On a warm night in Berlin, now many years ago, my wanderings took me toward the Brandenburg Gate. There, on the well-illuminated plaza, I saw a crowd gathered around a curious spectacle. As I approached and joined the circle of onlookers, I saw a group of musical performers wearing the external markings of Plains Indians—leather outfits, feather headdresses, with a large dreamcatcher on a stand beside them. What made the spectacle curious, at least to me, was in the music, the distinctive panpipes and notched flutes marking the music as Quechua, from the Indigenous language and culture family of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. I recognized this distinct musical style from performances at the Nebraska State Fair that I regularly visited as a child. It was a moment of “creative subversion” (Perry 384–86), with Indigenous South American performers engaged in a kind of ethnic drag, using an image of the Native American popularized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to make contemporary Indigenous music legible to a lay German audience that would otherwise likely not recognize it as such.2 I thought frequently of this moment—with its tension between performance and cliché, recognition and misrecognition—while reading A. Dana Weber’s Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (2019), a study of Karl May theater festivals and Wild West performance cultures in Germany, alongside Hartmut Lutz, Florentine Strzelczyk, and Renae Watchman’s edited volume Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses (2020).
Weber’s and Lutz, Strzelczyk, and Watchman’s books, though appearing within a year of each other, reveal the wide gap that exists in the field of German Studies in terms of engagement with Indigenous perspectives.3 The Indigenous perspectives foregrounded in Lutz, Strzelczyk, and Watchman’s volume help read the moments of misrecognition and missed opportunities in Weber’s and highlight the need to critically engage with Indigenous perspectives and the field of Indigenous Studies. This is particularly pertinent now as many universities increasingly emphasize decolonization, indigeniza- tion, and reconciliation. Using critical race theory, Indigenous Studies, and settler colonial studies and drawing on BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] perspectives not only serves to decenter dominant white perspectives but complicates and enriches the field of German Studies and what it can do.
Weber’s book uses a number of different festival locations to illuminate aspects of Karl May performance cultures in Germany. Chapter One takes as its backdrop the oldest continuing May theater festival in the Saxon town of Rathen and offers a primarily historical analysis, discussing the festival’s changing ideological orientation through the eras of National Socialism, divided Germany, and reunification; the history of representations of other cultures, in particular Native Americans, in European courts and stages; and the development of the fixed stereotypes about Indigenous peoples that May drew upon and that still inform contemporary German views of Indigenous Americans. Chapter Two describes the May festival at Bad Segeberg and analyzes the “foundational narrative” (97) of the May-verse, the blood brotherhood between fictional Apache Winnetou and white German Old Shatterhand, showing the influence of James Fenimore Cooper and Richard Wagner on May’s fictional pair. Chapter Three offers a genre analysis of May theater festivals using two of the smaller and less professional performance spaces, in Twisteden and Bischofswerda. Set on Elspe’s massive natural stage, Chapter Four analyzes themes of death and time in May works and their festival adaptations and discusses the lasting influence of performance traditions and exotic displays like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on May dramatizations. In Chapter Five, Weber presents the Karl May Festive Days in Radebeul as a site of varied performance traditions and tensions, with Civil War reenactment groups, May stagings, ethnic performers, and contemporary Indigenous people sharing space.
The book is, ultimately, an exculpatory project, centering white German perspectives to defend cultural practices that perpetuate racist and colonialist stereotypes and contribute to Indigenous erasure. Using interviews with festival organizers, performers, and spectators, Weber highlights the good intentions and positive, if stereotypical, views of Native Americans of those involved in the May-verse to argue for understanding these performances as self-contained and a type of—if you’ll excuse the term—indigenous German performance culture.4 Weber’s use of rich description, accessible and engaging style, thorough archival research, and interesting methodology combining literary analysis, performance theory, and ethnography to explore this subculture is not enough to cover the book’s many weaknesses, in particular its limited perspective and failure to engage with relevant scholarship from critical race theory or Indigenous Studies.
