Native Americans in German popular culture

Interessengemeinschaft Mandan-Indianer, Leipzig 1970; Indian reenactment was quite popular in communist East Germany

Indianer by August Macke

The traditional positive popular image of Native Americans in Germany had specific influences on folklore, literature, art, historical reenactment and theatrical and film depictions in Germany. It interacted with German-Americans' experiences and relations between Germany and the United States in general. While it involves some aspects of the classical European image of "Red Indians" as noble savages, there are specific German peculiarities which involve all sections of the political spectrum. Hartmut Lutz coined the term "Indianthusiasm" for the phenomenon.

Karl May (1842–1912), with sales of more than 50 million copies regarded among the most popular author (of Formula fiction) in the German language used, influenced and enhanced the image. May wrote various novels about the American Wild West. Specifically German fantasies, encounters, and projections. about Indianer (a term that refers to Native Americans but also to natives of the Pacific, Central and Latin America and "Indians" in the stereotypic sense) have influenced generations of Germans, in mainstream popular culture until leading National Socialists or Communist and socialist intellectuals.

Background

Projections of sentiments

East German reenacters at an Indianistikmeeting in Schwerin, 1982

H. Glenn Penny sees a striking sense of affinity for American Indians in Germany over two centuries. According to him, those affinities stem from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Already in the 17th and 18th centuries, German intellectuals' image of the alien (Native American) was based on earlier heroes. Counter movements to Biedermeier and other restoration tendencies always were on the outlook for suitable role models. They used the Greeks, the Scythians, or the Polish struggle for independence (as in Polenschwärmerei) as a base for their projections. The then popular recapitulation theory on the evolution of ideas was also used. Such sentiments underwent ups and downs. Philhellenism, rather strong around 1830, faced a setback when the actual Greeks did not fulfill the classic ideals.

Hartmut Lutz tried to explain why antisemitism and pro-Indian stances did not necessarily exclude each other in Germany. He agrees with the notion about German tribalism, using Germanic heroes such as Sigurd and Arminius as a base for German nationalism and an alternative role model of a colonizer loved by the colonized. Anton Kuh's mockery of the German 1920s contrast between Asphalt und Scholle (asphalt and clod), urban literature and rural-inspired Heimatschutz writings, applies as well to the different approaches. Lutz and others refer as well to the specific role of Catholic publishers in publicizing Mays Indian stories 1880. The way Mays described Native Americans was seen as helpful to better integrate German Catholics, which were "sort of tribal" on their own and just had undergone Kulturkampf, controversies with the Protestant dominated authorities and elite.

Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810) was among the Hessian mercenaries contracted for military service in Canada and wrote about his encounters with Native Americans in his autobiography. His admiration for naturality and a description of a Huron as a noble but sort of frank (and insofar quite German) man is part of his poem "Der Wilde" (the savage) which became well known in Germany. Seume is also among the first to use the words "Canada" and Kultur (culture) in today's meaning in German. There are some similarities between his and Scottish (self)-projections, which compared Indian tribes with Scottish clans and their fight with the English. Seume's Huron has stereotypical German(ic) characteristics: he drinks mead and wears a bear skin and uses a sort of blunt didactic on an unfriendly European settler. Seume had actually met some Micmac, but in his poems he used tribe names with symbolic significance. Hurons (Wyandot people) stood in the contemporary poetry for the noble savage, Mohawks for the brute.

Wandervogel and youth movement

A group photo of Circus Sarrasani Sioux on board the steamship Westphalia

Grave of Edward Two-Two in Dresden

The German Empire saw the rise of the German youth movement, especially the Wandervogel, as an antimodern culture criticism. The German image of Indians did not care much about actual Native Americans and their current situation. It projected German beliefs and dreams about a bucolic past onto them. Authenticity, living free and close to nature, was among those aims. It closely interacted with outdoor meetings, games, songs and even commercial Wild West-Shows, as by Buffalo Bill and other various media. The Austrian Christian Feest doubts a specific German heritage and attributes the popularity of the Indian in the German youth movement of this period to the all-European impact of late-19th-century human zoos.

The first actual Indians came to Germany in the 19th century. Kah-ge-ga-ga-bow, an Ojibwa born in 1819, baptized as Reverend George Copway, took part in the 1850 World Peace Congress at St. Paul's Church, Frankfurt am Main. The image of the warrior turned Christian went down well with the public and Conway became a media star in Germany. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recommended him to the leftist poet Ferdinand Freiligrath.

Other Native Americans arrived with human zoos and took part in shows in zoological gardens and circuses. In 1879 Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) engaged among others some Iroquois for a show in Dresden. Painter and author Rudolf Cronau, a personal friend of Sitting Bull, invited members of the Hunkpapa Lakota, who came to Europe in 1886. Buffalo Bill shows in 1890 and 1903–1907 in Europe involved several hundred Indians and were quite popular in Germany. Edward Two-Two, a Lakota-Sioux, worked at the Sarrasani circus in Dresden in 1913/14 and was buried there in 1914 according to his wishes.

Peter Bolz, the former curator of the Indian department of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, one of the largest collections of Native American artifacts in the world, sees a striking lack of interest in actual Indians and their issues in Germany.

• 
  Karl-May-Spiele, Bischofswerda: Winnetou and Old Shatterhand in the "blood brothers" bonding scene
• 
  Mary Kim Titla, an actual Apache politician
• 
  Karl-May-Spiele Bischofswerda: German actors playing Apaches

Karl May

Villa Bärenfett Radebeul, entrance to the Indian collection

Main article: Karl May

May (1842–1912) is among the most successful German writers. As of 2012, about 200 million copies of May's novels have been sold half of them in Germany. Karl May found admirers among such different personalities as Ernst Bloch, Peter Handke and Adolf Hitler, but has almost no presence in English-speaking countries. His most famous books, mainly about the Wild West with a fictional Apache, Winnetou, among the main characters, were at first deemed 19th-century pulp fiction. Winnetou was described by some as an apple Indian (outside red, inside white). May draw his inspiration among other sources from Balduin Möllhausen, who had traveled in the Rocky Mountains in 1850 with Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, and George Catlin's reports, which were popular in Germany.

Villa Shatterhand in Radebeul, Saxony hosts the Karl-May-Museum and in its backyard, a log cabin called Villa Bärenfett (bear fat villa) with an exhibition about Red Indians. Author, adventurer, artist, curator and acrobat Ernst Tobis alias Patty Frank (1876–1959) founded this leading collection of Native American artifacts in Germany and took care of them till his death. He led hundreds of thousands of visitors through the collection. Gojko Mitić became famous playing Red Indians in various films for the East German company DEFA, such as The Sons of Great Bear, and was popular in the Eastern bloc. The Karl May festivals (in East and West Germany) gain interest by real Indian guests and partners in the meanwhile. In 2006 the cultural authority of the Mescalero Apaches and the Karl-May-Haus in Hohenstein-Ernstthal made an agreement to cooperate. Films based on May's Winnetou novels were shot from 1962 to 1968, starring Pierre Brice. One of the parodistic adaptations of the genre, the comedy Der Schuh des Manitu, was among the biggest box office hits in Germany. Bravo, Germany's largest teen magazine, awards an annual prize, the Bravo-Otto, in the form of a classic Karl May Indian.

Spiritual and esoteric aspects

Winnetou book cover, 1898

At the end of the 19th century, there was a widespread notion of a coming new humanity, building on then-current esoteric myths such as those of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner as well as on popularly accepted philosophy such as Nietzsche's Übermensch. May was no esoteric, but a devout (Protestant) Christian, published by Catholic publishing houses. He used Winnetou and other protagonists (Winnetou's mentor Klekih-Petra, a former German 48er, became a member of the Apache tribe) less as 'apple Indians' than as personifications of his dream of a German-Native American synthesis based on shared Christian faith. According to Mays' vision "in place of the Yankees, a new man will emerge whose soul is German-Indian". This approach is found both in his later novels, such as Winnetou IV, and in public speeches, such as his last speech, given in 1912 and titled "Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen" (Ascend to the empire of noble men).

