Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany [1 ed.] 9781782386551, 9781782386544

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Fellow Tribesmen

Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

Studies in German History Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. General Editors: Hartmut Berghoff, Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Uwe Spiekermann, Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Volume 1 Nature in German History Edited by Christof Mauch Volume 2 Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 Edited by Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis Volume 3 Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America Edited by Alan Lessoff and Christof Mauch Volume 4 Two Lives in Uncertain Times: Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens Wilma Iggers and Georg Iggers Volume 5 Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 Thomas Zeller

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Volume 6 The Pleasure of a Surplus Income: Part-Time Work, Gender Politics, and Social Change in West Germany, 1955–1969 Christine von Oertzen Volume 7 Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany Edited by Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann Volume 8 Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945–1975 Sandra Chaney Volume 9 Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International History Edited by Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig Volume 10 Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918– 1933: Fight for the Streets and Fears of Civil War Dirk Schumann

Volume 11 The East German State and the Catholic Church, 1945–1989 Bernd Schaefer Volume 12 Raising Citizens in the “Century of the Child”: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective Edited by Dirk Schumann Volume 13 The Plans that Failed: An Economic History of the GDR André Steiner Volume 14 Max Lieberman and International Modernism: An Artist’s Career from Empire to Third Reich Edited by Marion Deshmukh, Françoise Forster-Hahn and Barbara Gaehtgens Volume 15

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914

Edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov Volume 16 Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany Edited by Richard F. Wetzell Volume 17 Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in the Federal Republic, 1945–1975 Benjamin Ziemann Volume 18 The Respectable Career of Fritz K: The Making and Remaking of a Provinicial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh Translated by Casey Butterfield Volume 19 Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Amerians, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany Frank Usbeck

Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

FELLOW TRIBESMEN The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany

S

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Frank Usbeck

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Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2015 Frank Usbeck

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Usbeck, Frank. “Fellow tribesmen” : the image of Indians, national identity, and Nazi ideology in Germany / Frank Usbeck. pages cm. -- (Studies in German history ; volume 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-654-4 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-655-1 (ebook) 1. National characteristics, German--History--20th century. 2. Nationalism--Germany--History--20th century. 3. Indians in popular culture--Germany--History--20th century. 4. Indians of North America--Public opinion. 5. National socialism--Philosophy. 6. Race--Philosophy. 7. Popular culture--Germany--History--20th century. 8. Public opinion--Germany--History--20th century. 9. Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945. 10. Germany--Intellectual life--20th century. I. Title. DD256.6.U72 2015 305.897’043--dc23 2014033563 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-78238-654-4 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-655-1 ebook

Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgments

viii

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Introduction

1

Chapter 1. The Image of Indians in German Romanticism and Emerging Nationalism

22

Chapter 2. Nation-Formation, National Identity, and Nationalism

55

Chapter 3. Relatives, Allies, or Subjects? Applications of Nazi Ideology through Indian Imagery in Popular Media and Academia

123

Conclusion

207

Bibliography

216

Index

234

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Unknown participants of the Tauch’scher in Indian costumes, c. 1930. Courtesy of Joachim Giel.

26

Figure 2. Alfred Giel, father of Taucha hobbyist Joachim Giel, posing on horseback in his Indian costume for local children during the Tauch’scher, c. 1930. Courtesy of Joachim Giel.

27

Figure 3. Chief Edward Two-Two’s tomb in Dresden. Photo: Frank Usbeck, 2011.

28

Figure 4. “Winnetous Schwur.” Scene from the 1939 Karl May Festival at Rathen in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, advertised in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 6 August 1939: Beilage.

33

Figure 5. “Adolf.” Cartoon depicting Hitler as a cruel barbarian in the liberal magazine Ulk, 1931. Hanfstaengl, Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt (Berlin: Verlag Braune Bücher, 1933), 33.

62

Figure 6. “Participants of a Hitler Youth camp-out.” Undated German postcard, 1930s. Courtesy of Hartmut Rietschel.

96

Figure 7. “Swastika Hotel,” in August W. Halfeld, “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands,” Die Woche 35 (1936): 23.

98

Figure 8. “Federschmuck mit tieferer Bedeutung,” in Arnold Hagenbach, “Ein Cowboy erzählt von Indianern,” Koralle 29 (1937): 1027.

99

Figure 9. “Im Schmelztiegel der Rassen: Amerikas ewiges Gesicht,” in Florian Panzer, “Die Rothaut wird weiss,” Koralle 31 (1937): 945.

135

Figure 10. “Das hätte sich der Rote Büffel nicht träumen lassen!” in Arnold Hagenbach, “Ein Cowboy erzählt von Indianern,” Koralle 29 (1937): 1140.

139

Figure 11. “Häuptlingstochter,” in Adolf Heilborn, “Ende des roten Mannes,” Koralle 28 (1927): 377.

140

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Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

Illustrations | vii

145

Figure 13. “Zweierlei Rot,” in A. E. Johann, “Zweierlei Rot in Mexico. Grundherr oder Bauer, Moskau oder Mexiko?” Koralle, vol. 5, 26 (1937): 905.

153

Figure 14. “Ein weitblickender Engländer.” Poster Collection, GE [3837], Hoover Institution Archives.

158

Figure 15. “History of the United States.” Poster Collection, GE [3837], Hoover Institution Archives.

159

Figure 16. “Freilichttheater an der Front.” German World War I field postcard, c. 1916, courtesy of Karl Markus Kreis.

174

Figure 17. “Nix wie ran.” Newspaper advertisement for a soft drink featuring children playing Indians. In Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (29 May 1938).

179

Figure 18. “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt (Wild West at the Edge of the City).” Scenes from a feature about urban children playing Indian. In G. Haase, “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt,” Illustrierte Zeitung (30 April 1930).

180

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Figure 12. “Das Antlitz des Indianers,” in August W. Halfeld, “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands,” Die Woche 35 (1936): 21.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book was initially conceived through my love of historical anecdotes. Eventually, it has come to encompass elements of all my major academic interests. The evolution of its research, writing, and multiple revisions cover a period of over a decade now. The project’s first sketches took shape when I encountered the topic of American Indians in World War II and a possible interaction of “Indians and Nazis” in a class on Native warfare during my studyabroad year at the University of Arizona in 2001. Since then, Tom Holm’s work on Native military traditions, Kenneth Townsend’s World War II and the American Indian, and other scholars’ contributions to the field have been permanent companions, sources of ideas, and reference points. During the development of this project, I had the opportunity to learn from, argue with, and benefit from the help of numerous friends, colleagues, and mentors. I am very grateful to them all. I would like to thank Hartmut Keil, Tom Holm, and Crister Garrett for being such great teachers, colleagues, supervisors, and critical readers. Their work has shaped my identity as a student and a scholar. Peter Tosic is a good friend and a great mentor; I am deeply indebted to his patience and philosophical comments on my writing over the years. My colleagues in the American studies colloquium at Leipzig patiently read long chapters and relentlessly challenged inconsistencies and fallacies in writing and argumentation. Their friendship and collegiality, the cooking and nights at the beach during our retreats, as well as our countless discussions, jokes, and teasing in the hallways facilitated an ideal work environment. Conferences and e-mail conversation brought me in contact with scholars in the field, many of whom I regularly meet and work with these days. They all provided invaluable research insights. Unfortunately, I cannot do justice to all of them here, but I will mention some who are representative of them all. My heartfelt thanks go out to Karl Markus Kreis, Hartmut Lutz, H. Glenn Penny, Pete Daniel, Charles Johanningsmeier, Bob Cherny, Bill Issel, and many many others for their help, comments, and inspiring shop talk. Hartmut Rietschel, Jörg Diecke, Frank Engel (who passed away in March 2012), and Joachim Giel (who passed away in December 2014) offered invaluable insight into the complex his-

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Acknowledgments | ix

tory of the German popular enthusiasm for Native American topics, hobbyism, and corresponding German-speaking scholarship. As a historian on the research trail, one needs to adapt constantly to the different systems for locating, ordering, and using material in numerous archives and libraries. I am very thankful for the support and patience I have encountered in institutions such as the Hoover Institution’s archives and libraries, the National Archive sites in Washington, DC, and College Park, the Library of Congress, the Bundesarchiv Berlin, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and the university and state libraries at the University of Arizona, San Francisco State University, Stanford, the University of Iowa, Leipzig University, the SLUB Dresden, the BSB Munich, and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. As a representative of them all, I thank Sophia Manns-Süßbrich at the Leipzig University Library for being a very good friend, for her untiring work in helping me locate and verify sources, and for helping make contacts with research institutions. Praised be our librarians! I also thank Martin Klimke, Uwe Spiekermann, and, particularly, Casey Sutcliffe at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, for their institutional support and their help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Ann DeVita, Adam Capitanio, and Elizabeth Berg at Berghahn Books were patient and friendly guides during the editing and production process. I am deeply grateful to Luci Tapahonso for her critical mentoring in creative writing during a graduate class in 2000, and to David Tsinnie of Tuba City for his stories and jokes on a chilly February day a few months later. My encounters with them have piqued and nurtured my interest in storytelling and the scholarship thereof. They are remembered as decisive moments in what I am convinced is a lifelong affinity for stories. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support over the years. Although my father did not live to see me finish this project, neither he nor my mother doubted I would succeed. My love to both of you.

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INTRODUCTION

S

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It’s the manly virtues of the redskins which are exemplary to us! Courage, relentlessness, loyalty, and self-restraint were their prime laws. These are the traits toward which we young ones strive. —Werner Kallmerten, “Der Untergang der Azteken,” 15.

For a period of well over a hundred years, German children have played “Cowboys and Indians.” While a few have preferred the role of the cowboy because, referring to historical events, they did not want to impersonate a loser and victim, many children have reveled in the role of the Indian. This German fascination with Native Americans is reflected not only in child’s play, but also in countless novels, Wild West shows, hobby clubs, and even the number of works on Native American topics in German academia. Most historical German depictions of Native Americans suggest a German familiarity with Indian features and customs, as well as similarities between German and Native American character traits. As in the above quote, authors often recognized the German in Indians, or found Indian features when looking at their fellow Germans, or declared presumed features of Indianness to be admirable and worthy of emulation. The Indian other always seemed to resonate in the German self. Thus, the much-cited German fascination with, and fantasies about, Indians are expressions of the German quest for, and struggle with, the self. Ever since German people learned of the existence of indigenous cultures in the New World, they, as much as other Europeans, tried to understand and explain these cultures by comparing them in a self-centered way to their own. Over time, Germans developed a sense of uniqueness in their comparisons with Native Americans and their reflections on German-Native relationships. This notion is part of the European perception of Native Americans, but it makes the German perception distinct from the perceptions of Native Americans in other European countries, especially the former colonial powers. Within German society, the repercussions of this self-centered comparison have differed among GerNotes from this chapter begin on page 20.

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2 | Fellow Tribesmen

man observers, commentators, philosophers, and writers, and they have changed over time as Germans’ self-perception and their cultural surroundings developed. From the early colonial encounters to this day, the perception of Native Americans has reflected problems, fears, longings, and struggles in German society. That is, images Germans had of Native Americans at particular times could be used to draw conclusions about German society, whether they reflected the sociocultural problems of absolutist mini-states in the eighteenth century, nationalism and cultural pessimism in the nineteenth, or National Socialism and the divisions of the Cold War during the twentieth. This study on the employment of the German fascination with Indians for Nazi propaganda will contextualize some of these fears, longings, and cultural struggles in German society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. National Socialism built on a conservative nationalist tradition of addressing these struggles. Since the image of Indians in Germany was intertwined with nationalism, the Nazis could readily utilize it to promote their ideology in domestic and foreign propaganda. Their development of an ideological doctrine based on racial thought and German indigeneity also generated changes in the German perception of Native Americans. These interrelated and mutually reinforcing developments included the postulation of shared character traits, of shared mental and spiritual idiosyncrasies, and of shared historical experiences between Germans and Indians. Thus, the exploitation of the traditional German fascination with Indians helped the Nazis ensure the loyalty of large parts of society; it instilled national pride and incited hatred against the Allied powers. The emergence of German conservative nationalism and national identity up to the founding of the German nation-state in 1871 was significantly influenced by socioeconomic changes in Central Europe during the nineteenth century. The industrial era saw a tremendous upheaval in social structures, rapid urbanization, and industrialization, resulting in class conflicts and cultural pessimism. Germany soon developed into a leading industrial power in Europe, while aristocratic elites tried to retain their status in the political hierarchy. Economic development spurred political envy and the race to develop a colonial empire, culminating in World War I. National Socialism profited from this escalation of political and cultural crises by fanning Germans’ inferiority complex after the defeat, crying for revenge, and promising to solve the internal strife with radical measures. In these developments over a period of more than seventy years, the German image of Indians was more or less explicitly present in the discussions about German identity and Germany’s place in the world. It adapted over time as the Germans’ self-perception underwent changes. The perception of Native Americans and the German image of Indians are closely linked to the quest for national identity in Germany, as Hartmut Lutz has elaborated. He coined the term “Indianthusiasm” to signify “a yearning for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a

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Introduction | 3

supposed Indian essence.”1 In the era of evolutionist thinking, wherein human progress was regarded as occurring on a linear scale, looking at Native Americans seemed to open a window to the ancient Germanic past. Nationalism received much of its authority and credit by postulating ancient national traditions. A nation, it was argued, was an eternal entity of blood-based relations, linked to particular inheritable character traits and mental idiosyncrasies and dependent on and determined by a particular environment. The historical discussion of the old Germanic tribes humanists had begun in the late medieval era provided eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalists with traditions that seemed very similar to depictions of Native Americans.2 Thus, many Germans believed that observing contemporary Native Americans—presuming that they were primitives—conveyed information about their own tribal past. The ensuing euphoric interest for ancient Germanic history could, following Lutz’s coinage of “Indianthusiasm,” be termed “Germanthusiasm” or, more comprehensively, “Norsetalgia.” I will employ Norsetalgia in this study because its proponents soon appropriated the history of Scandinavia as German and developed a general notion of Germanness as “Nordic,” romanticizing the history of both the Germanic tribes and the Scandinavian Norsemen. This historical comparison of American and Central/Northern European tribal peoples set the stage for applying typical motifs that will permeate the discussion of Indian imagery throughout this study. The most important motif of Indian imagery, which I term the “fellow tribesmen” motif, postulates similarities between Germans and Native Americans in character, historical development, and in their relationship to the natural environment. Innumerable examples advance the idea that Germans and Indians supposedly thought alike. Similarities in thinking, many examples suggest, were due to both the Germans’ and Indians’ close relationship to nature or to particular economic systems, such as farming or forest subsistence. Honesty, courage, intuition, emotionality, and even a melancholy disposition were said to be shared character traits. These terms will be important for an understanding of national identity and its relation to the German imagery of Indians throughout this study. The historical developments considered to be shared predominantly involved warfare, spirituality, and leadership structures that emphasized the tribal organization of both Germans and Indians and stressed indigeneity.3 German nationalists’ claims of indigeneity increased their authority to demand recognition of Germany’s status as a nation. Indigeneity suggested ancient origins and traditions, and it established the notion of Germans as the descendants of a pure and ferocious aboriginal people still in touch with their roots. Many Germans, detecting similarities between the depiction of Native Americans and (ancient) Germans, came to believe that Native Americans reciprocated their interest and fascination. This belief created room for notions of genuine kinship. Postulating similarities between Germans and Indians automatically

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4 | Fellow Tribesmen

differentiated Germans from other Europeans who, presumably, could not relate to German rootedness and whose decadent societies endangered German cultural purity and integrity. Identifying themselves as indigenous peoples and particularly as soul mates of a sort to Native Americans, then, helped German nationalists distinguish the German self from a European other and generated notions of German uniqueness. This point brings out the multi-layered perceptions of self and other: while Indianthusiasts adored the Indian as an exotic other, they likewise portrayed Indians and Germans as only slightly different versions of the self in order to distinguish this self from the other in Europe. This “GermanIndian self ” helped characterize Germany in opposition to France, Great Britain, the United States, and “the West,” in general, as well as to ideas with which “the West” was associated. Another typical motif derived from this distinction that construed Germans and Indians as fellow tribesmen: they had a “common enemy.” Identifying this enemy allowed German nationalists to utilize Indian imagery and warn fellow Germans of presumed dangers by employing historical comparison. For example, they could identify Germans with Indians on the indigeneity level, likening frontier conflicts during the conquest of the Americas to the conflicts on the frontier between the Roman Empire and ancient Germanic tribes in Central Europe. This scenario portrayed both Germanic and Native American tribes as struggling against an expanding, technologically superior settler state. This, in turn, allowed for comparative tales of heroic defense, of the threat of invasion and the terror of defeat, and of unifying leadership. Contemporary Germans were reminded of the common enemy when Native American dispossession, removal, and coerced assimilation were compared to recent German history, particularly to World War I and its aftermath. In both cases, Germans and Native Americans appeared to be the victims of imperialism on the part of the Western Allies/colonial powers in North America. Therefore, the common enemy motif was a significant propaganda device against Great Britain, the United States, and France throughout the twentieth century. For the discussion of Nazi propaganda, the fellow tribesmen and common enemy motifs are particularly interesting because they continue the traditional combination of fascination, contempt, and envy in German perceptions of America. Since German-speaking immigrants made up one of the largest immigrant groups, the North American continent always held the promise of freedom and self-fulfillment to German observers. After the founding of the United States, fascination with and envy of its democratic practices were mixed with contempt for American society’s presumed lack of sophistication. An increasing inferiority complex transformed the German envy of American technological achievements and material wealth into contempt for Americans’ supposed lack of true culture. These attitudes introduced a distinction between American civilization and German culture that reinforced the fellow tribesmen and common enemy motifs,

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Introduction | 5

embedding Germans’ perception of Native Americans into their wider perception of America. Nationalists and National Socialists evoked the fellow tribesmen motif in claiming similarities between German and Native American tribal cultures, and they evoked the common enemy motif in claiming that both German and Native American cultures were endangered by the imperialist expansion of a decadent American civilization. This comparison of Native Americans and Germans, like most comparisons, involved generalizations and simplifications. It posited similarities at the expense of accuracy. Among the generalizations important for this study is the widespread perception of Native Americans as one people and culture, which Hartmut Lutz describes as the “supposed Indian essence.”4 Although this misperception is not exclusively German, it is significant for understanding the fellow tribesmen motif, especially in the context of Nazi ideology. Seeing Native Americans as one people but several tribes, the Nazis could apply racial categories and construct similarities between Germans and Native Americans more easily. Like Indians, they argued, Germans were one people consisting of several tribes; unlike the Indians, however, their strength emanated from the German tribes having united (under a strong leader) and thus, having truly become a people.5 The racial perspective on Native tribes also allowed Nazi propaganda to construe frontier history in the Americas as a race war, from which Nazi scholars and political analysts could make predictions about future racial conflicts. To avoid making the types of generalizations often found regarding the perception of America, I emphasize different groups of Germans who developed different perceptions of Native America: as we cannot speak of one German perception of Indians, I will identify specific groups of German protagonists, media audiences, or ideologists as necessary. The German representation of the fellow tribesmen motif as a tribal brotherhood exemplifies the tendency of such representations to be based on stereotypes and misconceptions. Along with the German perception of self, these stereotypes changed over time such that the depiction of Native Americans in Germany likewise changed. H. Glenn Penny observed that, from the time Germans discovered their interest in Native Americans and began writing about them, they have striven for authenticity in their descriptions even as they have perpetuated stereotypes: “One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on ‘Indianness’ in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of ‘the authentic Indian.’”6 To avoid this quandary, I will forgo this tradition of German “cliché busting,” or the struggle among authors for the authority to define the authentic Indian. Many of these authors have juxtaposed German clichés with what they perceived as Native American reality.7 My study, however, will focus on the development of perceptions of Native Americans in Germany since the early nineteenth cen-

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6 | Fellow Tribesmen

tury and on the representation of Indian images in the German media during the Third Reich. It explores the functions of these particular representations and images for the Nazi leadership, and how they served to promote Nazi ideology. For this purpose, it is irrelevant whether German authors knew what the reality of Native American life actually was. The important question is what was portrayed as reality, and what function such a portrayal had. The tropes of Indian imagery analyzed in the following chapters will allow for a better understanding of the complex and expedient application of Nazi ideology in propaganda, in the presentation of Nazi ideals to the German public, and in the representation of the foreign powers in Germany during the Nazi era. They can be understood as ingredients that propaganda designers used to sharpen their statements on a particular issue and to focus the attention of the target audience. Different tropes were applied when feasible and thus served the greater goal of invoking Nazi ideology. My analysis of German national identity, Indian imagery, and Nazi propaganda draws on and extends the results of previous studies on German perceptions of Native Americans. It builds on Hartmut Lutz’s approach of explaining the interrelation between Indian image and nation formation.8 Klaus von See’s historiography of Germans’ fascination with their own tribal history provides many vantage points for the interrelation between German Indianthusiasm and Norsetalgia.9 My approach to nationalism and historical consciousness applies discussions on the construction of identity and tradition by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,10 Werner Sollors,11 and Benedict Anderson.12 Barbara Haible’s extensive analysis of Indian novels during the Third Reich emphasizes major aspects of Nazi ideology expressed in the Indian image.13 Deborah Allen provides a survey of influential factors for the Indian image and of sources by which the image was disseminated in Germany between 1871 and 1945.14 Glenn Penny’s long-awaited book Kindred by Choice came out while this book was being prepared for publication, and thus its findings can only be considered in passing. His vigorous analysis of imagery, perceptions, and cultural practices regarding Native Americans among Germans from 1800 to today makes many of the same observations on the longevity and flexibility of said imagery, perceptions, and practices as the present study.15 My own in-depth study of German periodicals expands the corpus of scholarship on Indian imagery and representations of Native Americans in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. This includes daily newspapers, magazines, academic journals, as well as a few selected academic monographs, works of fiction, and government documents. My approach to these sources emphasizes Romantic notions, the tradition of cultural despair, the conservative rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and German claims to indigeneity. In addition, I highlight the influence of racial thought on representations of Native Americans during the Third Reich, which has previously received only minor

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Introduction | 7

attention in the literature, wherein the complexity and ambivalence of racist ideology in regard to Indianthusiasm is not adequately represented. This focus provides a more comprehensive view of the historical development of Indian imagery and better insight into Nazi applications of this imagery in propaganda. In general, my approach represents a new perspective on German intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that will contribute to the understanding of conservatism, nationalism, and National Socialism. It is thus an interdisciplinary amalgam of cultural history, intellectual history, and media history, of German perceptions of (Native) America and of the Western hemisphere. The analysis of such a heterogeneous corpus of sources conveys numerous inconsistencies in the representation of Native Americans as well as in the presentation of Nazi ideals. It exposes the propagandistic intention of many texts by illustrating contradictions even within the work of individual authors whose publication records unveil changes in their arguments and writing. Heterogeneous sources, such as newspapers owned by the Nazi party, popular family magazines, or political analyses, make it possible to observe different approaches and intensity of propaganda directed at different target audiences. Comparing these over a longer time period allowed me to identify alternating phases in the depiction of Native topics and to put them into a historical context. It yields insight into the German perception of America, of which Indianthusiasm is a part, for contextualizing the Third Reich’s representation of America and its Indian policy within a longer tradition, and for identifying traditional tropes of this representation that have survived through several different political regimes in Germany. Had I focused on only one group of sources, or only one genre, I would not have been able to analyze these multiple layers. Expanding the academic discussion of Indian imagery in the early twentieth century, but also the understanding of Nazi policies, academia, and international relations during the National Socialist era, the multimedia approach to my analysis of the Indian image broadened the discussion to include more German intellectual history. Furthermore, my study discusses the competition among different rival camps within the Nazi movement. For example, media releases and scholarly projects within the Third Reich often applied contradictory language or made contradictory claims because of rivalries between Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg and the respective institutions over which they presided.16 This rivalry had repercussions for the public debates on ancient history or for the interpretations of racial studies, as Michael Kater’s work on Himmler’s SS research foundation Ahnenerbe illustrates.17 Similarly, Barbara Haible identified and analyzed a debate over the viability of Indian role models between camps of purists and pragmatists among Nazi educators, publishers, administrators, and propagandists, which my analysis of periodicals explores further.18 It is important to keep in mind that writing in Nazi Germany was highly charged with political implications and that it featured radicalized ideas, expressed

