Since the 18th century, Native Americans have been a topic of fascination in German culture, inspiring literature, art, film and historical reenactment, as well as influencing German ideas and attitudes towards environmentalism. Hartmut Lutz coined the term Indianthusiasm for this phenomenon.German professor lectures on his country's "Indianthusiasm", by Darlene Chrapko Sweetgrass Writer, Volume: 19 Issue: 12 Year: 2012, Aboriginal Multi-Media Society AMMSA CanadaLutz, Hartmut: "German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth" in: Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemnden, Susanne Zantop, Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 2002, .
These Native Americans are largely portrayed in a romanticized, idealized, and fantasy-based manner, that relies on historicised, stereotypical depictions of Plains Indians, rather than the contemporary realities facing the real, and diverse, Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sources written by German people, for example, Karl May, are prioritised over those by Native American peoples themselves.
In 1985, Lutz invented the term Deutsche Indianertümelei ("German Indian Enthusiasm") for the phenomenon.Watchman, Renne, Lutz, Hartmut & Strzelczyk, Florence Indianthusiasm, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2020 p.12 The phrase Indianertümelei is a reference to the German term Deutschtümelei ("German Enthusiasm") which mockingly describes the phenomenon of celebrating in an excessively nationalistic and romanticized manner Deutschtum ("Germanness"). It has been connected with German ideas of tribalism, nationalism and Kulturkampf.
Background
Projections of sentiments
H. Glenn Penny states a striking sense, for over two centuries, of affinity among Germans for their ideas of what American Indians are like. According to him, those affinities stem from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of "shared fate."University of Iowa entry Penny, H. Glenn, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: U of North Carolina, 2013, . In the 17th and 18th centuries, German intellectuals' image of Native Americans was based on earlier heroes such as those of 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 involved.Saul, Nicholas, Schwellen: germanistische Erkundungen einer Metapher, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999, . Such sentiments underwent ups and downs. Philhellenism, rather strong around 1830, faced a setback when the actual Greeks did not fulfill the classic ideals.Zimmermann, Tanja, Der Balkan zwischen Ost und West: Mediale Bilder und kulturpolitische Prägungen, Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2013, , p. 29
Antisemitism and pro-Indian stances did not necessarily exclude each other in Germany. In the 1920s, Anton Kuh's mockery of a contrast between Asphalt und Scholle (asphalt and clod), urban literature referred to metropolitan Jews and rural-inspired Heimatschutz writings.
Much of German nationalism glorified ideas of "tribalism", using heroes of Germanic mythology and folklore such as Sigurd and Arminius, and attempting to position itself as an alternative role model to the colonial empires of the time (and the Roman past) by trying to convey the ideal of a colonizer loved by the colonized. After 1880, Catholic publishers had a specific role in publicizing Karl May's fictional Indian stories. The way May described Native Americans was seen as helpful to better integrate German Catholics, which were "a tribe on their own" and faced Kulturkampf controversies with the Protestant dominated authorities and elite. 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.
Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810) was among the Hessian auxiliaries contracted by the British Crown 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 man is part of his poem "Der Wilde" (the savage) which became well known in Germany.Germany and the Americas: O–Z, Thomas Adam, ABC-CLIO, 01.01.2005, p. 968 Seume is also among the first to use the words "Canada" and Kultur (culture) in today's meaning in German.
Seume's Huron has stereotypical characteristics used as well for Germanic people of old – he drinks mead and wears a bear skin and uses a sort of blunt didactic on an unfriendly European settler.Puszkar, Norbert, "Johann Gottfried Seume's 'Der Wilde'. Homely/Unhomely Encounters in the Wilderness", Lessing Yearbook 2008/2009, American Lessing Society Seume had actually met some Mi'kmaq, 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
The German Empire saw the rise of the German youth movement, especially the Wandervogel, as an antimodern culture criticism.Howard Paul Becker. German Youth: Bond or Free. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Detailed history and sociology of the various aspects of the youth movement. OCLC 2083809 In 1998, Routledge reprinted this work as Volume 8 of its International Library of Sociology and The Sociology of Youth and Adolescence series. OCLC 761549797 The German image of Indians again 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. Austrian Christian Feest attributes the popularity of the Indian in the German youth movement to the then all-European impact of late-19th-century human zoos.Feest, Christian, ed. (1989). Indians and Europe. An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Aachen: Rader Verlag / Edition Herodot. .
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,Donald B. Smith, "KAHGEGAGAHBOWH", in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2003–, accessed 25 September 2014. 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 Copway 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's European shows in 1890 and between 1903 and 1907 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.
Karl May
A strong influence on the German imagination of Native Americans is the work of Karl May (1842–1912), who wrote various novels about the American Wild West which relied upon, and further developed, this romantic image.Lehman, Will: Cultural Perspectives on Film, Literature, and Language, Margit Grieb Universal-Publishers, 2010, p.115 May is among the most successful German writers.Perry, Nicole (McGill University Department of German Studies). "Karl May's Winnetou: The Image of the German Indian. The Representation of North American First Nations from an Orientalist Perspective" (Archive). August 2006. - Info page , about 200 million copies of May's novels have been sold, half of them in Germany.According to Karl-May-Gesellschaft e. V. He is among the most popular authors of formula fiction in the German language.Stoehn, Ingo Roland: German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism, Boydell & Brewer, 2001, p.19 These specifically German fantasies and projectionsColin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, Susanne Zantop (ed.): Germans and Indians. Fantasies, encounters, projections. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 2002, . about Indianer have influenced generations of Germans. Indianer refers to Native Americans in the United States, and also to natives of the Pacific, Central and Latin America, and "Red Indians" in the stereotypical sense.
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).
Karl May never visited America, or had any direct contact with Native American people, before he wrote these influential works. May drew 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..
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 meantime. 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. A parodistic adaptation of the genre, the 2001 comedy Der Schuh des Manitu, was among the biggest box office hits in Germany.InsideKino: Die Wahrheit über "Der Schuh des Manitu" 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
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.Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise. Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs. Herausgegeben von Robert Müller anno 1915. Hugo Schmidt, München 1915. Reprints 2007: , Reclam 1993 Igel-Verlag 1991 & 1992