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]

Read art historian Jacqueline E. Jung’s discussion of Saint Maurice.

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]

Readers can compare the poem’s descriptions with the fifteenth-century manuscript preserved by Heidelberg University Library. How do clothing, physical appearance and other visual choices shape a reader’s understanding of Feirefiz? The manuscript is primary evidence for its illustrations; explanations of an illustrator’s intentions require additional research. [4]

View the illustrated duel in Heidelberg University Library’s digitized manuscript.

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

Art historian Paul H. D. Kaplan examines Black Africans in imagery associated with the Hohenstaufen emperors, including Frederick II’s court and the Muslim settlement at Lucera in southern Italy. This Mediterranean context helps situate the German-speaking lands within wider networks of movement and representation. Religion, geographical origin and skin color require separate investigation; the historical category “Saracen” should not automatically be translated as “Black African.” [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: The Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe’s heritage account documents his arrival from South America as a child and his service in the household of Abbess Franziska Christina. It records his unusually privileged accommodation and burial near the abbess in her foundation’s chapel in 1789. These material traces allow us to examine court service, unequal power and remembrance without reducing his life to a decorative presence in a portrait. [7]

Angelo and Josepha Soliman: family life and dignity in Vienna

Angelo Soliman (c. 1721–1796) lived in Vienna from 1753 and worked in an aristocratic household as an attendant and tutor. Enslaved as a child, he later married, owned a home, and participated in Freemasonry. These relationships and activities belong within the history of Black life in Austria and the wider German-speaking world.

Josepha’s advocacy after her father’s death

After Soliman died, his remains were prepared and exhibited in Vienna’s imperial collections. His daughter Josepha protested this treatment. Her intervention brings a family member’s claim to dignity into a record often shaped by powerful institutions. Wien Museum cautions that the circumstances of who commissioned the display remain unclear.

For BGHRA, this history invites questions about who controls a family’s record, whose objections are preserved, and how museums acknowledge the people behind their collections. Soliman’s Austrian history should remain distinct from Amo’s work in German university towns.

Sources: Wien Museum: Angelo Soliman exhibition; Wien Museum exhibition guide (2011), including Josepha’s protest.

Continue into Black Austrian cultural history

In 1803, the Black violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower performed Beethoven’s violin sonata, Op. 47, with the composer in Vienna. Beethoven’s letter of recommendation dated 18 May 1803 offers a direct documentary starting point for studying their connection. These lives open different pathways into Austrian history; they should not be treated as a single experience.

Read the evidence: Beethoven-Haus Bonn: recommendation letter for Bridgetower.

Related histories: Black German and Austrian postwar adoptions · Amo books in the BGHRA archive.

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. Photograph of Saint Maurice in Magdeburg Cathedral: image, authorship and license
2. Yale University Press, Reflections on Africans in Gothic Sculpture, part 1 (2020)
3. Lynn Ramey, “Race and Identity in Medieval Europe” (2018), African American Intellectual History Society
4. Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 339, volume 2: illustrated Parzival manuscript, c. 1443–1446
5. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Black Africans in Hohenstaufen Iconography,” Gesta 26, no. 1 (1987): 29–36
6. Uffizi Galleries, On Being Present, volume II
7. Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, “Grabmal des Ignatius Fortuna in Essen-Steele,” Fremde Impulse heritage project
8. German History Intersections, Portrait of Angelo Soliman (c. 1750)
9. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Anton Wilhelm Amo: life, scholarship and remembrance
10. Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, Anton Wilhelm Amo: The Intercultural Background of His Philosophy (2014), pp. 16–17, on the lost 1729 disputation
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