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8 | Fellow Tribesmen

in a radicalized language. That is, authors were likely to explain and support even simple issues in a language loaded with superlatives and totalitarian terms, which made their statements extremely pointed and narrow and thus invited contradictions when even a few terms varied from text to text. These contradictions appear even more blatant in hindsight and with the compiled knowledge of some seventy years of international scholarship on the Nazi era. Therefore, my analysis will point out inconsistencies between ideological programmatic directives and publications in media and scholarship primarily to highlight possible propagandistic intentions behind these deviations. Writing a study about a society’s perception and stereotypical representation of other peoples carries terminological pitfalls, problems of voice, and the challenge of navigating between layers of analysis. Researchers following such an approach must distinguish clearly between a primary source’s statement of a fact or idea, its possible propagandistic intentions, and their own assessment of them both. In many cases, propagandistic implications are not identical with authorial intent: an author’s statements about Native American reservations may be true and his statements may be consistent with official Nazi ideology, but even if they are, one cannot necessarily conclude that the author made these statements in order to promote Nazi ideology explicitly. When scholarship touches on political reflections and culturally sensitive topics, the terminological intricacies are complicated further. This is the case in Native American studies as much as in scholarship about National Socialism. Conducting an analysis of German society and using mostly German sources in an English text also proved to be a challenge to stringent and unambiguous writing because of the culturally distinct use of terms that often lack a literal equivalent in the other language. These intricacies are particularly urgent where the totalitarian jargon of National Socialism is concerned. For that reason, my study follows a number of terminological guidelines to avoid misunderstandings or political implications where none are intended, and to ensure the best possible translation of German meaning into English. Scholars, activists, and the media in English-speaking countries have long debated the correct terminology to denote indigenous peoples in America without having come to a satisfying agreement. All versions, be they Indian, American Indian, Native American, or American aboriginal have flaws either in their inclusiveness, their distinctiveness, or in political sensitivity and even sensibility. Being aware of the inconclusive nature of this debate, I will follow Robert Berkhofer’s approach and speak of Indians when the German or American image is meant, and of Native Americans when the actual people(s) in the United States are discussed.19 When the focus is on indigenous peoples in North America or the Americas, the term American aboriginals will denote the entire hemisphere and thus include the Inuit, Native Hawaiians, and indigenous peoples in Latin America, as well. To avoid generalizations, I will name indigenous peoples by

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Introduction | 9

tribe whenever possible. Similarly, I will differentiate and use precise, distinctive specifications and group markers whenever possible to avoid generalizations in talking about the Germans, the Americans, or even the Nazis. Different cultural-historical backgrounds between the English and German languages require a sensitive use of terms and translations. It is important to note that some terms, such as race, acquire different meanings and cultural implications in the other language. The usage of race and Rasse is the result of different historical developments in the United States and in Germany. In this English text, I will use the English term race in the German meaning of Rasse, thus implying the notions of biological determinism and scientific racism that the German term carries. Large parts of my analysis will concern the German biologistic discussions of American aboriginals and Germans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus the concept of Rasse will recur throughout this study. Although common German terms such as Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist have entered the English lexicon for lack of appropriate English terms and should not receive special emphasis in English texts, I will treat some, such as Lebensraum and Blitzkrieg, as foreign terms and italicize and capitalize them to highlight the Nazi context of their usage. In addition, I have found it necessary to use a few German terms rather than employ an English equivalent or paraphrase. Terms such as völkisch or Naturvölker will remain untranslated because the English expressions do not adequately represent the original meaning, or sometimes even denote the opposite. I will provide explanations and possible English expressions for these in a note upon first occurrence. Throughout the text, I will use English translations for all original German sources in order to support the flow of the text; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. A few notes will offer explanations and context for some translations. These explanations have become necessary because the totalitarian language of National Socialism developed innumerable neologisms beyond regular forms of usage, often to the point of absurdity.20 In many cases, no English equivalents are available, raising the ethical question of whether an equivalent should be found in the first place, as using the original points out and retains the singularity of these terms. When feasible, these explanations will also provide the etymology of terms to highlight the intellectual traditions on which National Socialism relied. The three content chapters in this study are organized in a thematic order that will facilitate understanding of the interrelationships among Romantic notions, nationalism, and conservatism with the emergence of Indian imagery. They will address the sociocultural and political developments in Germany throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to explain the ideological roots of National Socialism and to illustrate why National Socialists believed that Indian imagery would be valuable for propaganda, both at home and abroad. They will also highlight particular applications of Indian imagery in the German

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10 | Fellow Tribesmen

media, in scholarship, and policy-making. This study is thus a mélange of intellectual, cultural, and media history of Germany, as well as a transatlantic history of German-American relations over the period of the early 1800s to 1945. Chapter 1 will discuss the historical context for an understanding of the interrelationships among Indian imagery, national identity, and National Socialism. It will introduce the evolution of Indian imagery in Germany, the basic criteria that helped develop a belief in the special relationship between Germans and Indians, as well as typical tropes of Indianthusiasm and the historiography of German perceptions on American aboriginals. Romanticism nurtured both Indian imagery and national identity. It established and amplified many tropes for the representation of both Germans and American aboriginals. Particularly important in this context will be the emphasis on cultural pessimism in Germany. These basic features intensified during the latter half of the nineteenth century as conservative nationalism established notions of German uniqueness by rejecting Enlightenment ideas and thus alienating Germans from “the West.” The militarization of German society allowed for a growing militancy in Romantic notions about German identity, which increasingly perceived Germans and Indians as similar in their physical drives and penchant for barbaric violence while dismissing reason and rational thinking as alien concepts. Chapter 2 will emphasize the influence of Indian imagery on the process of nation-formation and nationalism in Germany, and it will scrutinize how this influence was appropriated in Nazi ideology. The models of peoplehood and of invented traditions will illustrate the reference to Indians in nationalist attempts to define a German creation myth, a sacred history, a national character, a sacred geography, and religion. Examples of Indians apparently sharing typical (tribal) German traits supported claims to German indigeneity and German uniqueness in Europe. Expanding the scope and resource base of previous studies, this chapter further emphasizes racial thought, scientific racism, and indigeneity. Although German racism claimed the superiority of Germans over non-Aryan peoples, this analysis illustrates that the Nazis’ emphasis on indigeneity allowed for a positive racial interpretation of Native Americans. Claims to biological, spiritual, and historical relationships between Germans, their ancestors, and American aboriginals will be discussed in depth. Chapter 3 will build on the analysis of the interrelationships among nationalism, Indian imagery, and Nazi ideology, and look at applications of such imagery in media, scholarship, and politics. It will also highlight the contradictions that the pragmatic employment of Indian imagery for propaganda for varying audiences and purposes automatically entailed. It will deconstruct the notions of German uniqueness by conducting a transatlantic comparison of notions of indigeneity, primitiveness, and tribalism. In the end, it will show that the Nazis’ application of Indian imagery was a matter of expediency and opportunism in the service of gaining and retaining power.

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Introduction | 11

Both German and American reform movements around 1900 employed notions of naturalism, primitivism, and public health. The Nazis, while observing American practice, appropriated the German reform and Youth movements’ notions and thus continued and reinforced references to Indian imagery. Typical tropes of Indian imagery were expediently utilized for Nazi propaganda. Chapter 3 will thus scrutinize the trope of the vanishing Indian, revealing the continuation of typical Eurocentric notions of manifest destiny. My analysis of racial thought and cultural determination, however, also illustrates the Nazis’ argument that indigenous cultures in the Americas were on the verge of revitalization and reinvigoration. The discussion of these observations will take into account the political analysis of the “Indian New Deal” in the United States, the Indigenist movement in Latin America, and how the racial interpretation of these movements and policies in the Western hemisphere reveals the political and economic interests of Nazi Germany in these regions. In the context of the expediency of images, a discussion of which traditional Indian images worked well for Nazi propaganda in particular situations and why is needed. Chapter 3 will therefore scrutinize the continuation of typical German anti-American notions during the Nazi era. The Nazis pointed an accusing finger at frontier massacres, repression, forced assimilation, and economic exploitation as welcome ammunition for their propaganda efforts. This approach, in emphasizing American persecution of Natives, deflected attention from the Nazis’ persecution of dissidents and ethnic minorities, and helped Germans to identify with Native victims by invoking the common enemy motif. In some instances, however, positive reference to Indians was less profitable for Nazi propaganda so that notions of the master race prevailed. The academic debates on the discovery of America, spawned by the development of the Bering Straits migration theory and by the 450th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage in 1942, enabled Nazi propagandists to emphasize the German contribution to the discovery and settlement of America. Pre-Columbian expeditions and German agents of settlement and exploration were highlighted in order to depict the conquest of the continent as the achievement of the Germanic race. American aboriginals played only minor roles in these assertions of German greatness. One of the best-known images of Indians is that of the fierce warrior, which was utilized in the Nazi-controlled media to instill militarism and heroism in the German population. Newspapers spiced up their reports from the war fronts by stating that Germans fought “like Indians.” A short discussion of soldier jargon in this context reveals that reference to Indian warriors even entered the German soldiers’ lexicon. A comparison with contemporary American publications supports the impression that many Germans perceived Native Americans as possessing superior fighting skills. Children were prepared for war through a gradual intensification of training that began with playing Indian and ended with war games, instilling youthful joy in soldiers going into combat.

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Many Indian tropes in the media and popular culture during the Nazi era reveal academia’s entanglement in and exploitation (often from within) for propagandistic efforts. German cultural anthropology, having produced some of the most prominent scholars in the field, was engaged in the analysis of indigenous peoples regarding their value for postwar treatment in the future German colonies. Racial thought allowed the Nazis to declare themselves the natural protectors of indigenous peoples, and thus, as benign colonizers. Interest in “secret Indian wisdom” triggered a number of projects in medicine, which could have boosted German healthcare, but which also illustrate the Nazis’ fanaticism in the pursuit of military goals. These examples illustrate a selection of the multitude of possible applications of Indian imagery during the Nazi era, and they point to opportunities for future scholarship that will be addressed in the concluding remarks.

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Primary Sources on Indianthusiasm in Nazi Print Media Analyses of German perceptions of Native Americans have concentrated on fiction for a long period. Recent works have introduced the analysis of Wild West shows and ethnographic exhibitions, or the representation of Native Americans in visual arts and films.21 A few works have conducted comprehensive studies that included a great variety of sources and covered large time spans, such as Hartmut Lutz’s Indianer und Native Americans, Deborah Allen’s “Reception and Perception of North America’s Indigenous Peoples in Germany 1871-1945,” and H. Glenn Penny’s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800. Barbara Haible’s Indianer im Dienste der NS-Ideologie analyzed the Indian image in German children’s literature during the Third Reich and contributed to ongoing research about Karl May and its appropriation by Nazi educators and propagandists (1998). Focusing on the range of periodicals of the Nazi era, my own project expands the resource base and thus contributes to the research on perceptions of American aboriginals in Germany, on German-American relationships, as well as on National Socialism. For the project of gaining an overview of the media representation of American aboriginals in Nazi Germany, the Internationale Bibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriftenliteratur, called Dietrich, has proven a most valuable tool. Dietrich offers an index of German-language periodicals from 1876 to 1964 (with a gap from 1881 to 1896). Its early twentieth-century editors claimed to have included “the most important” academic journals, magazines, and newspapers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as periodicals for German minorities in other countries, organized by author and keyword. The broad range of indexed periodicals ensures that a keyword search locates articles from various academic disciplines but also from the popular media. During World War II, Dietrich also

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Introduction | 13

provided an index for German newspapers in occupied European countries. The index encompassed more than 5,000 periodicals and approximately 90,000 articles in 1940, so that an analysis of German print periodicals based on the selection in Dietrich can be sure to identify a majority of publications and to compile a representative sample of the German media environment during the time period in question.22 The list of keywords and authors’ names from Dietrich generated by the focus of this study included famous authors such as Karl May and James Fenimore Cooper. Dietrich also yielded results for keyword searches on the German equivalents of Indians and (United States of ) America, as well as on subject-related terms, such as race relations, racial law, and racial studies, on the related terms anthropology, ethnology, and Völkerkunde, on Naturvölker, and on the names of different Native groups. The time frame for the search encompassed the years 1925–1945 to enable a comparative analysis between the media of the Weimar Republic and of the Third Reich and to investigate possible changes after 1933. The resulting list consists of more than 1,200 articles and essays in over 250 periodicals. It has proven valuable to vary search terms, as many articles on the colonial history of the United States were listed under America, rather than United States of America. The variation and combination of search terms detected and avoided problems of classification, which would otherwise have significantly diminished the scope and number of articles found. In addition, the diversity of these search terms in relation to Dietrich’s broad coverage of periodicals allowed for a wide spread of sources. It can be said that Indian topics were published across the entire range of German-speaking media and in the entire period, covering newspapers of both political and commercial backgrounds, cultural and single-issue magazines of all types, as well as academic journals from diverse disciplines. However, basing the analysis on the media representation of American aboriginals in this periodicals index revealed a number of problems and raises questions about the value of Dietrich’s selection criteria and priorities for systematic research. First, in a number of instances, date information in Dietrich was incorrect as the dates of some articles in the index deviated by a few days in either direction from the actual publication dates. Second, a few articles listed in Dietrich could not be located at all, and even the supportive research by library staff at the University of Leipzig could not clarify why the articles were listed as they were. One could speculate that, in instances where daily newspapers and magazines have been microfilmed, the institutions conducting the film recording only recorded the first few pages of an issue (covering the politics and economy sections) and skipped the rest, namely, the human interest sections or the feature pages, where references to Native Americans were more likely. If this is the case, then many promising articles have been lost to analysis. It could also be that, at times, indexers mismatched articles and periodicals in their list, which would not be surprising given a total of 90,000 articles per year in a pre-electronic tabula-

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tion age. Third, spot checks and random browsing in newspapers and illustrated magazines beyond the entries in Dietrich revealed numerous articles and essays on Native topics not indexed by Dietrich. This problem in particular raises the issue of the bibliography’s selection criteria, and, thus, the reliability of this medium as a source listing. Dietrich’s editors stated in 1940 that in “less important journals and in publications appealing to laymen, especially in weekly magazines and the supplements to daily newspapers, an adequate selection is made; and in some publications, only now and then were suitable articles considered.”23 Thus, for many non-indexed articles located through browsing, it must be assumed that they were either not recognized by Dietrich’s editors or not deemed important enough. Consequently, systematic research on a particular topic depends on the editors’ selection criteria, their thoroughness, and their diligence: a study based on Dietrich can claim to provide a representative overview but not completeness, and claims about the relevance of index entries are entirely subjective. This has a heightened impact on systematic analyses of popular magazines and newspapers which, as the editors state, were considered “less important.” It can, therefore, be assumed that many more than the located 1,200 articles were published on Native topics during the time period in question, particularly in popular magazines and newspapers. A few other problems further complicate a thorough analysis of the German media environment of the 1920s–1940s. The German National Library (DNB), founded in Leipzig in 1912, collected daily newspapers and several weekly magazines only sporadically during the early years, and not all publishers sent the requested issues for archiving regularly. Therefore, I had to consult many different state libraries, such as the Zeitschriftenarchiv of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Sächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) in Dresden, and the Institut für Zeitungsforschung in Dortmund, to review most issues identified in Dietrich.24 The best tool for locating Dietrich’s listings is the online Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB), hosted by the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.25 However, if, for example, Dietrich lists an article in a periodical called Die Sonne, the source information is not sufficient to identify Die Sonne in the ZDB, since the database hosts several dozen periodicals by that name and Dietrich does not always list subtitles. Once a periodical was unequivocally identified and located through the ZDB, research in hosting libraries often revealed that particular issues are not available. The most common reason was loss through bombing raids in the war. In a number of cases, the central database has not yet been updated to reflect war losses in local libraries, and sometimes, even these libraries still list items in their inventories that were actually destroyed. To contextualize the information on American aboriginals gleaned from these newspaper articles, I complemented my overview on periodicals with Fritz Sänger’s collection of press directives issued by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry during the prewar years.26 These directives illustrate the extent to which newspa-

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Introduction | 15

pers were ordered to write about a particular topic, prepare articles in a particular way (i.e., fact-based or inflammatory), and give them prominence in particular issues. Directives also include reprimands to editorial boards when articles failed to conform to the desired appearance.27 Since direct reference to Native Americans was made only during the heated propaganda battle after the November pogroms of 1938, it must be assumed that journalists were free to write about Indians and believed Indians a topic safe enough to avoid angering the ministry’s censors.28 In this sense, one basic conclusion of my study is that “the Indian” seems to have been perceived mostly as soft news. It is all the more interesting that the close analysis of many articles filtered out typical features of Nazi ideology, leading to the conclusion that, depending on the publication, authors were either active followers of the Nazi regime, padded their articles with the “appropriate” Nazi language, or simply represented traditional Indian imagery in accordance with Nazi doctrine and thus did not require any steering or prodding by Nazi propagandists. The following quote illustrates that the Nazis did not need to introduce the image of Indians or prompt the media to use it as it was a prominent feature in German popular culture and they could exploit it in order to transport their own ideology, often very subtly: “Propaganda does not mean casting a populace toward particular ideas, providing them with slogans, or revealing opinions to them. Propaganda means talking about things that the populace wants to hear; it means using their drives and passions, investigating their desires, spying on their attitudes, in order to utilize them for one’s own goals.”29 Other sources proved valuable to complement the overview on the interest in Indians in the German public and to understand the deep penetration of Indian imagery into German everyday life. A number of dictionaries of soldier jargon illustrate the influence of Indian warrior images on Germans in the context of warfare, which extends from World War I to today’s Bundeswehr. Spot checks confirmed the influence for Austrian and Swiss soldiers, as well. To document the political use of Indian imagery and to confirm numerous references to Hitler in American sources, I have analyzed a collection of Hitler’s speeches, the documentation of his monologues in the Führerhauptquartier in 1941, as well as Mein Kampf and his second book for references to Native Americans and for uses of Indian imagery.30 Government documents provide insight into possible applications of Indian imagery in politics, espionage, or directed scholarship. However, the institutional rivalry among the various branches of the Nazi government and even within the German military make it very difficult to follow consistent references to American aboriginals in documents. Thus, the nonexistence of files on Native topics in one institution (for example, the intelligence service of one particular branch of the military) does not mean that other branches did not pursue such projects. The finding aids at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin did not reveal many direct references to Native topics, and future research would have to define par-

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16 | Fellow Tribesmen

ticular Nazi projects that might include, but do not index, Indian references. This study has used a few selected government documents to prove the interest of Nazi research institutions in Native topics and in “secret Indian wisdom,” discussed in chapter 3. Other documents might hold information on colonial planning, espionage, or on plans for the postwar administration of occupied territories. To compare Indian imagery in Germany with that in the United States and to gain an understanding of the perception of German Indianthusiasm among Americans, I have included selected American newspapers made available in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database. The thorough interweaving of Indianthusiasm with German popular culture and national identity was obvious to foreign observers, and a source of curiosity, as this comparison revealed. It also conveyed methodological problems in comparing the culture and media systems of Germany and the United States. The newspapers in ProQuest are digitized, which allows for multiple full-text searches, freeing the researcher from indexers’ selection criteria. Using and combining the search term Indian with any other keywords in full text unearthed a great number of extremely valuable sources, illustrating the use of Indian imagery in everyday language and idioms in American society as much as the American observations of such usage in Nazi Germany. Since German historical newspapers and magazines have not been digitized on a considerable scale, equivalent full-text research would mean reading everything remotely pertinent in the hopes of finding at least something. This approach is, if not impossible, extremely time-consuming and dependent on chance finds and thus holds no promise of equal comprehensiveness. My extended search for Indian imagery in war correspondents’ front line reports in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten 1941–1945 proved as much. The texts on Native Americans analyzed in this study show a great variety of topics often related to the nature of the publication. They range from travelogues, popular historiographies, and anecdotal reports to detailed analyses of historical events or of current developments in Native communities and in their relationships with non-Native societies. Fictitious stories or uncommented translations of Native fairy tales and sagas can be found as well as ethnographic treatises on very specific aspects of material culture in Native societies. The time frame for this study, designed to detect changes in the representation of American aboriginals in Germany after 1933, yielded mixed results. Typical cliché-busting stories that juxtapose the romanticized Indian past with life on the reservations continue after the Nazi takeover of power and the resulting tighter rein on the media, and so do popular historiographies of settlement and conquest. Adventurous feature pages mixed with semi-fictional reminiscence about the old frontier days appealed to children and adolescents in popular magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s as much as to the Hitler Youth in their party organization magazines. Some changes in representation may not be directly attributed to Nazi influence

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Introduction | 17

but to the course of events, such as the Indian New Deal in the United States after 1934, but these developments were subject to a visible Nazi influence in many publications, as their depiction mirrored Nazi ideology and racial doctrine. Several changes in the appearance of publications did not often concern the image of Indians but showed Nazi influence, nevertheless. Although popular magazines, such as Daheim, continued to discuss exotic places, technology, and soft news, they began to reflect the country’s gearing up toward war. Apart from droves of articles on Hitler, Daheim and other illustrated magazines discussed military inventions, provided instruction on food preservation for households, and commented on Germany’s progress toward self-sufficiency in food production. Where Indian imagery was concerned, changes in representations were often due to fluctuating phases in propaganda.31 When the Nazi leadership required fierce media attacks against the United States, typical anti-American imagery, including the accusatory descriptions of Indian massacres, were published with higher frequency, as many articles in November and December 1938 and 1942–1945 reveal. A short overview of the major kinds of periodicals and the types of articles with Native focus they produced helps to contextualize these changes. Daily newspapers mainly carried news about political events, such as the Indian New Deal, analyses of race relations in the United States and Latin America, eulogies for prominent writers such as Karl May or James Fenimore Cooper, or anti-American accusations. The articles on Native topics rarely carried photographs or sketches. While eulogies or discussions of new findings in scholarship on Natives usually appeared in the miscellaneous, culture, or human interest pages, political analyses and inflammatory leads were often prominently placed on the front page or page two. Major examples of newspapers with a high frequency of Native topics or reports about the United States were the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, the Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. The Völkischer Beobachter, purchased by Hitler in 1920 to function as the Nazi Party mouthpiece, represents a cross section of articles with Native focus.32 It covered archaeological digs in the Americas, mused about the rise and fall of pre-Columbian empires, discussed racial politics and race relations abroad, praised Karl May and the German explorers and settlers of America, and defamed the United States for its Indian policy. Weekly and monthly magazines committed more space to articles with Native topics and usually carried a number of photographs. In many of the popular magazines, such as Koralle, Universum, Die Gartenlaube, or Daheim, exotic places and peoples featured as prominently as technological progress and fashion. The focus on technology and exoticism grew stronger because these topics targeted the youth. Some periodicals, such as Der Erdball, Forschungen und Fortschritte, and Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, published academic findings for a

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broad audience and had a high frequency of articles on Natives of the entire Western hemisphere.33 Other periodicals that apparently covered Native topics frequently to profit from Indianthusiasm were Die Woche, Illustrierte Zeitung (Cologne and Leipzig), Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, and Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. These publications, in particular, utilized photographs that often reinforced German stereotypes about Indians and echoed typical Nazi sentiments about race relations in the United States.34 Several periodicals focused on single issues or regions, and many provided opportunities to discuss Indians. Among these, magazines and journals for the German minority in South America and those that appealed to German investors in these regions were the most fruitful. Many articles on indigenous peoples were published in Lasso, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, and Ibero-Amerikanische Rundschau. Apart from these regional-interest periodicals, magazines on hunting, on the Christian mission, and on medicine also made reference to indigenous affairs. Educational magazines and journals often included articles about Native schools in the United States and South America but also provided teachers with exciting anecdotes for use in class. Among these, Bücherkunde, Pädagogische Warte, Die Deutsche Schule, and Der Deutsche Erzieher informed their readers about U.S.-Indian policy and race relations. The latter two, especially, featured a few revealing articles by the foremost contemporary American Studies scholar in Germany, Friedrich Schönemann, whose argumentation mirrored Nazi perceptions of the United States.35 Periodicals owned by, or affiliated with, the Nazi Party were particularly interesting for this study, as they applied Nazi propaganda bluntly in their articles. Most importantly, magazines for the Hitler Youth, such as Die HJ or Der Pimpf, but also the SS mouthpiece Das Schwarze Korps, sought to influence readers by exploiting Indianthusiasm and Norsetalgia. The array of academic journals shows a great variety of disciplines discussing Native topics, but also a variety of approaches and political intents. Major academic fields were physical and cultural anthropology, racial studies, history, political science, education, and geography. In cultural anthropology, journals such as the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Anthropos, and Ethnologischer Anzeiger carried many essays on American Aboriginals. They could be very narrow in scope, for example, describing material culture among particular tribes,36 and thus often did not show explicit Nazi influence. However, anthropologists and historians often echoed Nazi ideology, as in their discussions of pre-Columbian settlements or their emphasis on racial segregation for the protection of racial purity. Some even actively sought to protect their discipline by carving out a niche for ethnological research within the Nazi system of directed scholarship.37 Thus, some academic periodicals offered scholars a niche where they could basically ignore the Nazis’ encroachment into German society, while others reflected Nazi ideals or even tried to curry favor with the Nazi leadership by applying Nazi ideology in their research and publications.

