Black lives and representations of Black people have long been part of the history of German-speaking Europe. This guide begins in the Middle Ages, follows art and literature into the Renaissance, and highlights the eighteenth-century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo. The modern German nation-state did not yet exist; these histories cross today’s German, Austrian, Italian and other borders.

Medieval art: Saint Maurice in Magdeburg

The mid-thirteenth-century sculpture of Saint Maurice in Magdeburg Cathedral represents the saint as a Black African knight. It is a major example of an honored Black figure in medieval European Christian art. Maurice’s story concerns a legendary late Roman soldier and martyr; the medieval sculpture does not document a thirteenth-century Black man named Maurice living in Magdeburg. Its value lies in what it reveals about sanctity, power and the visual possibilities of Blackness. [1, 2]

View Saint Maurice and read the historical commentary.

Parzival, Belakane and Feirefiz

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early-thirteenth-century Parzival belongs to the wider Arthurian tradition associated with Percival. Its Black queen Belakane and her son Feirefiz are especially relevant here. Feirefiz and Parzival share a father, Gahmuret; the brothers fight before discovering their kinship. Wolfram describes Feirefiz’s skin as patterned in black and white, an imagined representation of mixed parentage. These are literary characters, not biographical evidence of medieval Black German citizens. [3, 4]

The story offers questions about family recognition, religious difference and belonging. It also has limits: Feirefiz’s later Christian conversion matters to his place in the Grail story. We should examine that condition rather than turn the poem into a simple modern celebration of inclusion. [3]

Manuscript images do not always follow the text’s descriptions of skin color. Black Central Europe’s analysis of a fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript considers both racial assumptions and the workshop’s separation of writing from illustration. The discrepancy is a useful starting point for studying how Black characters become visible or disappear in retellings. [3]

Explore the illustrated duel and its Heidelberg manuscript source.

Early modern art: an African king

The Met connects Massys’s individualized depiction of the African king with the presence of free and enslaved Black people in Antwerp through trade with Portugal. The painting is a religious representation, not a portrait identifying a particular historical king. It offers a wider European comparison for the medieval and early modern images discussed here.

People, travel and the limits of the evidence

Black Central Europe’s source collection connects medieval courts to Mediterranean networks, including Frederick II’s traveling court in the 1230s. Its sources also use the category “Saracen” for Muslim people; this term must not automatically be translated as “Black African.” Religion, geographical origin and skin color require separate investigation. [5]

Katharina, 1521: Dürer drew a named African woman during his visit to Antwerp. The Uffizi identifies her as a twenty-year-old woman who was almost certainly enslaved in the household of the Portuguese commercial representative João Brandão. This is a documented Black person encountered by a German artist outside the German-speaking lands, not proof that she lived in Germany. Her portrait allows us to ask whose names survive and how art preserves a presence while leaving much of a life unknown. [6]

View the Uffizi’s On Being Present exhibition, including Katharina.

Ignatius Fortuna, eighteenth-century Essen: Fortuna was brought from Surinam as an enslaved child and entered the household of Abbess Franziska Christina. His later resources, loans and contested estate complicate the idea that court service fully describes a person’s life. The surviving claims made by white “siblings” reveal how dependence and paternalism could be invoked over his property. [7]

Angelo Soliman, eighteenth-century Vienna: Soliman’s life belongs to Austrian and wider German-speaking European history. Enslaved as a child, he later became a prominent figure in Viennese society and Freemasonry. His story should remain geographically distinct from Amo’s work in German university towns. [8]

Anton Wilhelm Amo: an Enlightenment philosopher

Amo was born in what is now Ghana around the beginning of the eighteenth century and was enslaved as a child. He studied in Halle and Wittenberg, received his doctorate in 1734, and taught philosophy in Wittenberg, Halle and Jena. He later returned to West Africa. Details of his early transfer to Europe and his final years remain incomplete; precise birth and death dates should be treated cautiously. He belongs to the Enlightenment, several centuries after the medieval works discussed above. [9]