Lutz, Strzelczyk, and Watchman’s Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses makes a necessary and timely intervention by offering a volume devoted to Indigenous Canadian perspectives on German Indianthusiasm. Through interviews with twelve Indigenous artists, authors, and activists, the volume offers diverse, critical takes on German Indianthusiasm. The contributors distinguish and discuss the different forms this German interest in Indigenous Americans takes, from Germans who hold powwows and dress up as Native Americans, to participants in Karl May theater festivals and Wild West shows, to those seeking spiritual experiences; John Blackbird describes this constellation of German Indianthusiasts as a “spider web” of overlapping and crisscrossing threads (64). The contributors largely avoid generalizations or any kind of round condemnation of these practices, showing a surprising amount of empathy and understanding with German hobbyists and Indianthusiasts. Most of the contributors see it as an opportunity for engagement, education, and exchange. As David T. McNab notes, “you can deal with stereotypes! At least you’re dealing with some knowledge” (144). Warren Cariou speaks against the commodification of Indigenous identity but finds the type of hob- byism common to East Germany flawed but more excusable: “at least it’s not intended to be stealing” (91). Jo-Ann Episkenew identifies “mixed feelings” about Indianthusiasm: “the concept that somebody likes them, that makes people feel good. Yet, at the same time, as people have become more aware of it, it almost can reflect internalized racism” (114).
The contributors, while showing empathy, are not without criticism of the harmful impact of the stereotypes that hobbyism perpetuates. Blackbird states, “You say, ‘Oh, I’m a Cree,’ but no, you’re just an indian person [to them], you know” (65).5 Other contributors note they are frequently criticized for living in the modern world rather than in a traditional fashion and bristle at this denial of modernity to Indigenous peoples. As Thomas King notes, “The joke is, though, that none of the Germans, nor the Czechs, nor the French, want to emulate contemporary indians. None of them get dressed up like me or like you, Renae. It’s all ‘dead indians’ they want. They want to dress up and look like ‘dead indians”‘ (131). As a consequence of this fossilized stereotype of Indigenous Americans, contemporary Indigenous people in Germany struggle for recognition. A common refrain from contributors is not being accepted as a “real” Indigenous person because they don’t resemble the stereotype; Ahmoo Angeconeb, Cariou, Episkenew, Audrey Huntley, and King all referenced this point in their interviews. Several contributors sharply critiqued the German hobbyists who deny modernity to Indigenous people and claim ownership of Indigeneity for themselves because of their knowledge of Indigenous histories and traditions. King states, “I tell you where the thorn is in my side, and that is when I’m talking to Europeans—they could be German, they could be French—who begin lecturing me on indianness” (136). Quentin Pipestem similarly notes, “they do know a lot of these old ways, but […] they look at the modern indians today as us losing our old ways. And so for them, they think of themselves as better than indians” (158).
Overall, the twelve interviews showcase the breadth of Indigenous perspectives on Germany, illuminate the many kinds of interconnections that exist—performance, study abroad and higher education, family, work, the art world—that are “framed by a history and ongoing presence of colonization and racism” (5), and offer opportunities for exchange between Germans and First Nations peoples. The volume deserves to be required reading across a range of fields, and its short interviews could easily be used in a variety of educational settings, for example to supplement the uncritical takes on Karl May that commonly feature in introductory German textbooks. I hope that a translation into German is planned so that this important work can find an even wider audience.
Weber makes a number of factually incorrect assertions about race, including stating that Immanuel Kant, like Johann Gottfried Herder, “rejected the idea of separate races” (217) and contending that most Germans who wield the Confederate flag do so out of ignorance, rather than for its ties to white supremacism (282).6 In a section entitled “A Note On Facial Makeup,” Weber discusses the use of blackface and brownface to darken the skin of white actors in order to play Black, Mexican, or Indigenous characters.7 Weber notes that blackface is uncommon at Karl May festivals, as characters like Bob, a formerly enslaved person from Unter Geiern, only rarely feature in stage productions; in 2012 in Bad Segeberg, Black German actor Mola Ad- ebisi played Bob in one of the few recent exceptions. Weber quotes correspondence with a white actor, Ben, who had played Bob in blackface in the past. He explains he did so out of inexperience and naivete: “From the perspective we had then, it was OK. In the meantime, we see things differently. We would only stage Bob again if we had an African member in our association who would be interested in playing the part. To paint the faces of white actors is inappropriate. But, as I said, at that time this was not yet a public topic in Germany” (164).