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Introduction | 19

Similarly, political and geographic journals often conveyed Nazi political interests through Native topics. The Monatshefte für auswärtige Politik and the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik discussed politics in the Americas, race relations, and historical developments on an intellectual level with the possible intent of supporting Germany’s political claims in the hemisphere. The latter journal was a publication of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Geopolitik, an organization headed by general Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), who trained German spies. In addition to numerous German-American scholars, Nazi scholars and travelers suspected of doubling as spies, such as Colin Ross (1885–1945), wrote for the journal.38 Some academic topics popular throughout the 1930s and 1940s provided material for ideologues to argue for German superiority and Allied wickedness. Among these were the debate on the origin of American aboriginals, patterns of settlement in the Americas, and the earliest contacts between Europeans and America. Historical overviews based on political research, such as “Gewaltstaat USA,”39 or the promotion of euthanasia through Native examples, illustrate the influence of political will on science and popular media.40 Academic findings and debates in the journals and the selected monographs analyzed for this study were frequently revised for a broad audience and published in popular magazines and newspapers. In these revised and abridged texts, Nazi propaganda often became more explicit than in the academic treatises. Thus, Nazi ideology permeated academic journals, single-issue magazines, illustrated magazines, and daily newspapers to varying degrees among the different source types but also within a single type of source. An author could write about Indians because this topic promised great reader interest and because the Nazis did not often steer writers toward these topics. However, Native topics could easily be exploited for Nazi propaganda, especially since Indianthusiasm made the demand for Native topics high. Therefore, choosing a Native topic could prove valuable to conveying political meaning, as in anti-American propaganda or in specific issues such as racial hygiene. Since Native topics were so widespread in the 1930s that Nazi propagandists had innumerable starting points for planting more or less explicit ideological statements, the history of Indianthusiasm must be seen as a major key to an understanding of German intellectual history and the development of German national identity in that period. If, as the above quote suggests, propaganda reflects the ability of leaders to utilize the desires and passions of the populace, Indianthusiasm must indeed have been convenient for such utilization. The following chapter will investigate the sources of these German desires and passions in regard to Native topics, as well as factors in the social, political, and cultural development of Germany during the nineteenth century. It will explore the interrelationships among Romanticism, nationalism, and Indianthusiasm in German society that made it so expedient for the National Socialists to appropriate Indianthusiasm during the 1930s and 1940s.

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Notes 1. Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm. A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” in Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Calloway, Colin G., Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 168. 2. See Herfried Münkler and Hans Grünberger, “Nationale Identität im Diskurs der Deutschen Humanisten,” in Nationales Bewusstsein und kollektive Identität, ed. Helmut Berding (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 211–48. 3. Ibid., 215–16. 4. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 168. 5. Applying Norsetalgia in their notions of tribalism, the Nazis incorporated the Scandinavians, Dutch, Flemish, and peoples of the Baltic nations as “tribal brothers” into the construct of the “Germanic people” during World War II, most explicitly in the foreign divisions of the SS. 6. H. Glenn Penny, “Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.04 (2006): 798. 7. Ibid., 798–99. 8. See Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” Indianer. 9. See Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994). 10. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 16th rpt. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11. Werner Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 12. Benedict R.O. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 13. Barbara Haible, Indianer im Dienste der NS-Ideologie: Untersuchungen zur Funktion von Jugendbüchern über nordamerikanische Indianer im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Kovac, 1998). 14. Deborah Ann Allen, “The Reception and Perception of North America’s Indigenous Peoples in Germany 1871-1945: A Study with Specific Reference to the North American Indian Image” (Ph.D. diss., Konstanz University, 2004). 15. H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 16. Himmler (1900–1945) and Rosenberg (1893–1946) were rivals because of conflicts in ideological perspectives; both of them led academic as well as government institutions, and they both sought to assume more and more authority to reduce each other’s influence. Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, rpt. 2005, s.v. “Himmler,” “Rosenberg”; Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed., s.v. “Wissenschaft.” 17. Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS, 1935-1945. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, 4th ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006). 18. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 22–77. 19. Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian, from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979), xvii. 20. For discussions of the language of totalitarian regimes, see John Wesley Young, Totalitarian Language: Orwell’s Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992). 21. See Christian F. Feest, ed. Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Pamela Kort and Max Hollein, eds., I Like America: Fictions of the Wild West (New York: Prestel, 2006).

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Introduction | 21

22. Felix Dietrich and Reinhard Dietrich, Bibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriftenliteratur, 128 vols., vol. 86 (Osnabrück: Felix Dietrich, 1940), 3–5. 23. Ibid., 3. 24. These were in addition to issues held by the DNB, the large inventory of the university library at Leipzig, and the Leipzig Stadtarchiv, which holds originals of all Leipzig daily newspapers. The Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten was one of the most prominent daily papers in the country and yielded many relevant articles for this study. 25. “Zeitschriftendatenbank,” Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 5 November 2009, http://www.zeitschriftendatenbank.de. 26. Hans Bohrmann and Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, eds., NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit. Edition und Dokumentation: 1933-1939 (Munich: Saur, 1984). 27. Ibid., 39–44. 28. For an examination of Indian topics in the German popular press, taking into consideration the intentions and needs of authors, publishers, and the audience, see Allen, “Reception,” 38–41. 29. Reiner Fabian, Die Meinungsmacher. Eine heimliche Grossmacht (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1970), 209. 30. Kenneth W. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 136; Max Domarus, Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945, 4 vols. (Leonberg: Pamminger & Partner, 1988); Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier (Munich: Propyläen, 2003). Hitler’s second book was written in 1928 but remained unpublished. The Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich published an annotated version in 1961. 31. See Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich. Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 19331945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997). 32. Andreas Wenzel, “Tendenzielle Meinungsbildung mittels sprachlicher Manipulation in der rechtsradikalen Publizistik—Eine kritische Untersuchung der Propagandamethoden der ‘Deutschen National-Zeitung’ im Vergleich zum NSDAP-Parteiorgan ‘Völkischer Beobachter’” (Ph.D. diss., Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1981), 20. 33. Publication of Der Erdball was terminated before 1933, so no data are available on possible Nazi influence after the takeover of power. 34. In her analysis of the German image of Indians from 1871 to 1945, Deborah Allen emphasizes the importance of illustrated magazines for perpetuating the imagery. Allen, “Reception.” 35. See Friedrich Schönemann, “Amerikakundliches im Unterricht,” Der deutsche Erzieher 8 (1939): 289–95; idem, “Rassenfrage in den USA,” Die deutsche Schule (1935): 633–36. 36. G. Hotz, “Über eine Büffeldecke mit indianischen Bilderschriften,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 69 J (1937): 27–30. 37. Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde Lebensprobleme der Rassen, Gesellschaften und Völker (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1936); Krause, “Bedeutung der Völkerkunde für das neue Deutschland,” Mitteilungsblatt der Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde Leipzig 1934.3 (1934): 1–12; Doris Byer, Der Fall Hugo A. Bernatzik. Ein Leben zwischen Ethnologie und Őffentlichkeit (Cologne: Boehlau, 1999); Thomas Hauschild, Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht. Ethnologie im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). 38. George Britt, The Fifth Column Is Here (New York: Funk, 1940), 58–59. 39. “Gewaltstaat USA,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, 14 January 1943. 40. “Rassenpflege bei den Naturvölkern,” Völkischer Beobachter, 7 October 1933.

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Chapter 1

THE IMAGE OF INDIANS IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM AND EMERGING NATIONALISM

S

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“Indians” … is a European invention, and it has been “Indians” who have inhabited the European (and Euro-American) mind ever since. Much of the history of European-Indian relations is thus part of a history of European ideas, their development, and their diffusion. The “Indian” is nothing more nor less than a concept created by the white man for his own use and enjoyment. —Christian F. Feest, “Germany’s Indians in a European Perspective”

Since Germans were among the first explorers, cartographers, and settlers of the New World, they had contact with indigenous Americans from the beginning. These early encounters were in many ways shaped by a fascination for the other that it in turn spurred on, and which developed into a mass cultural phenomenon during the late nineteenth century. From the beginning, this fascination was a mixture of observation, preconceived notions, clichés, and debates among Germans about what an “Indian” was like. In the following, typical factors that affected the German image of Indians will be discussed and historically contextualized. The discussion will illustrate how cultural and political developments in Germany during the nineteenth century informed the Indian image. Romanticism, emerging nationalism, and cultural despair forged a national identity in Germany, but they also influenced the image of Indians. As the image of Indians gained its shape and principal features in Germans’ popular perception, political and sociocultural developments in the Germanies impacted it so that it reflected the broad range of political and cultural affairs, and lent ever-adapting foils for German perceptions of self and other. Notes from this chapter begin on page 48.

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The Imagination and Explanation of the Indian in the Germanies From the very first European colonial voyages to the New World, the reports about its indigenous peoples circulated in Central Europe prompted debates in philosophy, religion, and the arts that aimed to explain their existence and determine Europeans’ relation to them. Early representations were fraught with imaginative details from European mythology, revealing preconceived notions about what “uncivilized” strangers might be like, precluding either objective observations or depictions.1 These notions drew on myths, sagas, and superstitions about wild men, which have been interpreted as precursors for the European image of Indians.2 These stories about wild men were projections of a society perceiving itself as civilized to denote the savage other. They implied assumed character traits of the other that the self did not share. Often these presumably savage traits were expressions of longing in a restrained society since they emphasized instincts, physical drives, or endurance. Wild men were usually described as silvatici, as forest dwellers, an important cue for the role of the forest environment in German identity-formation and assertions of indigeneity, which will be significant for the following discussions.3 Germans’ (and other Europeans’) perception and depiction of American indigenous peoples was self-serving and self-defining.4 As European societies changed, their views of the other changed, as well; but these usually implied a sense of the self as a standard, which automatically set the other apart as either lacking something the self had, or as having something the self had lost. These distinctions can be observed in depictions of American indigenous peoples as representatives of bygone golden ages, such as inhabitants of Atlantis, as wild men, and in the evolution of their portrayal in philosophy from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to Jean-Jaques Rousseau and on to Friedrich Engels.5 The sources of German Indianthusiasm have become a focus of scholarly attention in the last few decades. While some scholars have gone back to the sixteenth century to unearth triggers of interest and the development of their representation, others have focused on travelers and early expeditions, such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), or Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (1782–1867).6 Although there have been debates on whether German Indianthusiasm is unique to the country or merely an expression of a European development, the scholarship has unearthed a number of influences on the image of Indians in Germany that help explain the development of Indianthusiasm into a popular culture phenomenon.7 Deborah Allen argues that the Indian image was limited in scope before 1871, that the most influential features were added only afterwards, that the most significant events occurred afterwards as well, and that public schooling and the affordability of books and magazines favored the development of a mass phenomenon only then.8 While I agree with her argumentation on the limited scope, I follow Hartmut Lutz’s approach to the interrelation of Indianthusiasm and the

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formation of a German national identity, which requires looking into the early nineteenth century to understand the principal moments in the development of Indianthusiasm and German Indian imagery: “[T]he background and the inventory of perception for German depictions of Indians, along with the psychologicalcognitive prerequisites for local Indianthusiasm, were staked out already in the mid nineteenth century.”9 For my own interest in the influence of Romantic notions on the sense of peoplehood among German conservative nationalists, the early nineteenth century is an important era while the end of the century constitutes a zenith of Indianthusiasm owing to novels, shows, and exhibitions, paralleled by the rise of nationalism and cultural pessimism in Germany. Early explorers and missionaries during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as travelers, painters, and writers of the early nineteenth century, helped shape the image of Indians in German-speaking countries. They provided visual and verbal representations of indigenous peoples and their environments that stimulated the popular imagination and fascination among Germans. German readers and gallery visitors gleaned their image of Native America from these travelers, and the stories and imagery in turn stimulated more writing and visual representations.10 Similarly, the numerous appearances of Native Americans as captives, show objects, and performers before 1900, followed by Native soldiers, activists, and tourists during the twentieth century, were influential for Indian imagery and for Indianthusiasm in Germany. In these cases, many observers perceived these visitors through the lens of preconceived notions derived from earlier depictions, or with the sensational desire to encounter the type of exotic otherness that one would expect at a freak show. Recent studies have begun to unearth more material on early encounters in Central Europe, illustrating that they occurred quite frequently but also that German (and European) participants had fixed perceptions of Indians. Early exhibitions of Native peoples in Europe gradually evolved into the ethnographic Völkerschauen and the popular Wild West shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, along with the works of the novelists, attracted large numbers of German visitors, reinforced imagery, and turned Indianthusiasm into a mass phenomenon.11 More action-oriented Wild West shows soon replaced exotic and presumably “authentic” Völkerschauen, in part because the visual representations of Catlin and other painters, among other things, had already altered and transfixed the image of Indians as fierce, horse-riding Plains warriors.12 Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody, 1846–1917) toured Europe in 1887–1888, 1889–1892, and 1902–1906. These tours triggered a host of spectacular Wild West shows for the next three decades, prompting one reporter to comment excitedly: “Yes, black skin color has become something so ordinary and familiar that even the most exotic, thick-lipped, heathen, uncivilized, ravenous Negro

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Image of Indians | 25

races can hardly arouse much interest with us anymore as display objects.”13 With these tours, Indianthusiasm in Germany became so ubiquitous that it turned into a craze at some points. American and German impresarios organized tours featuring animals as well as scenes from frontier life. The shows were geared toward the audience’s expectations of action and spectacle, and their idealization and popularization of violence helped shape popular frontier imagery. The shows concentrated on Native Americans from the Plains, particularly the Sioux, because their recent resistance during the “Indian Wars” was fresh in spectators’ memories, and because earlier influences, namely, Catlin, had focused the German image of Indians on the Plains. Buffalo Bill finally “immortalized the clichéd image of the feathered horse-riding warrior as the ‘typical’ Indian in his visitors’ minds.”14 Karl Markus Kreis argues that scholars have underestimated the significance of the Wild West shows for German Indianthusiasm and even for Karl May’s writing: Kreis attributes May’s 1893 publication of Winnetou to May’s desire to profit from Buffalo Bill’s popularity.15 Wild West shows combined the thrill of adventure, the implicit notion of white superiority, and the display of exotic Indians; they seemed to make wellknown fictitious characters come alive, and they invited copying, homemade ethnic drag and play.16 The Indian quickly became a stock character in play throughout society. Children played and still play Indian today. Festivals such as Fasching, that is, the German carnival, or annual fairs such as the Munich Oktoberfest became opportunities for people to dress up like Indians and improvise scenes from the shows and from Karl May novels.17 The Wild West shows inspired the founding of clubs for hobbyists in the 1910s and 1920s, and thus still have a lasting influence on Indianthusiasm in Germany until today.18 As a result of the popularity of Buffalo Bill’s visit to Leipzig in the 1890s, the Tauchischer Jahrmarkt, or Tauch’scher (the locals’ shorthand), a regional fair with a tradition that reached back into the seventeenth century, developed a peculiar reference to Indians. Children and adults, dressed as Indians and cowboys, staged tumultuous street fights during the annual parade (Figure 1, Figure 2). Like Fasching, the tradition of the Tauch’scher relates to old Germanic pre-Christian customs and to human interaction with supernatural beings, i.e., forest spirits, inviting masquerade. The Indian costumes after 1900 expressed the popularity of the traveling shows, but the combination of Indianthusiasm and older Germanic tribal traditions reflects the interrelations between the fascination with the Germanic past and Indianthusiasm.19 This parallel reference to ancient Germanic spirituality in the description and representation of Indians in Germany will permeate the observations in this study. Because Buffalo Bill had a policy of never visiting the same place twice, German Wild West shows had the opportunity to fill the gap and profit from the American model. Among the very popular Wild West and circus shows was one

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Figure 1. Unknown participants of the Tauch’scher in Indian costumes, c. 1930. Courtesy of Joachim Giel. Note the shape of the shields that indicates a probable African, rather than Native American, influence.

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Figure 2. Alfred Giel, father of Taucha hobbyist Joachim Giel, posing on horseback in his Indian costume for local children during the Tauch’scher, c. 1930. Courtesy of Joachim Giel.

of Sioux in 1910 organized by the Hamburg Zoo’s director Carl Hagenbeck. It drew 1.1 million visitors to Hamburg over the course of five months.20 The Dresden-based Circus Sarrasani was very successful, intertwining imagery from Karl May’s novels, role-playing for the audience, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Between 1912 and 1939, Sarrasani continually hired Native Americans, of whom the Sioux Edward Two-Two (1851–1914) became the most famous; he later asked to be buried in the Catholic cemetery in Dresden (Figure 3).21 In 1912, when Two-Two and twenty-one other Sioux first arrived in Dresden, a crowd of over 100,000 people gathered to see their arrival at the train station and procession to their hotel. In later years, Sarrasani’s Native performers often traveled to Radebeul to converse with visitors and curators of the Karl May Museum, which was operated by May’s widow Klara (1864–1944) and Patty Frank (a.k.a. Ernst Tobis, 1876–1959), a former cowboy performer in Buffalo Bill’s show.22 These entrepreneurs not only spurred the founding of early hobbyist clubs, they also worked as catalysts for the legacy of Karl May, providing a constant visual representation of his plots and inviting their audience to copy designs, roles, and plots for their own play.

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Figure 3. Chief Edward Two-Two’s tomb in Dresden. Photo: Frank Usbeck, 2011. The site is usually adorned with an American flag, representing Two-Two’s status as an enlisted member of the U.S. Armed Forces. In this photo, the Pine Ridge Lakota flag can be seen, having been placed by recent Lakota visitors to Dresden.

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Germany’s Foremost Indianthusiast: Karl May, German Virtues, and National Socialism Woe and a thousand times woe to the people who would let the blood and spend the lives of hundreds of thousands, only to decorate some fivescore Knights of the Iron Cross, First Class! —Karl May, qtd. in Johannes Zeilinger and Sabine Beneke, eds., Karl May. Imaginäre Reisen. 21.

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In his settings, the law of the jungle prevails, his characters are not subject to any civil code, but solely to the unwritten law of the wilderness. There is no state that intervenes in the plot with its authority, the heroes set out against the villains only out of their own persuasion, and their moral strength eventually gives them the upper hand. —“Wer war uns Old Shatterhand?,” SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps 13.1 (April 1937): 16.

In the analysis of the German perception of Native Americans, one cannot bypass Karl May (1842–1912) and the legacy of his writings. As the most successful and most widely published German author, his stories on German adventures in the Wild West (and in the Orient) enthralled generations of Germans, and his influence has endured over one hundred years. He was always a controversial figure, with both praise and condemnation coming from literary scholars, politicians, philosophers, journalists, artists, fellow writers, and his audience. That being so, May’s work has invited research on his biographical background and its possible influence on his works, on the authenticity of his descriptions, and on the social, cultural, and political impact of his work. As Christian Feest observes, material by and on Karl May is so easily available that many scholars of German Indianthusiasm forgo research on less well-documented publications, instead writing “yet another book on Karl May.”23 Focusing on the interrelation of German national identity, nationalism, and National Socialism with the German image of Indians, this study will discuss a few selected secondary sources about Karl May, and only insofar as they offer insight into his influence on German notions of peoplehood and the German perception of Native Americans. It will also briefly discuss how Karl May was interpreted during the Third Reich and how his legacy was incorporated into the larger framework of Indian-related Nazi ideology. Karl May’s writings on Western topics became so influential because they represented major aspects of the petty bourgeois mindset in Germany during the late nineteenth century. May combined escapist dreams of exotic places with colonial longing, national identity, bourgeois values, and mythology.24 KarlHeinz Kohl described May’s adventures in the American West and the Orient as expressions of escapism among the German populace. May’s characters operate in remote areas and avoid urban and colonial centers. Thus, they do not compete

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with many other Europeans in their vicinity, they are not identified with typical agents of colonial administration and exploitation, and they act as benign figures in typical forms of culture brokering, such as trapping or trading in the West. In this position, they sometimes encounter Native American characters and establish cordial relations without having to shed their European features and become cultural renegades. The advantage of this setting for both May and readers who identified with the German character Old Shatterhand 25 was that they could retain their own German and Christian identity yet also play other roles and wear exotic costumes for a while.26 This openness toward role-playing had further influenced the customs of playing Indian among children and hobbyists during the twentieth century. May’s German characters, most notably Old Shatterhand, are equipped with superior qualities and traits that were identical with the cultural values of the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Germany. These values are linked to mythical references in the ancient Germanic past. Jace Weaver calls May a “poor man’s Wagner” and Old Shatterhand, consequently, a more widely appealing version of Siegfried. In this understanding, Karl May gave Germans their national epic of the “German Conquistador” (albeit without the feelings of guilt commonly associated with conquest) and contributed to German national identity by asserting the special relationship between superior Germans and noble Indians in America.27 Similarly, Godfried Bomans observes that May’s characters’ effortless problem-solving, and their “lack of material concern,” point to typical German mysticism. May’s Apache character Winnetou, Old Shatterhand’s partner and blood brother, “is a superman. A man like Winnetou is not subject to the laws of logic. He is a mythological figure.”28 Bomans, too, compares May’s and Wagner’s settings, stating that characters in both solve problems in childish, fascinating, and grand ways: “[A]ll those Siegfrieds and Brünhildes, even in the most sophisticated enactment, never reach beyond advanced boy-scouting, but at the same time this reconnaissance party is engulfed in a soughing music whose immensity elevates the whole thing to a strange realness, to a pseudo-reality.”29 This mythological super-heroism, says Bomans, appealed especially to adolescent boys because May’s stories were unreal: “after all, what are they at that age? Mystics without a god … because the idol of the father has just been toppled and that of the woman not yet been erected.”30 Old Shatterhand and Winnetou’s heroism nurtured a sense of hero worship among Germans that did not ask for laws and norms but only for action, and they provided role models that hardly ever engaged in self-doubt, self-reflection, or self-criticism. In this context, the benign superheroes had the potential to become demons and to evoke demonic qualities among Germans because they invited notions of a leader’s infallibility beyond doubt. Throughout his work, May praised and portrayed Germans and Germanness as amiable, but also superior, to both Native characters and to other Europeans.

