ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to "race" the traditional German bourgeois drama by locating both the staging of blackness and the construction of whiteness within eighteenth-century German bourgeois drama and thereby expanding the ways in which we read German literature, especially literature of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century German bourgeois drama constructs not only a class identity grounded in bourgeois consciousness, but also an identity that is both racially and morally "white". While the German bourgeois drama seeks to portray the white bourgeois ideal, the contradictions in the depictions of whiteness show the constructed nature of whiteness. Similar to the hierarchies of race and feeling that Kant sets up when discussing national characters, the bourgeois drama also sets up a moral hierarchy that locates the bourgeois male at the top of the scale as the moral ideal who is aware of class boundaries, and the aristocratic seducers and seductresses, the embodiment of vice, at the bottom of the moral scale.
