nineteenth century.
My argument is simple: racial thinking grew out of the anxieties of
the Bildungsbürgertum, and those anxieties also spawned German
nationalism. Thus, even when later German intellectuals poked fun as
the excesses of Steffens' Naturphilosophie, they actually retained his
core value, namely, the belief in a historically determined, culturally
superior, ethnically distinguished German nation. MONIKA FIRLA, "Parallel worlds: Africans as high esteemed individuals
or/and mere subjects of 'scientific' thought in 18th-century Germany
and Austria" In 18th century Germany and Austria we can notice two absolutely different traditions of (1) non-racistic versus (2) racistic attitudes towards Africans. These traditions are to be strictly kept asunder and must always be carefully attached to their special exponents: (1) Non-racistic traditions are to be found in the scope of clergy,
aristocracy and army. (2) Racistic traditions are to be found in natural
sciences (following f.i. Leibniz, Linné, Buffon, Soemmerring)
and in philosophy (following f.i. Montesquieu, Kant). Racism is a genuin
phaenomenon of enlightened thought of the bourgeoisie since anthropological
discrimination of Africans had to justify colonial exploitation as a
means for economic and political advancement of the middle classes. Within tradition 1 we can point out "positive biographies" like
these of (a) Rudolph Mohr (about 1674-1725), privileged valet of the
chamber at the court of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, and (b) Carl
von Commani (about 1694-1757), breaker-in, chamber-moor, supposed fellow
soldier and favorite of Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, who
in 1736 charched this African from the Goldcoast (present Ghana) with
making gold for him in Vienna, the then center of alchimists. If other
high esteemed Africans came into contact with tradition 2, we have to
state "mixed biographies" like these of (c) Anton Wilhelm Amo (about
1700-after 1752), professor of philosophy in Halle and Jena. Having
been abused a "satyr" and "man of the forests" by people, who knew Linne´s
"Systema naturae", he retourned to the Goldcoast (present Ghana); (d)
Angelo Soliman (about 1721-1796), decorated fellow soldier of Prince
J. G. C. of Lobkowitz, valet of the chamber, friend of aristocrates
and natural scientists, educator of Prince Alois I. of Liechtenstein
and important freemason in Vienna, was stuffed after death and made
up an exponate in the imperial museum. JONATHAN HESS, "Jewish Emancipation and the Politics of Race" This paper focuses on both the site of race-thinking in the debates
over Jewish emancipation and the role played by these political debates
in shaping more general perceptions of the function of the category
of "race" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When
Christian Wilhelm Dohm first proposed the "civic improvement" of the
Jews in the early 1780s, he did so with explicit reference to popular
appropriations of eighteenth-century racial thinking, claiming, in opposition
to Göttingen professors Michael Hißmann and Johann David
Michaelis, that an "unimproveable race of humans"-an unverbesserliche
Menschen-Raçe-was simply an unthinkable proposition. For Dohm,
as for Hißmann, Michaelis and nearly everyone else, the Jews constituted
a "nation" that was morally, politically and physically "degenerate."
The issue that political writers, theologians, philosophers and lay
intellectuals alike ruminated over in recurring waves of heated debates,
accordingly, was not the question of the Jews' rights to citizenship
but that of the causes of their "degenerate" nature and the possibilities
of their moral, political and physical "regeneration" in the context
of a more general program of "internal colonization." In this way, the
discussions over Jewish emancipation unfolded in close proximity to
both eighteenth-century's racial theory's concern with the category
of "regeneration" and the development of precolonial Germany's colonial
imaginary, constituting a practically oriented thought experiment in
the viability of monogenetic and polygenetic models of racial development. In the racial typologies one encounters in canonical Enlightenment
anthropological writings, Jews occupy a marginal position. In his 1790
treatise Ueber die Natur der afrikanischen Neger, Christoph Meiners
equated the permanently degenerate nature of blacks with that of the
Jews in such a way as to argue against both the liberation of slaves
and the emancipation of the Jews. For the most part, however, Jews were
peripheral to eighteenth-century racial theory, concerned as it was
with racial varieties that would coincide with continental land masses.
