In recent years scholars have given renewed interest to a literary tradition that presents light-skinned African American characters who pass as white, drawing attention to the complex intersections among race, class, and gender that such texts negotiate. As Valerie Smith remarks, these texts represent “sites where antiracist and white supremacist ideologies converge.” The competing racial politics that Smith examines are characteristic not only of early twentieth-century narratives of passing, but also of their nineteenth-century predecessors, often referred to as “tragic mulatto” fiction. These earlier narratives reflected generations of sexual abuses under slavery and the injustices of arbitrary race distinctions and anti-intermarriage laws that persisted after Emancipation. Both African American and Anglo-American authors wrote in this genre, as did a number of German writers, including the all-but-forgotten German American novelist Clara Berens.

In 1906 Berens published an antiracist novel for a young adult audience entitled Aus vergangenen Tagen: Eine Erzählung aus der Sklavenzeit (From By-Gone Days: A Narrative of Slavery Times), which makes a unique contribution to German American literature by exploring race, ethnicity, and gender in nineteenth-century America. The main plot follows Berens's German American heroine Erna as she encounters a panorama of American racial attitudes while struggling over her love for the light-skinned ex-slave Morrison. In spite of the unequivocal antiracism of Erna's decision to marry the presumably mixed-race hero, the last-minute revelation of his identity as Mexican American rather than African American retreats from interracial marriage in an apparent concession o turn-of-the-century racial thinking.