Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture: Staging and Staring—The Politicized Body is the second of two panels organized to situate this field in the contemporary scholarly discourse about non-normative bodies. This panel elaborates on unexpected bodies seen as non-human and monstrous. The four papers examine eighteenth-century bodies marked by race, ability/affliction, and associations in the material and ecological environment in the political and anthropological discourses.
The first paper, Obenewaa Oduro-Opuni’s “Black Bodies and Questions of Humanity in German Abolitionist Theater,” utilizes approaches rooted in Black thought and theories that allow for the centering of the human and Black humanity more broadly amid experiences of dehumanization and commodification. She highlights the politics of suffering in an empathetic context of Black bodies, slavery, and abolition in several examples of German-language abolitionist literature, challenging the notion of an absence of German abolitionist awareness in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. She argues that the little-known German eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century dramatic genre Sklavenstücke (slave plays) articulate a nuanced critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, bearing witness to a German-language discourse indicative of abolitionist currents. By playing on audience emotions, anglophone and francophone abolitionists and abolitionist literature aimed to suggest thought-provoking options to terminate the agony that the racial “Other” was subjected to. They hoped to call into question the legitimacy of slavery, a move which establishes a connection between the European readers and audiences and the enslaved Africans in the New World. However, drawing on African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, the torment of enslaved Black bodies is a site of “bringing slavery close” by reenacting atrocity, which results in anguish becoming instantiated rather than attenuated. Sympathy then lies with Black bodies rather than human beings of African descent, and in the collective commodity rather than the individual people.
The second paper, Anna Christine Spafford’s “Stigma, Staring, and Celebrity in Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser,” examines the relationship between stigma and celebrity in this psychological novel. The protagonist begins life as an unwanted and neglected child. Born to negligent parents, Anton suffers serious and debilitating illnesses that afflict his body, without attention, except from an aunt. When Anton moves outside of his parents’ house, the signs of their neglect make him the subject of unwanted attention. Anton’s disheveled appearance and his lack of social preparation make him the object of derision, contempt, and pity. Anton’s greatest desire in life quickly becomes to command attention. Spafford’s analysis of stigma and celebrity first examines the physical manifestations of Anton’s parents’ psychological neglect. Second, Spafford explores the relationship between Anton’s stigmatized experiences and his persistent drive to seek celebrity, despite repeated failure. This asks: to what extent is Anton being made an “unexpected body”?
Susanne Fuchs’s “Defenseless, Docile, Democratic - Dramatic Bodies around 1800” examines how certain political and military regimes produce certain understandings of the human body. Arguing that drama comments on these congruencies, she argues that staged bodies either perform or perform a revolt against these regimes. Fuchs traces a line of dramatic characters who embody and perform rebellion, focusing on Goethe’s Iphigenie, Schiller’s Don Karlos, and these are framed by references to Torquato Tasso, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and the Prinz von Homburg. Staging the opposition on both the political and anthropological level, she argues that these plays generate dramatic bodies whose faculties and constitution illustrate unprecedented democratic hopes.
Benjamin D. Schluter’s “Writing the Free Seas: Kühleborn’s Unexpected Body in Fouqué’s Undine and Beyond” examines de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine (1811), a text teeming with unexpected bodies. Beneath its Romantic surface of knights, water sprites, and magic castles courses an elemental opposition between land and sea which gains expression in the grotesque appearances of the water spirits, especially Undine’s uncle Kühleborn, who is unable to restrain his element’s tendency to dissolution. Fouqué’s text repeatedly marks Kühleborn as a body falling out of order: an unexpected body that challenges the “terrestrial bias” (Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media) symbolized in Undine’s assimilation to solid land. Undine eventually manages to banish him through a ritual act of writing. Particularly productive in this context is Kant’s notion of freedom and Carl Schmitt’s description of the sea’s “freedom” or lack of “character.” Following this notion of the “free seas,” Schluter argues that Kühleborn’s unexpected body erodes Undine’s self-assertion as a written work and embodies an aporia of Romantic literary theory around 1800.
The discussion will carry over from panel one to conclude the two-panel series.