It is, then, precisely by exploring the functions of racial thinking
outside race discourse proper that this paper seeks to contribute to
our understanding of the German invention of race. For even as anthropological
writings by Kant, Blumenbach and others were contesting what race "was,"
the political debates over the "civic improvement" of the Jews were
already exposing what the novel category of race could "do." It is crucial
here that the debates over Jewish emancipation explored the functions
of the category of race within a complex interdisciplinary matrix; race
rears its head in the writings of Orientalists, biblical critics, philosophers
and literati not always as a well-defined term but as a slippery concept
whose authority derived both from its function within these respective
discourses and from the ability of these discourses to command authority
in debating the political status of Jews. By reconstructing the work
that race does in these contexts, this paper seeks to lay bare both
the directly political uses of the emergent concept of race and the
dynamic interplay between the debates over Jewish emancipation in the
German colonial imaginary. NICHOLAS HUDSON, "'Hottentots' and the Evolution of European Racism" Soon after the Dutch colonization of the Cape of Good Hope in the
mid seventeenth-century, the indigenous Khoikhoi became notorious throughout
Europe as the most loathsome, backwards and "bestial" people in the
world. Known as "Hottentots," derived from the Dutch word for "stammerer,"
the Khoikhoi were placed by both Linnaeus and Samuel Smith in a sub-class
between humans and beasts on the Chain of Being, lower than even the
"Negroes.". Voltaire was typical in suspecting that Hottentots and monkeys
were "espèces differentes d'un même genre." Why were the
Khoikhoi singled out for this disdain? In order to explain the hatred
for Hottentots, we must journey deeper into the psychology of European
racism. When we study the representation of Khoikhoi from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries, we find that European attitudes were not
static, but were evolving during this period in response to changing
trends in ethnography, particularly the rise of racial science and modern
anthropology near the end of the eighteenth century. In the very earliest
accounts of the Khoikhoi, expressions of disgust are closely associated
with a sense of alarm and confusion about these people. None of the
cultural categories inherited from the Middle Ages and Renaissance ("wild
man," monster, barbaric infidel, Adamic "natural" man) fully suited
the Hottentots, with their "stuttering" speech, apparent fondness for
dirt and blackness, yet frequent moral uprightness and benevolence.
In eighteenth- century accounts, particularly Peter Kolb's fascinating
and influential The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1719; English
translation 1731), this confusion gave rise to serious investigation
of the Hottentots not just as a "savage" or "primitive" people but as
an alternative culture that possessed, in a different form, a version
of every aspect of European society - government, economy, religion,
marriage, medicine, and so forth. But such an ethnological picture threatened
European dignity and confidence, for it tended to suggest that cultural
values are relative, not absolute. Representation of the "Hottentot,"
moreover, verged dangerously on parody of European pride and vanity.
In the last phase in the representation of the Khoikhoi, therefore -
a phase corresponding significantly to the rise of racial science -
we encounter the strenuous and unified effort not to raise but to diminish
the strangeness of Hottentots, fitting them back into more comfortable
modern categories like "noble savage" or "primitive tribe." Above all,
the Hottentot became an obsessive object of physiological investigation
that tended to insist, as I argue, that the supposed physical strangeness
of this people was in fact "natural." Hence, this study of European racism explores the following irony:
the Khoikhoi were ultimately brought into the conceptual world-view
of European racial science and colonial enterprize not by increasing
but by decreasing their "Otherness." Racism of the modern form, based
on racial science, must finally deny absolute difference, which can
be threatening and frightening or imply the need for tolerance and the
readjustment of values. Rather, racism seeks a basis in recognition
of the Other as part of a comprehensible system of superiority and inferiority,
and therefore requires, paradoxically, that the despised Other be approximated
rather than merely separated and distanced. DEBORAH JANSEN, "A Parable against Exclusion: Overcoming the Human/Animal
Barrier in Bettina von Arnim's 'The Queen's Son'" With his separation of subject and object-of individual ego and
natural world-Johann Gottlieb Fichte established a metaphysical philosophy
that allowed for the domination and exaltation of "man" over nature.
