Indians in German Literature
North American Indians have occupied the German imagination for at least five centuries. Native American tribes have served various purposes, responding to both cultural and emotional needs in Germany.
In the process of establishing a fictional “other” on the American continent, a number of stereotypes have evolved. For the most part, Indians are characterized as noble, spiritual beings who are perfectly in tune with nature. They embody pride, courage, and dignity. In addition, the most famous representatives of their kind usually form loyal brotherly bonds with heroic, adventurous immigrants from Germany. Nevertheless, contradictory traits emerged of the “bad” Indian as the wild, war- hungry, naked, promiscuous, evil, bloodthirsty “red devil.” These opposing features are introduced as dramatic elements to advance and thicken the narrative plot of adventure literature. German Indianerttimelei or “Indianthusiams” (Lutz 2002, 13) are marked by an exoticized, sympathetic, and idealized depiction of the ethnic “other.” As both ethnic groups are separated by an ocean, their interaction has been, for the most part, limited. Therefore, it was easy for Germans to imagine and perceive Indians as a noble but vanishing people. In the nineteenth century, the transatlantic fascination turned into a form of obsession with Indian culture. Native Americans became stylized as victims of ecological exploitation, sprawling urbanization, and self-serving court decisions. In Germany, escapist fantasies about Indians corresponded with growing political dissatisfaction and oppression at various times, ranging from absolutism to the geographic fragmentation in the wake of the Vienna Congress (1815) and Metternich’s restorative politics during the Vormdrz era. Even the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 did not bring about the cultural unity intellectuals had been fighting for since the French Revolution. After the trauma of two world wars in the twentieth century, literary accounts regarding Native American culture continued to support empathetic feelings with them as victims rather than with the perceived white oppressors. The popularity of Indians in German literature has even penetrated the German language with idiomatic sayings like ein Indianer weint nicht (an Indian does not cry) or ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz (an Indian does not feel pain).The roots of these (one-sided) elective affinities can be traced back to various artists and their literary products. The broad spectrum of cultural mediators includes early settlers, adventurers, scientists, novelists, authors of children books, and painters. While Karl May may seem to be the most influential, albeit cliche-ridden, cultural mediator in the reception history of German images of the American Indian, he was just one writer standing in a long line of ancestors that dates back to the late seventeenth century. Umbrella terms like Germans and Indians are problematic for German-speaking authors. They denominate people from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, and Alsace on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and more than 500 Indian nations on the western side of the ocean. Thus, both terms represent crude ideological and racial constructs.
Specific patterns of cultural encounters have been popularized by literature. The earliest German Indian encounters can be traced back to travel literature. The distinction between illustrative travel accounts and scholarly observations during expeditions is blurry. In the nineteenth century, two aspects stimulated the German fascination with Indians: First, a wave of German mass emigration between 1820 and 1850 produced a rich literary market for journalistic reports, letters, and adventure stories about Indian culture. Second, German translations of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (Die Pioniere, 1824) and The Last of the Mohicans (Der Letzte Mohikaner, 1824) triggered a flood of escapist literature that fed on the longings of those who wanted to emigrate or embark on journeys to far-off countries.
Additionally, many underprivileged people who were not able to break out of the feudal system were among the most devoted readers. Cooper’s books stimulated a romanticized outlook on American socioeconomic conditions and suggested adventurous encounters with the “other,” which for many Germans was synonymous with Indians like Chingachgook or Uncas.The beginning of Indian characters in German literature coincides with the establishment of scholarly disciplines concerned with the classification of cultural differences in the 1770s: Ethnographie, Volk- erkunde, and Ethnologie (ethnography, traditional, and modern ethnology). Along with this came the popular travel accounts that brought Native American culture to the attention of German readers. Well- documented expeditions were mounted by John Lederer, who was the first European to explore the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North America in 1670. Georg Wilhelm Steller explored the coast of Alaska in 1741 and 1742. Other expeditions were led by George von Langs- dorff in the early nineteenth century and Otto von Kotzebue to coastal Alaska from 1814 to 1818. Kotzebue was accompanied by the German poet Adelbert von Chamisso, who wrote a well-received book on the voyage entitled Reise um die Welt (Voyage around the World, 1836). Alexander von Humboldt’s prominent reports on his trips to North and South America aroused a new interest in exotic and unknown cultures. His authority on travel literature was used to market less scholarly but more dramatic accounts. Humboldt’s prefaces to Balduin von Mollhausen’s Tagebuch einer Reise vom Mississippi nach den Kusten der Sudsee (Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coast of the Pacific, 1858) and Reisen in die Felsengebirge Nord-Am.eri.kas bis zum Hoch-Plateau von Neu-Mexiko (Travels from the Rocky Mountains of North America to the High Plains of New Mexico, 1861) exemplify this successful marketing device. Prince Maximilian von Wied- Neuwied provided excellent ethnographic work on the upper Missouri, producing a detailed account of his travels between 1832 and 1834.
