Colors 1800/1900/2000: Signs of Ethnic Difference

This anthology on questions of ethnic difference in German culture is divided into an introduction and three parts, which are organized according to the three historical moments indicated in the book's title. The collection brings together scholars from Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, and the essays are written in English and German. In her introduction, Birgit Tautz does not elaborate on the historical contexts chosen as the anthology's chronological foci; rather she identifies several key theoretical questions that hold together individual contributions. She reviews the current state of discussions regarding the concept of "ethnicity" in German Studies today and calls for a more extensive dialogue between scholars located in the United States and across the Atlantic. Her exploration of the notion of ethnicity addresses its varying historical and geopolitical dimensions. Of central concern to Tautz is the interrelatedness of questions of visuality and ideas of ethnicity, which in fact emerges as a central link connecting most of the essays. She also addresses the relationship of ethnicity to other categories of difference and—in her discussion of Paul Gilroy's work––problematizes the political implications of the focus on ethnicity and race.

The first group of essays is devoted to the time around 1800. Gudrun Hentges discusses the idea of race in Immanuel Kant's writings, which emerge as foundational texts of racial science, and highlights the link between ideas about race and the nation in Kant, situating these ideological constructs in the context of European expansionism. Wendy Sutherland's close reading of Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler's Die Mohrinn compares the play to G. E. Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson. She shows convincingly that Ziegler combines social and racial conflict in this bourgeois tragedy about an interracial relationship; it ends with the eloping of the lovers, which Sutherland interprets as the banishing of the interracial couple from Europe. Based on an analysis of writings by Winckelmann, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, Daniel Purdy presents an insightful discussion of the role that whiteness played in the classicist fascination with Greek sculpture. Assenka Oksiloff's discussion of texts by Adalbert von Chamisso focuses on the role of the visual in the narrating subject's exploration of the world. Chamisso's narrators struggle in their attempt to retain a stabilizing, rational gaze and often succeed in developing a self-reflexive mode, particularly when engaging with cultural difference.

Thomas R. Miller's contribution to the second group of essays, located around 1900, focuses on the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas, in particular on the role that the visual played in the development of Boas's school of thought. The next essay, Andreas Michel's discussion of the art historians Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein, highlights the impact of non-European art on the development of early twentieth-century art theory. Nana Badenberg's analysis of the idea of "Mohrenwäsche" (the whitewashing of the Moor) draws attention to a cultural idea that––like other examples of racist terminology which are part of everyday German language to this day––reflects deeply ingrained attitudes toward Africans. The last essay in this section, by Fatima El-Tayeb, traces the emergence of anti-miscegenation laws, which were first implemented in 1905. Her discussion shows that the severity of the German laws has to be understood in connection to the fact that German citizenship was (until 2000) exclusively tied to bloodlines.

Uli Linke's essay on post-Holocaust memory opens the third and last section of the anthology. Linke investigates the changing meanings of what she calls the "Aryan aesthetic, with its tropes of Germanness, whiteness, and nakedness," as expressed in multiple ways throughout the twentieth century (209). The figure of the "black drug dealer" is at the center of Christine Achinger's analysis of recent Hamburg media representation. Although, according to Achinger, contemporary images of blackness differ from those circulating one hundred years ago, they do employ tenacious discursive modes of anti-Semitic stereotyping. Helen Cafferty's contribution raises once more the question of the compatibility of blackness and Germanness. Her analysis of two films from the 1990s bespeaks the persistence of racist parameters in today's multicultural Germany. The final contribution to the anthology explores the contemporary situation in Germany. In her epilogue, Birgit Tautz raises questions with regard to the relationship between different minorities, the impact of reunification on discussions of multiculturalism, and the radicalization of the debate over multiculturalism and citizenship in recent initiatives such as "KanakAttack."

The anthology amounts to a substantial contribution to a critical debate. One could question the correspondence between the conceptual framework as indicated in the anthology's title and the actual overarching themes. Given the centrality of the connection between visuality and ethnic difference, for example, it may have deserved to be acknowledged in the title in order to facilitate the reception of this important concept. Although the specific historical context is addressed in the individual contributions, I would have liked the introduction—at least briefly—to consider various changes and continuities in light of historical events such as colonialism, nationalism, expansionism, and immigration. Altogether, the thought-provoking and informative anthology fills significant gaps regarding the discussion of ethnicity in German Studies, adds to a growing corpus of scholarly investigations of questions of alterity in German culture, and lays the groundwork for further investigations.