Indianthusiasm and Indigenous Contacts: A Very Personal German Perspective

ThisLutz, Hartmut essay explores Indianertümelei or IndianthusiasmIndianthusiasm, i.e., the GermanGermany fascination with “Indians” in general and with Karl May’s fictional character WinnetouWinnetou in particular. It is based on the author’s researches on racialRace stereotypingStereotype in American and German books on “Indians” as well as on half a century of personal involvement in Native American and Canadian First NationsFirst Nations, MétisMétis, and InuitInuit Studies. Following Indigenous scholarly protocols of personal accountability and storied experience, rather than abstract theorizing, the author describes how his naïve readings of NaziNazi author Fritz Steuben’s TecumsehTecumseh novels in his childhood “inoculated” him ideologically against romanticizingRomanticizing May’s Winnetou volumes later, which he found kitschy, stereotyping, colonialist, and as advocating the petit bourgeois values of the German Kaiserreich. Returning to Steuben’s Tecumseh novels as an adult reader later in his researches, he realized that Steuben’s books had openly advocated the most prominent fascistFascism principles for the education of German boys during the Nazi period: absolute obedience to a führer, “racial purity,” and military prowess. The essay follows the iconographic and narrative development of the Indianer stereotype from Columbus’s letters via CooperCooper, James Fenimore and May to the present. It shows how the cliché is functionalized politically and commercially, and how the stereotyped image distorts a European perception of Indigenous North Americans as contemporary citizens of the world. While the stereotypical Indianer is still celebrated today, there is an increasing number of artistic and scholarly interventions by Indigenous artists, authors, filmmakers, and intellectuals to help us deconstructDeconstruction and dismantle our Indianthusiasm.