Austrian novelist Robert Müller's 1915 Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise. Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs (Tropics, The myth of travel) is an important early example of a German exotic novel. Here, as in May, the Indians are not just projections of what white Europeans had been (in a mere racist outline of unilineal evolution), but also of what they should be in the future, on a higher level.

Role of the noble warrior image

US Screaming eagle paratroopers in Iroquois styling, England, June 1944

The romantic image of the seasoned warrior took a special hold on Wilhelminian Germany; phrases that originated in this period such as "An Indian knows no pain" (Ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz) are still in use today for example to console children at the dentist's.

In World War I, about 15,000 Native Americans went to war with Allied forces from Canada and the USA. Both their own comrades and the enemy shared the image of them as a "vanishing race" but with a strong warrior spirit. German soldiers feared Indian snipers, messengers and shock troops and the Allied troops were already then using Indian languages via "windtalkers" to encode open communication. WWI propaganda quoted a Cherokee soldier Jo Fixum with stereotypical language features.

[Kaiser Wilhelm II] killum papoose und killum squaw, so Jo Fixum will find this Kaiser and stickum bayonet clear through. Ugh!

— Britten, p. 100

World war II saw 101st Airborne Division paratroopers playing on the image with mohawk hair cuts and war paint.

Johnny Cash's ballad of Ira Hayes became famous in Germany too. Like Cash himself, who had been a GI in Bavaria, soldiers formerly or currently based in Germany play an important role in German - Native American relations. Nearly half of the chieftains of Indian nations are former soldiers. The Native American Association of Germany (NAAoG) was founded 1994 in Kaiserslautern, alias K-town, in close connection to the neighboring large US Army base. Artist Jimmie Durham founded Incomindios Switzerland, an NGO acknowledged by the UN.

H. Glenn Penny's Kindred By Choice treats the image and changing role of masculinity connected to Indians in Germany besides a (mutually assumed) longing for freedom and a melancholy sense of shared doom.

"Indianthusiam" and politics

Rathen Open Air Stage had a völkisch origin

Willy Michl, self-described Isar Indian, Munich, 2010

Czech Indians in a kohte, 30th anniversary of the Triptis Indianistik meeting, 1988

There was a widespread cultural passion for Native Americans in Germany throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. "Indianthusiasm" contributed to the evolution of German national identity. Imagery of Native Americans was appropriated in Nazi propaganda and used both against the US and to promote a "holistic understanding of Nature" among Germans, which gained widespread support from various segments of the political spectrum in Germany. The connection of anti-American sentiment and sympathetic feelings toward the underprivileged but authentic Indians is common in Germany, and it was to be found in both Nazi propagandists such as Goebbels and left-leaning writers such as Nikolaus Lenau as well. During the German Autumn in 1977, an anonymous text by a leftist Göttinger Mescalero spoke positively of the murder of German attorney general Siegfried Buback and used the positive image of Stadtindianer (Urban Indians) within the radical left.

Karl May festivals in the Nazi Regime

In 1938 the first outdoor Karl May festivals took place at the Rathen Open Air Stage. The open-air theatre was laid out in 1936, inspired by the ideas of the Thingspiele movement, which was active in the early stages of the Nazi regime. The Thingspiele movement failed in staging neopagan and Nordic mythical aspects of the völkisch movement, while May's all-Christian legends found more approval with the mainstream.

Communist interpretations

The Communist East German government had major problems with the mixed heritage of May's works: his strong Christian leanings and his broad support, including on the political right. His books were not available for a long time, and "indianistic" reenactors were closely monitored by the security forces. The Communist authorities tried to integrate the movement into the socialist world view. Some of the communist classics, such as Karl Marx' friend and sponsor Friedrich Engels, had used Native American tribal structures as examples for theories on family, private property, and the state. Engels contributed to the controversy about whether the native American tribes actually had a notion of private property before the Columbian age. Even more strangely, Indianerenthusiasm is also being found in Russia.

