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Introduction
Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß; und der Lette will nicht in den Himmel, sobald Deutsche da sind.
—Johann Gottfried Herder1
In 1996 Jürgen Heeg wrote in his analysis of Garlieb Merkel’s work2 of 1796, “durch die Nationalisierung der Letten und Esten wurde die ständische Ordnung in den Ostseeprovinzen Rußlands in ihren Grundfesten in Frage gestellt.”3 This process of emancipation and nationalization gained particular momentum in the second half of the eighteenth century and forms part of the European movement of the Enlightenment. The national dimension of Garlieb Merkel’s work arose out of an agrarian and social reform discourse that publicized the long-standing cruel and debilitating state of near slavery in which the indigenous populations were held by the Baltic German landholding minority. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is regarded as the pivotal thinker central in identifying and articulating the essential characteristics of a nation at this time.4 He influenced the emerging reform discourse as well. The agrarian and social issues connected to serfdom in Livonia are considered by scholars to be the central ones of the Livonian Enlightenment.