Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800

Preface

xi Preface “Let me confess,” said Charlotte, “that when you call all these curious entities of yours affined, they appear to me to possess not so much an affinity of blood as an affinity of mind and soul.” —johann wolfgang von goethe Elective Affinities, 1809 This book began as an effort to explain the abundant references to American Indians in contemporary Germany as well as the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters in Indian country today. That explanation, I quickly realized, has deep roots. It turns around a striking sense of affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries, and which stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. It also has much to do with Germans’ historical interactions with the United States and the transnational world of German cultures that spread across the Atlantic during the nineteenth century—a world we too often forget. Germans’ affinities for American Indians were always elective. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many millions of Germans repeatedly chose to embrace a sense of kinship with American Indians that stemmed from affinities “of mind and soul.” At precisely the time when this process began, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe turned to the notion of elective affinities developed in the natural sciences to explain the tendency of some chemical species to combine with some substances rather than others. He drew on these scientific theories in order to explore the attractions and emotional connections between particular individuals. Later, scholars such as Max Weber drew on Goethe’s insights while seeking to understand relationships within and between human societies. Others, such as Walter Benjamin, critiqued them extensively.¹ xii Preface What Goethe and those who followed him most sought to understand were the shared dispositions revealed by elective affinities. That is also a central goal of this book. For behind those affinities lies an internal tension about the place of Germans in the modern world that ran across multiple generations and persisted through all the political regimes and the most radical ruptures in modern German history—from the early nineteenth century through the so-called Age of Extremes.² Scholarly efforts to engage the relationship between continuity and rupture in modern German history have long been plagued by teleologies. Most recently, for example, Helmut Walser Smith sought to expose the “profound roots” of what took place in Nazi Germany by sketching out the “chronological depth and the historical connections” of nation, race, and religion from the Nazi period back to the sixteenth century.³ However, as Alon Confino and Dieter Langewiesche astutely noted, Smith’s “narrow method” was so focused on revealing the historic roots of the National Socialist discourse of annihilation that it often ignored narratives and evidence that might call that putative continuity into question.⁴ A central problem with Smith’s project was his desire to reach back in time for the antecedents of a historic event and his willingness to label continuity what might better be thought of as repeated similarities, each of which had singular meanings defined by their particular contexts. To Confino’s mind, a preferable approach to the problem of continuities in German history would be to “conceive of German culture as made up of a repertoire of symbols and memories that were differently adapted, adopted, and changed as each generation chose certain elements within the constraints of the evolving tradition.”⁵ The first example he suggested, as someone who had written extensively on the topic, was the idea of Heimat, which persisted across the modern era, and which, as he and others have demonstrated, took up radically different resonances in different political eras.⁶ This book engages the problem of continuities and ruptures as well. For what began with an interest in Germans’ persistent fascination with American Indians ended with an appreciation for how analyses of consistent or persistent dispositions within German (and, by implication, other) cultures can inform our investigations of particular events. There is no question that Germans’ affinities for American Indians resonated differently within different historical contexts; but there is also no question that these affinities retained certain consistent characteristics that reveal persistent dispositions, moods, and attitudes within German cultures over a long period of time Preface xiii and across a geographic space that extended far beyond Germany’s national borders. Indeed...