Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

Abstract

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.