He set out to document the life of the Indian people before their unique culture was gone forever. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the German American anthropologist Franz Boas analyzed Indian languages and habits in a meticulous manner, thereby paving the way for a deeper understanding of Native American culture. With his concept of cultural pluralism came the abandonment of a hierarchical ranking of societies that passed moral judgments on different ethnic groups. In The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas insisted that the notion of difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man rested on unscientific prejudice. According to his anthropological fieldwork, there was no basis to connect race and personality.Among those who accompanied these expeditions were painters, illustrators, and photographers. Their visual records offered another stimulus for the imagination. These authentic images paved the way for fictitious book illustrations. The paintings of Charles Wimar, Albert Bierstadt, and Winold Reiss are remarkable examples of illustrations that in turn inspired other literary accounts and descriptions of Indian culture. Of particular interest are Karl Bodmer’s drawings for Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied’s travel accounts. Published under the title Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika (Travels in the Interior of North America, 1839) in German, the
work is still held in high esteem as containing some of the finest ethnographic records of the nineteenth century on American Indian culture. Authors like Heinrich Bal- duin Mollhausen or Friedrich Armand Strubberg even drew their own illustrations to heighten the level of authenticity within their fictional accounts, as the subtitle of Strubberg’s novel Amerikanische Jagd- und Reiseabenteuern aus meinem Leben in den westlichen Indianergebieten (American Hunting and Travel Adventures from My Life in the Western Indian Plains) suggests: mit 24 vom Verf. nach der Natur entworfe- nen Skizzen (Including 24 Illustrations by the Author Inspired by the Landscape, 1858).
Groundbreaking works in photography have been supplied by German Americans like John Hillers, Eugene Buechel, Frederick Weygold, Ulli Stelzer, Helga Teiwes, and Christine Turnauer. Pictures have always been an important inspiration for readers on book covers or as il-
Karl Bodmers drawing “M4to Tope, Mandan Chief’ (ca. 1840) served as a model for many German writers on American Indians. (New York Public Library)
lustrations for the stories. Expensive reprints of original editions with imaginative artwork are still a marketable product for publishers. Thus, accounts of travel to North America gave birth to a new national literary genre, the so-called Indianer- Roman (Indian novel).
In the wake of German translations of Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales and particularly The Last of the Mohicans in the early 1820s, fictional and nonfictional texts about Native Americans were booming. Among the large number of authors who wrote influential books on American Indians was Carl Postl, a former Moravian monk. After he escaped to the United States in 1823, Postl assumed the identity of Charles Sealsfield, claiming to be an American citizen. Due to many blank spots in his biography, he is still considered one of the most enigmatic writers of the nineteenth century. Under this American pseudonym he wrote popular novels on American life and the American Indians. His publications appeared in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, where he spent most of his time and produced the majority of his writings. In his first novel, Tokeah; or the White Rose (1829), he presents himself as a Jacksonian advocate of the Indian removal policy. In the tradition of captivity tales, the story follows the Indian chief Tokeah and his relationship with a young English man. Sealsfield accepts the Indians’ cause as lost and their removal to restricted territories as a necessity.
