This article investigates how early modern Germans observed, classified, and represented cultural, religious, and physical difference long before the emergence of modern racial thought, through proto-racial categories and practices of race-making. Using the
Historischer Wunder-Baum merckwürdiger Curiositäten
(1705) as a central case study, the article shows how encyclopaedic compendia organized knowledge about Indigenous peoples around the world, their practices and environments, while also reflecting on inherited medieval epistemologies and emerging classificatory logics. Beyond the
Wunder-Baum
, the study engages with travel accounts, botanical and pharmacological texts, maps, visual materials, and other encyclopaedias to trace patterns of ethnographic representation, othering, and categorization across early modern German contexts. In conversation with German studies, early modern global studies, history of science and knowledge, ethnography, and critical race studies, the article demonstrates how processes of classification and observation contributed to the development of proto-racial thought. I highlight the pre-modern roots of racial epistemologies and the
longue durée
of racial thought in German-speaking Europe, as well as the interplay between local and global knowledge networks.