In so doing, he followed in the footsteps of other Enlightenment thinkers
who saw the natural world as existing for human use. In Fichte's system,
the absolute ego (or intelligence-in-itself) posits the finite ego in
order to know itself in and through the human mind. Thus while there
is a merging between individual minds and the absolute mind, there is
none between individual minds and objects of nature. Instead, nature,
according to Fichte, exists so that human beings can differentiate themselves
from others and thereby achieve self-awareness. While German Romantics were inspired by Fichte's ideas concerning
the relationship between life's infinite and finite aspects, they rejected
his Cartesian opposition of "man" and "nature," preferring instead to
dissolve such artificially imposed boundaries by relying on direct perception.
Still, male Romantics liked to think of human beings (or, to be more
precise, of white, European men) as organs of nature's consciousness,
thereby perpetuating man's superior position vis-a-vis nature. This
is not, however, the viewpoint of Bettina von Arnim, a female Romantic
who recognized that language has long been a powerful agent in establishing
human domination over other animals. The human-animal barrier is a central theme in von Arnim's fairy
tale "The Queen's Son," written in 1808. In this tale, a pregnant queen
transgresses conventional gender expectations by failing to produce
offspring within the normal nine-month term. As a result, her angry
husband banishes her to the castle's back quarters. She remains confined
there for the duration of her pregnancy, which lasts seven years. Finally,
she gives birth to seven sons, but her first-born is carried off by
a she-bear. Though the queen raises her other six children dutifully
and lovingly, she continues to mourn the loss of her oldest son. In
the end, the missing child returns with his furry companions to become
ruler, not merely of his father's kingdom, but of all human and non-human
animals together, "in spirit, without language." Both the queen and the gardens to which she is confined represent
border positions that trouble the socially constructed binaries of wilderness
and civilization, or nature and culture. The queen's abnormally long
pregnancy associates her closely with nature since it results in a "litter"
of seven children. Yet by being confined to the castle's manicured grounds,
the queen is also separated from nature, i.e., from the wild animals
who inhabit the surrounding forest and who are raising her son. Whenever
she sees the animals drinking from the river that runs between the forest
and the gardens, the queen begs them to return her first-born to her.
The animals cannot, however, understand her pleas because they have
never before been asked to comfort human beings, having instead only
been persecuted by them. The sense of isolation the queen suffers thus
results from human culture's mistreatment of those it has assigned to
the natural realm. In this sense, the tale can be read as a parable
that critiques not only civilization's hierarchical separation from
and silencing of nature, but also its rejection of other "objects of
nature," such as all women and non-white men. In the paper I am proposing,
I hope to clarify von Arnim's social critique by locating it within
competing perspectives on the human-animal barrier in late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century Germany, and demonstrate how it addresses
interconnections between speciesism, sexism, and racism. For just as
Western civilization justifies its exploitation of non-human species
by categorizing animals as incapable of rationality and therefore as
inferior, so too have women and all "people of color" traditionally
been excluded from membership in Western society's so-called moral community. DAVID MURPHY, "'First Among Savages': Racial Identity, Intercultural
Encounter, and the German Romance of the Eskimo from Chamisso to the
Great War" German intellectuals began to take systematic notice of the indigenous
peoples of the far North in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
particularly with the published accounts of Adelbert von Chamisso's
journey around the world in the 1820s. Although Chamisso focused upon
the Chukchi of northern Siberia, and Germans paid some attention to
the entire circumpolar milieu, the identity of the north's natives was
largely constructed for Germans around the Inuit inhabitants of Greenland
and the Canadian archipelago known to the outside world as "Eskimo".
