Elective Paternities: White Germans and Black Americans in Hugo Bettauer’s Das blaue Mal (1922)

In his 1922 novel, Das blaue Mal, Austrian journalist Hugo Bettauer constructs a narrative of kinship between African Americans and Germans centered around the concept of Bildung. At a time when many African Americans envisaged education as a path to liberation, Bettauer’s African-Austrian-American protagonist embodies both a biological and intellectual model for this imaginary affiliation. By proposing German education and culture as an elective father figure for black Americans, the novel effectively displaces racist white America with a colorblind Europe, undermining the fascination with the New World at the same time as it reasserts the superiority of the Old World.