A European novel of racial mixing and "passing" in early
twentieth-century America that serves as a unique account of
transnational and transcultural racial attitudes that continue to
reverberate today.
Hugo Bettauer's The Blue Stain, a novel of racial mixing and "passing,"
starts and ends in Georgia but also takes the reader to Vienna and New
York. First published in 1922, the novel tells the story of Carletto,
son of a white European academic and an African American daughter of
former slaves, who, having passed as white in Europe and fled to America
after losing his fortune, resists being seen as "black" before
ultimately accepting that identityand joining the early movement for
civil rights. Never before translated into English, this is the first
novel in which a German-speaking European author addresses early
twentieth-century racial politics in the United States - notonly in the
South but also in the North. There is an irony, however: while
Bettauer's narrative aims to sanction a white/European egalitarianism
with respect to race, it nevertheless exhibits its own brand of racism
by assertingthat African Americans need extensive enculturation before
they are to be valued as human beings. The novel therefore serves as a
unique historical account of transnational and transcultural racial
attitudes of the period that continue to reverberate in our present
globalized world.
Hugo Bettauer (1872-1925) was a prolific Austrian writer and journalist,
a very early victim of the Nazis. Peter Höyng is Associate Professor of
German Studies at Emory University. Chauncey J. Mellor is Emeritus
Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Kenneth
R. Janken is Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