From the very start, the Eskimo occupied a special place among the models
of racial hierarchies prevalent in German intellectual life, a place
that was remarkable for its extraordinarily positive appraisal of the
culture, customs and characteristics of the northerners. Although Franz Boas is today the best-known German interpreter of
Inuit life, he was not widely read in the German world of his day. Instead,
German images of the Eskimo as a "race" rested upon a tradition of casual
cultural observation derived from the accounts of missionaries, gentleman
travelers, and German Arctic adventurers, creating for the Eskimo a
discourse of racial identity occasionally leavened with the interjections
of more systematic observers from the budding disciplines of anthropology
and geography. In striking contrast with the images nineteenth-century
Germans fashioned for other non-Western peoples, the German image of
the Eskimo was uniquely favorable, characterized for more than a century
by praise for the social organization, family structure, work ethic,
material culture, and 'hygienic' sexual practice of Inuit life. At the
same time, German observers typically used those very elements of Inuit
life which they found praiseworthy in order to refine their own racial
image of "Germanness" and to relegate the Inuit to a place which, though
lofty in many ways, cast them as nonetheless only 'first among savages'. Drawing upon published and unpublished accounts of German travelers
among the Inuit, this paper frames the dimensions of Eskimo "racial"
identity for Germans, and its impact upon the formation of German "racial"
identity. The analysis is informed by a consideration of the intersections
of the evolving German cultural-racial notion of the Eskimo with the
emerging scientific discourse of anthropology, particularly Waitz' conception
of the distinction between Naturvölker and Kulturvölker. At
the same time, relying in part upon analytical frameworks evolved by
Urs von Bitterli, the paper will consider the remarkable durability
of the "noble savage" motif in German understanding of the Eskimo, and
draw conclusions on the meaning of this phenomenon for German ideas
about race in general. SYLVIA PFEIFFENBERGER, "Aesthetic Distinction/Racial Distinction:
Feminine Ideals and the Modern, Monogenist Construction of Race" The 18th century's dominant theory of race, propounded chiefly by
German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, favored the theory of
a common human origin (monogenesis) and a historical view of difference
as (de)-generated by climate. Though it is often therefore viewed as
a paradox, from its inception, monogenic race theory was nonetheless
founded on a classically shaped, aesthetic hierarchy. It is instructive
to recall that racial distinctions founded upon European cultural and
aesthetic biases were once mobilized to argue, not essential difference
between races, but the unity of the human species; not the mental inferiority
of blacks, but opposition to the enslavement of Africans. It is my argument
that in monogenic race theory of the late 18th century, theorists turned
increasingly to philosophical aesthetics to solve the dilemma they had
just created, namely: that "race," newly invented and defined, was inherently
unmeasurable and unstable as a scientific category. Aesthetic distinction,
the 'science' of subjective judgment, therefore became the model and
refuge for racial distinction. As both beautiful object and tasteful
subject, the European (and particularly, German) maintained superiority
through the operations of taste, simultaneously inventing modern notions
of racial and sexual difference, and assimilating them into a universalist,
hierarchical aesthetic economy. Aesthetic objects, representations, and theories played key roles
in the debates on how to represent race 'scientifically' in the 18th
century. So, too, did gendered ideals of the moral and the beautiful
(usually interrelated). In this paper, I discuss how Blumenbach's encounters
with individual females, or feminine objects, contributed to the construction
of ideal racial categories and shaped particular debates about race.
The two seminal objects/encounters I discuss are Blumenbach's "Schöne
Georgierin," a female skull in his collection considered the most "beautiful"
and therefore most "representative" of white Europeans; and his encounter
with the so-called "Schöne Negresse de Yverdun," a Caribbean midwife
living in Switzerland who became emblematic of admirable African qualities
in Blumenbach's aesthetic debates with Dutch anatomist Peter Camper.
I trace the history of racial terms such as "Caucasian" to an exotic
European fascination with white slavery and miscegenation, and analyze
how monogenist racial-aesthetic debates were in turn constructed by
this exotic discourse of gender and European self/other. As a pendant
to this discussion of Blumenbach, I include Samuel Thomas Sömmerring's
"Schöne Mainzerin" project, an ideal female skeleton created as
an extension (literally) of Blumenbach's beautiful Georgian skull. The
example of Sömmerring, more (in)famous for his works on race and
the nervous system, shows how deeply the newly invented discourses of
racial and sexual difference where interrelated through a similar mode
of aesthetico-scientific representation. ALEXEI PIMENOV, "Naturphilosophie, Orient, and German Mission: Othmar
Frank's Aryan Theory" 1. The significance of oriental, specifically Indo-Iranian studies
for German romantic nationalism and later racism is well known. Such
terms as Indogermanen (not Indoeuropaeer), invented by J. Klaprot in
1823, and Indogermanische Altertumskunde spoke for themselves. No less
remarkable is the fact that the founders of German nationalism not rarely
were also creators of the German indology. The most brilliant representatives of German romanticism considered
India cradle of the World civilization, "the source of all languages,
all thoughts and poetry created by human spirit" (F. Schlegel). Correspondingly,
the question about how this primordial cultural and spiritual unity
had been lost became central for them. 2. In this connection, two moments seem to be of special importance:
(1) the picture of India as a "lost paradise" symbolized, after all,
the German identity crisis; (2) the extent to which some prominent theorists
of German nationalism adopted basic patterns of traditional Indian thinking
is remarkable. First of all, the romantic philosophy of World history deserves
mention. According to F. Schlegel, Joseph Goerres and many others, the
history of humanity had been a degradation from primordial unity and
harmony to contemporary chaos and egoism. This attitude mirrored the
Hindu theory of yugas changing one another. No less important is that explaning the reasons of the desintegration
of the formerly single civilization, romantic thinkers also payed attention
to ethnic issues implementing nothing but traditional Brahmanic model
of mlecchabhava ( situation when Aryan tribes having neglected dharma
gradually transformed into barbarians (mlecchas). 3. All this was, however, a prelude to the central messianic motif.
The last stage of the universal reintegration should follow and it was
Germany to play the main role in this process. The myth according to
which Germans were successors of the Indo-Aryan civilization constituted
a link between oriental studies and romantic nationalism in its most
extremist form. This paper deals with Othmar Frank (1770 - 1840), a thinker in whose
work one of the earliest manifestations of Aryan myth in German literature
can be found. Professor of philosophy at Bamberg, Wuerzburg and Muenich,
he was one of the first German indologists. At the same time, Othmar
Frank could be characterized as highly remarkable nationalist mythmakers.
In contrast to Fr. Schlegel and J. Goerres, O. Frank was Napoleon's
supporter and dedicated his central philosophical work "Das Licht vom
Orient" (1808) to the "Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine".
Frank's teaching (he defined it as magism, on the one hand, and as parsism,
on the other) was a combination of the romantic Naturphilosophie (its
central motif was the mysticism of light) and a kind of historyosophy.
According to it, a mystical link had always existed between Germans
and Orient. Unlike other Europeans, Germans had had not Greeks and Romans
but Persians as their ancestors. 4. Considering Germans an oriental people and emphasizing his "universalism",
O.Frank, basically, created a chauvinistic doctrine for which many motifs
of the future "Aryan Theory" were characteristic. Let alone the idea
of the Aryan superiority and of Aryan identity of Germans, his Aryan-Asiatic
dualism should be emphasized. It would be no exaggeration to consider
him a forerunner of the model of "two Orients, the "good" one represented
by Aryans and the "bad" one represented by mlecchas and chandalas. Frank's
impact on the racist traditions of Southern Germany and Austria needs
further investigation. But in his work we undoubtedly can recognize
some motifs that later would be developed by Austrian Aryosophists,
Thule theorists, and Nazis. KAREN RIECHERT, "Law, Race and the 1848 Revolution in Germany" Sixty percent of the members of the "Frankfurter Nationalversammlung",
the revolutionary parliament of 1848/49, were lawyers or other representatives
of the legal profession. Among them were nineteen professors of law.
They included famous names like Eduard Simson, Robert von Mohl or Carl
Mittermaier. My paper will demonstrate the use of the concept of race in early
19th century legal works. It will examine how the idea of race was subsequently
perceived in the discussions of the revolutionary parliament. Furthermore
the changing relationship between the new concepts of race and nation
and the old concept of tribe at that time will be discussed. The paper
will provide new insights into the early roots of the concept of race
within the history of law. It will be its argument, that already before
the 1850s and therefore much earlier than commonly believed, the idea
of race had an impact on legal works. Its reception within the legal
profession clearly preceded the later concepts of the French Count Arthur
Gobineau and his subsequent influence on the legal field. The time of the 1848 Revolution was even crucial to later understandings
of race as it can be shown in the work of the member of the Frankfurt
parliament Robert von Mohl, who in the 1860s elevated the idea of race
to an important position in his international public law theory. The
paper will draw on early 19th century legal materials and major legal
works, the discussions of the 1848/49 revolutionary parliament in Frankfurt
and selected papers of its members. MONIQUE SCHEER, "'Why is she black?': an analysis of German discourse
on the 'Mystery' of Black Madonnas" A significant number of images central to the cult of Mary in Germany
are referred to as "black madonnas" due to the fact that the coloring
of their skin parts is considerably darker than considered usual for
Europeans, ranging from brown to jet black. A quick scan of the secondary
literature reveals that they are often considered anomalies, strange
"mysteries" that require some sort of explanation in order to be understood.
