THE PANEL OF the DGEJ (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts) at the 2022 ASECS convention in Baltimore was organized by Sigrid G. Köhler and Claudia Nitschke. Based on recent historical studies that have demonstrated how the Germans participated in the transatlantic slave trade (whether directly or indirectly) and the slave plantation system, the aim of the panel was to examine more closely the extent to which German-speaking authors knew of these connections, how this knowledge came to bear on their writing as well as political and theoretical thinking, and, finally, how impactful these considerations ultimately were. The panel not only placed an emphasis on the normative frameworks of (anti)slavery in the eighteenth century but also on the media and strategies of representation that were employed in the discussions revolving around these topics.
In his paper There are Slaves in the Past and Nowadays: Slavery in German Natural Law, Frank Grunert examined the justification given by natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to legitimize or delegitimize slavery. I n the Latin nomenclature of natural law, borrowed from Roman law, the terms servus and servitus stood for different forms of economic and legal dependence, of which slavery is an extreme version. A ccording to Grunert, in Samuel von Pufendorf's philosophy of natural law, slavery is a systematic part of natural law, which Pufendorf saw as justified by an assumed voluntary agreement. However, and this accounts for the ambivalence of his argument, Pufendorf emphatically advocated for the difference between the possession of a person and a thing. A t the beginning of the eighteenth century, authors such as Johann Gottlieb Heineccius still argued in keeping with Pufendorf's ideas, even if they already posed the question of legal protection against extreme violence by the lord or owner. I n the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the institution of slavery could no longer be justified under natural law because, as Gottfried Achenwall and Johann Stephan Püttner argued in their Elementa Iuris Naturae, people could not be property. S uch power over people would be despotism, and voluntary consent would not be a declaration of will, but simply madness.
