‘You read hideous accounts of the transport of African slaves. Ours was very much like it,’ stated the German merchant Johann Wilhelm Fischer after he had experienced a most unpleasant sea voyage due to a military intervention during the Napoleonic Wars in 1813. After their ship had been captured by the British, he and his fellow travellers were held in a cramped, dark room where they could neither stand up nor lie down; they were hungry and thirsty, seasickness and diarrhoea adding to their severe discomfort. In short, the journey was so terrible that according to Fischer everyone felt like dying. By highlighting lack of food and water, scarcity of space and disease, Fischer did indeed evoke features common to the excruciating experience of the Middle Passage, although he had to endure these only for one night instead of several months. Fischer and his family lived in the Duchy of Berg, one of the smaller German principalities and an area remote from the Atlantic coast, seemingly unconnected to the world of the slave trade. Nevertheless, Fischer could be sure that readers of his memoirs – friends and relatives – would be familiar with the terrors of the Atlantic slave trade and would thus sympathise with his plight on the British ship. This raises the question of how people in continental Germany knew about the slave trade and how far they were concerned by it, materially and morally.

German states had been involved in the slave trade only briefly at the end of the seventeenth century when Brandenburg-Prussia tried to become a player in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. The effort was orchestrated by the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische Handelscompagnie (Brandenburg African Trade Company) which organised the shipment of 18,000 Africans to the ‘New World’ between 1682 and 1711. German seamen participated in slaving voyages for much longer than that, with men from the Frisian Isles serving on both Dutch and Danish slavers throughout the eighteenth century. Probably because of this relatively marginal involvement in the slave trade, the issue did not become a heated object of public debate as it did in Britain, but it did receive scholarly attention.