In one episode of the early thirteenth-century romance Diu Crône , the presence of a dark-skinned “Moor” is featured quite literally as a blessing and a curse. Yet by simultaneously including two opposed perspectives on this God-sent punisher, the text fixates on his deeds and on his place in the story world, dispensing with any interpretation of his blackness, positive or negative. Diu Crône circumvents the period’s views of skin colour as an indicator of a person’s character and the literary stereotypes associated with processes of race-making, all the while showing some awareness of their existence in other passages. The text’s neutral stance towards this ambivalent figure’s blackness, and its refusal to formulate a fixed notion of dark skin as referring to anything other than itself, are therefore reminders that literature is not bound by overarching ideologies.
While recent scholarship in pre-modern German studies has shown an awareness of the need to reflect on ideas about race and race-making, the definitions and practices of race and the classification of human diversity remain largely ocularcentric. The sensory process of listening to the spoken word can allow for racial ideologies to remain more deeply rooted than in seeing. Employing recent theories on the politics of racialized listening and of linguistic racism, I examine a set of highly canonical pre-modern German works by Martin Luther (1483–1546), Martin Opitz (1597–1639), and Justus Georg Schottelius (1612–72). I do so with the aim of tracking their strategies of delineating and forming a national community through theories of Germanic prosody, lexica, grammar, pronunciation, orthography, and articulation. In addressing these canonical works as pre-modern makings of linguistic racism and raciolinguistics, I aim to encourage scholars to consider race through language, spoken and heard.
