Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

A journalist’s profound investigation into the reality behind an intense waking vision and the search for healing after death • Details the author’s vivid waking vision of a dying German soldier in World War II and how he discovered the soldier was a real person, including his research into German military archives and meeting the man’s surviving family members • Explores synchronicities, reincarnation, and communication across the veil between life and death • Reveals how the author helped the dead soldier find forgiveness and healing While on a spiritual retreat in Peru, journalist Stéphane Allix experienced a vivid waking vision of a soldier dying on a snowy battlefield, followed by scenes from the soldier’s earlier life. He also clearly saw the man’s name, Alexander Herrmann, and felt a disturbing sense of closeness with the soldier. Obsessed by the power of this extremely real vision, Allix began an intensive investigation that revealed this individual had actually existed: a German soldier who died in World War II during the 1941 Russian campaign. As he began retracing Herrmann’s past, he found that the other images accompanying the battle scene were also of people who had truly existed and were close to the man who died. Diving deep into German military archives, meeting the man’s surviving family members, and following his own intuitive hunches, the author also discovered that the soldier was part of the Waffen S.S., the infamous Totenkopf Brigade, and his investigation broadened to explore what drove Herrmann to become part of such an organization. While Allix’s initial impression is that this German soldier was a past life, as he progresses in his rigorous investigation and his decoding of the events surrounding it, he realizes that it was actually his own work with the paranormal and his unresolved feelings over the death of his brother and his father that made him particularly sensitive to the veil between life and death, culminating in the soul of this dead soldier coming to him in search of forgiveness and healing. Allix realizes that his mission is not to bring about the rebirth of this person but to heal him--and the victims of his ignominious actions during the war. Offering a fascinating exploration of visions, synchronicities, reincarnation, and the connections between the spiritual and physical planes, When I Was Someone Else shares a powerful message of healing after death along with the profound epiphany that light needs darkness to be perceived.

"Born into ancient nobility and son of the most powerful statesman in the land, Ferdinand is willing to forsake his fortune for the love of Luise, daughter of a humble musician. But in a world governed by deception and greed where power is everything, their future happiness and liberty are beyond their control. Adapted from Friedrich Schiller's 1784 play Kabale und Liebe, a masterpiece of power and politics that explores the battle between honor and corruption, between truth and betrayal."-- Publisher description.