Bildwechsel. Frühneuzeitliche Pocahontasillustrationen im deutsch-englischen Spannungsfeld

A series of German illustrated editions from a series of early English travel reports about the colony of Virginia has been published contemporarily through the copper engraver family de Bry/Merian. More important than even London, Frankfurt established itself as the primary distribution center for those engravings that would become formative for the imagination of the North American indigenous peoples. This connection has also been vital for the accounts and narratives concerning the Algonkin chieftain’s daughter Pocahontas (about 1595–1617) and her early iconography. Literary texts based on the imagination of fictionally expanded engravings that were produced after original watercolor paintings were first published in Germany in the 18th century. These texts predate the Anglo-American narrative tradition around this figure. Without direct contact to North American indigenous peoples themselves, early incarnations of a double theme simultaneously incorporating both the “barbaric” and the “noble savage” were developed in Germany based on this imagery.