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Scholars have identified Old Shatterhand’s constant lecturing and paternalizing as typical German schoolmaster behaviors. They also argue that the German characters’ benign superiority implies that German colonialism is better because it focuses on teaching. This, in turn, suggests that colonized peoples are inferior to Germans and need German lecturing to be elevated to civilization and true culture.31 The notion of German superiority is identical to the general Eurocentric rejection of Native American group identities. Winnetou was an acceptable character only because of his German features and because he had shed his Indianness, appearing as an individual, thoroughly educated by a German teacher. Detached from his own tribe; he even converted to Christianity on his deathbed.32 Lists of Germans who publicly stated that they had read Karl May’s works as children, or who admitted that his writings influenced their own work or Weltanschauung, present a representative cross section of German society. Names range from the far left, including the anarchist bohemian poet Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) and the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), as well as writers and artists of the Lebensreform and of Expressionism, such as Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) and George Grosz (1893–1959), to numerous National Socialists, such as Adolf Hitler and Hans Schemm (1891–1935).33 Similarly, May’s critics have come from very diverse social groups. This diversity of influence means that associating May’s writing with particular political movements fails to do it justice. As Baruch Hamerski elaborates, “Karl May provided every class, every political current, every ideology with the appropriate—at least seemingly appropriate— arguments”; consequently, anyone could interpret May’s work “at his leisure and ‘prove’ the dissenters wrong.”34 Klaus Mann branded May the “cowboy mentor of the Führer,”35 and Godfried Bomans, claiming that “it smells like gas in Karl May,”36 similarly alluded to Nazism, yet their interpretations easily obscure the difference between May’s intentions, the interpretation of his writings, and the deliberate appropriation of his legacy. Regardless of May’s political intentions—did he write to promote German colonialism?—the bourgeois values presented in his work could be reappropriated for various political purposes.37 Since Karl May’s financial security depended, for most of his career, on the commercial success of his writing, it can be assumed that he designed his plots and settings to suit the interests, desires, and tastes of a mass audience, and thus reflected the values of a majority of German readers. After his death, May’s widow and the editors of the Karl-May-Jahrbuch worked to rehabilitate May’s reputation, damaged by years of court battles.38 The Jahrbuch editors also began to appropriate May for völkisch-nationalist ideology.39 Praising May for his “naive honesty” and his presumed intention to point out good and evil to German youth, educator and editor Ludwig Gurlitt (1855–1931) “celebrated him as a great pedagogue” whose legacy was “truly völkisch.”40 Once these interpretations, accompanied by revised new editions of May’s works, gained

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wide attention and were accepted as the authorized and true readings, it was only a small step for National Socialists to appropriate May to suit their ideology. In addition, it was a clever propagandistic move on their part to profit from May’s popularity by identifying Nazism with May’s ideas. A few insights into the appropriation of May during the Third Reich at this point will support the general observations on the interrelation of Nazi ideology, Indian imagery, and German identity presented in this study. Scholars usually attribute Nazi appropriation of May not to a few leaders’ whims but to their realization that a positive assessment of May matched the Zeitgeist.41 For this appropriation, censors, educators, and propagandists had to rearrange the public perception of May’s work to align it with Nazi ideology. This ideological distortion targeted May’s overt appraisals of Christianity and pacifism, as well as his critique, particularly in later works, of Nietzsche’s philosophy as indicated by their rejection of militarism and racial doctrines.42 Even though some Nazis branded him as a Marxist and pacifist to effect a ban on the publication of his works, the Nazi leadership did not wish to lose a propaganda opportunity and thus exercised their control over the media and publication system to promote an image of May that did not contradict Nazi ideology.43 The Nazi appropriation of Karl May soon evolved into a regular cult. The open-air theater in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains near Rathen, Saxony, hosted Karl May festivals between 1938 and 1941 that attracted over 500,000 visitors. Two high-quality coffee-table books were produced in conjunction with these events to extract further profit from their popularity. During the festivals and in the books, Karl May’s plots were reduced to action scenes, with the characters (many played by SA storm troopers) clearly symbolizing good and evil. These simplifications employed the fellow tribesmen and common enemy motifs described throughout this study.44 The festivals were widely advertised and reviewed in newspapers and magazines. One article commented on the suitability of the Saxon sandstone cliffs as they resembled the American Southwest and noted the authenticity of setting and costumes (Figure 4). Most important, however, was the commentator’s explanation that May was not only a great dramaturge, but that “educational values can emanate from the brave, decent, and powerful stance of his popular characters.” The main purpose of the festival was not, as the author confirmed, to promote high literature, but the “joy of male bravery, of struggle and of companionable dedication, of the belief in the victory of strength and of good [over evil].”45 At the same time, the festivals satisfied the people’s need for theater, play, and amusement. It is surprising how little disguised the obvious resemblance between this festival and the bread and circuses of old Rome was. A quote by the festival’s president, who admitted that the event was not actually about Karl May’s work in particular but rather was geared toward “inspiring the people for great thoughts, and mediating values that are accessible to everybody,” further augments this notion.46

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Figure 4. “Winnetous Schwur.” Scene from the 1939 Karl May Festival at Rathen in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, advertised in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 6 August 1939: Beilage.

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Karl May’s work also received prominent media attention during the Nazi era. Papers and magazines covered not only Hitler’s courteous honors to May’s widow and his sister but also discussed Hitler’s personal library, which included several of May’s novels. Nazi officials were frequently quoted praising May as an exemplary German.47 In addition, the public exploitation of May’s onehundredth birthday in 1942 and the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death in 1937 aided the official promotional campaign.48 Dietrich’s bibliography of periodicals lists ten May-related articles from 1937, but around twenty-five from 1942 (and several more from the years in between). While the 1937 eulogies constitute only a fraction of the articles on Native American topics for that year, the 1942 articles comprise the bulk of articles on Natives, followed by commemorations of the 450th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, and by inflammatory antiAmerican comments prompted by America’s entry into the war. Fritz Sänger’s collection of prewar press directives did not include a single entry about Karl May in March 1937, the weeks immediately prior to the anniversary of his death, when we would expect propaganda ministry officials to have launched a drive for articles.49 The fact that the propaganda ministry did not urge newspapers to write about May in 1937, although such eulogies were frequently expected for other public figures, suggests that May’s popularity was so great that the authorities did not need to prod newspaper editors to celebrate May. No similar information is available for press directives during the war years; therefore, one can only speculate whether any directives were issued in 1942. However, since the period after the German declaration of war was a phase of heated anti-American propaganda, it seems sensible to conclude that propaganda directors would have used May for militaristic pro-German and anti-American comments.50 This would have been especially beneficial from the propaganda perspective since May’s novels lent themselves to appraisals of heroism and to the branding of Americans as imperialist oppressors, as the following discussion will illustrate. Karl May’s portrayal of Germans as superior fighters, knowledgeable schoolmasters, and benign culture brokers provided extremely valuable propaganda material for the Nazis. Media articles and the Karl-May-Jahrbuch emphasized the superiority of the German characters and their weapons. A 1936 dissertation compared May’s works to national epics such as the Song of the Nibelungs, claiming that both texts showed Germans could prevail in any dangerous encounter. Its author also made direct comparisons between the Indians May depicted and the Germanic tribes.51 Fighting was portrayed as a racial character trait of Native Americans, and the Nazi ideal of life as continuous struggle was evident in the colonial struggle for the American Lebensraum. The Indians, as May seemed to prove, knew they were too weak to prevail in the end but stubbornly resisted even so, an attitude to which Nazis could relate.52

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May’s simplistic distinctions of characters into good and evil, along with the inevitable victory of the German-Indian allies, could also be used for militaristic hero worship. Authors constantly pointed out that May, whose biography was fraught with hardships and mishaps, like his characters, was able to overcome the greatest obstacles. Such portrayals of his legacy also associated the primitive with the positive notions of “pure” and “honest” which can be observed in May’s writings. These parallels became propaganda devices once the Nazis decided to benefit from May’s popularity and turn his works, as well as the stains in his biography, into a vehicle for German greatness: “The decisive issue remains that, from the inner destitution of a man who saw himself surrounded by a sheer wall of enemies after unprecedented triumph, some kind of fantasy image emerged, exemplary for the desires and longings of countless people who wanted and want to escape destitution and daily routine into a land of the plainly … primitive … in which evil is punished by the same inner rules and degrees with which it had defamed goodness before.”53 The Nazis depicted the ability to overcome all obstacles in spite of individual drawbacks as a German national trait that instilled a sense of invincibility in children and soldiers.54 Heroism and military sacrifice went hand in hand with reckless abandon and ruthless discipline. A 1943 article recommended May’s work to illustrate the necessity of such discipline for soldiers and the general public because his novels showed “that every crime is punished severely.” The author adds: “This relentless rigor in judgment may be too tough for times as soft as butter, but it correlates to the much-cited ‘public feeling’ not just in writing, but also in practice. The current initiation of the death penalty against war criminals is proof of that.”55 These war criminals were German deserters. Both the German government and the army leadership at that time were calling for relentless courage in the face of Soviet advances and of the Anglo-American operations in North Africa and Sicily. Though the most prominent influence on the German image of Indians, Karl May was by no means the only or even the first such influence. His writings profited from earlier notions of Indians and exploited the available tropes and stereotypes. He was able to make use of the evolution of mass literature around 1900; his work and the popularity of Völkerschauen and Wild West shows reinforced each other. The emergence of Imperial Germany as a nation-state, its inferiority complex about its belated founding, and rapid economic improvements influenced German identity and self-perceptions as much as many Germans’ longing for exotic places and for colonial adventures. Romanticism, national identity, cultural crisis, and the perception of the Indian other generated tropes of Indianness and of Germanness during the nineteenth century on which Karl May, and eventually the National Socialists, could build. The following discussion will illustrate how Indian imagery developed along with Germans’ self-perception.

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Romanticism, Emotion, and Longing for the Past: Breeding Grounds for the Indian Image and German Conservatism

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Our canopy spread for thousands of years A home to red sons of the woods Who were roaming in freedom and hunting with spears While they praised us for weapons and foods We prospered and in honor we grew Protected and nurtured the land Then the palefaces came with a vengeance and slew What was sacred and whole with their hand We gave them their homes and provided a hearth For these palefaced, cowardly men from afar But they in their greed assaulted the earth As they cut and felled and left scar upon scar. —Konrad Nies, “The Revenge of the Forest Primeval,” 381.

The emergence of Romanticism and its ilk had an impact on the image of Indians in Europe and Euro-America, but the movement also influenced the development of German conservative and nationalist ideas. Informed by Romantic thought, the Indian image and currents of conservatism in Germany interacted and mutually reinforced each other. Romanticism triggered and/or propelled forward a number of concepts which still impact German Indianthusiasm today, such as thoughts on ancient German tribal history and humans’ relationship with nature. The analysis of selected aspects of Romantic thinking at this point will set the foundation for the following observations on German notions of peoplehood and uniqueness as well as on the evolution of Nazi ideology through a tradition of Romantic cultural pessimism. The application of Romantic concepts to the discussion of Indianthusiasm and intellectual conservatism in Germany is vital to understanding the longevity of interest in Indians and the resulting utilization of Indian imagery for political purposes by German nationalists and during the Nazi era. Embedded in the larger era of Romantic thinking, the literary period of Romanticism reflected philosophical debates and sociocultural developments at the beginning of the industrial age in Europe. In turn, the tropes of Romantic literature were borrowed and disseminated so that what counted as “Romantic” spread through all walks of life. Not only could particular objects or human activities be seen as Romantic, but the notion also came to be variously applied to concepts of nation and race, to old and modern, or to conservative and revolutionary.56 Romantic concepts, such as emotion, adventure, nature, the Gothic, the sublime, grandiose landscapes, tragedy, historicity, and heroism, lent themselves to the promotion of Indian imagery as much as to German self-reflection with regard to the German past and present during the nineteenth century.57

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European Romanticism as a literary and intellectual movement emerged in the late eighteenth century and, to varying degrees in different European countries, addressed problems caused by the accelerating modernization and industrialization of European societies. It aimed at once to overcome the feudal social order and to oppose earlier developments in the humanist tradition that had begun to dissolve that order. Romanticism rejected the major ideals of the Enlightenment, such as rationalism, reason, and an emphasis on science and technology. Romantics developed notions of intuition, individuality, and emotionality to counter these Enlightenment principles.58 Romantics significantly shaped the arts, aesthetics, philosophy, and political thinking, which still retain Romantic elements today.59 In the German states around 1800, these Romantic notions were anti-French as much as they were anti-bourgeois. Not only did Germans have to cope with their own industrialization process, but they also knew that Napoleonic France was farther ahead. France had a stronger military, which increased the feeling of competition with the old rival along with the inferiority complex many Germans had toward their neighbor. Seeing Napoleonic occupation as the “military culmination of a French cultural dominance,” nationalists in Germany rallied the people to the cause by utilizing the foreign oppressor as a unifier.60 Romanticism played an important role in this as its protagonists provided thought structures to address the idea of the nation, of ancient heritage, and of heroic resistance. Embedded in the context of asserting a German national identity against foreign dominance and of the general rejection of some aspects of modernity, Romanticism developed a complex interest in the past. This interest became evident in the search for old texts about German ancestry and the emergence of the respective academic fields, such as vaterländische Altertumskunde. The past was also a treasure chest for those who sought to revive old customs, traditions, and virtues, and to propagate particularly escapist and anti-urbanist notions.61 Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka argue that, ever since the early Romantic period, European youth have sought to re-establish harmony between humans and nature, and have looked for ways to cope with the alienation generated by modernity. In this respect, Romanticism can be seen as the starting point for both Germans’ interest in their own ancient tribal past and for German Indianthusiasm as ways to rediscover German tribal roots.62 These distinct layers of interest in the past supported a sense of continuing ancient German(ic) history. They also worked toward an openness among Germans to Indian imagery as they suggested similarities between Germans and Indians in their senses of historicity, mysticism, tragedy, and simplicity—already significant parts of the Indian image. It has been noted that Romantic sentiment about the past, in combination with an enthusiasm for purportedly underdeveloped, primitive peoples, has been a longstanding argument of cultural criticism. Tacitus’s Germania is often mentioned as an early example of a text whose author described the virtues of “bar-

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barians,” seemingly unspoiled by the trappings of civilization, as a mirror to his own group’s decadence.63 As Robert Berkhofer has observed, the notion of the primitive generated a longing in Europeans to regain their own lost innocence.64 Idealizing Native Americans as much as Germanic tribes thus became a major Romantic notion that late nineteenth-century arguments about the past carried forth as an alternative to the unbearable present. The emergence of industrialism and urbanity in Germany threatened Germans’ traditional sense of identity and community, as well as their relation to nature, and it triggered a general sense of rejection among German conservatives.65 Isolating themselves from the rapid transitions of their society, they hailed the past because it provided images of small and manageable communities with clear-cut social structures, a simple life, and a close affinity for nature, all of which seemed imperiled by the results of the French Revolution and by emerging industrialization. The urge to escape could be acted out in Biedermeier art, in Romantic novels about medieval knights, or in fiction about exotic peoples and places, such as American aboriginals and landscapes, or in the mystification of the German home environment, namely, the forest.66 Escapism throughout the nineteenth century not only included flight into an imagined past, but it also associated exotic peoples with the evolving German inferiority complex about having “come too late as a people.” That is, Germany was perceived as too late in the grab for colonies and thus denied access to these exotic peoples.67 As Hartmut Lutz stated, these Romantic notions were a mixture of “colonial desire and escapist fantasies”; people used them to reunite with “the primitive, the unspoiled, [and] the folk,” features believed to be found in indigenous peoples. Writing and reading about Native Americans opened up the ideal world of the past that avoided modernist complexities.68 For this escapism to work, one, of course, had to regard Indians as a “thing of the past,” ending the recognition of Indian history with the closing of the frontier in 1890 and disregarding the persistence of Native cultures.69 As Romanticism evolved, its intellectual leaders were eager to distinguish themselves from earlier currents of thought, and from French cultural dominance, especially in Germany. Since the ideas of the Enlightenment—and intellectualism in general since the Renaissance—had been centered on reason and science, Romanticists hailed emotionality, instincts, and intuition, instead. They responded to questions of true or false, of proof and cognition, not with reason but with sentiment and instinct. Romanticism’s great emphasis on individuality and individual experience also supported these new paradigms.70 The movement’s focus on intuition and emotion, and its rejection of reason and rational thinking, increased throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, irrationality was promoted as a German virtue and discussed as a probable source of Nazism after 1945.71

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Since such notions of radical subjective emotionality, however, would lead to misunderstandings between individuals, the idea of the Volk, the people, became a platform for a collective identity enabling individuals to understand each other. The people came to be understood as a constant entity, distant from everyday politics, and therefore beyond all strife and alienation. The idea of the nation, or of peoplehood, became a guardrail protecting against the insecurity abysmal Romantic self-observation engendered.72 A presumably common national soul encompassed emotions and thought patterns shared and inherited by all members of the people. In this context, the Romantic interest in national identities became a basis for notions of national character traits and, later, presumed racial psyches, all of which provided ample opportunity to invoke the fellow tribesmen motif, that is, the special relationship between Germans and Indians. It is vital to discuss the growing emphasis on emotionality, instinct, and passion in German self-perception in detail in order to grasp the complexity of Nazi ideology. Many Germans claimed to have a special relationship with Indians because they saw themselves as inherently Romantic. German Romantic nationalists believed Germans could make sense of the world through intuition, passion, and empathy and that other nations could not, thus constructing an image of German exceptionalism, or a German Sonderweg.73 A major factor in this construction was the option it entailed for pragmatic inclusion or exclusion. This was tied to Romanticism’s interest in the past and in exotic peoples. Native Americans fell under the category of “primitive,” with its corresponding notions of, and reference to, the origin of humanity, as well as a close affinity to nature. Natives were seen as unspoiled by advanced civilization; their thoughts and actions were thus “naturally” based on instincts, emotions, and intuition. Within the trends of nationalism and conservatism, German national identity was construed as a continuation of old Germanic tribal history and Germanic virtues. This set up modern Germans as quasi-modern primitives, or as a cultured Naturvolk.74 These assumptions furthered the use of the fellow tribesmen motif. Within this framework, intuition and passion were ascribed to both Indians and ancient and modern Germans, so these elements became a common denominator between the two imagined identities, allowing Germans to assert a special bond long after Romanticism. It must be emphasized that these elements, and direct reference to Romanticism, were used to invoke the fellow tribesmen motif even in the context of scientific racism, where such bonds seem utterly bizarre from outside.75 Germans’ apparent inclusion of Native Americans in the illustrious circle of us through the employment of Romantic elements, then, allowed them to exclude internal others, such as Jews,76 as well as to “other” their neighbors: within the common enemy motif, the Anglo-Saxons were to the Indians what the French or ancient Romans were to Germans and their ancestors. This is not to suggest that Nazism was a logical, somewhat natural, result of Romanti-

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cism, but to explain the Nazi promotion of Indian images in large part with the active tradition of Romanticism in Germany,77 and to explain the Nazi belief that Romanticism was part of German national identity. The rejection of reason by early Romanticists, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, also entailed new approaches to understanding other peoples. Emphasis on empathy and experience turned the study of the other into a very personal endeavor. Understanding could not come through mere empiricism, Herder argued, but through intuitive, immediate sensation, and personal experience. In Herder’s terms, this implied that one had to undertake a sea voyage to truly grasp the meaning of the Odyssey. Since Romanticists believed the essence of humanity was the same everywhere, they saw the key to understanding the other in the exploration of the self.78 This belief in internal qualities also triggered an obsession with origins, as Romanticists thought that only the natural, original state of humans would reveal the full essence of this common human nature. Thus, the German interest in Indians as examples of (nearly) original man falls into the same category as the nationalist insistence on the continuity of German(ic) history, which claimed an unbroken evolution from the Germanic hero Arminius to modern Germans. The internal qualities of an individual, as well as an individual’s intuitive ability to sense and make sense of a phenomenon, are expressions of Romantic thought. Individual “soul” within this paradigm circumscribed the essence of their being even as this term clouded over the exact working mechanisms, causes, and effects of human behavior, thus expressing the Romantic tendency toward the diffuse, impalpable, and mystical. Intuition and mystery obtained religious qualities that could not be doubted, a predilection that continued in postRomantic nationalist circles of the late nineteenth century.79 These Romantic leanings eventually prompted discussion not only of the souls of individuals but also of entire peoples, which provided room for postulating kinship or at least cultural affinity between Germans and Native Americans.80 They also reinforced existing currents of cultural pessimism and anti-liberalism and promoted the dichotomies of community versus society and of culture versus civilization, as the following section will detail. This infatuation with savage, and thus presumably natural, qualities helped construct the image of the German Sonderweg and generated space for continual reference to the image of Indians. The tradition of German Innerlichkeit, empathy, and the rejection of modern society lent itself to German Indianthusiasm in two ways. First, the fellow tribesmen motif allowed Germans to see the Indian as “like us,” given particular conditions. The constant assertion of Native Americans as emotional, mystical, irrational, or fierce fixed this image of the Indian in Germans’ perception. When, for whatever reason, these Romantic elements were applied to Germans, the parallelism either suggested a conspicuous identity, or at least left ample space for interpretations of such identity, be it in implicit references to German tribalism,

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or in explicit historical comparisons. Secondly, since German Romanticism had established that the self, as much as foreign peoples, could be understood best through intuition and empathy, and since these abilities were denied to most other peoples, Germans were apparently in a unique position to understand, and love, Indians. Consequently, the legacy of Romanticism spurred many Germans to feel destined to be experts on Indians. Their insistence on a unique relationship also permitted widespread criticism of Anglo-American and Hispanic policies toward American indigenous peoples, thus putting Germans on a pedestal of moral high ground.81 At this stage, it is necessary to mention two well-researched tropes of Indian imagery common in the discussion about Indians as influenced by Romanticism: the distinction between the noble and cruel savage, and the trope of the vanishing race. Not only were clear good/bad or noble/cruel distinctions quickly copied from American Romantic literature such as the Leatherstocking Tales, but they also became dominant features for understanding frontier life in Germany.82 The noble savage was embedded in the grandiose landscape of his surroundings, his character traits seemed at once exotic and familiar, and his fate seemed inevitable. Because these features adhered to popular Romantic themes, the noble savage was one of the major Romantic images of the Indian. The Romantic mindset projected its interest in the mysterious and adventurous onto the concept of the noble savage—for this, the American landscape provided a perfect setting. Rustling forest trees, raging whitewater, and magnificent canyons attracted painters and writers alike. Immigrants and pioneers sought the promise of freedom of choice and opportunities to prove their individual valor, strength, and entrepreneurship. The original inhabitants of these landscapes were often treated as part of the setting; their status as children of nature made them a part of nature itself. Romanticism’s euphoria concerning what was wild, natural, and original made Native Americans—and especially their idealized image—perfect objects of Romantic adoration. The universal character traits of the images of both the noble and cruel savage could easily be applied to Native Americans with their presumed wild nature and their affinity with their natural environment. The noble savage served as a countercultural device for criticizing one’s own society in that the other depicted in the image became a mouthpiece. This technique was by no means a Romantic invention. Among others, Tacitus and Montaigne had employed the image for this purpose; it seemed to satisfy a diffuse, escapist longing for a simple social order, a sense of community, the heroic protection of homeland, and the means to live.83 These were all crucial notions during the Romantic era in Europe and remained so in large parts of German society for a longer period. Character traits ascribed to the noble savage fit neatly into the contexts of teaching virtues and escapism. While the noble savage was universally described as proud, bold, stoic, free, and aloof, his cruel savage counterpart was said to be devilish, compulsive,

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beastly, and warmongering.84 Characters employed in the process of othering— heterostereotypes in Lutz’s words—are usually flat and static.85 This leads to the paradox that the Indian image takes on characteristics of both the cruel and noble savage at the same time. The apparent contradiction begins to make sense when one looks at the various ways Indian images were used. On the one hand, there was the pragmatic and expedient use of the image, and, on the other, German nationalists utilized Indian imagery to define essential German features. Within these contexts, one could emphasize the cruel or noble characteristics of the Indian either to underscore familiarity or to assert racial or cultural superiority as necessary.86 The nobler traits were often applied to provide a role model one’s own society should strive for—which is why Karl May’s Winnetou has been said to be noble only to the extent that he exchanged his Indian identity for German bourgeois character traits.87 Consequently, the noble savage was supposed to be exotic but not alien. For Germans’ self-perception as descendants of ancient Germanic tribes, reinforced by Romantic notions, it was not a contradiction to be both noble and cruel at the same time; rather, Germanness was playfully identified with parallel notions of the barbarian and berserker, on the one hand, and the honest and dreamy natural philosopher, on the other. In short, both Germans and Indians were portrayed as generally amiable people whom one would hope not to antagonize. Once war, violence, and superiority were taken into account, the noble savage came to be intertwined with the image of the vanishing race and led to the Romantic infatuation with tragedy. Among others, Berkhofer pointed out that most noble savage characters in American literature were dead Indians from the past who could not hurt anyone anymore. The more distant in time and place Indians became, the nobler was their appearance in literature and public perception. Observing the results of forced culture contact and conflict, such as epidemics, massacres, relocation, and the loss of traditional economies, Euro-Americans assumed that Indians’ inferiority prevented them from coping with the contact and acculturating to European ways of life without degenerating into miserable drunkards. If the contact of cultures in America led to Indians’ demise, they believed, their doom was inevitable; thus, they accepted the image of the vanishing race as a given of colonial reality. These thought structures freed Euro-Americans from guilt and responsibility and allowed them to pity the dying Indian from a safe temporal and spatial distance.88 For an understanding of Nazi ideology, though, the vanishing race trope would gain importance (as we will discuss in the following chapters) as it linked the dying Indian to prominent Nazi tropes such as the notion of all life as struggle, racial conflict, extermination, and doomsday scenarios in general. As for what was “Romantic” in Nazi ideology, the idea of Indians heroically and stoically dying for a lost cause made them exceptionally noble.