The paper, based on research completed approximately one year ago, does
not attempt to explain why the images are black, but rather explores
the origin of this "mystification" of black madonnas. It is an analysis
of (primarily) German discourse, popular and elite, regarding black
madonnas, beginning in the 17th century. The turn of the 19th century
marks a major break in the discursive tradition, which I interpret as
a direct result of the invention of race and of skin color as its primary
signifier. Prior to the late 18th century, as the French art historian Sophie
Cassagnes-Brouquet has shown for France (Vierges noires - regard et
fascination, 1990) and I have confirmed for Germany, the black skin
color of a madonna was understood at the popular and elite levels to
be a positive attribute. Founding narratives of pilgrimage centers and
legends attesting to the miraculous nature of Marian images provide
information on the connotation of black skin color among worshipers
as a sign of the authenticity of the portrait and of its wonder-working
power (which incidentally explains why the leading shrines in Baroque
Germany - Loreto (northern Italy), Einsiedeln (Switzerland), and Altötting
(Bavaria) - are all dedicated to black madonnas, an issue hardly addressed
in the secondary literature). The blackness of the madonnas does not
require legitimation; rather, it provides legitimation of the images
themselves. Elites -apparently more concerned with overcoming the apparent
contradiction between the traditionally negative iconography of black
skin color (as the color of the eternally damned and of the devil, for
example) and the sublimity of the Virgin Mother - are the first to ask
the question "why is she black?". They have a ready reply: her black
skin is interpreted using the Song of Solomon 1:5 - "nigra sum sed formosa"
(I am black but comely). These interpretations of Mary's black skin
exist parallel to one another up to the end of the 18th century, when
they fell into disuse within and without Catholic circles and were increasingly
replaced by "materialist" arguments: the color was explained by chemical
reactions in the paint, for example, or the influence of candle smoke. The reason for this sudden shift has never been explored in the
scholarship, but is directly linked, in my opinion, to the development
of the concept of race and of skin color as its primary signifier (Europeans
as "white", Africans as "black"). Previous perceptions of the black
madonna were eclipsed by this new signifié. From this point onward,
it became impossible to see the black skin of the madonna and not think
of its racial implications, which led to the question "why is she black?"
in the sense we know it today: an inquiry not into the meaning of the
color but into its intentional status. Because the earlier discourses
had lost their relevance and plausibility, the dark skin color of the
madonna was suddenly a riddle. And by attributing the blackness to accidents
of chemistry, the madonna was, in effect, made white. To use Zygmunt
Bauman's terminology, the ambivalence represented by a black Mary could
not be tolerated by the modern mind and was eliminated with the use
of the materialist explanation. The second most important modern answer to the question of the Madonna's
blackness was developed by the Grimm brothers in 1835. They believed
the black madonnas to be direct descendants of pre-Christian black goddesses,
a line of reasoning related to that which saw in Marian devotion (and
Catholic devotion to saints in general) a survival of pagan religious
practices. This "Romantic" discourse, which lives on today (as in the
groundbreaking study by the American anthropologist Leonard Moss) and
is often linked with depth psychology, can only be touched upon briefly
in the paper, which focuses on the consequences of the invention of
race for the discourse on black madonnas. The material used in this
study consists of a body of some 60 legends surrounding Marian images,
"black" and "white", as they were recorded by the Jesuit scholar Wilhelm
Gumppenberg in the early 17th century; a sermon from 1726 illustrating
the theological approach to the question of the blackness of the Madonna
of Einsiedeln near Zurich; a document from 1799, when this same Madonna
had to be restored after having suffered some damage to the paint, an
early source of the new "materialist" explanation of the dark flesh
tones and interesting account of its (lack of) consequences; and scholarship
from the areas of theology, church history, art history, religious folklore
studies, cultural history and depth psychology dating from the mid-19th
century to the present. Thus, the discourse surrounding the (reasonably
narrow) issue of black madonnas is represented for a span of some four
hundred years, time enough to gain a sense of its continuities and changes.
