Review of Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections Edited by Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemiinden, and Susanne Zantop

Authors

Peter Bolz, Ethnological Museum Berlin
Ann Davis, Berlin

Date of this Version

Summer 2003

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 193-97.

Comments

Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

DO GERMANS REALLY LOVE INDIANS?

"Of all Europeans, the German has the greatest love for the Indian." This 1939 quote from a German novelist, reproduced in the book's introductory chapter by Christian Feest, could serve as the motto for the 1999 conference ("Germans and Indians/Indians and Germans: Cultural Encounters across Three Centuries") held at Dartmouth College, from which this book evolved. The idea that Germans have a special affinity with Indians is a long-standing conviction that is, nonetheless, difficult to prove. But the converse, that Indians might have a special affinity for Germans, was disproven by the conference itself: only a few Native American scholars were found to take part. "Why, after all, should Native Americans be interested in Germans?" asks Susanne Zantop, herself a German, in the introduction. And so it was that German and American scholars from various disciplines had the conference almost entirely to themselves, with Native American participation limited to discussion periods. In order to include Native American voices in this publication, however, the editors have "framed" the volume with stories about Germans that appear in the works of Emma Lee Warrior (Peigan Blackfoot) and Louise Erdrich (of Ojibwa and German origin).

In his introductory essay, "Germany's Indians in a European Perspective," Feest provides an overview of Indian-related activities by Germans in America and in Germany, reaching far back into history because the fate of the Germanic tribes during Roman times has often been compared to that of the North American Indians. Further on in his essay, Feest argues-in contrast to other contributors to this volume-that people in different European countries identify similarly with Indians, the presumed special German affinity with Indians being above all a question of scholarly interest and publication activity, larger in Germany than other European countries. Feest is surely correct as long as the term "Indians" is used to describe only "real" Native Americans. But, as we shall see further on, fictional characters like Karl May's Winnetou have much deeper emotional resonance and are more commercially successful in German- speaking countries than in the rest of Europe.

The essays in the following section, "Historical Encounters," confirm Feest's view about the relationship between "real Germans" and "real Indians." In his historical overview, Colin Calloway discusses various themes, from "Germans in Indian Country" and "Show Indians in Germany" to "Indian Soldiers in Two World Wars," and comes to a similar conclusion when he writes: "Unlike the Spanish, French, British, or Americans, Germans did not enter Indian country as members of a colonizing nation, but they participated in the colonizing process .... [R]elations between Indian people and German people seem to have been not much different from those between Indians and other groups of Europeans" (77).

This idea is also expressed in "American Indians and Moravians in Southern New England," by Corinna Dally-Starna and William A. Starna, as well as in Liam Riordan's "'The Complexion of My Country': The German as 'Other' in Colonial Pennsylvania" and Russel Lawrence Barsh's "German Immigrants and Intermarriage with American Indians in the Pacific Northwest." Nowhere can it be seen that Germans behaved differently with Indians than did colonists or missionaries from other countries. But in "A Nineteenth-Century Ojibwa Conquers Germany," a fascinating essay on George Copway, Bernd Peyer notes that the Ojibwa statesman was greeted by the German delegation more enthusiastically than by others at the Third World Peace Congress, held in Frankfurt in August, 1850. Copway "consciously acted the part of the romantic noble savage in this controversial gathering" and was viewed by some critics "as a tractable symbol for the illusionary position of the entire peace movement" (148).