Dunkelhäutige Frauengestalten in Wolframs von Eschenbach Parzival und in Strickers Königin von Mohrenland aus postkolonialer Perspektive

Dark-skinned female figures in Wolfram’s von Eschenbach Parzival and in Stricker’s Queen von Mohrenland from a post-colonial perspective The chapter deals with the representation of black women in medieval literature and art. The problem of dark skin reflects the ideological legacy of modern racism, but the article tries to reconstruct the pre-modern thought patterns in which skin colors were connoted significantly differently. The text-analytical part of the chapter focuses on two texts from the high medieval German epic, Wolfram’s von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Stricker’s Königin von Mohrenland. The story of the black queen Belakane is in open contradiction to all the beauty topoi common in the High middle Ages, which usually associated „black“ with „ugly“. It is also part of a structural framework that emerges at the end of the novel with the appearance of Feirefiz, the black and white spotted son of Belakane and Parzival’s father Gahmuret. His skin color is seen as a cultur- al-integrating characteristic. The Königin von Mohrenland, on the other hand, can be read as a proto-racist text on which many of the modern racial stereotypes are modeled.