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German Sonderbewusstsein, Rejection of Western Ideas, and Their Relevance for Indian Imagery The rejection of Enlightenment principles as alien in Romantic notions, which began around 1800, and the postulation of German exceptionalism among nationalists and conservatives intensified throughout the nineteenth century, especially since nationalism abandoned its liberal tendencies in the mid 1800s. During the same period, German interest in America and in American aboriginals increased in tandem, popular Indian fiction flooded the markets, and the ongoing construction of the Indian image provided constant reference points for German identity formation, escapist idealization, and colonialist longing. The fellow tribesmen motif matured along with the German Sonderbewusstsein not only because the intensification and radicalization of Romantic notions in discourses on Germans’ relation to other peoples invited Indian references. German uniqueness suggested that Germans were closer to peoples who Western Europeans generally saw as the barbarian other, namely, indigenous peoples. It is important to note that many expressions of the Sonderbewusstsein included the deliberate appropriation of the barbarian image as a counterweight to a civilization perceived as alien. Colonial envy and assertions of otherness vis-à-vis Western colonial powers presented a common enemy motif that seemingly put Germans in the position of “European Indians” subject to the same cultural duress as indigenous Americans. Romantic ideals in Germany set in motion the rejection of reason and the claim to uniquely emotive, intuitive behavior and thought patterns among Germans. As the nineteenth century progressed, these notions were radicalized. They influenced German philosophy and political ideologies long after the actual Romantic era had ended. Up until the mid 1800s, Romantic ideals were ascribed to the German character through historic continuity, for example, as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) suggested in his celebrated inaugural lecture on the presumed “German Movement” in 1869.89 Eventually, Romantic notions became more and more integral to Germanness through biological racism, such that Nazi-era writers could claim that Germans had a genetic propensity to be Romantic, and that Romanticism was an essential part of German racial and cultural identity. Romanticism, then, for the preservationist Walther Schoenichen (1876–1956), was the “reflexion on our völkisch essence and on the fountainheads through which it continually regains new strength and ardency. The idea of Romanticism, in this understanding, is not a fruit of the nineteenth century; it was avid among our people as long as our very own ancient völkisch culture has been exposed to alien radiations.”90 The intensifying claim of German emotionality and intuition was visible in philosophy, academia, and the radicalization of language. While Romanticism was originally manifested in inconsequential longing and dreamy contemplation, new developments introduced the force of the will, the joy of violent expression

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of one’s will, and the debate on evil to the philosophical arena. Philosophers, most prominently Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), emphasized volition, physical drives, and the acceptance of evil for an understanding of an individual’s identity. It did not take long for conservatives to appropriate these ideas and use them to dichotomize Germans against what was seen as rationalistic Western Europeans.91 The focus on individual will and the drives presented a more violent and fierce self-image, and made the use of violence and the unrestrained expression of violent feelings more acceptable in German society. Irrationalism thrived now and turned out to be a handy tool for simplistic us-versus-them oppositions. The implications of drives, violence, and irrationalism in German conservative thought and cultural pessimism have triggered much public and scholarly debate. To name one example, Klaus Theweleit’s seminal study Male Fantasies discusses the role of drives and disturbed gender relations among World War I veterans in the development of Nazism. Even though his psychoanalytic approach has been criticized as too narrow to explain the emergence of National Socialism, his emphasis on ancient, primitive drives as new factors in German identity-formation at that time supports the analysis of Indianthusiasm in Germany.92 While Barbara Haible claims that Nazi ideology in Indian novels always asserted Indian inferiority because Indian characters were portrayed as subject to physical drives, Theweleit draws on a number of examples which prominently display exactly these drives as valuable traits.93 Most important among these are the writings of Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), whose reflections on experiencing the front in World War I made him famous in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and preserved his prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Jünger writes that Germans need to be barbarically violent in order to be respected: “We appeared like the war god himself, such as the German at times appears throughout history, with this Germanic furor which is irresistible. They hate us over there, and there is but one measure to counter that, if you do not want to be contemptible: To be terrible.”94 The attribution of barbaric features and primitive drives as positive Germanic traits comes to the fore even more clearly when Jünger describes the furor of one of his semi-fictional characters: “There is still a lot of animal in him … when the sine curve of life swings back to the red line of the primitive, the mask comes off. Naked as ever, he breaks loose, the primeval man, the caveman in all his uncontrollable drives.”95 One must agree with Theweleit when he adds that these statements are perfect expressions of cultural pessimism. They do, indeed, portray German violence as an inherent national trait and also hint at an affinity of these Germans in a furor to similarly warlike Indians of the German imagination. After Nietzsche introduced violence and physical drives as positive traits, Nazi ideology utilized his ideas. Since 1945, therefore, Nietzsche’s influence on the Nazis has been discussed.96 In this study, however, I am more interested in the ways these ideas enabled and apparently emphasized parallels between

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Germans and Native Americans. Nietzsche’s (and others) acceptance of evil as part of human nature increased the acceptance of the notion of the barbarian.97 Nietzsche’s postulation of the blond beast, and generally of man as a predator, grew from a tradition of praising savage features in Germanic tribes, and of claiming the continuity of these features among contemporary Germans.98 This increasing tendency to glorify barbaric features gave more credibility to the aforementioned symbiosis of noble and cruel savage images of Indians. The ongoing transformation of Indian imagery allowed Germans to stay enthusiastic about Indians because, apparently, both Indians and Germans had a propensity to let their emotions and drives reign when it came to fighting. The increasingly violent self-perception of Germans as emotional barbarians was sometimes used to underscore their growing political and military strength after the founding of the empire in 1871, as Emperor Wilhelm’s 1900 “Hun Speech” illustrates.99 It could also be used to express a typical German defiance toward “the West.” Once Germans could accept and take pride in themselves as semi-barbarians, the potential for positing similarities with Indians obviously grew. Thus, the increasing acceptance of violence in German society gradually transformed the general German self-perception as much as it did the Indian image and provided for more variety in the application of Indian imagery in German contexts. The tradition among Germans of rejecting Western civilization can be traced as far back as the Roman encroachment into Germania. Within this tradition, Catholicism became a medieval equivalent for “Rome,” and France came to be identified as the descendant of the old Roman enemy, so that “Romance” peoples were “othered” among many Germans.100 Herder, in his treatise Kritische Wälder, criticized Catholicism and explained how basic Catholic principles were alien to the prevailing German character.101 The anti-Catholic approach was complemented by mainly anti-French nationalist assertions of otherness, which often included allusions to German climate, geography, history, and character. To name but a few examples, Goethe’s 1797 Hermann und Dorothea praised a pastoral, organic landscape and people while it condemned French urban chaos and revolutionary unrest. For this reason, it was widely promoted during the Third Reich.102 Similarly, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) stated in 1806 that Germans were an original people who, as the only Europeans, still used an uncorrupted language and therefore had to resist foreign intrusions. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) argued along the same lines but emphasized notions of race. Both authors were widely received by nationalist circles throughout the nineteenth century and promoted by the Nazis as harbingers of National Socialist ideology.103 German nationalism often asserted uniqueness in a system of dichotomies wherein culture was considered a German trait, while civilization (and liberalism) were said to be features of the West. This idea entailed the belief in the German

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inability to embrace, and adopt, liberal democracy. As Fritz Stern noted, antiliberalism provided a basis for many more notions of alienation from modern society, such as secularism, capitalism, and urbanity.104 The dichotomy of community versus society portrayed Germans as a tribal people that retained roots in the concepts of clan, ancestor cults, and sacred territory, whereas it often presented society as resulting from the negative effects of modernity: reckless individualism, secularization, or social upheaval and the demise of traditional values. In his sociological classic of 1887, Community and Society, Ferdinand Tönnies set up a conceptual dichotomy between the two poles of his title. Although he warned against a political appropriation of this dichotomy, in Germany it was widely read as an anti-modernist justification for the resistance of the tribal German self against the liberal, chaotic, and devious Western other.105 Tönnies never explicitly compared Germans to Native Americans, but he constantly invoked Indian imagery in his discussion of ancestors, chiefs, elders, and council fires. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) highlighted these dichotomies. Under the influence of the cataclysmic experience of World War I, he contrasted the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in “feminine” and “masculine” terms, respectively, referring to Nietzsche’s use of these terms. For Germans, he said, the eighteenth century apparently had been “feminine and fraudulent,” but the nineteenth, marked by Romanticism, nationalism, and pessimism, could be described as “honest,” “dark,” “brutal,” and “stern.”106 In these descriptions of masculine qualities one can easily discover the savage of the woods, who sports both noble and cruel traits. It is relevant to the argument of the German Sonderbewusstsein and the cultural pessimism of many German conservatives to discuss Mann in a little more detail because he understood himself as a product of the nineteenth century and yet underwent a transformation in his thinking during the 1920s that eventually made him reject the culmination of German nationalism in National Socialism. Mann had stated in 1918 that democracy was not only an alien phenomenon but a direct threat to the German soul, and further exemplified the nineteenth-century tradition of dichotomizing culture and civilization: “The difference between Geist and politics includes the difference between culture and civilization, between soul and society, between freedom and franchise, between arts and literature; and Germanness stands for culture, soul, freedom, and arts; and not civilization, society, franchise, and literature.”107 Mann is one of many who asserted German uniqueness by way of the culture versus civilization contrast and its subdivisions. Exponents of German cultural pessimism, such as Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891), Arthur Möller van den Bruck (1876–1925), Werner Sombart (1863–1941), and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)—in varying degrees—advocated irrationality and rejected reason and civilization as un-German.108 Many of these thinkers countered the assumed cultural threat with a self-proclaimed protest movement

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of Germans who experienced modernity and World War I as the resistance of German indigenous culture to the intrusion of Western civilization. This led many to assume a familiarity with the plight of Native Americans. According to Thomas Mann, the German role in World War I was not imperialistic but a form of defense against the militaristic and spiritual hatred of the West.109 In this context, the construction of a dichotomy in which German culture constantly had to defend its essence against Western civilization provided the perfect stage for German Indianthusiasm. As Fritz Stern noted, the cultural pessimism that fed the German Movement in the nineteenth century created a longing for alternative societies—or better, communalities—that was not tied to this particular situation but could recur in slightly altered form. He detected parallels in the global movement of the “68ers” in the twentieth century, including similar crises of spiritual emptiness accompanied by increased materialism and plenty. In both situations, there were “voices denigrating reason and elevating feeling” and a longing for “a new communal existence, for a new faith, for wholeness.”110 The stories generating the German Indian image could easily nurture this longing for wholeness, organic structures, and communal life. The obvious parallels between culturally pessimistic (German) and Native societies inspired the fellow tribesmen motif even without direct reference to Indians. Ominously, the Indian was, thus, constantly present by his absence where cultural pessimism was concerned. Whereas Germans assumed that they shared a sense of organic community with the Indians, they held that Romance societies, such as the French, were based on mechanistic principles of absolute power. This threatening difference in social structure between Germans and Indians, on the one hand, and Romance peoples, on the other, was apparently experienced by Indians in the form of colonial imperialism, and by Germans during World War I. Celebrated theater director Heiner Müller added that during the Third Reich, “to be a German meant to be an Indian,” as the Nazis cashed in on this urge for cultural revival.111 Müller explained that hatred for civilization could be kindled through youth literature: “This Indian Romanticism was anti-plutocratic propaganda against American democracy. Of course, this did not occur to us back then … Yes, the Nazis were ingenious at using this anti-civilization element, this longing for savagery in these stories.”112 As one can see here, the assumed special German-Indian relationship could also serve as an anti-liberal, or anti-colonial, construct by invoking the common enemy. Pointing an accusing finger at the Anglo-Saxon powers and at France allowed Germans to express their feelings of inferiority as latecomers in the grab for colonies. In addition, it transformed the self-image of the German nation among many of its citizens from a weak competitor into the victim of Western civilization. Many conservative Germans in imperial Germany indeed felt under attack. The dichotomy of German culture versus Western civilization purveyed

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by cultural pessimists made it easy for Germans to identify with Indians (since they were apparently uncivilized) and assert their uniqueness in Europe, constructing themselves as European Indians. From this perspective, the French and Anglo-Saxons had been intent on bringing civilization to Native Americans, thus destroying their ancient cultures. It is, therefore, no surprise that nationalist Germans understood World War I as a struggle of heroic Germans who wanted to preserve their ancient culture against the onslaught of the alien civilizer and colonizer.113 In the wake of Romanticism, German nationalism grew and was increasingly influenced by conservative notions. German exceptionalism claimed that there were fundamental differences between the German ways of life and essence of being—das deutsche Wesen—and those of other Europeans. Within this context, constructed Indian images suggested a similarity between Germans and Indians that cemented the idea of a special bond between them. The fellow tribesmen motif portrayed the proponents of liberalism and civilization as alien and a threat to Germanness. It used the history of Native-European relations as a cautionary tale and, at the same time, vented German longings for the exotic and the adventurous. The image of Indians among Germans, thus, reinforced their own self-image as being special. The following discussion will analyze German nationalists’ construction of peoplehood and national identity in depth, exploring how they utilized typical tropes of Indian imagery and of nation-building, such as creation myths, rituals, and relations to nature, and how Nazi ideology eventually employed these tropes in its propaganda efforts.

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Notes 1. Susi Colin, “The Wild Man and the Indian in Early 16th Century Book Illustration,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 5–6. 2. See Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 14–15; Colin, “The Wild Man and the Indian,” 5–36; Lutz, Indianer, 246–50. 3. Lutz, Indianer, 246–50. 4. Christian F. Feest, “Germany’s Indians in a European Perspective,” in Germans and Indians, ed. Calloway et al., 27. 5. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 21–22; Lutz, Indianer, 259–64; Allen, “Reception,” 79–83. 6. Conrad, “Mutual Fascination: Indians in Dresden and Leipzig,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 456; see Feest, Indians and Europe; Calloway et al., Germans and Indians. 7. Feest, “Germany’s Indians”; Penny, “Elusive Authenticity,” 798; Susanne Zantop, “Close Encounters: Deutsche and Indianer,” in Germans and Indians, ed. Calloway et al., 13n8. 8. Allen, “Reception,” 4. 9. Lutz, Indianer, 270. 10. Daniel E. Williams, “Until They Are Contaminated by Their More Refined Neighbors: The Images of the Native American in Carver’s ‘Travels through the Interior’ and its Influence on the Euro-American Imagination,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 195.

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11. The literal translation of Völkerschauen would be “peoples’ shows,” but “ethnographic” or “cultural exhibitions” corresponds better to the original. I will continue using the German term coined by Hamburg zoo director and show entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck. Kort and Hollein, I Like America, 176. American aboriginals were put on display in central Europe as early as the sixteenth century; Germany, too, recorded an incident in which two captive Native Americans were exhibited at the Leipzig trade fair in 1723. William C. Sturtevant and David B. Quinn, “This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 61–140; Alfred Lehmann, “Zeitgenössische Bilder der ersten Völkerschauen,” in Von fremden Völkern und Kulturen. Hans Plischke zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Lang, Walther Nippold, and Günther Spannaus (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1955), 32. 12. According to Wolfgang Haberland, the 1886 show of Bella Coolas had to reschedule its stay in Berlin because a troupe of Lakotas had stopped there already and the managers were aware that the “Sitting Bull Indians” would draw a bigger audience. “Nine Bella Coolas in Germany,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 345, 356–60. 13. Eric Ames, “Seeing the Imaginary: On the Popular Reception of Wild West Shows in Germany, 1885-1910,” in I Like America: Fictions of the Wild West, ed. Kort and Hollein, 213. 14. Peter Bolz, Indianer Nordamerikas. Die Sammlungen des Ethnologischen Museums Berlin; [anläßlich der Ausstellung “Indianer Nordamerikas. Vom Mythos zur Moderne” im Ethnologischen Museum—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Eröffnung: 25. November 1999] (Berlin: G-und-HVerlag, 1999), 15; see Conrad, “Mutual Fascination,” 461–62; Karl Markus Kreis, “Indians Playing, Indians Praying: Native Americans in Wild West Shows and Catholic Missions,” in Germans and Indians, ed. Calloway et al., 195; Carolyn Thomas Foreman, Indians Abroad, 1493-1938, ed. Armed Services (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943), 288–303. 15. Kreis, “Indians Playing,” 197. 16. Ames, “Seeing the Imaginary,” 214, 222; Kreis, “Indians Playing,” 201–02. 17. Conrad, “Mutual Fascination,” 464; Allen, “Reception,” 169. 18. Kreis, “Indians Playing,” 201. 19. Achim Beier, e-mail interview on Stolpersteine and Tauch’scher, 11 June 2008; H. Köhler, “Der Tauchsche,” online Posting. Tauch’scher.de, 1 June 2007, http://www.tauchscher.de/ downloads/artikel_tsaz_010607.pdf; Joachim Giel, personal interview on Indian costumes at the Tauchischer Jahrmarkt, 17 December 2009; Arbeitsgruppe Stolpersteine Leipzig, “Salomo Weininger,” Stolpersteine Leipzig, Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig e.V. 2006, http://www .stolpersteine-leipzig.de/index.php?id=177. 20. Ames, “Seeing the Imaginary,” 224–25. 21. See Penny, Kindred by Choice, 127–37. 22. Conrad, “Mutual Fascination,” 463–70; Bolz, Indianer Nordamerikas, 16. 23. Feest, “Germany’s Indians,” 38. 24. Lutz, Indianer, 355–56. 25. This nom de guerre derived from the character’s ability to knock opponents unconscious or even kill them with his surgically precise punch. 26. Karl-Heinz Kohl, “Kulturelle Camouflagen. Der Orient und Nordamerika als Fluchträume deutscher Phantasie,” in Karl May. Imaginäre Reisen, ed. Zeilinger and Beneke, 96–102. 27. Jace Weaver, ed., “An Übermensch among the Apache. Or, Karl May’s Tour of the Grand Teutons,” in Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 78n25. 28. Godfried Bomans, “Es riecht nach Gas bei Karl May,” Rheinischer Merkur, 9 April 1965, 19. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid. 31. See Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 108–12; Lutz, Indianer, 348–52. 32. See Lutz, Indianer, 340–44, 351–52; Weaver, “An Übermensch among the Apache,” 81.

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33. See Dieter Sudhoff, “Über den Wunsch, Indianer zu werden. Karl Mays Spuren in der Literatur und Kunst der Moderne,” in Karl May. Imaginäre Reisen, ed. Zeilinger and Beneke, 251–62; Baruch Hamerski, “‘Fatal Attraction.’ Missdeutet und Missbraucht. Karl May im Nationalsozialismus,” in Exemplarisches zu Karl May, ed. Walther Ilmer and Christoph Lorenz, (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993), 180–228; Christian Heermann, Old Shatterhand lässt grüssen. Literarische Reverenzen für Karl May (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1992). 34. Hamerski, “Fatal Attraction,” 207, 214; Christiane Reuter-Boysen, “Im Widerstreit: Karl May,” in Handbuch zur völkischen Bewegung 1871-1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Munich: Saur, 1999), 699. 35. Klaus Mann, “Karl May Hitler’s Literary Mentor,” The Kenyon Review 2 (1940): 391–400; idem, “Cowboy Mentor of the Fuehrer,” Living Age 352 (Nov. 1940): 221. 36. Godfried Bomans, “Es riecht nach Gas bei Karl May,” Rheinischer Merkur, 9 April 1965. 37. Reuter-Boysen, “Im Widerstreit: Karl May,” 699; Lutz, Indianer, 348–52. 38. Reuter-Boysen, “Im Widerstreit: Karl May,” 700; Thomas Kramer, “Heldisches Geschehen, nacherzählt. Rezeption und Medienwechsel 1933 bis heute,” in Karl May. Imaginäre Reisen, ed. Zeilinger and Beneke, 291. 39. The term has previously been translated as “folkish”; see George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 286–87. Yet, although the English term refers to peoplehood as much as the German original, it does not adequately grasp the racial aspect that is prevalent in the German term. 40. Reuter-Boysen, “Im Widerstreit: Karl May,” 700–701. 41. Haible, Indianer Im Dienste, 86–89. 42. See Hamerski, “Fatal Attraction,” 1993; Kramer, “Heldisches Geschehen,” 293; Hans-Rüdiger Schwab, “Der Sieg über den Panther. Karl Mays Auseinandersetzung mit Friedrich Nietzsche,” Jahrbuch der Karl May Gesellschaft (2002): 235–74; Haible, Indianer Im Dienste, 86–108; Claus Roxin, “Politische Wirkungen Karl Mays,” Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft 64.1985 (1985): 30. 43. Erich Heinemann, “‘Karl May passt zum Nationalsozialismus wie die Faust aufs Auge’: Der Kampf des Lehrers Wilhelm Fronemann,” Jahrbuch der Karl May Gesellschaft (1982): 234–44; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 131–33. 44. See Haible, Indianer Im Dienste, 135–40; Kramer, “Heldisches Geschehen,” 297–99; Richard Thalheim, Winnetou lebt! Eine Bilderfolge aus den Karl-May-Spielen (Rathen: Verlag Felsenbühne (Knibbe), 1939); idem, Das Vermächtnis des alten Indianers (Rathen: Verlag Felsenbühne (Knibbe), 1940). 45. Paul Beyer, “Winnetou wird lebendig—Eröffnung der Karl May Festspiele auf der Felsenbühne Rathen,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 30 May 1938. 46. Ibid. 47. Hamerski, “Fatal Attraction,” 207–17. 48. Heinemann, “Karl May passt,” 236; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 140–41. 49. Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen. 50. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 258–67, 288–89. 51. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 108–12; Heinz Stolte, Der Volksschriftsteller Karl May. Beitrag zur literarischen Volkskunde (Radebeul: Karl-May-Verlag, 1936), 81, 83–84, 89. 52. See Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 124–31. 53. Zerkaulen, “Karl May—ewig jung!,” Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen, 12 December 1940, 3. 54. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 112–19. 55. Wilhelm Stölting, “Winnetou und Kara Ben Nemsi,” Bücherkunde: Organ des Amtes für Schrifttumspflege bei dem Beauftragten des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP und der Reichsstelle zur Förderung des Deutschen Schrifttums 4 (1943): 252.

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56. To remain in the local and temporal context of this study for the selection of an example, one need only to consider Carl Schmitt’s deliberation of “Romantic” in the introduction to his treatise on Political Romanticism. Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1919), 3–27. 57. It should be noted that this study focuses on Romantic sentiments that were not only present in various social groups in Germany during Romanticism, but also prevailed long after the actual epoch of Romanticism was over. Therefore, nineteenth-century “Romantic notions” as discussed here should be understood as those that could be observed in the late nineteenth century and even throughout the twentieth century as well. 58. One of the many ambivalences of Nazi ideology was its foundation in part in the nineteenth-century conservative tradition of praising individualism as a way to counter the effects of mass society even as it decried individualism as a deplorable side-effect of liberal capitalism against which the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people, had to prevail. 59. For an overview of German political and cultural history and the interaction of nationalism, liberalism, and Enlightenment thought, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 18001866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: Beck, 1983); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For a discussion of stages of Romanticism and the accompanying political movements, see Alvin Ward Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 60. Gouldner, For Sociology, 361–62; Hans Ulrich Wehler, “Nationalismus und Nation in der Deutschen Geschichte,” in Nationales Bewusstsein und kollektive Identität, ed. Helmut Berding (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996). Bernhard Giesen, Kay Junge, and Christian Kritschgau, “Vom Patriotismus zum völkischen Denken: Intellektuelle als Konstrukteure der deutschen Identität,” in Nationales Bewusstsein, ed. Berding, 345–93. 61. See, Barbar, 296–98. 62. E. Gugenberger and R. Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, Magie und Politik. Zwischen Faschismus und neuer Gesellschaft (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987), 294–96. 63. See, Barbar, 31–60; Karl-Heinz Kohl, Entzauberter Blick: das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisation (Berlin: Medusa, 1981), 29, 40. Allan Lund notes that the tradition of studying Germanic tribes reached back into the sixteenth century and was often ideologically biased. Allan A. Lund, Germanenideologie im Nationalsozialismus. Zur Rezeption der ‘Germania’ des Tacitus im “Dritten Reich” (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995), 11. He states that, since Germanthusiasm and Norsetalgia peaked between 1919 and 1945, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and other authors were stigmatized as “proto-Nazis” by post–World War II authors because Nazis promoted their discussion of Tacitus, rediscovered during the Third Reich. Nazi propaganda used these Romantics for the construction of a continuous line of Germanic history. 64. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 71–75. 65. Ingo Wiwjorra, “Die Deutsche Vorgeschichtsforschung und ihr Verhältnis zu Nationalismus und Rassismus,” in Handbuch, ed. Puschner et al., 187. 66. In the context of Klaus von See’s observations on Ossianism, Indianthusiasm is one of a number of parallel Romantic settings popular in Germany, all of which were based on clear good/ evil distinctions, mystical peoples and landscapes, and sentiments expressing tragedy, violence, and doomsday scenarios. Barbar, 64, 75–77, 214–16. 67. Picker, Tischgespräche, 693–94. 68. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 168. 69. Some German authors even placed the “end” of Native American freedom, or resistance to Euro-American encroachment, in the early nineteenth century, either with Tecumseh or with Black Hawk. Apparently, any later developments were not seen as important to them. See Hans Driesch, “Indianer,” Universum 44 (1928): 978.

