page_title: Native Americans in German popular culture
section_title: Projections of sentiments
hierarchical_section_title: Native Americans in German popular culture / Background / Projections of sentiments
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. ADN-ZB / Pätzold / 3.7. 82 / Bez. Schwerin: 25. Indianistiktreffen Zum 25. "Indian Council 1982" trafen sich an der Ellerbäk bei Gadebusch rund 260 Mitglieder von Kulturgruppen für Indianistik aus allen Teilen der DDR. In der Republik widmen sich 31 Gruppen mit mehreren hundert Mitgliedern der Erkundung des Lebens der Indianer und deren vielschichtigen Kultur.
context_page_description: Native Americans in German popular culture are largely portrayed in a romanticized, idealized, and fantasy-based manner, that relies on historicised stereotypical depictions of Plains Indians, rather than the contemporary realities facing the real, and diverse, Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sources written by German people are also prioritised over those by Native American peoples themselves.
  Since the 18th century, this fascination with imaginary Native Americans has had specific influences on German popular culture, including Hitler, environmentalism, literature, art, historical reenactment, theatrical and film depictions of Indigenous Americans. Hartmut Lutz coined the term, Indianthusiasm, for this phenomenon. After the Second World War, Indianthusisam served as a way of coping with the guilt, and avoiding taking responsibility for, the Holocaust, through both escapism into a fantasy past and blame-shifting the burden of genocidal qualities onto the victors of World War II.
  In 1985, Lutz invented the term Deutsche Indianertümelei for the phenomenon.
context_section_description: H. Glenn Penny states a striking sense, for over two centuries, of affinity among Germans for their ideas of what American Indians are like. According to him, those affinities stem from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of "shared fate." In the 17th and 18th centuries, German intellectuals' image of Native American was based on earlier heroes such as those of the Greeks, the Scythians, or the Polish struggle for independence (as in Polenschwärmerei) as a base for their projections. The then popular recapitulation theory on the evolution of ideas was also involved. Such sentiments underwent ups and downs. Philhellenism, rather strong around 1830, faced a setback when the actual Greeks did not fulfill the classic ideals.
  Antisemitism and pro-Indian stances did not necessarily exclude each other in Germany. 
  In the 1920s, Anton Kuh's mockery of a contrast between Asphalt und Scholle (asphalt and clod), urban literature referred to metropolitan Jews and rural-inspired Heimatschutz writings.
  Much of German nationalism glorified ideas of "tribalism", using heroes of Germanic mythology and folklore such as Sigurd and Arminius, and attempting to position itself as an alternative role model to the colonial empires of the time (and the Roman past) by trying to convey the ideal of a colonizer loved by the colonized. After 1880, Catholic publishers had a specific role in publicizing Karl May's fictional Indian stories. The way May described Native Americans was seen as helpful to better integrate German Catholics, which were "a tribe on their own" and faced Kulturkampf controversies with the Protestant dominated authorities and elite. H. Glenn Penny's Kindred By Choice treats the image and changing role of masculinity connected to Indians in Germany besides a (mutually assumed) longing for freedom and a melancholy sense of shared doom.
  Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810) was among the Hessian mercenaries contracted by the British government for military service in Canada and wrote about his encounters with Native Americans in his autobiography. His admiration for naturality and a description of a Huron as a noble but sort of frank man is part of his poem "Der Wilde" (the savage) which became well known in Germany. Seume is also among the first to use the words "Canada" and Kultur (culture) in today's meaning in German. Seume's Huron has stereotypical characteristics used as well for Germanic people of old – he drinks mead and wears a bear skin and uses a sort of blunt didactic on an unfriendly European settler. Seume had actually met some Micmac, but in his poems he used tribe names with symbolic significance. Hurons (Wyandot people) stood in the contemporary poetry for the noble savage, Mohawks for the brute.
caption: East Germans at an Indianistikmeeting in Schwerin, 1982
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