Ben’s critical account of his change of opinion is interesting to read, and it speaks to the potential of Weber’s methodology, combining interviews and fieldwork with performance studies and literary analysis. Ben’s remarks align with a remark from Huntley from Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses reflecting on her time in activist circles in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s: “I had experience with both institutionalized forms of racism and individual ones. I always felt as though the debate was kind of lagging behind what people were doing and talking about in Canada and the US” (121). For Ben, because there had been very little public discussion of the topic in Germany, it had not occurred to him that blackface might be problematic.
Weber’s analysis of Ben’s statements and the character of Bob lacks this level of nuance and even seems to contradict Ben’s own account: “Bob’s character illustrates the differences between American and German perceptions of what constitutes both acceptable and unacceptable racial representations onstage” (164). However, nowhere in Ben’s account does he discuss the differences between American and German understandings of the topic. The other evidence provided in this section—an anonymous email survey of thirteen German and Austrian festival participants and spectators and interviews with other, unnamed actors—similarly fails to substantiate Weber’s assertion of generalizable German and American cultural differences. To me, Ben’s remarks seem to signal larger cultural shifts on the topic, bringing German views more in line with a widespread transnational understanding of blackface as inappropriate.
Weber supports her reading of blackface and theater in Germany by studiously avoiding engaging with relevant work, both academic and popular, on the topic. Though she claims that the blackface debate in Germany is conducted “among intellectuals and scholars” (164), popular sources contemporaneous with her fieldwork contradict this, such as Black German author Noah Sow and the “Der Braune Mob” blog to which she contributed. In her 2008 book Deutschland Schwarz Weiß, Sow discusses blackface in German contexts as a “racist praxis” that is “demeaning” (erniedrigend, 162). Her assessment demonstrates that one ought not to speak of generalized “German” and “American” understandings of blackface; rather, there is a spectrum of views on the topic on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses, several of the interviewees reflect on how race and racism function within Germany, with Indigenous North Americans seen as a kind of privileged minority, particularly compared to Turkish-Germans. Cariou notes that Indigenous people are “never going to be a threat to come and transform a nation” (85) and are therefore idealized rather than demonized. Pipestem speaks of racism in Germany, noting that even neo-Nazis see First Nations people “not really as equals, but that they’re better than the other [minority] people” (155). Watchman describes this as “liminal racism,” the moment when racial aggression “turns to sudden admiration and respect” upon her interlocutors discovering she is Diné and not Turkish or Eastern European: “This in-between racism is not ‘less than’ actual, explicit racism, but the racists project that it is. [ … ] It’s not comfortable to be metaphorically patted on the head as an acceptable minority in Germany, simply because I am indian” (212).
These Indigenous perspectives, as well as Sow’s Black German perspective, show how topics like race can be local and contingent as well as transnational and interconnected. Understandings of race and racism are shaped transnationally through interaction and engagement, as people and ideas move across borders.8 Given that a central argument of Weber’s book is to interpret German performances of Indigenous identity in Karl May festivals as moments of cultural transfer or cultural exchange, it is striking that she fails to interpret blackface under the same rubric. Instead, she constructs monolithic “German” and “American” views on the topic that can seemingly not be reconciled. I am struck by the unintentional resonance of Weber’s take with the recent international backlash against critical race theory, where in European countries such as France it is dismissed as an American importation, rather than a home-grown response to racism and colonialism. Weber’s discussion of race shows how conceptually and methodologically limited and limiting a near-exclusive focus on white perspectives is and highlights the importance of a critically and theoretically informed, nuanced understanding of race and racism that centers the perspectives of People of Color.
In addition to a failure to contend with critical race theory and minority perspectives, Weber’s work also shows little evidence of familiarity with Indigenous Studies and related fields like settler colonial studies. While Weber briefly addresses older works on Native American representation from scholars such as Vine Deloria, Philip Deloria, Shari Huhndorf, and Jaquelyn Kilpatrick, the lack of deep engagement with recent works and theoretical concepts from Indigenous Studies impoverishes the book’s argument.
Weber acknowledges that the images of Native Americans found in Karl May and May theater events are “clichéd and unrealistic” (69), stating they are “expressions of a colonial cultural heritage” (17) and “a legacy of former colonial appropriations” (24). This understanding of colonialism solely as history is problematic; as Drew Hayden Taylor remarks in Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses, “Native people are not postmodern. We’re not postcolonial. We’re still colonized” (180). Patrick Wolfe wrote in 1999, offering what has since become a critical concept in settler colonial studies, “invasion is a structure not an event” (2). In settler colonial states—that is, places like Australia, the United States, and Canada, where the “colonizers come to stay” (Wolfe 2)—colonialism is an ongoing process shaping political and social reality, not a past event. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write, “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation” (Tuck and Yang 5).