He translated and revised his book considerably for its publication in Germany under the new title Der Legitime und die Republikaner (The Legitimate One and the Republicans) in 1833. In the process of translation, the novel became “more American” (Sammons 1998, 30) as Tokeah’s heroic stature was diminished. The original description of the noble savage gradually loses its positive connotations as the story progresses. Instead, the struggle between the “legitimate” Indians and “the republicans” takes on overtones of the battle between the young democratic movement, which inspired the revolutionary freethinkers of the so-called Vormarz period in Germany, against the tyrannical aristocratic powers.Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen accompanied Paul Wilhelm of Wurttemberg on his trips to the United States in 1851, 1853, and from 1857 to 1858. He worked as a draftsman and topographer. His illustrations and diaries were published before he became a prolific writer on the Indians of North America. Mollhausen wrote nearly 200 books. Following Cooper’s moral separation of Indians into good and evil tribes, he produced his writings according to strict, but rather mechanical, patterns. This can be seen in his first fictional work written in Germany called Der Halbindianer (The Halfbreed, 1861). In his diary about travels to Mississippi he remarked cheerfully how the dreams of his youth inspired by Cooper and Washington Irving had come true. One of the crucial moments in the life of Mollhausen was his encounter with Indians. They rescued and nursed him after he was abandoned during an adventurous journey to the Rocky Mountains with Duke Paul Wilhelm on the wintry plain in the Nebraska Territory in late 1851. Working as an illustrator, he took part in various expeditions to Arkansas, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains, the West Coast, and the Grand Canyon during the following decade. Of particular value in recent studies on Native American culture have been his drawings and watercolors of Indians. After his return to Germany, he reworked his impressions in a number of Western novels of low literary quality.
Friedrich Gerstacker is among those German writers about Native Americans who may have had more firsthand encounters with Indians than any other German writer of fiction. Gerstacker launched a busy literary career beginning with his travel accounts. Popular adventure novels like Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (The Regulators in Arkansas, 1846) or Die Flusspi- raten des Mississippi (The River Pirates of the Mississippi, 1848) established him as one of the first German Western writers. Works such as Fritz Waldaus Abenteuer zu Wasser und zu Lande (1854, translated under the title Frank Wildman’s Adventures on Land and Water, 1855) contributed to his reputation as a writer of children’s literature. Gerstacker’s works reveal him to be an ordinary storyteller with a crude and superficial style. However, there are also strong motives in Gerstacker’s oeuvre that concern his efforts to counter romanticized fictional images of America. He successfully employed the pattern of Indian captivity tales, playing with variations on Catherine Maria Sedgewick’s Hope Leslie (1827). In Zivilisation und Wildniss (Civilization and Wilderness, 1848) Gerstacker describes a white man who grows up within an Indian tribe, adopting the Indians’ values and habits. When he is reunited with his white family, he cannot help feeling dislocated and finally decides to return to the Indian tribe. With a keen eye on the fate of the Indians, Gerstacker does not eliminate friction points of intercultural encounters. He addresses problems such as diseases that wiped out entire tribes (Die Rache des Weissen Mannes [The Vengeance of the White Man], 1846) or the jurisdictional problems Indians faced during the gold rush in California (Gold!, 1858). In his novels, Gerstacker is critical of aggressive behavior and policies against Indians, which he blames as the source of their degeneracy and loss of cultural identity.
During his formative years as an author on Indian culture, Karl May never wrote from firsthand experience. Like many of his contemporaries, such as Sophie Worishoffer (Auf dem Kriegspfad [On the Warpath], 1880), his depictions of Indians are imitative. His technique of recombining familiar elements often borders on plagiarism. May drew his information and inspiration from travel accounts, adventure books, paintings, and photographs. When he published his first fictional book on the Mescalero Apache chief Winnetou in 1893, public attention on German Indian encounters was extremely high. The newspaper Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily) financed to a large degree the expedition of anthropologist Franz Boas to the Inuit of Baffinland in 1883 and 1894. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show with seventy-two Indians received a great deal of media attention when it toured Germany in 1890. Shortly after this tour, a group of Indian people from South Dakota visited Germany, performing in traveling Wild West shows or as members of the Sarrasani Circus. While other writers moved away from Cooper’s plot design and depiction of Indian chiefs like Chingach- gook or Uncas, May reverted back to the standards of the early nineteenth century. Cooper’s hierarchy of virtues from the Mingos at the lower end to the Delawares at the upper end corresponds to May’s Kiowas and Apaches. The much-debated partnership between May’s noble Indian Winnetou and his German immigrant Old Shatterhand has been unmasked as a bond of unequal parties. This fictitious partnership paved the way for a racial discourse, which in retrospect seemed to support fascist ideas.
