This panel examines how German literature and drama served as key sites for negotiating the possibilities and limits of political, social (including women’s), and colonial emancipation. It focuses on the late eighteenth century as part of the German “Sattelzeit” (Koselleck), a threshold period of profound political and social transformation in which core concepts of modernity were fundamentally reconfigured. Amid tensions between emerging political-philosophical visions and the persistence of entrenched feudal hierarchies and pervasive censorship, literary texts not only reflected debates on natural rights, equality, and legitimate authority but translated them into narrative and dramatic form. By staging conflicts between authority and self-determination, these works probe the ethical foundations of resistance, the legitimacy of power, and the conditions under which emancipation could be imagined or enacted. At the same time, Enlightenment concepts of reason, tolerance, and humanity reveal the exclusions inherent in their visions of emancipation, particularly along lines of gender, race, and social status.

The strengths and limitations of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory project have long been a focus of critical debate. Its political dimensions—particularly the translation of natural rights into political practice and the distinction between legitimate authority and despotism—have been examined since early foundational studies (e.g., Hazard 1935) and further developed in scholarship on “anti-tyrannical” discourse (Turchetti 2013). More recently, attention has turned specifically to colonialist entanglements (Pečar/Tricoire 2015) and ambivalent gender configurations (Taylor/Knott 2005; Cattunar 2014). Bringing these perspectives together, the panel seeks to highlight how literary texts negotiate, contest, or complicate the emancipatory frameworks of eighteenth-century thought. It asks how texts articulate emancipation, whether by direct intervention or through strategies such as temporal/geographical displacement, character portrayal, and the dramatization of tensions between ethical principles and political action. Drawing on a range of texts, the papers ask how literature not only reflects but reshapes discourses of emancipation, and at times conversely reproduces structures of domination across axes of social, colonial, and gender relations.

Maciej Jędrzejewski’s paper on Christian Daniel Schubart (presented in German) portrays the writer as an agent of political dissent. Drawing on his literary-journalistic writings, prison texts, and poetry, it shows how literary expression becomes a form of direct intervention in social reality. Rooted in Enlightenment ideals, Schubart’s work exemplifies an “aesthetics of dissent” that seeks not only to expose feudal oppression but to shape emancipatory political consciousness under conditions of censorship and repression.

Nikola Keller’s contribution (presented in German) turns to abolitionist drama and examines the role of figural narration in staging colonial oppression. By analyzing how enslaved characters are made to “speak” their suffering on stage, Keller highlights the ambivalence of such strategies: while they can generate immediacy and empathy, they remain structurally precarious, as the voices of the enslaved are mediated and appropriated. Her paper thus reveals the tension between emancipatory intent and representational limitation within the German-speaking abolition discourse.

Two further papers address Friedrich Schiller’s engagement with tyranny and political community, offering complementary yet contrasting perspectives on his works. Luke Beller’s reading of Wilhelm Tell situates emancipation within the framework of sociability, arguing that Schiller reconceptualizes political liberation as a fundamentally collective process. Rather than centering on individual acts of resistance, the drama emphasizes solidarity, shared ethical commitments, and participatory political action, opening space for the inclusion of marginalized actors, including women, in the revolutionary process. Kunning Zhang’s analysis of Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa offers a more critical perspective on the exclusions embedded within emancipatory discourse. While the drama problematizes the difficulty of maintaining moral integrity in politics and the dangers inherent in revolutionary action, it simultaneously exposes the gendered limits of political emancipation. Zhang shows how female figures are denied political subjectivity and reduced to symbolic or instrumental roles within male-centered narratives of resistance, highlighting the tension between the articulation of freedom and women’s exclusion from its realization.

Taken together, the papers highlight the diversity and tensions of eighteenth-century emancipatory narratives across political, colonial, and gendered axes. The panel thereby aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly debates by interrogating such narratives as contested, multifaceted processes shaped by social, historical, and aesthetic constraints. The contributions have been selected not only for their thematic breadth—covering all the key strands of the CFP while remaining closely interconnected and cohesive—but also to bring together emerging and established scholars with different geographical backgrounds in a productive dialogue. To ensure punctuality, each presentation is scheduled for 14 minutes, thus allowing brief opening remarks, transitions between talks, and 15 minutes reserved for the final Q&A.