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70. Gouldner, For Sociology, 329. 71. See Fritz Richard Stern, Das Scheitern illiberaler Politik. Studien zur politischen Kultur Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1972). 72. Giesen, Junge, and Kritschgau, “Vom Patriotismus zum völkischen Denken,” 353–55; Lund, Germanenideologie, 11–14. 73. A public debate on the German Sonderweg among contemporary philosophers and politicians culminated in the postulation of the Deutsche Bewegung (the German Movement); there was also a long tradition of historical scholarship on whether or not German traditions, political practices, and ideas were unique in Europe. Currently, scholars agree that there was no unique German Sonderweg but certainly a Sonderbewusstsein, or a self-perception as unique. See Dorit Müller, “Review of Die Deutsche Bewegung. Der Mythos von der ästhetischen Erfindung der Nation by Daniela Gretz,” 15 October 2007, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezen sionen/2007-4-044; See, Barbar, 188. 74. The intricacies of translation inhibit the use of the closest English equivalent, “primitive people,” in this case. Herder coined the term Naturvolk to avoid savages, to distinguish the term from Kulturvolk, and emphasize the close relationship such peoples had to their natural environment and to the “natural state of man.” German ethnology and anthropology have used it with varying connotations over time, all of which implied some degree of inferiority. They have yet to agree on a better term although indigenes Volk currently seems to be very common. For that reason, I will use Naturvolk to avoid the English “primitive” and to invoke the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German understanding of the term, which incorporates both inferiority and the close relationship to nature. See the entry on “Naturvölker” in the Wörterbuch der Völkerkunde, 2nd ed. 75. To take one example of many, the article “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands” stated that Indians were the perfect image of Romanticism since they exemplified the “lost original state of humanity.” August W. Halfeld, “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands.” Die Woche 35 (1936): 19. Halfeld regarded Johann Gottfried Seume’s poem “Der Wilde” (The Savage, 1793) as the ideal representation of an Indian for Germans because it lists the Indians’ virtues and implies that “savages are the better people, after all.” With the same stroke, he referred to Tacitus’s text describing to Roman readers “the strong and honest Germanic Naturvolk.” Ibid. Thus, Germans and Indians apparently shared values and Romantic features. 76. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 180. 77. See Lund, Germanenideologie, 11. 78. Fritz Kramer, “Einfühlung. Überlegungen zur Geschichte der Ethnologie im präfaschistischen Deutschland,” in Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht, ed. Hauschild, 87. 79. Gouldner, For Sociology, 331, 335–43. 80. See See, Barbar; Gouldner, For Sociology; Kort and Hollein, I Like America; Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977), 29–30, 333–34. 81. The use of Indian imagery and the fellow tribesmen motif for German moral aggrandizement worked before 1945, but it also continues today. Lutz has pointed out that today’s Indianthusiasm is as much anti-capitalist and escapist as it is designed to affiliate Germans with victimized peoples for the purpose of fleeing the feeling of guilt after the Holocaust. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 169. The roots of these arguments can be found in the early anti-modern Romantic criticism of colonial conflicts. 82. Lutz, Indianer, 268–69. 83. See Kohl, Entzauberter Blick, 29, 40; Lutz, Indianer, 134–36; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 80–85; Karsten Fitz, “‘Der Wilde’ als Mythos in der deutschen kulturellen Wahrnehmung,” in Mythen Europas—Schlüsselfiguren der Imagination: Das 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Neumann (Regensburg: Pustet, 2008), 122–41. 84. See Allen, “Reception,” 19, 52; Lutz, Indianer, 380.

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85. Lutz, Indianer, 8. 86. This phenomenon has been analyzed in detail by Lutz, ibid., 144; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 303–23. Most Karl May scholars state that the noble Indian was portrayed as amiable but that Indians in general retained features of cruelty allowing Germans to feel morally superior. 87. Lutz, Indianer, 351. 88. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 88–91. 89. Gretz, Die Deutsche Bewegung. Der Mythos von der ästhetischen Erfindung der Nation (Paderborn: Fink, 2007), 144. 90. Walther Schoenichen, Naturschutz als völkische und internationale Kulturaufgabe (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1942), 35. 91. See, Barbar, 58–60; Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), xviii. 92. See, Barbar, 341. 93. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 343. 94. Ernst Jünger, Feuer und Blut. Ein kleiner Ausschnitt aus einer großen Schlacht (Leipzig: Reclam, 1929), 156. 95. Qtd. in Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1979), 29–30. 96. See Ben Macintyre, Vergessenes Vaterland. Die Spuren der Elisabeth Nietzsche (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994). 97. Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, xviii. 98. See, Barbar, 58–60; Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (Munich: Beck, 1931), 10–17. It should be noted here that the reception of Nietzsche’s ideas among Native Americans is largely positive with some different interpretations suggested. As Nuu-Chah-Nulth (Nootka) scholar Richard Atleo pointed out to me during a conference in 2009, the concept of Übermensch should actually not be understood as “Superman,” and thus, as an assertion of superiority, but as an ability to “rise above” and reach the metaphysical realm that stores common knowledge, and which Nuu-Chah-Nulth shamans believe to be the only place that has reality. In this context, Übermensch would denote someone who believes that humans are surrounded by mystery and that most of reality cannot be known. Atleo further argues that Nietzsche, “mad genius” that he was, seemed to be far ahead of his time in his thinking, and was consequently incomprehensible to most Europeans. The Übermensch would therefore be something like a traditional shaman. Richard E. Atleo, personal interview, 17 May 2009. I have not yet been able to unearth evidence for similar interpretations of Nietzsche among Germans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but many Germans would have agreed that there is a relationship between Nietzschean ideas and mystery. 99. See, Barbar, 60. In this speech, Wilhelm II addressed German troops embarking on the expedition to quell the Chinese Boxer uprising, instructing them to show no mercy and be as furious as the Huns. This pompous allusion resulted in the Allied use of the pejorative nickname for Germans during World War I. 100. Ibid., 66–70, 209–10. 101. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Herders Sämmtliche Werke, 19 vols, vol. 4: Facsim (Boston: Adamant, 2006). 102. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, ed. Albert Matzinger (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1944). 103. Lund, Germanenideologie, 16–19. 104. Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, xvii. 105. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Grundbegriffe der Reinen Soziologie. 8th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1935), xlvii. 106. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: Fischer, 1918), xxiii, xxv. 107. Ibid., xxxiv.

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108. See Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns, and Rolf Parr, Historische Mythologie der Deutschen, 1798-1918 (Munich: Fink, 1991); Herf, Reactionary Modernism. 109. Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, xxxv. 110. Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, ix. The same could be said of Manfred Schneider’s concept of “Kulturrecycling,” a cyclical reappearance of revival movements and youth subcultures since the eighteenth century. It is interesting to note that the image of the barbarian seems to feature prominently in all the movements and subcultures analyzed by Schneider. Manfred Schneider, Der Barbar. Endzeitstimmung und Kulturrecycling (Munich: Hanser, 1997). 111. Friedrich von Gagern, Der Marterpfahl, ed. Frank Castorf, Christoph Homberger, and Heiner Müller (Berlin: Freie Volksbühne Berlin, 2005), 48. 112. Ibid. 113. The notion of Germans as Indians in the struggle against alien civilization becomes more apparent in many of the recollections of World War I and the German civil war Theweleit analyzed. In more than one instance, German soldiers or Free Corps volunteers address other Germans as “fellow tribesmen,” a reference Adolf Hitler also frequently used. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1, 413. It can be seen as an implicit expression of the common enemy motif but also works to convey an understanding of Germans as descendants of ancient Germanic tribes finally united under Nazi rule. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 1, 71–72.

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Chapter 2

NATION-FORMATION, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND NATIONALISM

S

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Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist. —Benedict R.O. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6

After the previous observations on interrelations between Romanticism, Indian imagery, and German self-perception, it is necessary to take a closer look at the German construction of nationalism and national identity and the role of German Indianthusiasm in this. As a national identity emerged in Germany, it included both the reference to ancient Germanic tribes and to aboriginal inhabitants of the Western hemisphere. These parallel courses of Germanic Romanticism and Indianthusiasm were so tightly intertwined during the late nineteenth century that they eventually became interchangeable.1 German nation-building and nationalism have been immense fields of research, and most probably will continue to be.2 Ever since scholars set out to explain National Socialism and the Holocaust, they have ventured back to the nineteenth century and further to find the source of the extreme ideologies that made Auschwitz possible. Academic debates have been heated, at times, and no single source, idea, or event can provide a satisfactory, stand-alone explanation. This study will avoid the trenches of the ongoing debate and, instead, employ some of these approaches to discussing how German nationalism and the Indian image in Germany were related. The following chapter will discuss how both nationalism and the Indian image changed under the influence of Nazi ideology and how ideologists eventually used the Indian image for propaganda. For that reason, I will draw on a few selected texts on German national identity in the nineteenth century to provide a backdrop to the histories of the German image of Indians. Basing my Notes from this chapter begin on page 109.

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own analysis on these previous studies will help clarify connections between the national self-image of Germans, their view of other nations, and their assumed relationship with Native American identity. To examine the relationship between Germanic Romanticism, the Indian image, and the construction of Germans as an oppressed and endangered indigenous people, I will apply the model of peoplehood.3 German nationalists developed a sense of peoplehood that explains the appeal of Indian imagery among many Germans. Major aspects of this sense of peoplehood, such as sacred history, geography, as well as religion and ritual, illustrate how Indian imagery was woven into the imagined German identity. This interweaving demonstrates the reinforcement of German and Indian imagery and shows that not only was the German image of Indians imagined, but Germans’ collective identity was as well. Throughout the nineteenth century, German nationalists sought ideas that could symbolize national unity and the common goals and interests of all the members in all the German principalities. These ideas did not grow overnight but rather, symbols and basic features were borrowed from contemporary currents in literature and the arts, such as Romanticism, and also from the evolving interest in Germanic tribes and from Norsetalgia. Imagining their own tribal past, German nationalists created a similar yearning, romanticized ancient Germanic life and constructed notions about the essence of Germanness, and eventually of the Nordic race. Proponents of the nation-state debated how Germans of all social groups and from all regions could be brought together and how they could develop a sense of belonging. The cohesive fabric that was supposed to achieve this sense centered on the distinction between a proposed self and anything seen as other. To some extent, then, defining us, hard enough for such a fragmented society, was supported by defining what was not us first.4 Nation-formation not only included the construction of self, but it also laid the groundwork for patriotic self-aggrandizement, for pointing a finger at the other’s flaws, and for the eventual justification of violence against the other. German nationalism followed a typical European pattern in that it sought to create new power models after the old systems of religious authority and dynastic power had begun to disintegrate and in that it reinterpreted and invented ancient traditions as inherently national and membership in the national community as free of interest.5 As this study seeks to explore the interrelationship between German Indianthusiasm and nationalism, a comparison of European and Native American concepts of tradition and of what constitutes a people, or a nation, will provide a better insight into the problem. The model of peoplehood, developed as a paradigm for the new discipline of American Indian studies in the 1980s, will be compared with and set in the context of late twentieth-century European or Euro-American academic discussions on the construction of national identity. Although it will employ Glenn Penny’s notion of cliché busting, which this study

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generally seeks to avoid, the contrast between Native American history and Indian imagery will be an underlying theme in this chapter to emphasize the constructed nature of the new German national identity. It will, therefore, discuss the promotion of nationalism in Germany through notions of historic continuity, sense of place and nature, and religious traditions, and by invoking the fellow tribesmen motif. The Nazis built on these traditions that were (re)invented throughout the nineteenth century. Their application, appropriation, and radicalization of these traditions with regard to Indian imagery in propaganda and media, in fiction, and in academic publications will be analyzed in this chapter.

Creation Myth and Nation-Formation

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The sovereign must remain the ruler over the myths … He must not, believing them, submit to illusions and turn into a demoniac … he must use them in cold blood as devices, as fascinating instruments with which he—knowing mass psychology well—can exert the intended influence … The idea has a value as long and as far as it has an effect: Not because it is “good,” “right,” “true” etc. —Julius Evola, qtd. in Franz Wegener, Das atlantidische Weltbild, 88.

There was no nation-state in Germany before 1871, and no sense of true national identity had emerged until the early 1800s. As the previous chapter has illustrated, referring to the past, for nationalists and Romantics alike, meant invoking a history that itself was partially imagined. Invented traditions represent only a “factitious” continuity and basically “are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.”6 In order to establish their own past, then, German nationalists set out to find unifying features to which all Germans could relate and which would be satisfactory markers of Germanness. Many Romantic nationalists used defining markers of nationality, such as “folk and fairy tales, costumes, the vernacular, people’s superstitions, [and] an epic tradition.”7 Drawing on concepts by Edward H. Spicer and Robert K. Thomas, a group of authors in American Indian studies employed similar markers to discuss the idea of “peoplehood.” They define the basic paradigm of American Indian studies as the study of peoplehood among Native societies with a model that “consists of four fundamental elements: a sacred history; a well-defined territory and environment; a distinct language; and a characteristic ceremonial cycle.”8 The peoplehood model, therefore, will be a useful device to contrast with a Euro-American academic understanding of how nations and nationalism were constructed rather than organically developed, or, how they are inherently present in the groups they represent.9 Since German nationalism defined Germanness as a continuation

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of major aspects of the Germanic tribal order, it is especially rewarding to apply academic models about tribal peoplehood to a society that invented a historical tradition to assert its own peoplehood. With their premise of the German Sonderweg and the importance of a German Sonderbewusstsein, German nationalists and cultural pessimists both imagined their German identity and imagined that it was under threat. In order to prove both, they used their image of Indians, an image that was similarly constructed but that referred to the very real colonial threat Native peoples faced. The conditions of colonialism, therefore, served as a template for imagining German national traditions and identity, with a resulting similarity in representations of Germans and Indians through the common enemy motif. While some local German cultures met the above criteria of peoplehood, there was no set of encompassing features for all groups within the new German nation. In search of such features, one would usually look for a traditional narrative, or a set of narratives with which all parts of the nation could identify. As Goethe had mused, a group needs an epic story to present historical events or epochs as great history. Such a story would ideally feature a hero (usually a king) carrying out heroic deeds or suffering hardships, symbolically for the entire people. Such an epos would create meaning and a sense of national identity. The Germans had neither stories cohesive enough for all regions to identify with nor stories persistent enough for people from very different time periods to relate to. Other peoples could proudly refer to such stories, founding myths, and heroes, such as the French to Joan of Arc, the Swiss to William Tell, or the Serbs to the Battle of Kosovo. The lack of such powerful stories may have contributed to the German inferiority complex and its accompanying drives to acquire something similar to, or even surpass, the glory of others.10 In their search for a German creation myth and for German “founding fathers,” Romantics and nationalist intellectuals reached far back into the past and rediscovered the Germanic tribes as sources of Germanness. They eventually focused on Arminius (Hermann), the Cherusci leader, whose forces defeated three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in a.d. 9 and “liberated a ‘Germany’ that did not even exist.”11 As Hartmut Lutz notes, it is no coincidence that the monstrous memorial statue of Arminius, finished in 1875 after the Franco-Prussian War, symbolically faces West to defy the “arch-enemy” across the Rhine.12 The tradition of glorifying Arminius reaches from Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) to Adolf Hitler, who repeatedly called Arminius Germany’s great “first unifier.”13 Nationalist intellectuals also attempted to establish the Song of the Nibelungs, an epic medieval saga about heroes in Burgundy and Saxony, and about the dragon-slayer Siegfried, as a national epos. Among other attempts to relate to ancient Germans, the discussion of Publius Cornelius Tacitus’s Germania (a.d. 98) proved to be among the most popular and long-lasting. Nineteenth-century Germans increasingly became enthusiastic about what

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nationalists and Romantics portrayed as German origins. This Germanthusiasm later entailed a continuous line of reference points that apparently proved contemporary Germans were closely related to the old Germanic tribes.

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Nation and Sacred History Tacitus’s Germania was a Roman outsider’s view of seemingly barbaric, uncivilized tribes, and as such actually a less fortunate choice for a national epos for Germans. Yet the lack of Germanic texts forced Germans to scrutinize Germania for useful information on early Germanic society, customs, and belief systems. The text is a classic example of ethnological description and of counterculture, as “it constructed ethnicity within a hierarchical perceptional frame, allocating civilization to the viewer and an ambivalent, dualistic primitivism to the viewed.”14 Its ethnocentric author criticized his own decadent, civilized society by praising the purity, freshness, and honesty of the supposed primitives. Thus, early nineteenth-century Germans, owing to Tacitus, understood Germanic tribes generally as one pole in a dichotomy between the Roman Empire and “Germania.” Likewise, most historical receptions and reflections of Teutons were distilled into this dichotomy. The origins of this notion can be found in the classical humanist tradition of the early 1500s.15 Variations of this scenario of a pristine indigenous culture threatened by an expanding empire have recurred up to today. Racial theory, or references to the North or a Nordic race were integrated into this set of dichotomies only during the late nineteenth century.16 In some instances, ancient Rome represented this empire, the Roman Catholic Church in other instances, Romance nations—particularly France—next, or Western civilization and ideas in general on yet other occasions. In all instances, both the common enemy motif and the fellow tribesmen motif fostered parallels among Native Americans, ancient Germanic tribes, and modern Germans. In his ethnological portrait of the “barbaric” Teutons, Tacitus described the character traits, the habits, and the appearance of these tribal people, which nineteenth-century German Romantics eagerly picked up. Among the features he presented were courage in battle, physical hardiness, honesty, closeness to nature, a spirit of independence, hospitality, as well as an extreme sense of loyalty to family, clan, and leaders. Traits Tacitus distinctly cast in a negative light and termed “barbaric” included indulging in alcohol and gambling, cruelty, and a propensity to go berserk in battle.17 For Romantic intellectuals, these character traits of the “original Germans” were mother lodes of ideological power because they appealed to contemporary Germans of all persuasions and regions and contributed to a unifying sense of national identity. Consequently, conservative nationalists used Tacitus’s depiction of Germanic tribes to proclaim German national character traits and increasingly declared these traits to be uniquely

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and exclusively German. Positive depictions were utilized as well as the negative, barbaric ones, which were reinterpreted in positive ways. Unbeknownst to most Germans at the time, Tacitus’s description of these character traits adhered to a tradition of depicting the barbarian other that reached all the way back to Thucydides and Herodotus.18 Tacitus’s depiction of ancient Germanic tribes was, thus, by no means unique. Tacitus himself probably did not mention these traits to reflect on what he actually knew about Teutons but used them as a common stylistic device to denote the barbarian other to contemporary readers.19 Classical ethnographic writers wanted to paint a broad picture, not a detailed study; and they were successful in this. Klaus von See’s direct reference to Native Americans in the following quotation exemplifies the parallels in the discussion of German(ic) and Indian history, and it points out the fallacies inherent to an outsider’s view: “Ethnographic literature … is more interested in a general, cultural-anthropological problem. That does not mean that their descriptions did not have an equivalent in reality. The overall picture may even be approximately correct, such as our overall image of Indians is probably approximately correct. Only the detailed statements are not—in the respective individual case—reliable. Since it is not actually the Persian, the Scythian, the Teuton, [or] the Iberian that is being discussed, but again and again the ‘Barbarian’ [emphasis in original].”20 Klaus von See’s discussion of ancient approaches to explaining the existence of barbarians, of an other that does not meet the self ’s standard of civilization, is an interesting focal point for this study’s discussion of the interrelation of landscape/ territory with national character and of evolutionist concepts. The evolutionist approach can be traced forward in history into the modern era. It assumes that all peoples started out at some mysterious mutual point of origin but for several reasons did not progress at the same speed.21 Therefore, the analysis of a primitive people and comparison with one’s own society supposedly provided insight into one’s own civilized people’s earlier stages of development. Another feature von See analyzed in Tacitus’s Germania becomes important at this point: the “classical barbarian clichés” would later reappear in EuroAmerican depictions of Native American cultures.22 First, the idea of the Volk in Waffen (people under arms) assumed that all males of a particular community were warriors and could not pursue any other career.23 It emphasized the assumed disposition of the barbarian group as a constant threat to peaceful civilized neighbors, and as incapable of any constructive, peaceful activity. A 100-percentwarrior ratio among the male population of a “primitive” society usually meant they were hunters. Barbarians could not be agriculturalists, as agriculture traditionally indicated “civilization.” This logic presents another ambiguity in the German self-image as indigenous semi-barbarians since nationalists constantly highlighted sedentary agriculturalism as a typical German tradition, which allowed them to dichotomize Germans and the supposedly nomadic Jews.

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Second, von See’s analysis unmasked the typical understanding of Germanic tribes as having more liberty than “civilized” peoples because they were free of the constraints of institutional hierarchy. Their confinement in the “natural state of man,” as Rousseau described the assumed point of human origin, allowed for more personal liberties than an organized, bureaucratic state society. Later texts said the same about Native Americans. Barbarians’ resulting lack of discipline in this understanding generated envy in the civilized and restrained viewer and contempt in an ethnocentric observer. Although fierce fighters, barbarians were said to follow the whims of the moment and to be incapable of endurance. They could neither make nor execute serious plans, nor comprehend the abstract principles of giving and following orders. Their axioms of crime and punishment were similar to the features of the warrior, who was seen as brutish and ruled by fits of temper.24 Thus, observers portrayed their own nations’ military abilities as superior while admiring the military potential of barbarians. Third, proponents of the “barbarian” or “primitive war” paradigm understood warrior life and lack of discipline as resulting in distinct fighting techniques and battle tactics. Germanic combat styles seemed quite disorderly to a Roman accustomed to rigid battle lines and strict chains of command. Teutons, however, feigned flight and reattacked when feasible, and generally were individualistic fighters. Von See remarks on the obvious similarity to the Indian cliché: “Reading the descriptions of the Roman Germanic wars today, we are automatically reminded of movies about fights between U.S. troops and Indian tribes; there, too, [one sees] conventionally trained, closed formations who are opposing extremely mobile enemies … who often operate in individual actions, utilizing their familiarity with the territory.”25 Classical writers described barbarian fighting abilities stereotypically as racial character traits. The same racial cliché was applied to Native American soldiers in the U.S. armed forces in twentieth-century wars. The racial explanation for their supposedly inherent ferocity accompanied the concept of the linear progress of societies, namely, the consideration that the barbarians’ backwardness and lack of statehood did not allow for civilized, disciplined fighting.26 This description reveals once more the aforementioned ambiguities in the construction of a German national identity by way of Romantic notions. The coexistence of noble and cruel savage in the same individual, the keen sense of individual liberty paired with ferocity, were features that German nationalists liked to attribute to German national character. The contradiction between the supposedly positive aspects of individual bravery and the negative aspects of a supposed lack of unity and organization were not addressed; each aspect was utilized when feasible and interpreted as dictated by the moment. The cartoon below is an example of such paradoxical notions of the barbarian among Germans (Figure 5). In a collection titled Hitler in Cartoons of the World, Hitler disciple and personal adviser on American affairs Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl

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Figure 5. “Adolf.” Cartoon depicting Hitler as a cruel barbarian in the liberal magazine Ulk, 1931. Hanfstaengl, Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt (Berlin: Verlag Braune Bücher, 1933), 33. The original caption from Ulk magazine, adopted by Hanfstaengl, reads “The chief of the savage headhunters after the Battle of Leipzig—in full warrior regalia.”

