The article exemplifies the thesis that, in the German-speaking world of the late 18th and early 19th cen-tury, the Haitian Revolution was closely linked to the narrative of the Enlightenment. This shall be il-lustrated by discussing three narrations from that time that look at the link between slave labor and wage labor, the connection between the French and the Haitian Revolutions, and the anthropological discourse about people with black skin.