ABSTRACT
Feminist readings and the queering of the German canon have become accepted approaches in German Studies, even while more traditional Germanists resist these perspectives. Gail Hart's A Tragedy in Paradise: Family and Gender Politics in German Bourgeois Tragedy; Ingrid Walsøe-Engel's Fathers and Daughters: Patterns of Seduction in Tragedies of Gryphius, Lessing, Hebbel and Kroetz; Susan Gustafson's Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing's Aesthetic and Dramatic Production; Alice Kuzniar's Outing Goethe and his Age; and Roman Graf's essays on homosocial desire in J. M. R. Lenz's The Soldiers and The Tutor represent examples of such trends. The "raceing" of the German canon, however, still remains a terra incognita, and race, and particularly blackness in eighteenth-century German literature, an unspoken and often ignored taboo. This chapter intends to "race" the traditional German bourgeois drama by locating both the staging of blackness and the construction of whiteness within eighteenth-century German bourgeois drama and thereby expanding the ways in which we read German literature, especially literature of the eighteenth century. I have chosen the bourgeois drama as the representative genre for the construction of whiteness because of its important role in elevating and teaching morals to the rising German bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century through its didactic function: for the first time, the German bourgeois male becomes the hero of tragedy, a position previously reserved for the aristocrat. In addition, the bourgeois drama, in its presentation of the bourgeois milieu—the domestic sphere of the nuclear family—puis forward bourgeois virtues as linked to a particular class consciousness while simultaneously grounding these virtues in a national identity that will later be read as "German."
