Chapter 5
Showing and feeling the atrocities of slavery
Abolition, human rights violations, and the aesthetics of the drastic in popular German theatre, circa
1800
German-language playwrights inscribed themselves into the international debate on abolition at the
end of the 18th century, making themselves part of a transnational political communicative space. Most of these
authors are rarely read today, except for August von Kotzebue, the most frequently performed German-language author of
this period. These authors usually conceived their plays as discourse dramas that reflected the contradiction between
the ideals of the Enlightenment and the system of enslavement and denounced slavery as a violation of human rights. To
this end, as an analysis of Kotzebue’s play The Negro Slaves will show, they transgress the
sentimentalist aesthetics prevailing in contemporary theater and develop an implicit poetics and aesthetics of what I
call the ‘drastic.’
Article outline
- Atrocities on stage — the aesthetic transgression of the bourgeois drama
- Staging atrocity: Towards an aesthetics of the drastic
- An aesthetics of the drastic: Showing and feeling the horrors of human rights violations
- Abolitionism as transnational frame for the german demand for human rights
- Author queries
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Notes
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References
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