In bracketing off the German representation of Indigenous North Americans and its expression in May festivals as “domestically fixed” (14), “naturalized within German popular culture” (14), and “a cherished cultural tradition with a life of its own” (25), Weber forecloses other, more interesting interpretive possibilities. Looking beyond the self-expressed good intentions of the predominantly white performers, organizers, and attendees with a critical eye informed by Indigenous perspectives and settler colonial studies reveals deeper layers of meaning. While Germany was, of course, not a colonial power in North America, Germany and Germans are implicated in US colonial history, with German settlers having not only benefited from the US government’s eliminationist policies, but also having actively participated in them. Approximately six million Germans immigrated to the United States between 1820 and WWI, and today roughly 15% of the US population— more than forty million people—identifies as having German heritage, according to the US Census Bureau. Emina Mušanović and Ashwin Manthri- pragada have demonstrated how the “unexamined, romanticized settler colonial past” continues to influence how German and German Studies are conceptualized and marketed in the United States today (411). Winnetou and Karl May festivals in general could provide an opportunity to think through the relevance of ideas from settler colonial studies to a non-settler state like Germany. If these festivals and the stories they tell are both “expressions of a colonial cultural heritage” and “meaningful performances that have much to say about contemporary German culture” (17–18), then listening to more than the dominant, white, Eurocentric perspective of festival participants would allow us to understand further dimensions of these meanings.
Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses shows the power of providing a platform to Indigenous people to speak on the topic of German performances of North American Indigeneity. The interviewees express discomfort with rather than condemnation of May theater festivals and hobbyist groups. Episkenew finds it “creepy” (112), while Huntley thinks it “falls flat”: “I don’t think Germans, when they are romanticizing [ … ] get the connection to land. And that’s the very basis of Indigenous spirituality. And that gets completely obliterated, when it’s been exported and taken to a whole other place” (124–25). King notes, “my experience has been that the Germans tend to – this is not just the Germans – There is a sense that they have a stake in or that they own a part of Native culture, that because they’ve taken it on, that that’s theirs” (128). While expressing concern with the misrepresentation or appropriation of cultural practices, many of the interviews in the book also see Indianthu- siasm as an opening for cultural exchange, if those playing indian are willing to listen. In her conclusion, Watchman notes that Indianthusiasm can be an opportunity to find connection and community for Indigenous people in Germany but also states, “Masquerading as Indigenous peoples (from a prereservation era past, or only on weekends, dressed in meticulously designed powwow regalia) is active erasure and epistemicide” (212).
“Epistemicide” refers to the destruction of existing knowledge, in particular the eradication of Indigenous knowledge systems through colonization, as initially theorized by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Watchman’s use of the term speaks to the tension that runs through the volume in discussing German Indianthusiasm both as stereotypical and harmful cultural appropriation and as indicating an interest in Indigenous Americans that is an opening for cultural exchange. In their introduction and conclusion, the editors speak to the importance of Indigenous methodologies and research ethics in their compilation of the volume, with a “commitment to oral processes of knowledge transmission” (11) and to “refrain from abstract didacticism and generalizing interpretation,” instead relying on “the power of stories to unfold” and giving “recipients the space to arrive at their own conclusions” (207). The multivocality of the volume leads to multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradicting interpretations of German Indianthusiasm, and it is left up to each reader to make of these tensions and incommensurabilities what they will.
Weber’s book offers a stark methodological contrast. Indigenous voices feature in Weber’s book only in very limited ways, most prominently in her final chapter, on the Karl May Days at Radebeul, home of the Karl May Museum.9 At this festival, Weber is able to speak with Indigenous participants, as the festival organizers make a concerted effort to invite (and pay) Indigenous people to participate. She quotes from about half a dozen Native Americans who express an “uneasy ambivalence” with the festival (262). However, when confronted with alternative interpretations of May festivals, Weber is largely dismissive.10 In focusing primarily on the perspectives of the predominantly white festival organizers, producers, and spectators and marginalizing or dismissing other perspectives, Weber offers a very limited perspective on the May-verse that is presented as universal and neutral.