In West Germany May's heritage was less problematic; both the books and the festivals were soon copied and reprinted. The Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg overtook its predecessor in Rathen, as the GDR officials discontinued the tradition there.

Going redface as cultural treat

Germans still have an easygoing approach to using blackface or redface; there is a varied and continuing tradition of temporarily immersing oneself in different customs that is part of Carnival. Indianerhobby reenactment or living history is in effect part of German folklore. The "cult" goes beyond Karl May and aims at a high level of authenticity. This sort of "second-hand folklore" is an alternative way of dealing with Americanization, "anti-Imperialism", and popular ethnology.

The background in human zoos (Völkerschau in German) and the first Western movies is still vivid as well in "Cowboy and Indianer" children games. Americans have harshly critized e.g. Heidi Klum's Germany's Next Topmodel show's German photoshoot of (predominantly white) candidates dressed in Native American garb.

The harsh condemnation by Marta Carlson, a Native American activist, of Germans for getting pleasure from "something their whiteness has participated in destroying", is not shared by others. As with Irish or Scottish immigrants, the "whiteness" of German immigrants was not a given for WASP Americans. Both Germans and Native Americans had to regain some of their customs, as a direct heritage tradition was no longer in place. It is however still somewhat disturbing for both sides when German hobby Indians meet Native German enthusiasts. There are allegations of plastic shamanism versus mockery about Native Americans excluding non-Indians and banning alcohol at their events. German (and Czech) hobbyists' concept of multiculturalism includes the inaleniable right to keep and drink beer in their tipis or kohtes.

The Federal Republic experienced some aspects of an idealized Indian image during the Protests of 1968 and the related generation and in the founding phase of Die Grünen and NGOs like Greenpeace, which have a strong influence in Germany. Cultural critics tended to depict Indians positively to criticize Western society while conflicts of and with actual Native Americans over issues such as fur hunting, slavery, forest fire triggering, non-sustainable practices such as buffalo jumps, seal clubbing and whaling were neglected. The positive image, however, also influenced the self-image of actual Indians.

Literature and art

Karl Bodmer, Horse Racing of the Sioux (c. 1836)

German-American painter Albert Bierstadt's Sketch for The Last of the Buffalo 1888

Louis Maurer, 1895 Great Royal Buffalo Hunt

The specific image of Indians originated earlier than May's writings. Already in the 18th century a specific German view on the fate of Native Americans can be found in various travel reports and scientific excursions.

Philipp Georg Friedrich von Reck (1710–1798) traveled to Massachusetts and Georgia in 1733/34 and saw the Muskogee nation.

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales were admired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and still are among the German youth literature classics. In 1815–18, the poet Adelbert von Chamisso took part in a tour around the world led by Otto von Kotzebue and met native people in Latin and Northern America.

Christian Gottlieb Prieber, a lawyer and political utopian from Zittau, emigrated to North America in 1735 and lived with the Cherokee in Tennessee. He tried to build a society based on his ideals but was imprisoned in 1743 and died in prison in 1745.

Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, a nobleman and scientist, traveled from 1815 to 1817 to Brazil and from 1832 to 1834 to North America, accompanied by the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. Bodmer's portraits of North Dakota, Ohio River and Missouri River Indians includes among others Blackfoot, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw. His sketches and paintings are part of Prince Maximilian's travel report book Reise im Inneren von Nordamerika (1844) and can be seen at the Nordamerika Native Museum (NONAM) in Zurich and in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

Karl Postl (1793–1864) wrote various novels about his experiences in the US between 1823 and 1831, using the pseudonym Charles Sealsfield. Similarly to Friedrich Gerstäcker, he wrote about Tecumseh and provided a more realistic picture than previous authors. Fritz Steuben's Tecumseh novels were bestsellers in the 1930s. After some Nazi allegations had been erased, the novels were reprinted – and sold well again – in the 1950s.

