A new day, a new online debate on the subject of “Cancel Culture”. Outrage erupted on Twitter after German publisher Ravensburger announced it was dropping two children’s books, a sticker book and a jigsaw puzzle.
The books were inspired by the wild west stories of the hugely popular and increasingly controversial German writer Karl May (1842-1912). It follows the childhood of May’s most famous hero: the fearless Apache Winnetou, a fictional Native American chief. He appeared for the first time in 1875 and his adventures have been narrated in numerous novels. May’s books have sold around 200 million copies worldwide – there are also several films and even an animated series.
The new books were published to accompany the film “The Young Chief Winnetou”, which was released in German cinemas on August 11th. Meanwhile, there are also demands to discontinue the film, among other things because of redfacing.
The recently released children’s film “The Young Chief Winnetou” has also been criticized
Citing the “many negative reactions” surrounding the books’ “romanticized” and “clichéd” portrayal of Native Americans, Ravensburger Verlag dropped the titles from its program and apologized if it hurt anyone’s feelings.
The reactions were not long in coming. Since then, “#Winnetou” has been trending online – with the majority of users grumbling – entirely in line with the German tabloid “Bild”, which claims to recognize an “awakened hysteria” that “burns our childhood heroes at the stake”.
Germany’s passion for the Wild West
Behind the online anger lies Germans’ transfigured love for a romanticized Wild West – an affection that can be traced directly to Karl May and his idealized depiction of 19th-century America.
May’s characters – the noble, heroic Winnetou and his “blood brother” Old Shatterhand, an immigrant German surveyor – are as anchored in Germany as the characters from Grimm’s fairy tales.
You can find Winnetou books and records in almost every household. Films made in the 1960s based on Karl May’s books are still regularly shown on television today. There are Karl May festivals and theme parks across the country.
The performances in Schleswig-Holstein’s Bad Segeberg and the adjoining “Indian Village” are particularly popular. Around 250,000 people come here every year.
Many see the unreflected presentation as a problem. They criticize May’s vision of Native American culture as little more than a kind of naïve utopia and practical fiction that ignores the grim truths about the genocide of indigenous peoples by white settlers. Another argument becomes relevant here: Karl May, as a white man, wrote about a culture of which he had no first-hand knowledge.
May visited America only once, having already been a successful novelist – and never went further west than New York.
The Winnetou films, including the most recent ones, all feature white actors and actresses in the roles of the aborigines. The most famous Winnetou is Pierre Brice, a Frenchman who played the Apache chief in nearly a dozen films from 1962 to 1968, at the Karl May Festivals in Elspe and Bad Segeberg, and in a television series in the 1980s.
The cliché of the “noble savage”
Ravensburger Verlag took the books off the shelves because these new editions also served the colonial cliché of the “noble savage” – especially Winnetou.
May’s natives are not real people, the critics argue, but idealized, almost magical figures whose main task is to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the white protagonist.
Blood Brothers: Pierre Brice as Winnetou and Lex Barker as Old Shatterhand
After all, Karl May did not follow the then-current depiction of “wild Indians” and “civilized cowboys”, but instead portrayed indigenous Americans (at least Winnetou and his friends) as heroes and white settlers mainly as villains.
The historian and indigenous researcher Hartmut Lutz is a harsh critic of Karl May. Nonetheless, in his 2020 book Indianthusiasm, he acknowledges that the author’s escapist fantasies sparked interest in indigenous culture in Germany and inspired generations of German academics to discover the truth behind the stories.
More authentic insights into the reality of life
Anyone who wants a more realistic look at Native American life should watch Reservation Dogs, a hilarious series about teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. Indigenous people stand in front of and behind the camera. Or watch the sci-fi thriller “Night Raiders” by Canadian filmmaker Danis Goulet, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2021. In the dystopian film, set in mid-21st century military-ruled North America, a Cree woman joins a resistance group to free her daughter from a state military academy.
Adaptation from English: Suzanne Cords
