set in the Wild West of the United States, Karl May published the first volume in 1875 Winnetou (Hoffman 57). Its protagonist, Old Shatterhand, is a German-born adventurer who consistently out-fights, out-shoots, out-hunts, and generally out-pioneers the seasoned American mountain men, and through a sacred ceremony becomes blood brothers with a noble, handsome young Apache chief named Winnetou. As a pious Christian, Old Shatterhand does not support the whole-sale extinction of American Indian peoples, but as the epigraph at the beginning of this article indicates, the Indian is a sick, a dying man, and we now stand at his miserable “Yes, bedside feeling sorry, with nothing left to do but to close his eyes” (May, 1892 xiii). “Preface” The defeat of the noble savage was, to the protagonist and many 19th and 20th-century German readers’ understanding, inevitable, and so the trilogy ends with Winnetou converting to Christianity and then dying of a grievous wound earned in his final battle. Native cultures from across the continent are combined in a colorful mash-up, including Winnetou’s Mescalero Apache community living in pueblos and using totem poles as torture stakes. This trilogy is the particular story, the rhetorical frame, through which the exhibit at Bärenfett” was “Villa conceived and is displayed. This rhetorical frame is laden with multiple meanings, and so a German historical framework is worth sketching in order to understand why the Karl May phenomenon has the staying power it does in the first place. German scholar Susanne Zantop focuses on German history and culture from 1770-1870, and argues that while Germany never had a colony in North America, and had only a limited time and space for participation in the colonialism (its own colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific lasted only from 1884-1918), it still fostered “colonial fantasies” that make an impact today (Colonial 192). According to Zantop, Fantasies “colonial fantasies” are of sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations “stories
set in the Wild West of the United States, Karl May published the first Winnetou volume in 1875 (Hoffman 57). Its protagonist, Old Shatterhand, is a German-born adventurer who consistently out-fights, out-shoots, out-hunts, and generally out-pioneers the seasoned American mountain men, and through a sacred ceremony becomes blood brothers with a noble, handsome young Apache chief named Winnetou. As a pious Christian, Old Shatterhand does not support the whole-sale extinction of American Indian peoples, but as the epigraph at the beginning of this article indicates, “Yes, the Indian is a sick, a dying man, and we now stand at his miserable bedside feeling sorry, with nothing left to do but to close his eyes” (May, 1892 “Preface” xiii). The defeat of the noble savage was, to the protagonist and many 19th and 20th-century German readers’ understanding, inevitable, and so the trilogy ends with Winnetou converting to Christianity and then dying of a grievous wound earned in his final battle. Native cultures from across the continent are combined in a colorful mash-up, including Winnetou’s Mescalero Apache community living in pueblos and using totem poles as torture stakes. This trilogy is the particular story, the rhetorical frame, through which the exhibit at “Villa Bärenfett” was conceived and is displayed. This rhetorical frame is laden with multiple meanings, and so a German historical framework is worth sketching in order to understand why the Karl May phenomenon has the staying power it does in the first place. German scholar Susanne Zantop focuses on German history and culture from 1770-1870, and argues that while Germany never had a colony in North America, and had only a limited time and space for participation in the colonialism (its own colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific lasted only from 1884-1918), it still fostered “colonial fantasies” that make an impact today (Colonial Fantasies 192). According to Zantop, “colonial fantasies” are “stories of sexual conquest and surrender, love and blissful domestic relations
revisiting_winnetou_and_the_karl_may_museum_1.docx