Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte b. September 15, 1901; Munich, Bavaria d.June 16, 1979; Garmisch- Partenkirchen, Bavaria
East German author of Indian novels under the name of Liselotte Welskopf- Henrich, and scholar of classical studies under the name of Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf. She developed her rejection of the Eurocentric mode of thought through her scholarly studies of American Indian civilization and pre-∕ancient societies.
Her theory of writing was primarily derived from the cyclical quality of oral traditions. She had studied and questioned the Iliad and worked from firsthand experience with oral traditions. Welskopf’s early interest in antiquity and American Indians became evident in her teenage years (reading classical texts; despising Eurocentric, masculin- ist Indian novels). Liselotte Welskopf graduated with a doctorate from the University in Berlin in 1925.In Nazi Germany, Welskopf worked in the underground, helping Jews and concentration camp inmates, and organized the escape of an unknown man, her husband-to-be, Rudolph Welskopf. Those years are described in her semiautobio- graphical novels Jan und Jutta (1955) and Zwei Freunde (Two Friends, 1955). She also continued to work on her first American Indian novel, Die Sohne der Grossen Barin (Sons of the Great Bear Mother), published in 1951 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This version contains a simple hope for a communal future as a higher developed form of basic tribal society, derived from a cyclical, spiral notion of societal advancement (more highly developed form of basic tribal society). The novel takes place around the last Lakota uprising (1878) and concludes with the escape of a group to Saskatchewan. The main character, Tokei-ihto, reappears in Wel- skopf’s second set of five novels that take place on the Pine Ridge Reservation preceding the second battle at Wounded Knee in 1973. He is then renamed after John Okute, a family elder and author, whom Welskopf met in Saskatchewan.
Throughout her life, Welskopf’s active resistance was motivated by her shocked response to Stalinist Eastern Europe, the common German desire to repress its Fascist past, and the discrepancy between her ideals and reality. To the exterior world, she was an internationally renowned scholar and the author of American Indian novels that were translated into many languages. Due to her age, reputation, and status as an anti-Fascist, Welskopf was able to circumvent law and politics and use her international royalties to travel to North America and Europe in support of dissidents, American Indian protests in the United States, film director Chris Spotted Eagle, American Indian prison inmates, Pine Ridge Reservation residents, the so-called Indian traveling college that undertook the reintroduction and maintainance of American Indian cultures, and more.
With regard to novels about American Indians, she demanded that they not be used “like a coat hanger on which to hang adventure stories” as she repeatedly demanded in interviews and at conferences. and that they be written from the American Indian point of view. As so often, her research and fiction writing played off each other. Her investigation of the pre-graeco substrate of schole, which is an investigation of sources predating Greek society as they are rudimentarily preserved in cyclical narratives within the text of the Iliad, especially in the famous description of the shield, and the observation as well as conclusion of who was in leisure during certain festivities and activities, lead to the understanding that before the word schole came into existence there had to have been a form of “leisure” that included not just our more modern understanding of leisure but also the aspect of labor. Welskopf redefined the necessary unity of leisure under freedom and of upbringing and education with labor (distorted Western concepts), as it has been much more preserved in traditional cultures that was also evidence to comprehend life as a cyclical spiral as opposed to Christian/Eurocentric linearity.
This fundamental finding and conviction had been worked out in her professional area of expertise and has been not so much worked into her literature as it has been developed throughout her literature in cooperation with her real life learning among traditional people. It even influenced her understanding how contemporary upbringing and education should be harmonized and reconnected with “labor.”Welskopf rewrote her novel Die Sohne der Grossen Bar in into a cycle (a circular spiral form of oral tradition): the first book, substantially reworked, is now the last volume chronologically in a trilogy: Die Sohne der Grossen Barin (Tokei-ihto’s manhood, but in the context of a warrior’s life), Top und Harry (mostly adolescence, 1963), and Harka, der Sohn des Hauptlings (Harka, Son of the Wartime Chief, 1962). (She sued the DEFA film studios because they had adapted her first novel into a cowboy and Indian Western, except that the Indians were the “good guy” victims.) The cycle begins with Harka, living with his bear band of Teton Oglalas. They live in what appears to be the normal, harmonious cycle of life, only disturbed by nondisruptive aspects of disharmony but do not break the cycle. That changes during the years 1863 to 1878, due to interference by European civilization. Chief Mattotaupa is made drunk by Red Fox and, accused of having given away the secret of the gold in the Paha Sapa, he is banished from his band. His son follows him and witnesses Mattotaupa’s murder by Fox. As an outcast, Harka follows the fate of his people and others, repeatedly interacting with them but not allowed back. Eventually, through intervention by Totanka Yotanka and Tascunka Witko, Harka (also known as Stonehorn and now called Tokei- ihto) rejoins his band and people in the last stand against reservation imprisonment. He survives captivity. His closest friends and he lead the band towards Canada, taking the last gold from the Bear Mother’s cave in the Paha Sapa to buy land.