The geographical focus is on southern Germany and Switzerland, though
the European dimension is kept in mind. The theoretical basis of the
inquiry relies heavily on theories of symbols laid out by Roland Barthes,
Pierre Bourdieu and, particularly with regard to religious symbols,
Thomas Luckmann. Edward Said's notion of "orientalism" is implicit in
my analysis; Sander Gilman (On blackness without blacks, 1992) and Peter
Martin (Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren, 1993) inform my understanding
of the history of the Black in German society and discourse. In the spirit of "demystifying" the "mystery" of the black madonnas,
I challenge the assumption that they are curiosities (one author has
even called them "exotic") and wish to see them placed in a context
in which their historical meanings can be better grasped. This paper
is intended as a step in that direction. SUSAN SHELL, "Kant on Race" HAN VERMEULEN, "The Early History of Ethnography and Anthropology
in the German Enlightenment (1740-1780)" Anthropology, as the hybrid study of human culture and nature, is
generally regarded as having emerged in the mid-nineteenth century,
parallel to and influenced by evolutionism. My studies show that one
of anthropology's most important roots, ethnography or descriptive ethnology,
emerged much earlier than has commonly been assumed, namely in the early
and mid-eighteenth century. Contrary to the standard account this development
occurred not in Scotland, the USA or France, but in what later became
Germany and more precisely in the work of German historians, linguists
and geographers associated with the Russian Kamchatka expeditions (1720-27,
1733-43) and the University of Göttingen (c. 1750 onwards). It
was in the works of scholars such as Gerhard Friedrich Müller and
Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, working for the Russian Academy of Sciences
in St. Petersburg, that the "Beschreibung der sibirischen Völker"
became a new subject. Müller employed the term "Völker-Beschreibung"
while working in Siberia (1740) and conceived several works relating
to the description of peoples of Siberia (1737-50) which, however, were
never published. This pristine but clear form of ethnography was then
elevated to a higher level by universal historians such as August Ludwig
Schlözer and Johann Christoph Gatterer at Göttingen, who transformed
the "ethnographia" of the fieldworker into a generalized study of peoples
called "Völkerkunde" (1771-2). They knew very well that their subject
was related to the larger study of "man", and particularly the physical
study of "races" as developed by Buffon, Camper, Kant, Forster, Soemmering,
and Blumenbach at about the same time. Did anthropology or "the study
of human races" precede ethnology as "the study of peoples"? Gatterer
expressly linked the two and classified "Ethnographia" (Völkerkunde)
with "Anthropographia)" (Menschenkunde) within (historical) geography
or "Erdkunde" (1775-8). We see this linkage also in other German scholars
of the time, suggesting a conception of the world inhabited by people
living in groups, called "Völker" or "Volksstammen" (tribes), as
subcategories of humankind, which can also be subdivided in "races".