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(1887–1975) used cartoons that had been designed to ridicule Hitler in order to defame Nazi opponents.27 Originally published in 1931 in Ulk, a humorous liberal magazine, this cartoon portrays Hitler as a cruel barbarian featuring typical details of Indian imagery. Hitler had publicly announced during a trial at the Leipzig Reich Court in 1930 that, after the Nazi takeover of power, “heads would roll.”28 Hanfstaengl refutes the portrayal of Hitler as a cruel barbarian by pointing out that, after 30 January 1933, anti-fascists were not summarily beheaded, but had merely “rolled” into concentration camps, instead, thus proving the legality of the Nazis’ repressive measures.29 The Nazis’ self-portrayal shied away from the barbarian image in this instance while, in others, it portrayed cruelty as a positive aspect of Germanness. Beyond the analysis of ancient classical authors’ references to Germanic tribes, the other major work sought out by German proponents of national identity is the Song of the Nibelungs, a narrative of heroic warriors whose representations facilitated direct references to Indians as they were so similar in spirit. The epic medieval poem was rediscovered in the eighteenth century and became very popular in the nineteenth century. It is the story of the hero Siegfried who, after killing a dragon and bathing in its blood, becomes invincible barring one spot on his shoulder untouched by the magic dragon blood. When this secret weakness is eventually betrayed, Hagen von Tronje, Siegfried’s rival, kills him. The long narrative of the revenge of Siegfried’s widow, Kriemhild, follows, culminating in yet another, more figurative, bloodbath. Although the saga was a regional story set primarily near the Rhine, nineteenth-century German Romantic nationalists highlighted characteristics such as reliability, loyalty, and honesty as national character traits since these were also the ones the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie aspired to.30 The various uses of the Song of the Nibelungs provide an intriguing example of a text being reinterpreted for one’s own needs and to suit the moral and ethical conditions of the time. The German reception of the saga underwent different phases between the text’s rediscovery and the interwar years of the twentieth century, mirroring major societal shifts including increasing aggression and militarism, a growing need for heroic leaders, as well as the need to justify barbaric events by readjusting ethical standards.31 Von See identified three phases of reception, all of which have at least subtle references to Indian imagery. They range from Romantic longing to the praise of reckless ferocity and exemplify the gradual changes in Indian imagery that ran parallel to the gradual militarization and growing aggressive spirit in German society. The most popular interpretations of the saga during the early nineteenth century related to concepts appealing to the bourgeoisie, such as honesty, stuffiness, and integrity. Post-1871 reflections emphasized Siegfried, a once ridiculed self-made man turned hero who symbolized Germany’s rise as a united empire, a bustling industrial force, and a young colonial power. At the same time, movements critical of progress and industrialism could easily relate to the timeless

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romanticism of adventure and heroism in the woods. Interestingly, Richard Wagner’s opera Gőtterdämmerung has Siegfried and his king Gunther become blood brothers while they plot to win Brűnnhilde for Gunther. For the first staging in 1876, the ceremony was performed in Indian costumes.32 After World War I, Hagen came to stand for the fate of Germany, with bitterness and disillusionment coming to the foreground, along with an unquestioning loyalty to leaders allowing followers to commit sins in the name of loyalty.33 These examples of interpretations show how the saga of noble knights and damsels reflects a sense of familiarity with the German image of the Indian, which equally reflects transitions in the German worldview and came to include more and more allusions to warfare and violence over time.

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Das Deutsche Wesen. Character, Identity, and the Implications of Fate The texts discussed above, along with the growing popularization of Nordic sagas and mythology, such as the Edda songs, fostered a sense of unity among nineteenth-century Germans. The combination of Norsetalgia with ancient Germanic themes amalgamated into a synonymy of German and Nordic, a notion German nationalists have used ever since. Intellectuals and Romantics used these texts and concepts to debate what it meant to be German and how Germany could be distinguished from other nations. They compared ancient tribal German traits, praised in sagas and myths, to contemporary, mainly bourgeois, role models. These role models then formed the basis for the “fabrication of a ‘national character’ and a national ‘fate’”; they also contributed to the racialized identification of Germanness, which helped exclude Jews even as secularization eroded the underpinnings of religious anti-Semitism.34 National character traits not only make it possible to distinguish one group from another; they also encourage unification, simplification, and the leveling out of diversity within groups. If Germans were said to be loyal, this trait would be attributed to all members of this distinct national group without regard to individual preferences and personalities. While the postulation of these traits nurtures a sense of belonging, it also promotes the sense of exclusion. Increasingly, national character traits were used not so much to attribute positive features to the self but to deny these positive features to the other. Exclusion was even more significant in the context of the German Sonderbewusstsein, which identified the essence of Germanness (das deutsche Wesen) as unique in Europe and as fundamentally opposed to Western civilization. The character traits German intellectuals borrowed from ancient and medieval texts portrayed the Germanic tribes as uncivilized and unsophisticated barbarians. Originally, their authors had used these character traits for the denigration of Germanic features. German nationalists reread these texts for more positive

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features and reinterpreted the pejorative terms to give them positive meaning. If the Germanic tribes, in the Roman view, did not have many fine material goods nor sophisticated political structures, they did have several moral traits, such as honesty and loyalty, that German nationalists were quick to appropriate. The reinterpretation of primitivism into superior morals is an indicator of a German inferiority complex that triggered defiance and stubbornness, evoked feelings of isolation in a hostile neighborhood, and laid the foundation for the notion of the master race.35 As Hartmut Lutz observes: “The self-aggrandizing tendencies within this construct only thinly veil a deep and dangerous insecurity felt by the fledgling German nation in relation to other European nations, especially the successful colonial powers England and France. This self-aggrandizement combined with insecurity not only underlies anti-Semitism but ties it to Indianthusiasm.”36 Allegedly superior morals, the general lack of colonies, and physical distance to Indian-related problems of colonization (since Germany had no colonies in the Americas) helped Germans feel sympathy for the Indian and allowed them to safely criticize the colonial practices of their rivals.37 It was no coincidence that the construction of deutsches Wesen progressed parallel to the construction and perception of Romantic Indian images in works by Cooper, Chateaubriand, the Prince of Wied, Möllhausen, Catlin, and Bodmer. At the same time that Germans became aware of their noble—albeit primitive—ancestors, the noble savage from the New World became a fixed image for them. The same holds true for the German mental association of Indians with nature and Indian resistance to the encroachment of expanding colonial powers.38 In the discussion of distance from colonial power, it is interesting to note that Germany, in fact, became a colonial power in 1886 and eventually committed the same cruelties and exploitation and caused the extinction of indigenous peoples like the American Indians with whom they had so sympathized. There is no indication of Germans similarly romanticizing the Hereros or other African colonial subjects of the German Empire. Assigning inheritable character traits to peoples was not only a strategy of German intellectuals, but also of the media in the nineteenth century and beyond and, thus, became an accepted practice in the public mind. Some of the magazines analyzed for this study attributed national characteristics to specific Indian tribes, while others saw their putative aim in the promotion of German national identity across all classes, religions, and regions.39 National characteristics were a stylistic device Karl May used to distinguish “good” from “bad” Indians, and to cast the light of moral superiority on his protagonist Old Shatterhand against the devious practices of Anglo-American settlers and entrepreneurs.40 One can trace the practice into the Nazi era, when the assertion of inherent, biologically determined character traits had become standard practice. Adolf Hitler preached that democracy meant the downward leveling of the nations’ talents, that it was contrary to the idea of the survival of the fittest and, therefore, deadly to the

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ideological paradigm of life as an eternal struggle: “In general, they say there are no innate Volkswerte 41 but that, at the most, situational differences in upbringing occur and that there is no significant difference in the value of Negroes, Aryans, Mongols, or Redskins.”42 Further ridiculing the notion of equality, Hitler stated that it led to the neglect of genius and talent because it pulled the accomplishment of the talented down to mediocrity both within a society and among peoples. National Socialism advocated a distinction between better and weaker peoples. Consequently, one had to accept that some nations excelled in particular activities. It is interesting to note that Hitler did not propose that Germans and Native Americans had the same abilities, or were in any way equal in their talents. The neglect of equality could also be seen as an indicator of the general feeling of racial superiority among National Socialists. Indians, regardless of their similarities with Germans in histories, fates, or character traits, were still seen as an inferior race by many Nazi leaders and authors.43 In the context of national identity, a people could not only be specified by certain inheritable characteristics and virtues, it could also have a particular fate. Conservative German thinking increasingly focused on the idea of fate, of an individual or race being inescapably tied to specific ideas, tasks, and courses of events. Fate could mean that an individual could not avoid belonging to a particular people, and thus could not help but share values and characteristics. This is the basic principle of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, or the community of fate, that emerged during the late nineteenth century. It could be the fate of a people to be constantly thrown into the same situations. National Socialists utilized the latter idea, especially, alongside social Darwinism, to construe Germans as a warrior people who had to fight constantly because of threats from the outside. Fate could explain Germany’s defeat in World War I, and it rallied nationalists to revive its greatness. Proponents of the Schicksalsgemeinschaft even went so far as to say that, since fighting was their fate, Germans did not fight to win but for the sake of fighting, which made defeat easier to bear. Such fatalistic views apparently made Germans accept and even love hardships, for they were destined to experience them.44 Once Germans saw themselves as a warrior people, it was especially easy for them to accept the concept of a special bond with Indians since the Indian image in Germany was inextricably tied to the warrior image.

Nation, Nature, and Sacred Geography Love for animals, and for nature as such, is one of the most beautiful and noble German traits. The German is far ahead of all other peoples in this respect … This is, ultimately, due to the fact that the German has an entirely different relationship with nature than other peoples. The German’s blood, the German’s character, reveal something that relates back

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to the ancient past, to the limits of historical memory. Ancient Aryan religious experience … lives on in German blood. —H. Wohlbold, “Naturbeherrschung—Naturverwandlung,” |Naturschutz. Monatsschrift für alle Freunde der deutschen Heimat 17 J6 (1936): 122.

The peoplehood model argues that defining and distinguishing a people from other peoples requires reference to a well-defined territory and landscape.45 Ever since Rousseau and Montesquieu discussed national character and linked it to geography, national characteristics have been tied to the land that nations occupy.46 In this context, Germanness, among other features, derives from typical characteristics of Germany’s landscape and climate. Indianness, in German eyes, bore some of the same features; discussing landscape and inhabitants’ relation to it fostered German Indianthusiasm as the German road to national unity seemed more similar to Indian tribulations with reference to the tribal Germans of antiquity. Montesquieu’s 1748 statement that “liberty is at home in Germanic forests” suggested that climate and territory dictate a people’s physical and psychological conditions, and that the social and political institutions regulating the people’s desires and characteristic behavior, in turn, linked to their natural environment.47 Since Germanic tribes apparently had stayed closer to the natural state of man, they did not need many regulations—Montesquieu cited Tacitus’s assertion that “good customs make good laws unnecessary” in “Germania.”48 A magazine author argued in 1936 that Germans loved Indians because the Aryan race had developed in a harsh climate similar to that of the Native North Americans and, therefore, had developed similar character traits. Thus, Aryans were able to understand Indians much better than Mediterraneans.49 This idea directly ties the forest and a cold climate to positive character traits. In contrast, the supposed desire for luxuries and decadence characteristic of the southern (Roman, Mediterranean) states apparently needed a number of laws and institutions to keep society in order. Sophisticated state organizations, proponents of such environmental determinism argued, were developed among peoples whose idiosyncrasies required a tight rein, while harsh climates generated characters that did not require such systems. This view essentially equipped the noble savage with a positive environmental and racial explanation that supported the fellow tribesmen motif. When Germans looked at Indians, many writers and philosophers have argued, they saw their own tribal past: “Behind [the Indian image] lies concealed that marvelous, early stage of human development, in which we all lived in the woods, which every young German experiences, and which he should never forget.”50 This perspective stood in the tradition of regarding forest dwellers as lower on the evolutionary ladder. If both contemporary Native Americans and ancient Germanic tribes could be identified as woodland peoples, they could

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both function as symbols of the origin of man and of the presumed common state of pure and untainted humanity. Their natural environment, the forest, became a symbol of the womb, out of which developing peoples emerged, and which was remembered as a dear, safe, and mysterious place, longed for in order to preserve cherished memories and a sense of self. Once the forest as a natural environment gained such symbolic power, the special relationship between American and Germanic tribes by way of environmentally determined character was easy to assume. While ancient Germanic peoples were seen as untainted and unrestrained, modern Germans were believed to have retained their original honesty, bravery, and inwardness. This connection is visible in Werner Sombart’s 1911 contrast between Germans as forest peoples and Jews as desert dwellers.51 This understanding of original character and rootedness resulted in a “parochial contempt for progress,” as von See put it, a core element of both Norsetalgia and Indianthusiasm.52 If the German character was tied to forests, many conservative nationalists argued, the preservation of Germanness required the preservation of the German forests. Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that deforestation opened the door to foreign influence on the very German soul.53 The inherent forest-dwelling in Germanness was also apparent in the German aversion to urbanization.54 The German oak came to symbolize Germanic strength and perseverance, while the historical relation of Germans to trees and wood became a popular theme for scholarship and the arts.55 Both Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, pioneering the emerging late nineteenth-century discipline of Volksgeschichte,56 and the preservationist Walther Schoenichen in the 1930s argued along the lines of Herder. They saw the core of original Germanic life in small forest communities. This core was worth protecting against the onslaught of modernity and industrialism. Volkskunde/ Volksgeschichte aimed to establish continuity in customs by tracing current local folk traditions as far back as Tacitus. The German interest in the forest environment generated a tradition of reference to Indian settings in German literature and mass media, emphasized by Romantic topoi. It was also favorable that Romantic notions cultivated the image of the noble savage as a part of wilderness settings. Numerous writers over centuries had compared Indians to the Roman description of Germanic barbarians, ranging from Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) in the 1540s to German Indian novels in the 1930s.57 Authors like Fritz Steuben (Erhard Wittek), in particular, argued that Indians, “like the Germanic tribes, lived off hunting and fishing in fortified villages; they had only scant agriculture, they were woodland peoples, they were up-front, hospitable, brave, and freedom-loving.”58 Steuben, explaining the function of adventure novels to Nazi educators, said that a child, playfully hiding in the woods, experienced the same mysterious chirps and rustles that allowed Naturvölker to develop a sense for the supernatural,59 and that civilized peoples had apparently retained this sense in their fairy tales and sagas.

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Thus, adventure novels and playing Indian in the woods helped German children re-establish the link to their ancestral origins. The growing mystification of nature had a further influence on many Germans’ concept of what constituted religiousness, for which Indian imagery provided additional reference points.

Nation, Religion, and Ritual

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Our ancestors were, in essence, a genuine Naturvolk. Hence, their worldviews and concepts of divinity rested on a simple reverence for their ancestors and for nature. —Franz Kießling, qtd. in Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 26.

Germany’s transition to the modern era included the loss of religiosity as a guardrail for everyday problems and as an umbrella unifier. Secularization and the growing mechanistic understanding of the world, along with the emergence of rationalism, triggered counter-movements among groups that felt alienated by modernization and urbanization. Yet, they also allowed niches for alternatives within the process of social modernization, as revisionist scholarship on occultism in Germany has pointed out.60 As the previous chapter argued, some of the ideas behind these counter-movements included rejecting reason and rationalism, and embracing intuition, emotionality, and myth. From the late eighteenth century, countercultural movements emerged in German society seeking alternatives to modernization and its effects; many of them were spiritualistic, and some have persisted in one form or another up to the present.61 Parallel to this, the Sonderbewusstsein, with the claim that Teutons had had a talent for what was understood as immediate religion, increasingly fostered anti-Christian notions: in this view, religiousness was not expressed by following liturgy and submitting to church regulations but in a much more individual and private way.62 Accordingly, these counter-movements, when they did not completely reject Christianity, at least Germanized it by postulating a long Germanic tradition of contempt for idolatry, dogma, and church authorities. In essence, they were questioning Christianity and seeking alternatives, many of which were interwoven with tropes of German indigeneity, or with the anti-Western common enemy motif. The development of neo-paganism, attempts at (re-)establishing natural religions, and an emphasis on tribalism all occurred after this period. These phenomena were manifest in the Life Reform movement, the Youth movement, and the völkisch movement. They reinforced the “light cult” at the turn of the twentieth century, justified and mystified the concept of blood and soil, gave religious qualities to Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and supported the anti-Christian, Ariosophical notions of Los von Rom.63 Eventually, the Nazis appropriated some of these con-

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cepts for propaganda and to profit from the popularity of alternative spiritualities among many Germans. These spiritual concepts can in part still be observed among the range of today’s alternative and esoteric movements, Indian hobbyists, and neo-Nazi occultists.64 The interrelation of Romantic notions, Indianthusiasm, and the construction of German identity becomes visible in attempts to promote an alternative sense of spirituality among proponents of counterculture. The widespread rejection of a mechanistic worldview among Germans throughout the social strata during the late eighteenth century triggered multifaceted quests for alternative religious practices. Neo-paganism, in this context, can be understood as an umbrella for different responses to modernity, all of which help to explain the German interest in Indians, and especially the enthusiasm for Native spirituality. Romanticism provided the emphases on the mystical, intuition, and emotion. Germanthusiasm and Norsetalgia provided the models of the old Germanic gods and religious practices, which allowed not only anti-modernists and the völkisch movement recourse to (imagined) ancient roots, but others as well. Occultism combined scientific racism and myth to create quasi-religious models of the origin of man, and of the Aryan race, which raised speculation about possible biological relationships between Germans and aboriginal Americans. Neo-pagan and radical right-wing currents in German society at the turn of the twentieth century showed an increased interest in animist religions. These could build on the Romantic tradition of deification, since Romanticism “resonated with an animism or Pantheism that sought to transform even inanimate objects by a deifying ‘spiritualization.’”65 As these animist religions assigned a soul to all plants, animals, and inanimate objects in nature, they reinforced the emphasis of soul over geist among proponents of the Sonderweg in Germany. Since charms or enchantments could actively influence all these objects, animist practitioners were seen as endowed with omnipotent powers. In contrast, Christians were dependent on moving an omnipotent God with their appeals and could only hope to better their lot. This Romantic embrace of animism, therefore, can be seen as a rejection of Christianity among some occultists and as their attempt to regain godlike status through self-empowerment.66 Animist tendencies further reinforced the symbolism of blood that became a central theme in National Socialism; it also supported reference to the moon, which came to symbolize the rejection of Christianity in many German social circles. In some animist religions, blood was regarded as the seat of one’s soul, allowing völkisch racists to argue that the purity of a person’s blood influenced the purity of the soul. Thus, the Nazis “elevated the animist blood superstition to the level of state ideology as the basis of racism.”67 In race psychology, blood was the carrier of racial character traits. Nazi icons, such as the Blood Flag, gained religious status.68 It is not surprising that Nazi discussions of Native rituals reveled in the blood theme, and that Karl May’s trope of the “blood-brotherhood” between heroic Germans and noble Indians lent itself perfectly to Nazi ideology.69

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The moon cult had already been borrowed from non-Christian religions in the late eighteenth century in order to counter Christianity and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the sun. Worship of the moon appealed not only to different youth movements in Germany, but also to nationalist pioneers such as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852). The moon symbolized the strength and innocence of pagan Germanic culture, which the Christian mission was said to have contaminated, colonized, and almost destroyed.70 Such Christian repression of indigenous spirituality in ancient Germany and in the Americas thus served as another element in the common enemy motif. Increased historical and archaeological research into Germanic ancestry and even older Indo-Germanic prehistory revealed the tribal societies’ religious reverence for nature. Within pre-Christian belief systems, landscape features were often used as altars, and trees and animals took on supernatural powers and significance. Nationalists and Nazi ideologists eagerly took up these findings and used them for propaganda. A 1936 article entitled “Deutsche Waldsehnsucht [German longing for the forest]” exemplifies these publications. It portrays the Roman Empire and Christianity as the colonizing other and praises the German ancestors’ reverence for the forest. Even though, the author argued, Christianity worked hard to destroy old sagas and customs and was therefore to be blamed for the destruction of most of the sacred forests, there was still a tradition to hold some ceremonies and meetings at particular places in the woods (i.e., the remnants of Germanic ceremonial Thing sites). The old Indogermans’ custom of surrounding grave sites with groves was cited to demonstrate their reverence for trees. In this, the forest gained religious qualities, replacing a church as the proper place of worship. One quotation is worth citing at length, as it incorporates Romantic notions with a religious elevation of nature and with the racist assertion of German superiority: “In the forest, under the majestic giant trees, you are closer to your god than in the dusky dome of your church. Reverently you hearken to the mysterious murmur: The rustling of the leaves, the ripple of the water, the song of the birds. … This feeling for nature is not a specter; it is the essence and content of our race. It already made its appearance in our first religious myths and has been with us to this day.”71 This passage automatically links the supposedly typical German affection for nature to folklore and old sagas. The following quote intertwines Sonderbewusstsein, naturalism, and reference to supernatural beings: “The love for nature is among the most graceful character traits of our people. Sagas long faded away tell us about gods, fauns, and hobgoblins who inhabited the woods and mountain peaks, who had their cult sites, their playgrounds there; and the lakes, rivers, and brooks were the habitat of mermaids and nymphs.”72 The late-nineteenth-century worship of nature and the rediscovery of pagan oral traditions intensified during the Nazi era with the German Forestry Department assigning “biological education areas” to schools. Children were to be

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exposed to outdoor teaching and activities as much as possible, and were supposed to be taught about plants and animals in tandem with sagas and fairy tales featuring these plants and animals, and also about their value for medicine, food, and industry. Teachers were instructed always to forge links to the Germanic ancestors and their supposed worship and use of these plants and animals. Nazi ideology also incorporated deliberate reference to cyclic occurrences in nature, likening 1933 to spring and the rebirth of the nation, or using fire circles in Hitler Youth ceremonies to link them to ancient traditions. The author of a recent study on the Nazis’ spiritual approach to nature concludes: “German piety worshiped nature as the place and the revelation of a supreme, all-encompassing, transcendent deity. National socialism had the features of a natural religion.”73 This constant reference to and identification with the belief systems of tribal cultures also entailed increased discussion of the implications that tribal organization and clan systems might have for contemporary Germans. The understanding of Germans as quasi-indigenous people with tribal roots (and comparing them to Native Americans) could serve as both a positive and a negative example. Nazis and right-wing occultists could refer to Native Americans or ancient Germans to either prove the merit of the old tribal ways or claim that National Socialism’s combination of tradition and progress prevented Germans from re-enacting the “Indian destiny.” Reference to tribalism allowed researchers and ideologists to assert alternative approaches to German history, as in the following discussion of the Männerbund theory and its reference to ecstasy, or to propose alternative forms of social and religious organization to avoid the dilution of Germanness through foreign influence, as in discussions of matriarchy among alternative and esoteric circles beginning in the late nineteenth century.74 A supposedly typical German feature entered discussions on ancient Germanic religiousness at the turn of the twentieth century. The ecstatic religious experience replaced the Norsetalgic emphasis on aloofness and pastoral harmony. Like occultists, protagonists of the Life Reform movement, and members of sectarian communities, Germanthusiasts proposed ancient Germanic rituals as a communal remedy for the alienation in modern life. The Germanic dichotomy of mitgard versus utgard 75 emphasized safety within the community and discouraged trust of anybody who did not belong. Borrowing from Germanic ancestors made borrowing from other “primitive peoples” easier, especially since “primitive” was popular in the arts at the time.76 The concept of ecstasy as a Germanic characteristic stimulated numerous opportunities for alternative worldviews around 1900. It worked as a liberator from Wilhelmine boredom and petty bourgeois virtues. It was dynamic, savage, dangerous, and thrilling. An awakened interest in the religious experience of Germanic ancestors and of contemporary Naturvölker set the stage for new schools of thought that reshaped the image of ancient Germans, and with it, the German self-image, toward something more violent.