Increasingly, this kind of researcher neutrality is called into question by Indigenous methodologies and research ethics. In an article in the journal Research Ethics, Ranjan Datta highlights the need to “critically examine [… ] the underlying assumptions that inform the research, and challenge [ … ] the widely-accepted belief that Western methods and ways of knowing are the only objective, true science” (11). Kevin Snow et al. explain how methodological rules that call for researcher “detachment” (358) can serve to disempower, objectify, and exclude; in conducting research with Indigenous people, they call instead for “methodological flexibility” allowing for “roles beyond the ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ interviewer, observer, or surveyor” (368). Further, as Linda Smith explains in Decolonizing Methodologies, drawing on Edward Said, “both the formal scholarly pursuits of knowledge and the informal, imaginative, anecdotal constructions of the Other are intertwined with each other and with the activity of research” (2). Weber distinguishes between cultural insiders and cultural outsiders, writing, “Most spectators and producers do not view these events as political entertainment, nor do they question their ethnic representations and professed cultural goodwill. It should also be noted that these festivals are not exported beyond German-speaking countries and can seem strange and even offensive to cultural outsiders” (17). However, this distinction is tautological; without a clear definition of what makes one a cultural insider or outsider, it is seemingly the very interpretation of these redface performances as “strange and even offensive” that defines the difference. Cultural insiders find Karl May festivals unproblematic, and cultural outsiders find them racist. By drawing this arbitrary distinction and positioning herself between these two categories, while repeatedly calling for “balance” (22), Weber posits herself as neutral observer, failing to acknowledge “the complex ways in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices” (Smith 2).
This false sense of balance can be seen in Weber’s analysis of the Karl May Museum’s scalp controversy. In 2014 representatives from the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa made a formal request to the museum to return an object in its collection, a scalp trophy purportedly from an Ojibwe (Chippewa) warrior. Weber reports on a public discussion held in May 2014 at the Karl May Days between representatives from the Ojibwe and Oneida peoples and the Karl May Museum where the groups laid out their differing perspectives on the issue.11 Weber’s “both sides” approach frames this debate as a problem of “mutual misperceptions” (264) and “difficulties in communication between groups with differing cultural outlooks and expectations” (269). Tempting as it might be to see this not as a matter of “fundamental incongruity but one of weighing priorities differently” (269), as Weber does, fundamental incongruities do exist between Europeans and Indigenous North Americans in terms of power, representation, and access to resources due to the history and ongoing impact of colonization. Perspectives from Indigenous Studies show that these “debates” might be best understood not as showing two sides of the same coin but as revealing different epistemologies. The scalp controversy shows that the cultural rights and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples only uneasily coexist with Western ideas of museum ethics, artefact preservation, and ownership.12
Weber reads the scalp controversy as an opportunity to learn from Karl May: “Structurally, the issue resembles the conflict at the center of May’s fictions and the one May festivals are most interested in: how cultures that are unfamiliar to each other may gradually discover their affinities and, if they are willing, build bridges through communication” (269). However, her analysis here reveals precisely the problem with the kind of alterity that Karl May festivals thematize. If, as Weber argues, Karl May festivals show examples of “positive perceptions of alterity” (308), “egalitarian cultural exchange” (312), and “a vision of positive cross-cultural rapport” (313), why is there still such a gap between Indigenous and white German perspectives on these issues? Why did it take the Karl May Museum more than half a decade to finally agree to repatriate the human remains from its collection? The answer, of course, is that the kind of alterity from the May festivals is a particular vision of Indigenous life that is designed to appeal to a predominantly white German audience, rather than a representation of Indigenous perspectives or Indigenous epistemologies. May festivals, like May’s works, present a whitecentered vision of reconciliation that is revealed as inadequate—or perhaps incommensurable—when confronted with actual living Indigenous Americans.
