Set at the height of the Haitian Revolution (1789-1804), Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777–1811) last novella, “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, 1811), relates the story of Toni, the mestize daughter of a family of freedom fighters, and her fatal love for a Swiss gentleman, Gustav von der Reid. Throughout the explosive text’s tumultuous two-hundred-year reception history, Germanists and artists have engaged in hot debate over Kleist’s engagement with the history of occupation, colonization, and enslavement, where some have accused Kleist of endorsing structures of racism, while others have seen in his novella a literary upheaval of the epistemological assumptions upon which racialized views of the world rest. Indeed, given the fact that Kleist’s sympathies lie throughout his works with the vulnerable and the disenfranchised, “Verlobung” and the history of criticism that surrounds represents a valuable resource for exploring more progressive perspectives on differences of race and gender during the late Enlightenment.

One exciting method for considering these conflicts in and around Kleist’s works in the classroom would be to place the German author’s work in conversation with literary texts by authors of color likewise responding to the Haitian Revolution. In 1837, the Creole author Victor Séjour (1817–1874)—who like Kleist wrote short prose fiction and dramas, and unlike Kleist was fairly successful during his lifetime—penned the short novella “Le Mulâtre” (The Mulatto), which portrays the pursuit of justice by a young man whose mother was enslaved to his father, a white man.

In reading Sejour and Kleist together, students might be prompted to reflect further on some of the following thematic and gestural commonalities: