ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the lives of two eighteenth-century Court Moors who lived in the German realm. The first, Anton Wilhelm Amo, lived at the court of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel; the second, Angelo Soliman, at the court in Vienna. Amo's case shows that Blacks arrived in the German states as chattel purchased from slave traders of other nations to be servants or otherwise employees of German royal courts. At the Viennese court, a kind of Inszenierung, or staging of blackness, displayed in the exhibition of Soliman, reveals both the eighteenth-century views on blackness and the performance of whiteness, at the royal court. The need to exoticize the Black, used as a status symbol of courtly representation, sheds light on eighteenth-century German and Austrian whiteness and how whiteness sets boundaries of humanity on the body, specifically in the skin, both symbolically in the form of the ridicule Amo was exposed to by his peers culminating in the parody mentioned in the exhibition of Soliman.
