On the colour of slavery and servitude in the literary imagination of the German–Polish borderlands

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge assumptions about the way in which slavery and enslavability are represented in literary texts of the high imperial era by examining representations of slavery, serfdom and captive labour in Heinrich Sienkiewicz’s Krzyżacy (1900, The Teutonic Knights) and Ernst Wichert’s Heinrich von Plauen (1881). These two novels were written during a period when many authors sought to present intensifying German–Polish conflict as the product of ‘racial’ difference, rendered visible in the asymmetric distribution of light and dark physical coloration patterns. Neither Sienkiewicz nor Wichert pursues such strategies. Their novels are set in the borderlands bridging Central Europe and the Eurasian steppe, a landscape where the Teutonic Order clashed with the unified Polish–Lithuanian forces and where both intrinsic and extrinsic slave-raiding was commonplace. The connections between war, enslavement and captive labour are actively thematised, and members of various ethnic groups (including not only Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Bohemians but also Tatars, Turks and others) are discussed in terms of their enslavability and fitness for servitude. Here too, physical coloration patterns play no role.