August von Kotzebue’s Bruder Moritz, der Sonderling and German Transcultural Consciousness around 1800

August von Kotzebue’s drama Bruder Moritz (1791) demonstrates the impact of non-European cultures on the German discourse and expresses a transcultural consciousness in German culture around 1800. Discussing Moritz’s friendship with the Arab Omar and Moritz’s provocative attitude toward female virtue and the incest taboo, this essay shows how Omar co-constructs Moritz’s identity and empowers him to imagine a different moral and social order. Moreover this essay foregrounds the happy ending of Moritz’s refuge in the remote Pacific Islands and argues that non-European cultures evoke the generic instability of bourgeois tragedy and pave ways for melodramas with happy endings.