Before they can cross the Missouri, however, they are trapped by their pursuers led by Fox. In a last fight, Tokei-ihto revenges his father’s death. They escape, making sure that Tokei-ihto is believed dead because the pursuers suspect his knowledge of a gold cave. The bear had been killed by gold diggers, but the band takes her cub with them; that is, the origin of the people will not be lost. Throughout the cycle, the essential story of Stone Boy is told, mentioned, or retold. It is tied to the Lakota origin and land rights to the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, as testified to by Charlotte Black Elk at a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs on July 16, 1986. In Welskopf’s last five novels, the narrative is increasingly the one given by Black Elk. Another aspect develops in the novel cycle. Hawandschita, the secret keeper, loses trust in himself and cannot fulfill his role in oral culture. Tokei-ihto’s grandmother, a woman of special knowledge herself, grows into the role of the keeper of culture, continuing the upbringing and educating of the tribal youth. This significant role of an untschida as the protector and carrier of a people’s culture is continued in the reservation novels, in accordance with Welskopf ’s real-life observations regarding women, and especially older women on various reservations and on Pine Ridge in particular.The five volumes of Das Blut des Adlers (The Blood of the Eagle) appeared in chronological order from 1966 to 1980 (posthumously). Nacht uber der Prarie (Night over the Prairie, 1966), Licht uber weissen Felsen (Light over White Rocks, 1967), and Stein mit Hornern (Stone with Horns, 1968) are the first novels written after Welskopf ’s direct reservation experiences in Canada and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Embedded in a larger constellation of characters, the couple Tashina (Queenie) and Stonehorn (Joe King) present the center of telling about reservation reality from founding a school ranch to tribal rodeos, the return/purchase of the buffalo, the alcoholism of American Indians and whites, extreme hostility, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, political and legal injustice, high incarceration rates, and a high suicide rate among teenagers, but also includes small successes in the effort to develop an economic basis.
Stonehorn, released from prison, grows into the role model, hated by the bureau and puppet elders, but looked up to by others. Culture—tradition and religion—receives new impulses, especially by the untschidas. Okute, now over a hundred years old, returns to see the young Inya-he-yukan (Joe King ) and to pass onthe secret of the Great Bear Mother’s cave. The origin story, Stone Boy, Heyoka, sacred names, and anything that would be an anthropologist’s delight to use in an academic report is referred to by Welskopf in such a way that it is meaningfully mentioned in the right context but not exploited because it is not explored. However, for cultural insiders reading the books, a significant dimension is added. Furthermore, these books contain what are commonly considered to be features of crime and adventure. However, Welskopf insists that American Indians are not misused to create this effect, but that the reality—on Pine Ridge and other reservations and for urban Indians—forces various types of violence and suspense on her “characters” with shocking frequency.
In 1972 Welskopf’s fourth novel, Der siebenstufige Berg (The Seven Step Mountain), attained a new level. She had visited American Indians in Minneapolis and San Francisco, had met the later-murdered civil rights activist Pedro Bissonette, and had gone to Alcatraz and repeatedly to Pine Ridge. This novel is much less fiction than it is a historical/contemporary book about real events. Tashina and Inya-he-yukan are set aside for other characters. The hard-hitting reality includes forced sterilization of American Indian women, the growing threat of even more loss of land, increased violence in connection with this goal, and the growing resistance. Das Helle Gesicht (Ite-ska- wih/The Light Face, 1980) is the sum total of Welskopf’s experience and contacts with Pine Ridge, including her own interrogation by the FBI and Dicky Wilson’s goons (so- called guardians of the Oglala nation), the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, the standoff at Wounded Knee, the role of the American Indian movement, and the incarcerations, murders, and disappearances of others.
Among her closest connections were Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt of AIM, the writer Richard Erdoes, Elwa One-Feather, and a young German nurse on Pine Ridge. All of them and others have found their way into Wel- skopf ’s literary form of telling. (Her fictional couple is murdered off.) She did condense some of them into single characters and never used people’s actual names—not even the acronym AIM. The book is hardly a novel anymore. It certainly “lacks” the fluidity of adventure and received very little praise from critics. Welskopf ’s followers were a different matter. With her particular mission in mind, she organized as much support for AIM as possible. When she died, her son tried to contact most of her American Indian friends but many were on the run, in prison, or dead.Elsa Christian Muller
See also Indian Films of the Deutsch Film Aktiengesellschaft; Indians in German Literature; May, Karl Friedrich
References and Further Reading
Muller, Elsa Christina. A Cultural Study of the Sioux Novels of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. PhD thesis. University of Maryland, College Park, 1995.