Undeutsch and Unmündig: Human Bondage Compared—An Enlightenment Discourse on Baltic Serfdom and Atlantic Slavery

Radical Enlightenment critics of serfdom in the Eastern Baltic drew analogies with slavery and colonization in the Americas. This analogy raised the possibility that abolition of the one form of labor exploitation should also call forth the abolition of the other. This chapter examines how the critic of feudal labor also included the argument that the Baltic territories, including East Prussia, were themselves colonial societies founded on racial discrimination and forced labor of Indigenous peoples, who were commonly referred to as “UnDeutsch.” The chapter describes the degree to which serfs were also “Unmündig,” according to Kant’s famous definition in “Was ist Aufklärung?” to suggest an overlap between the two terms’ racial and social exclusions. The chapter concludes by showing how nineteenth-century racist nationalists affirmed the conquest and genocide in founding the Baltic territories as a necessary step in bring German civilization eastward.