What Amo wrote and argued

• Legal status and freedom, 1729: De iure Maurorum in Europa addressed the legal position of Black people in Europe. The dissertation’s full text has not survived; a contemporary report records its subject. That report is evidence of his legal intervention, but cannot support a detailed reconstruction of every argument he made. [10]
• Mind and sensation, 1734: In On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, Amo distinguishes the mind’s activity from the body’s capacity to be affected by material things. Sensation belongs to the living organic body, rather than to an immaterial mind receiving physical impressions. “Impassivity” here concerns the mind’s relation to bodily affection; it should not be read simply as emotional coldness. [11, 12]
• Mind and body, also 1734: The second dissertation in the Menn–Smith edition examines what belongs to the mind and what belongs to the living organic body. Together the texts place Amo within substantive philosophical debates about embodiment and knowledge. [11]
• Philosophical method, 1738: Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing addresses how to philosophize carefully. Mabe’s study follows Amo’s methodology, language, interpretation and prejudice as well as his account of mind and body. These are reasons to study his arguments, alongside the history of racial exclusion from the philosophical canon. [12, 13]

Read Amo directly: the 2020 edition edited and translated by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith supplies Latin texts and facing English translations of the two 1734 dissertations. It is an edition of those dissertations, not a complete collection of every work attributed to Amo. [11]

Amo, art and remembrance today

The Faculty of Sensing brings philosophy, poetry and contemporary art into dialogue with Amo. Edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jule Hillgärtner and Nele Kaczmarek, the bilingual volume includes contributions by Peggy Piesche and Paulin J. Hountondji, among others, and accompanies work presented at Kunstverein Braunschweig and SAVVY Contemporary in 2020–21. [14]

There is no surviving verified portrait of Amo. Halle University cautions against treating Gerhard Geyer’s Free Africa sculpture as a likeness of him. Remembrance should identify the historical philosopher without inventing his face or confusing a later symbolic artwork with a portrait. [9]

Books added to BGHRA’s reading list

• Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body — primary philosophy, Latin and English, edited and translated by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith (2020).
• Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, Anton Wilhelm Amo: The Intercultural Background of His Philosophy — translated by J. Obi Oguejiofor (2014); an African philosopher’s interpretation of Amo.
• The Faculty of Sensing: Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo — bilingual art and philosophy (2021).
• Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival and Titurel — Cyril Edwards’s English translation (2009); medieval literature, not a book by a Black German author.
• Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914 — edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke and Anne Kuhlmann (2013), with chapters on Renaissance art, early Black presence and court service. [15]

Questions for readers and teachers

• What does a portrait or manuscript show, and what remains unknown about its subject?
• How do stories connect kinship with religious or social belonging?
• What changes when Amo is read as a philosopher with arguments, rather than mentioned only as an exceptional biography?

Cited sources and visual references

1. Black Central Europe, Saint Maurice in Magdeburg (ca. 1240)
2. Yale University Press, Reflections on Africans in Gothic Sculpture, part 1 (2020)
3. Jeff Bowersox, Duel between Parzival and the pagan Feirefiz (ca. 1443–1446), Black Central Europe; includes Heidelberg manuscript reference
4. Black Central Europe, Depicting Feirefiz in the age of empire (1888)
5. Black Central Europe, Frederick II impresses with his processions; translated chronicle extracts
6. Uffizi Galleries, On Being Present, volume II
7. Black Central Europe, Ignatius Fortuna’s white “siblings” petition for his estate (1789)
8. German History Intersections, Portrait of Angelo Soliman (c. 1750)
9. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Anton Wilhelm Amo: life, scholarship and remembrance
10. Black Central Europe, contemporary report on Amo’s 1729 legal dissertation
11. Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body, edited and translated by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith (Oxford University Press, 2020)
12. Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, Anton Wilhelm Amo: The Intercultural Background of His Philosophy, translated by J. Obi Oguejiofor (Traugott Bautz, 2014); publisher-hosted English text
13. Justin E. H. Smith, Anton Wilhelm Amo: Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing (1738), in Neglected Classics of Philosophy, volume 2
14. The Faculty of Sensing (2021), publisher/distributor description and contents
15. Germany and the Black Diaspora (Berghahn Books, 2013), publisher record and contents

Related: World War I · The Nazi Period