Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800

PART I: Origins and Transformations across the Nineteenth Century

25 part i Origins and Transformations across the Nineteenth Century In 1951 Hans Plischke’s From Cooper to Karl May set the stage for a half century of literary analysis. Presenting a genealogy of German authors of “ethnographic novels” set in Native America, he argued that romanticism led Germans to develop an interest in these books at the outset of the nineteenth century. They “took readers into the past, into the communal life of earlier times,” and “immersed them in natural landscapes.” James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, he explained, experienced particular success because of the quality of Cooper’s writing and the fact that “a weariness with European politics and society” had increased Germans’ interest in America and American Indians.¹ In turn, Cooper’s success generated a long series of German emulators, including Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker , Balduin Möllhausen, and ultimately Karl May. Plischke’s narrative was marked by their personalities, but it was driven by evaluations of accuracy and notions of authenticity as much as literary skills, and it took its most striking turn in the shift from travel narratives and novels based on romanticized experiences to the pulp fiction and fantastic tales epitomized by May. That trend, in his opinion, was corrected only during the interwar years, with authors such as Fritz Steuben, who ostensibly strove for authenticity, and the translation of autobiographical books by the Santee Sioux Charles Eastman, which became immediate classics in Germany.² 26 Origins and Transformations There is, however, a story behind Germans’ interests and eventual obsession with American Indians that informed the production, character, and reception of these novelists’ tales, but it remains obscured by such genealogies. For the German fascination with American Indians took shape within multiple , shifting contexts in both Europe and the United States: America and Native America witnessed radical transformations during the nineteenth century; political structures in German-speaking Central Europe shifted mightily during this period as well; and during the later third of the century, so too did relationships between Imperial Germany (founded in 1871) and the United States. At the same time, the astounding influx of millions of German immigrants into the United States during the middle third of the century led to the expansion of a German Kulturkreis (an uneven linguistic-cultural area) across the Atlantic and a concomitant increase in many Germans’ ease of movement within the United States and back and forth across the ocean. Consequently, as the next chapter shows, the production of ideas, notions , and beliefs about American Indians within this Germanophone world were not so much transnational (for they predated the creation of the German nation-state considerably) but transcultural: many of the most iconographic images of Native America, for example, were fashioned by Germans in America, or by German Americans on both sides of the Atlantic. Literature and art produced within the context of cultural expansion, however, were only part of the story. Indeed, by the end of the century, groups of American Indians themselves were traveling ever more frequently to Europe, helping to channel and shape the discourse on America and American Indians within Imperial, and later Weimar, Germany. As the German fascination with American Indians emerged and developed within these contexts, it nurtured notions of affinity between Germans and American Indians—especially Germans’ admiration for American Indian resistance. Those notions easily accommodated even the most violent clashes between members of these two conglomerate groups. Despite travelers’ importance to this discourse, Germans were not always outside observers of either American settler colonialism or American Indians’ efforts at resistance. Indeed, as chapter 3 makes clear, they could be both victims and perpetrators of the worst kinds of violence. But even the most terrible of those could be folded, sometimes quite quickly, into the German discourse on American Indians as it took shape in both Europe and the United States. Thus, those notions of affinity stemmed from neither Germans’ putative colonial fantasies nor some Germans’ experiences with harsh colonial realities. Rather they persisted in spite of those realities, and they owed much to many Origins and Transformations 27 German Americans’ often-antagonistic relationships with their Anglophone counterparts in the United States, as well as the vision of “the Yankee” that took shape in German-speaking Central Europe. Shifting cultural contexts, the end of the “Indian Wars,” even radical transformations of the American landscape could be accommodated as well—although they left traces. In...