While the latter, anthropological, tradition has received a great deal
of the limelight, the former discourse, which I call ethnological, has
largely gone unnoticed in recent scholarship. DROR WAHRMAN, "Hottentots, Amerindians, Jews, and the pre-history
of race: a British counterpoint" My paper will look at the evidence of a sharp shift in British understandings
of race in the late eighteenth century, in which contingent and changeable
causes of human diversity - like climate, environment or civilization
- were suddenly losing ground to deterministic and innate ones. I will
try to pinpoint the nature and meaning of this shift with several examples
that allow us to chart change over time. One is discussions of the Jews:
in the eighteenth century the endogamous Jews had been put forth as
living proof of climate-induced human malleability, looking like Englishmen
in England and like Ethiopians in Africa. But suddenly their malleability
was widely and nervously denied, by insisting either that they always
resembled other Jews more than their host populations, or that they
never remained truly endogamous. Another is the reports of the "greasing"
practices of the relatively fair-skinned Khoikhoi - the "Hottentots"
- of South Africa: whereas throughout the eighteenth century numerous
observers explained greasing as a deliberate choice shaped by an aesthetic
preference, towards the end of the century this possibility of the deliberate
manufacturing of blackness was no longer mentioned (because no longer
imaginable?), leaving greasing to be interpreted solely in functional
terms. A third example involves representations of Amerindians, and
the ways that they too were seen to manufacture they physical features
(time permitting, I will also discuss the possibility of European captives
becoming Indians as part of this section). The paper will then sketch the broader contours of this shift in
the understandings of race (not to be confused with a hardening of racism),
and place it in a wider context: namely, in relation to analogous transformations
of other categories of identity during this period, and indeed in the
epistemology of identity that underpinned them. GEORGE S. WILLIAMSON, "Gods, Titans, and Centaurs: Images of Race
in German Scholarship on Myth, 1770-1830" The rise of a scientific notion of race has normally been associated
with the emergence of a materialist philosophy of science in the eighteenth
century. Yet conceptions of race also informed the study of art, religion,
and mythology during these years. These notions of race were derived
in part from the ancient sources-e. g., the battle between the beautiful,
human-like Olympians and the gigantic, misshapen Titans. Indeed, ancient
myths often described beings that lay at the boundaries between the
mortal and the immortal, the human and the animal, male and female.
From the 1760s onward, however, these aspects of ancient mythology became
integrated into modern historical investigations concerning the relationship
between nations, culture, and religion. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the representation of the divine as a (naked) white body became
associated with liberal ideals of freedom, community, and bodily health.
Challenges to this image of the divine were seen as implicitly threatening
individual freedom and a liberal conception of society. This paper will examine how notions of race became imbedded in German
scholarship on ancient mythology from the late eighteenth to the early
nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on the study of ancient Greek
mythology, it will show how racial thinking helped to define Greek mythology
and to distinguish it from the religions and myths of the "Orient,"
i.e. Egypt and the Near East. In analyzing these phenomena, this paper
addresses a number of questions raised by Martin Bernal in Black Athena
concerning the history of classical scholarship in Germany. At the same
time, it takes account of the numerous objections that have been raised
to his historical method and argumentation. In particular, it seeks
to show how a notion of race, tied closely to Greek mythology, became
normative for early German liberalism in the early nineteenth century.
By contrast, challenges to the predominance of the Greek gods were rejected
as undermining the basis of individual freedom and public life. The first part of the paper examines the image of the ancient Greek,
Egyptian, and Oriental [sic] gods in the late eighteenth century mythography,
focusing on the views of Winckelmann, Herder, and Friedrich Schelling.
It also shows how these ideas informed the thought of early liberals
concerning religion, the body, and the public sphere. The second part
examines the challenge to this Philhellenist notion of ancient Greece
by the Romantic philologist Friedrich Creuzer, whose notion of an ancient
Symbolik decentered the (white, racially perfect) Greek gods while emphasizing
the importance of the non-anthropomorphic deities of ancient Egypt and
India. (The illustrations in Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie [1810]
offer a fascinating contrast to Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des
Alterthums [1764]). The controversy over Creuzer's Symbolik (1810),
which drew in Hegel, Schelling, Voß, and others, reveals the fault
lines in early nineteenth-century German culture concerning issues of
art, religion, race, and politics. The last section shows how the Creuzer
affair foreshadowed later entanglements of race and myth in German scholarship
and literature over the course of the nineteenth century. JOHN ZAMMITO, "Policing Polygeneticism in Germany, 1775: Kames,
Kant and Blumenbach" The 1770s saw both the revival of polygenetic theories of human variety in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the intensification of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on Germany. Kames's Sketches of the History of Man were translated immediately in Germany. Within a year of their publication, Immanuel Kant published privately his first essay on race and Johann Blumenbach submitted his dissertation on the natural variety of mankind, each of them explicitly addressing the work of Kames. This paper will explore the politics of the revival of polygeneticism in the 1770s in Britain and the politics of its resistance in Germany in that same historical moment. |