Painter and ice skater Julius Seyler (1873–1955) lived in Montana and depicted Blackfeet (Three Bear, Eagle Calf, Bear Pipe Man, etc.) and sacred locations such as the Chief Mountain. Early modern painters inspired by Native Americans include August Macke, George Grosz, Max Slevogt and Rudolf Schlichter.

Klaus Dill (1922–2000) was a well known illustrator of German books about Native Americans.

The descendants of the founders of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg in Texas claim that their peace treaty with the local natives, the Meusebach–Comanche Treaty of 1847, has never been broken. However, German immigrants underwent less of a close synthesis and interaction than, for example, Scottish Americans, with some notable exceptions such as Ben Reifel.

Princess Theresa of Bavaria, a natural scientist, Bavarian princess and eager traveler, visited the US in 1893 and published papers on her research about the Puebloan peoples. Her collection of Indian artefacts and art is in the Museum Five Continents in Munich. Bavarian world music artist and blues legend Willy Michl described himself as an "Isar Indian".

Prominent German-Americans with a certain role in image-building of Native Americans include the painters Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Louis Maurer (1832–1932). Important contribution in the humanities include anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Native American Renaissance writer Louise Erdrich (born 1954).

Franz Kafka's short short story (just one sentence) "Wish to become an Indian" (Wunsch, Indianer zu werden) was published in 1913.

Wenn man doch ein Indianer wäre, gleich bereit, und auf dem rennenden Pferde, schief in der Luft, immer wieder kurz erzitterte über dem zitternden Boden, bis man die Sporen ließ, denn es gab keine Sporen, bis man die Zügel wegwarf, denn es gab keine Zügel, und kaum das Land vor sich als glattgemähte Heide sah, schon ohne Pferdehals und Pferdekopf. (If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one's spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse's neck and head would be already gone.)

— Franz Kafka,

Further reading

• Friedrich von Borries / Jens-Uwe Fischer: Sozialistische Cowboys. Der Wilde Westen Ostdeutschlands. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-12528-1 (www.sozialistische-cowboys.de about the 'socialist cowboys' in the GDR)
• Gerd Gemunden, Colin G. Calloway, Susanne Zantop: Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 2002, ISBN 978-0803264205
• Ulrich van der Heyden: Eine unentdeckte Nische der DDR-Gesellschaft: Die "Indianistikszene" zwischen "antiimperialistischer Solidarität" und Verweigerung, in: Kultursoziologie. Aspekte – Analysen – Argumente, Nr. 2, Leipzig 2002, S. 153–174, about the GDR Indianistik scene
• Pamela Kort and Max Hollein (ed.): I like America. Fiktionen des Wilden Westens. Katalog der Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. München: Prestel, 2006. dnb entry and catalogue.
• H. Glenn Penny: Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800, UNC Press Books, 12.08.2013
• Hans-Peter Rodenberg: Der imaginierte Indianer. Zur Dynamik von Kulturkonflikt und Vergesellschaftung des Fremden, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. (The imaginated Indian)
• Frank Usbeck
  • 'Fellow Peoples.'The Influence of the German Image of Indians on German National Identity and its Appropriation by National Socialism in German Periodicals 1925-1945, Doctorate' Berghahn, New York.
  • "Germans, Indians, and the Forest. The German Oak as Link between Cultures", Historiker-Tagung der DGfA, Tutzing, 2.-4. Feb. 2009.
  • "Fellow Peoples. The German Affinity for American Indians", American Studies in International Perspective, Creighton College, Omaha, Nebraska, Oct. 2007.

External links

• Melissa Eddy, "Lost in Translation: Germany's Fascination With the American Old West", The New York Times, August 17, 2014
• Noemi Lopinto, Albertra Views, "Der Indianer: Why do 40,000 Germans spend their weekends dressed as Native Americans?", Utne Reader, May–June 2009
• Red Haircrow, "Germany's Obsession With American Indians Is Touching—And Occasionally Surreal", Indian Country Today Media Network, March 23, 2013