Hans Rudolf Rieder expressed in his introduction to the German translation of Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography (1929) the exoticism behind the German reverence toward Indians in a nutshell: “The Indian is closer to the German than to any other European. This is perhaps due to our partiality to the world of nature.... As young lads, however, we find in the Indian an example and a brother; later he remains one of our favorite memories and images of those years.” Thus, brotherhood and mutual affinities exist in ideology only. Ten years later, Rieder explains in his collection of stories Lager- feuer im Indianerland (Campfire in the Country of the Indians, 1939) that as a writer he fantasizes about Indian adventures by drawing on other literary sources. This ethno-cultural relatedness with its latent imperialist attitude was successfully utilized for propagandistic purposes when Adolf Hitler came to power. May’s fictional characters would serve as heroes who provided a code of honor for military leaders. In the wake of Hitler’s blessing of Indian fantasies, Fascist writers like Fritz Steuben and Franz Schauwecker translated National Socialist ideals such as the cultic reverence for leadership, the Aryan race theory, and social Darwinism into adventure stories. Historical figures like Pontiac, Sitting Bull, and particularly Tecumseh were utilized to engage in a battle against foreign oppressors with chauvinistic undertones. After 1945, authors like Gerhard Drabsch (Die Indianergeschichte [The Indian Man], 1965), Jurgen Misch (Der letzte Kriegspfad [The Last Warpath}, 1970), or Ursula Wolfel (Fliegender Stern [Flying Star], 1996) continued to construct myths of the exotic “other” rather than addressing issues of imperial conquest and postcolonial developments. In East Germany, Liselotte Welskopf-Hen- rich set out to write more realistic novels, like her three-volume epic beginning with Die Sohne der grossen Barin (The Sons of Great Mother Bear, 1951—1963), which dealt with the Dakota Indians. She moved away from stereotypes that culminated in May’s fiction and Steuben’s Fascist interpretation to focus increasingly on contemporary Dakota reality, such as in Stein mit Hornern (Stone with Horns, 1968) or Der siebenstufige Berg (The Seven-Steps Mountain, 1972).
The deeply felt identification of Germans with Native Americans lives on in so- called hobbyist groups. They organize meetings, dress up in Native American costumes, and imitate a lifestyle they read about in travel accounts and fiction books. In the wake of the Vietnam War, antiAmerican feelings sparked new interest in the activities of the American Indian movement as a means to criticize cultural practices of the self-proclaimed “policeman of the world.” Additionally, the German translation of Dee Brown’s best-selling book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Be- grabt mein Herz an der Biegung des Flusses, 1972) paved the way for literary efforts that followed a more realistic depiction of Native American history and culture. In the early twenty-first century, encyclopedias and Native American fiction find their way into German bookshops with a special focus on ecological aspects.
Frank Mehring
See also Bodner, Karl; Buffalo Bill; Chamisso, Adelbert von; Humboldt, Alexander von; Indian Captivity; Indian Films of the Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft; Langsdorff, Georg Heinrich von; May, Karl Friedrich; Mollhausen, Heinrich Balduin; Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Wurttemberg; Sealsfield, Charles; Strubberg, Friedrich August; Welskopf- Henrich, Liselotte; Wied-Neuwied, Maximilian Alexander Philipp Prinz zu
References and Further Reading
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Mans Indian. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
Brenner, Peter. Reisen in die Neue Welt. Die Erfahrung Nordamerikas in deutschen Reise- und Auswanderungsberichten des 19. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991.
Calloway, Colin G., Gerd Gemunden, and Susanne Zantrop, eds. Germans and Indians. Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska, 2002.
Feest, Christian F., ed. Indians and Europe. An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Aachen: Herodot, 1987.
Lance, Buffalo-Child Long. Langspeer. Hauptling Buffelkind. Eine Selbstdarstellung des letzten Indianers. Translated and edited by Hans Rudolf Rieder. Leipzig and Munich: List, 1929.
Lutz, Hartmut. Approaches. Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures. Augsburg: Wissner-Verlag, 2002.
Rieder, Hans Rudolf. Lagerfeuer im Indianerland. Erzahlungen aus den fruhen Tagen des Indianers. Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1939.
Sammons, Jeffrey L. Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.