There is a kind of misrecognition here, much like the one I highlighted in my opening anecdote. Audiences at Karl May festivals, which, until the disruptions of COVID-19, had only continued to grow from year to year, are not confronting the Other, but confronting the self that is misrecognized as the Other. The visions of positive alterity, interculturality, transnational friendship and peaceful coexistence between cultures that the May-verse the- matizes fail to prepare participants and spectators to accept Indigenous ways of knowing and being. For all Weber’s talk about ambiguity and “diversity of interpretations” (308), her insistence on understanding Karl May festivals solely within their white-dominated German contexts and based on the intentions of the performers, organizers, and spectators is limiting and simplistic. Karl May festivals can both reflect a longstanding German performance history that features well-meant portrayals of cross-cultural friendship, and still be embedded in colonial, racist stereotypes and represent harmful cultural practices that run counter to the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. Tuck and Yang call for an “ethics of incommensurability” that recognizes that social justice projects based in civil rights or human rights might not be compatible with decolonial projects rooted in an understanding of Indigenous sovereignty (28). I think this idea can be extended not just to the scalp debate but to other attempts to too easily find a resolution or common ground on topics like cultural appropriation, redface performance, and Indianthusiasm: “Opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common” (28), Tuck and Yang argue.
I would like to conclude this essay in the spirit with which Lutz, Strzelczyk and Watchman conclude their volume, which “encourages readers to develop their own perspective from the accounts of those interviewed. We conclude this book by doing the same ourselves, and, again following Indigenous protocol, locate ourselves in relation to what we have heard from those we asked, and share what we have learned in the process” (207). In reading and rereading Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes, Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses, and a raft of secondary literature, I came to see more clearly how my own academic career as a Germanist has been enabled in complex and multi-layered ways by colonization, from my German and Irish ancestors who settled on the traditional lands of the Pawnee in the nineteenth century, to years of higher education and employment at “land grab universities,”13 to my current home on the lands of the Kaw, Kickapoo, Sioux, and Osage peoples, and my current academic position in Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.
I was struck by the moments of convergence and divergence between these two volumes. In her introduction, Weber notes that Americans have “periodically rediscovered” Karl May and German Indianthusiasm for the past century, with consequent press coverage “fascinated and puzzled by it, exo- ticizing this seemingly bizarre interest as much as it exoticizes ‘America’ and its ‘Indians’” (23). Watchman similarly notes, “When people find out about Indianthusiasm for the first time, it always strikes them as new news” (211). Seemingly both think this approach is an impediment to genuine understanding of the phenomenon or true cultural exchange. Where the books diverge is in how they respond to this challenge. In her monograph, Weber elevates the intentions of the performers and participants in Karl May festivals as the sole or most important determiner of their meaning and argues that the images of positive cultural exchange in May’s works, theater performances, and the May-verse should thus be taken at face value. The editors of Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses, on the other hand, “make [ … ] space for Indigenous voices in their experiences and exchanges with contemporary Europe, particularly Germany” (5). As Watchman writes, “Indigenous responses to In- dianthusiasm are essential for some form of cross-cultural understanding” (213). The contrast here—on the one hand a methodologically conservative approach that marginalizes critical theory and centers white perspectives and on the other a complex, multivocal approach that allows for tension and contradiction while foregrounding traditionally marginalized perspectives—is striking, and in only one of these approaches do I see a vision for German Studies scholarship that opens the discipline to new voices, perspectives, areas of research, and critical questions.
What I hope to take away from the experience of reading and reviewing these volumes is some of the spirit of generosity with which the contributors to Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses approach German Indianthusiasm, a topic that I have often dismissed as merely racist. These practices can be viewed with a critical perspective but also taken seriously as genuine opportunities for cultural exchange, as well as illustrations of how complex and multi-layered questions of decolonization and reconciliation can be. As Lutz writes, “German Indianthusiastic interest in Indigenous cultures from Turtle Island may be utilized to initiate the dialogic learning process, which is direly needed if we are to continue on our planet,” and essential to this process are more platforms for Indigenous people to speak to those of us “who are ready to listen” (219).
Footnotes
1 I offer my thanks to Sabine Gross and Monatshefte for the opportunity to write this review article, to my colleague Wesley Lim for his clever title suggestion, and to all the members of the DDGC writing support group, in particular Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rebekah Slodounik, and Holly Yanacek, who read and provided feedback on a draft of this essay.
↵2 A major influence on Germany’s image of Indigenous Americans were touring groups in the late 19th and 20th centuries such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show, which performed in Germany beginning in 1890, one of a large number of exotic spectacles or ethnographic shows that were part of popular entertainment culture (Kort and Hollein, Ames, Stetler).
↵3 Other relevant recent works in German Studies include a special issue of the journal Seminar,“Building Transdisciplinary Relationships: Indigenous Studies and German Studies” (2019), edited by Renae Watchman, Carrie Smith, and Markus Stock; and Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj’s Diversity, Decolonization and German Studies (2020). Also of note is Charlotte Schaillié, Helga Thorson, and Andrea Van Noord’s After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (2020).
↵4 I was particularly struck by how much Weber’s argument resembles those used by defenders of Native mascots. The long tradition, pride, and nostalgia that many alumni feel for their school mascots and supposed good intentions to “honor” Native American warriors are used in an attempt to foil arguments that the use of Indigenous people as mascots is based in racist and stereotypical caricatures that harm Indigenous people, as has been demonstrated (Fryberg et. al).
↵5 Following Gerald Vizenor, the editors of Indianthusiasm use the lowercase, italicized indian when referring to the often stereotyped and caricatured representations of Indigenous people, but otherwise do not alter their interviewee’s terminology, and consequently use a variety of terms to refer to the original inhabitants of the Americas, including Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nation, and Native American. I will generally use the term Indigenous, which is capitalized, following Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style, as a “deliberate decision that redresses mainstream society’s history of regarding Indigenous Peoples as having no legitimate national identities; governmental, social, spiritual, or religious institutions; or collective rights” (77).
↵6 In “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” Robert Bernasconi lays out a convincing case for seeing Kant as “the one who gave the concept sufficient definition for subsequent users to believe that they were addressing something whose scientific status could at least be debated” (12). In his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind, Herder famously disagreed with Kant’s racial classifications for human beings. Dozens, if not hundreds, of academic essays and books have been written on Kant and Herder and their views on human difference (Bernasconi, “Source of Racism;” Eze; Hill and Boxill; Sikka; Zammito). To understand the diversity of Enlightenment thinking about race, see The German Invention of Race, edited by Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore. On the topic of the Confederate flag, Germans’ and Europeans’ motivations for flying it vary widely, from using it as a sign of rebellion, a piece of American kitsch, or part of a reenactment event to neo-Nazis using it as a stand-in for the Nazi flag that cannot legally be displayed in Germany (Brasher, Bernstein). Weber provides no evidence for her assertation that most Germans wield it in ignorance of the flag’s white supremacist meanings.
↵7 While Weber does mention performances of Indigeneity in her discussion of blackface and brownface, she fails to engage with the clearly relevant concept of redface, which activists and scholars use to refer not just to facial make-up but to the general practice of dressing up as an Indigenous American and which has been written about by scholars such as Cydney Crue, Jill Lane, and Michelle Raheja.
↵8 Another excellent illustration of this point is Kira Thurman’s body of work on African American musicians in Central Europe, which documents how Germans “heard” race and the impact of Black American musicians on understandings of culture, nationalism, and race in German-speaking Europe. Her book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, is forthcoming with Cornell in 2021.
↵9 Even then, these two sections, “The Karl May Days’ Flurry of Alterities” and “‘Through Discussion … We Can Become All of One Mind’“ constitute only ten pages of the volume’s four hundred.
↵10 Weber notes a “cultural misunderstanding” on the part of the Indigenous people she speaks to, who frequently ask “Why do Germans not embrace their own traditions, heroes, and German myths?” (264). However, a running theme of Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses is the Holocaust, genocide, and differing memory cultures in Germany and Canada, where participants show a very nuanced understanding of this topic.
↵11 In 2017, Robin Leipold of the Karl May Museum published a case study online on H-Soz-Kult about the scalp controversy, using the German Museums Association’s 2013 “Recommendations for the Care of Human Remains in Museums and Collections” to explain the museum’s position at the time.
↵12 I lack the space in this review essay to adequately discuss the concept of Indigenous cultural sovereignty, but it is very relevant to the question of Karl May festivals. As outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), “Indigenous peoples have a recognized right to their cultures, past and present, wherever those cultural representations take place” as Lisa Michelle King explains in an article about Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty and the Karl May Museum (47).
↵13 In their “Land Grab Universities” report for High Country News, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone have meticulously documented how much of US higher education was built not only “on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land,” with the 1862 Morrill Act enabling the expropriation and sale of Indigenous land to not only provide physical campuses but capital and endowments to many US colleges and universities.
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