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In the early years of the twentieth century, the so-called Männerbund 77 theory argued that impulse and drive, rather than reason, spur community formation and organization; consequently, education should rest on these concepts. Providing very useful material for National Socialist military and leadership ideology, academics such as Ernst Krieck studied the rituals of Naturvölker to verify this assumption about community-building, exemplified in the trance dance and ecstasy of initiation rites and other rituals. Furthermore, these researchers began to argue that Männerbünde rather than clans constituted the formative powers of great political entities, and thus the nuclei of states.78 These rituals and ecstatic experiences did not signify primitiveness and a low cultural level to its modern adherents but were indicators of the perseverance of cultural traits in German society. While Klaus von See pointed out the interaction of the Sonderweg assertion and nationalist references to Germanic Männerbünde in his work, his focus precluded a closer look at this theory.79 This study will emphasize the theory at this point because it helps clarify how the Indian image in Germany once more was part of the construction of German identity. In his attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the development of religions, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer concentrated on what he termed “the ecstatic experience” as a trigger for new religious movements. To feel such an experience, a person (or a group) had to be very passionate and intuitive, that is, in his view, to exert “typically German” traits.80 Hauer quoted Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo to describe the force of personal revelation, rapture, and the loss of control this revelation can release. He concluded that Native American prophets would probably agree with Nietzsche’s description.81 For Hauer, the ecstatic experience formed the basis of culture on which all social organization rested: “Human society is not a creation of men’s social instinct, but the fruit of religion, that is: The roots of culture are supernatural experiences, regardless of how we interpret their meaning and cause. Human history is rooted in the ‘sacred.’”82 With these assumptions, Hauer explained the cultural work of Männerbünde as the cohesive social fabric in indigenous societies. If a people had the talent for great passion and intuition, there was great potential for ecstatic experiences among its individuals, and the men’s societies could take these experiences to mold social structures based on religion. Since Hauer assigned these talents especially to Native Americans (and implied that Germans also had them), both Native Americans and Germans had to be understood as peoples particularly predisposed to creating great cultures, even though he never explicitly suggested a special bond between Germans and Native Americans. The example of a people’s religious relationship to animals, in particular, reflects Hauer’s judgment of Native Americans with the potential it invoked for the fellow tribesmen motif: “Certain races seem to have a special talent for these kinds of emotions. To them, the animistic feeling deepens almost inevitably into the supernatural, the metaphysical. The Indian race is probably the most significant among these races.”83

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These presumed similarities between Native American religious practices, ancient Germanic views, and German identity in the early twentieth century reflect the influence of the Indian image. Even though Hauer strove to describe religions without bias and gestured toward cultural relativism, later scholars who similarly played with Native American imagery and references built upon his work on the history of religions. These later works openly sought to incorporate völkisch or outright Nazi ideology into Norsetalgic scholarship.84 Lily Weiser and Otto Höfler were two such later scholars during the rise of Nazism. In her 1927 dissertation, Lily Weiser aimed to prove the persistence of ancient Germanic initiation rites and men’s societies. She used examples taken from “primitive peoples” to explain the spiritual bond among the members of men’s societies based on their ecstatic experience during initiation. She declared this bond to be the driving force behind social progress. Weiser cited Tacitus to identify similar rituals and customs among Germanic tribes and argued that the scarcity of sources actually proved the longevity of secret men’s societies.85 Otto Höfler likewise sought to prove the continuity of ancient Germanic practices in the modern era with the notion of secret societies, which helped the Nazis link their organizations to supposedly ancient traditions. Höfler is one of the most prominent protagonists of a presumed continuity of ancient traditions in Germany. As Klaus von See observed, he was also a proponent of the ecstatic warrior image, which replaced the placid pastoral Iceland farmer in the popularity of Norsetalgic enthusiasm.86 Höfler interpreted and emphasized ecstasy in men’s societies as the ritualistic sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the community.87 Thus promoting the Volksgemeinschaft, he actively criticized historical materialism and rationalist religion studies from a Nazi perspective, arguing that these disciplines interpreted religious practices only as the result of hunger, the sex drive, or anxieties, but neglected the possibility that they might be built into the biological framework of a people and, thus, be original and inherent. In this understanding, masked dancers in a ceremony do not “perform” demonic experiences but rather experience the demon by wearing the mask; that is, they actually become the demon.88 Höfler averred that rationalism was unable to accept this perspective whereas “German science,” embracing passion, intuition, and mysticism, permeated these concepts, which in turn proved the continuity of an ancient Germanic spiritualistic worldview. Allan Lund describes Höfler as “the best-known proponent of an improbable continuity theory” and adds reasons for the popularity of the Männerbund theory.89 The Nazi Party, and the SS especially, drew on such academic theories in order to place their own organizations on a more traditional footing. Discussing the Männerbünde as state-making agents that turned Indo-Germanic90 nomads into Germanic tribes and, eventually, facilitated the emergence of National Socialist Germany retroactively justified the extraordinary authority of NS institutions over all aspects of Germans’ everyday lives. As Höfler stated during that

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era: “The most peculiar talent of the Nordic race, its state-making power, found an expression in the Männerbünde and has driven them to the most prolific development. They have evolved into authorities that have buoyancy and momentum, and, through fighting, shaping, and ruling, have gone down in global history.”91 Klaus von See observed that only after the Männerbund theory had drawn impetus from the study of Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other Naturvölker did it become popular among National Socialists.92 These structures were ideal for the Nazi movement’s self-image as an emotional-ecstatic current. Furthermore, the strict hierarchy and male bonding in the Männerbünde guaranteed the desired strength for the leadership of and obedience to Nazi ideology. One disciple of the idea, Friedrich Hielscher (1902–1990), went so far as to propose the dissolution and subsequent reorganization of Germany into fraternal tribes according to the principles of Männerbünde.93 The idea of ecstatic warriors in a religious ritual automatically reminds one of enthralled Germans, raising their arms in the Hitler salute at the Nuremberg party rally. The deep spirituality many anti-modernists, occultists, and neo-pagans may have originally felt was replaced by the Nazi insistence on superlatives, which turned everything into a cult and ritualized all proceedings, be they torchlight vigils, or the “cult of youth, the cult of labor, cult of the people, leadership cult, or the cult of strength.”94 If all proclamations of a revival of animist holistic natural religions were to be taken at face value, National Socialism would appear to be the culmination of völkisch, occult, and neo-pagan movements in a Germany that had abandoned European Christian traditions. As the examples have illustrated, some texts suggest this view and portray the extreme right in Germany as deliberately anti-Christian. However, Nazi ideology, although adhering to principles such as blood and soil, racism, and anti-liberalism, was always loyal to the supreme principle of retaining power. For this reason, Nazi educators, propagandists, and leaders could be very pragmatic. Thus, a few words on Nazi pragmatism and the opportunity of the moment are necessary here to gain a more complete understanding of the problem. While Peter-Michael Steinsiek observes that National Socialism “bore the features of a natural religion,” the obvious expediency of spiritual concepts for the construction of identity must be noted.95 Steinsiek finds that blood-and-soil ideology did not lead to a canonization of farming in Nazi ideology. Farmers received more attention, and farming, as it best represented blood and soil, was hailed as the most “German” activity. Although the head of the Agrarian Department, Walther Darré (1895–1953), as well as Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg appeared to advocate natural spirituality in many of their statements, none of them had what could be called an emphatic sense of nature. They were simply interested in a healthy environment for healthy food, which would support racial breeding. Race, they believed, developed through nature, so nature needed to be healthy for the sake of racial health. The blood-and-soil ideology thus did not

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canonize nature; it canonized race.96 In this sense, Nazi ideology indeed used Romantic notions and aspects of Indian imagery to instill a new sense of spirituality among Germans, which was supposed to support the Nazi movement beyond reason. Similarly, Gugenberger and Schweidlenka argue that Nazi nature mysticism was merely bait to bring spiritualists, Life Reformers, or völkisch neo-pagans into the fold. After all, in the late 1930s these notions of alternative spirituality and the esoteric approach to nature were supplanted by massive industrialization for rearmament. The apparent call to go back to the (indigenous) roots in Nazi propaganda was useful for unifying the people and for spiritually justifying practical Nazi measures. Spirituality served as bait for power.97 The promotion of medicinal plants and traditional methods of harvesting forest products were supplements in the struggle to provide food and resources in a wartime economy. Because of the apparent contradiction of spiritualistic bombast, on one hand, and the development of technological gadgets such as the V-2 rocket or the Tiger tank, on the other, Nazi ideology could be regarded as “quantitatively expansive techno-fascism wrapped in the theatricality of origin myths,” as a Green Party conference described it in 1982.98 That these spiritual trappings were often a mere cloak for expedient measures is apparent from the contrast between the public and private opinions of leaders, even within the Nazi movement, concerning views on spiritualism. Adolf Hitler was a master of ritual, yet he condemned many of his paladins’ extravagant ventures into mysticism and cultishness. Though he may have publicly attacked the churches, he appears to have been a staunch Catholic when compared to Himmler and others who attempted to replace Christianity with a Germanized, mystical natural religion.99 Mysticism and cultish rituals that could be seen in close relation to Indian imagery had their place in Nazi Germany; the pragmatic, power-mongering top levels of the Nazi leadership promoted them when feasible. Hitler’s pragmatism allowed for on-demand utilization of ritual and for a focus on Indian imagery when it seemed to further the general goal of National Socialism; but hard science and reason were employed just as easily when they helped the movement to overcome obstacles: National Socialism is a dispassionate school that teaches reality through the sharpest scientific findings and their intellectual forms … First and foremost, National Socialism is a people’s movement, but under no circumstances a cultic movement … Its purpose is not some mystic cult but the maintenance and guidance of the people determined by blood. For that reason, we do not have cult temples but only people’s halls, and not cult sites but assembly and convergence sites … For these reasons, the creeping-in of mystic and occult Jenseitsforscher into the movement must not be tolerated. The foremost in our program is not some mysterious inkling but clear cognition, and, with it, open acknowledgment.100

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Nazi Ideology, Racial Thought, and the Indian Image

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I couldn’t care less whether this or another story tells the truth about the prehistory of the Germanic tribes … The only important factor is … to have such thoughts about history that reassure our people in their necessary national pride. —Heinrich Himmler, qtd. in Wegener, Das Atlantidische Weltbild, 111.

As it developed during the 1920s, National Socialism presented itself as a revolutionary movement but rested firmly on nineteenth-century notions of a unique Germanness. Scientific racism and the pragmatic appropriation of useful concepts, such as alternative spirituality or reverence for nature among many Germans, reinforced the movement. Historians have argued for the last few decades that the conservative nationalists’ transition from pastoral backwardness and anti-modern nationalism to embracing technology in concert with the pragmatic use of Romantic imagery helped the Nazis develop an ideology to support the rapid militarization and rearmament of Germany after 1933.101 While earlier works, such as Barbara Haible’s analysis of Indian novels of the Nazi era, emphasized the continuity of master race attitudes in the German perception of Native Americans during the Third Reich, I argue that racial thought and Romantic claims to German indigeneity allowed for a more positive German reference to Indians. The importance of racial thought and claims to German indigeneity for this positive understanding is illustrated by a variety of sources, ranging from party-owned newspapers and popular books to academic studies. Among the Romantic aspects of Nazi ideology, it is especially rewarding to look at the search for a common racial origin for Germans and Native Americans. The quest for the origin of the Aryan race revealed a number of bizarre constructions asserting a common origin and, thus, common racial stock for Germans and Indians. Analyzing the perceived cultural similarities between Germans and Indians illustrates how the Indian image continued to be a role model for many Germans even when the biological speculation no longer held. Cultural similarities invoked the fellow tribesmen motif; Indians were employed both as role models and as cautionary tales. A third useful application of Indian imagery for the Nazis was the interpretation of historical parallels in the development and, especially, the fate of Native American tribes and Germans. The positive reading of Indianness did not go unchallenged in Germany, however. During the 1930s, controversy broke out between race-ideology purists, who scoffed at the idea of using non-white peoples as propaganda idols, and pragmatists, who saw the opportunity to profit from the popularity of Indian topics in the German populace. The pragmatism in connecting these different layers of the German self with the exotic Indian other allowed Germans of many different persuasions

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to feel included, and their bond with Indians was transformed into a bond with the Nazi leadership. In applying racial concepts, Nazi ideology drew on the nineteenth-century tradition of race as a category for the classification of human societies. In the wake of nineteenth-century scientific discoveries such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, race seemed to be the most reliable category for such classifications as it seemed to offer criteria for quantifiable comparisons. Racial theory promised to reveal hitherto secret knowledge of human history: one could now hope to understand why some peoples acted or had developed in particular ways. Race (more than nation), for anthropologists, constituted a stable criterion for revealing long-term developments in a given human population. Over time, race became loaded with other criteria that made the concept more complex and allowed it to be used politically. Part of this added complexity was the growing identification of race with people among anthropologists. The environment complemented biology as an influence, and, in the late nineteenth century, intellect and mentality were added as determining criteria, interpreted as inheritable talents and character traits of a people that could be indexed, for instance, by the size and shape of skulls.102 The following discussion addresses selected aspects of racial theory as they relate to the German perception of Native Americans and especially Nazi utilization of Indian imagery by way of race. The application of racial theory enabled ideologists to polarize and explain hierarchies among peoples. Racial theory lent scientific legitimacy to ideologies with which it could be loaded. In Germany, racial theory helped to establish the racial unit German, which served to justify the national/political unit German. This entailed the increasing exclusion of Jews as domestic enemies while, at the same time, extending the understanding of German beyond the national borders.103 Similarly, the integration of race, environment, and mentality into national and racial ideology merged in notions of blood and soil.104 The racial classification of peoples led to their distinction into superior and inferior ethnicities, with certain criteria setting in motion the politics of inclusion or exclusion. Both Hartmut Lutz and Barbara Haible have addressed the German racial perspective on Native Americans in their works. Lutz applied Jörg Becker’s adaptation of the theory of structural violence to the German racist perception of Indian imagery.105 Becker and Lutz, for the respective ethnic groups they analyzed, found that structural racism helps implant an understanding of power relations in the children of a dominant group, which works to ingrain racism in each new generation. Haible applied these concepts to scrutinize racist Nazi ideology in German children’s novels about Indians.106 She concluded that, throughout most of the novels analyzed, their writers depicted Indians per se as an inferior race with negative character traits. Since this notion obviously contrasts with German Indianthusiasm, Haible argued that these writers used Indian chiefs as shining examples with good, quasi-“Aryan,” traits to set the superior leaders

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above and apart from the inferior masses, thus nurturing the leadership cult among German children.107 However, racist perceptions of Native inferiority and a focus on the leadership cult alone do not explain the persistence of Indianthusiasm throughout the Third Reich. An analysis of popular and academic periodicals illustrates that the focus of some Nazis and earlier conservative nationalists on German indigeneity promoted a more positive image of Indians and highlighted the fellow tribesmen motif. Thus, extending Lutz’s and Haible’s approach by adding the German claim to indigeneity to the analysis of racism and leadership generates a better understanding of the complexities in the use of the Indian image in Nazi ideology and propaganda. Classifying human societies by race allowed the classifiers to establish a hierarchy among races. At this point we need to discuss the role Native Americans played and the purpose these hierarchies could have. The hierarchical classifications of race scholars and philosophers typically put Native Americans in the lower ranks, but was this interpreted as proof of their inherent inferiority or did it allow opportunities for propaganda, as well? In the following discussion, I will also reflect on evolutionist perceptions of human development, and, finally, consider possible applications of racial theory in political practice. Racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene), the German equivalent of eugenics, offered the Nazis ample opportunity to compare their racial policies to those of the United States.108 Both countries used these policies against minorities, and they both observed each other’s actions closely. Beyond transatlantic notions of state-sponsored racial policies, racial hygiene allowed Nazis to use some actual and presumed Native American practices and historical cultural traditions as models and justification for their own eugenics program. In the early days of racial studies, the subdisciplines of craniology and phrenology were regarded as valuable tools for the racial classification of human societies and for the determination of long-term developments of human groups and their interactions. Yet, it soon became obvious that there were too many samples deviated from the presumed norms to allow for clear results. The subliminal takeover of racial theory by ideological zealots intent on confirming their preconceived notions through science was apparent in the debate on Aryan origins. While some argued that Aryans—a term often used interchangeably with Indogermans—had migrated to Europe from central Asia, proponents of Aryan racial superiority claimed a northern European origin. Yet, skull findings did not yield clear results on hair color, eye color, or language, which were then being used as criteria for determining race. Thus, the concept of Aryans as the core stock of Indogermans became “increasingly an ideological fiction,” which, by the early twentieth century, was supported mainly by pseudo-scientists on the political right fringe.109 Proponents such as Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) linked the classification of peoples based on race with the hierarchical claim to German, Aryan, or Nordic superiority.110

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Their ideological assumptions also led to increasingly bizarre claims about where Aryans had originated, and who was to be included in the illustrious circle of the master race. An author known only as O. Wiehle analyzed the similarities of physical features and supposed racial character traits between American Natives and Europeans.111 Referring to the work of a leading Nazi race theorist and physical anthropologist, Egon von Eickstedt’s Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit, Wiehle found features of both Europeans and Mongols among American Natives. He argued that Indians could not be a race in their own right because they were “too young” for such a development, an allusion to the Bering Strait migration theory developed in the 1930s. He claimed that Indians were a “contact race” (Kontaktrasse)—actually a “European type of human, which absorbed profusely Mongolian blood in prehistoric times, thousands of years ago.”112 The Indians’ European ancestors apparently lived near the Siberian Yenisei River where they mixed with Mongolian peoples before they moved across the Bering land bridge to become Native Americans. Interestingly, the author refers to the Wallam Olum, the written Lenni Lenape (Delaware) creation history, to prove that even the Indians remembered their Eurasian heritage.113 Another article in a pedagogical journal explained the value of racial classifications for education in Nazi Germany. The author suggested that what he termed “depicting peoples” (Völkerschildern) should receive greater emphasis in schools to instill a sense of race in children. He focused on Native American examples and listed authors to use as sources for education about Indians, such as Egon von Eickstedt, Hans Krieg, Richard Nikolaus Wegner, and Hans Meinert. He also suggested illustrating racial thought for children not through a classification by area, but by stage of development.114 Quoting Meinert, he argued that “our own position, and also our own value, can only be understood if we attempt to understand all of humanity and its development and progress.”115 He demonstrated the notion of German racial superiority by looking at supposed primitives to foster children’s sense of their own superiority, supporting Lutz’s and Haible’s analysis of structural racism. The abundance of sources, however, invites another, more complex reading of Nazi applications of racial studies. Nazi ideology entailed more than a simple us (superior) versus them (inferior) opposition, with discussions of foreign, exotic peoples being used for more than merely demonstrating Germanic superiority. American aboriginals could also serve as examples of the danger of miscegenation and as role models for the promotion of racial purity.116 A 1942 article on the racial stock of Mexico makes this function of Native modeling especially apparent. It depicts the racial mix in Mexico as a cautionary tale for members of any dominant race who want to assure their superiority, which he identifies with racial purity, arguing that “everywhere in the world, the mixed-bloods have been the most dangerous enemies of a racially pure ruling class.”117 In Nazi ideology,

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each race had its own essence and character. In order to preserve the health and cohesion of a race, the conditions for its character had to be preserved.118 On a similar note, the ideological connection between character and environment discussed in the previous section on sacred geography generated an interest in Native peoples among Nazi scholars and educators. Native examples, in this context, demonstrated peoples organizing their lives according to the opportunities and dangers of their natural environment. Throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalists and conservative revolutionaries had praised this connection and advocated that Germans rediscover it to preserve Germanness. This reduced the perception of Natives as “primitives.” For example, Hans Krieg argued in 1943, “Peoples who live close to nature, and who, in adapting to the struggle for subsistence, live simple lives, are not necessarily ‘primitive.’”119 Such references to a people’s indigeneity and their successful adaptation to the environment served Nazi ideology well as markers of a healthy existence in harmony with nature and in accordance with natural laws. Nazi ideology not only applied traditional Romantic images of Indians and Germans in tune with nature, but it also employed Indian imagery for (pseudo-) scientific approaches to nature, and to the nature of race. A 1936 article in the journal Naturschutz credited Hans Schemm, founder of the NS Teachers’ Association (NSLB), for stating that National Socialism equaled applied biology.120 Explaining that the Nazi regime based all measures, ideology, and politics on biological principles—and thus on natural law—the author presented the manifold, racial-scientific Nazi approach to Native Americans as representatives of Naturvölker, and to nature itself. These principles concerned the debate on the preservation of both the wilderness and the primitives whose habitat it was, as well as the discussion of the racial character traits and the supposedly inheritable talents of Native Americans. If Naturvölker were attuned to natural conditions, understanding their ways would help Germans adjust to the environment themselves, and enhance its exploitation. In addition, if indigenous peoples were not to be perceived as primitive, Germans could claim indigeneity and familiarity with Indians without losing their status as a leading industrial nation. This understanding demonstrated the self-image of Nazis as members of a superior race responsible for practicing benevolence in caring for the lands and peoples they were destined to govern—White Man’s Burden par excellence.121 Identifying the environment with character, Third Reich authors followed the tradition of seeing Germanness as determined by forested wilderness. Race psychology, Rassenseelenkunde, and other new social sciences studied the influence of the natural environment on a particular group (a race), and how environmental contingency shaped relations between groups. In his work on the history of Germany’s nature sanctuaries, Schoenichen claimed that Germans possessed a mystical connection between their natural environment and their soul because of this contingency.122 The knowledge of such relationships made it possible to evaluate

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peoples in terms of their capabilities and highlighted the need to preserve a given group’s natural environment.123 It was no coincidence that the Nazis republished the works of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, the nineteenth-century pioneer of the discipline of Volksgeschichte, in the 1930s to emphasize the theory of continuous Germanness by way of the forest. Nazi ecology tied its traditional mystic forest cult to modern pseudoscientific racial theory. Combining an assumed continuous tradition of mystical forest adoration with modern technology, Third Reich Germans not only found themselves on moral high ground in terms of ecological principles, but they also felt a sense of privilege and responsibility to protect nature.124 Since they apparently had inherited and retained a strong respect for nature, they were entitled and obligated to preserve it as the world’s leading forest rangers, much as they saw themselves as protectors of foreign indigenous peoples. The Nazis, consequently, constructed the image of Germans as the chosen protectors of nature based on their presumed roots as a forest-dwelling indigenous people. True to the Nazi agenda of applied biology, and affirming the notion of Indians as part of nature, contemporary works on preservation rarely distinguished between the protection of trees, forest animals, or forest-dwelling Naturvölker. Preservationists such as Schoenichen looked to U.S.-Indian policy for points of comparison in the treatment of indigenous peoples, but the tenor of Nazi suggestions was mainly that U.S. efforts had failed: the Christian mission, forced assimilation, and miscegenation were all detrimental to the well-being of a Naturvolk.125 The failure of such civilizing policies was attributed both to American ignorance of the Indian peoples’ soul or racial psyche, and to the limits of the Natives’ racial talents. At this stage, the work of Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann should be discussed in somewhat more detail because it demonstrates the cultural-anthropological (ethnological) depiction of American Natives in the 1930s but also provides insight into how racial aspects permeated all academic disciplines during the Nazi era. Mühlmann’s research focused on the interaction between peoples and the resulting cultural conflicts. His findings were not solely academic; he included suggestions for policies regarding assimilation and the absorption of peoplehood (Umvolkung), by which he meant the state-sponsored and organized absorption of a small people into a bigger, dominant one, so that the small one lost its distinctiveness.126 Even though his research interests were Eastern Europe and the “high-cultured” exotic peoples such as the Chinese and Japanese, his findings influenced Nazi perceptions of race relations, of Naturvölker in general, and, thus, the German image of Indians. He navigated between biological and sociological explanations in seeking traces of the development of human societies and increasingly introduced environmental factors because the racial-biological approach of Nazi purists seemed too simplistic to him.127

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Mühlmann’s 1936 Rassen- und Völkerkunde provides a glimpse of German Indian imagery typical of the time. Yet, Allen’s depiction of this work’s significance as owing to its discussion of Indians “according to levels of intelligence and racial specifics” does not capture all the interesting aspects.128 She describes the change in terminology from “primitives” to Naturvölker as intending to assert the hierarchy between peoples who lived close to nature and “urban industrialized Europeans.”129 Ute Michel depicts Mühlmann as a proponent of applied ethnology who focused on “exotic main peoples” such as the Chinese and discouraged the future study of “primitives” as irrelevant to German interests.130 However, I would argue that, in addition to showing racist attitudes of Germanic superiority over all other peoples, Mühlmann’s classic book also demonstrates the tradition of constructed German indigeneity by emphasizing the circumstances of “primitiveness,” by showcasing the advantages of living in close relation to one’s environment, and by arguing for German responsibility to protect indigenous peoples’ racial and cultural integrity through segregation because Germans were once an indigenous people. I will look at each of these three arguments in turn. Concerning “primitiveness,” Mühlmann refuted the notion of a linear development of peoples. The idiom about a people being “still in the stone age” did not mean the group had not progressed since the Paleolithic, in his view, but that it had been forced to live in a “space of retreat” (Rückzugsraum) whose environmental conditions hindered further technological progress. Such “primitive” peoples had adapted to their environment as best as they could, and progressed as far as possible. The popular notion of studying Naturvölker to infer one’s own original state from their current state was pointless, Mühlmann argued, because the original state of a people could not be known. The practice of ethnology to document the “twelfth hour” of a people before it became extinct was irrelevant. In his eyes, it was more important to look at the interaction of peoples to understand the law of the jungle at work.131 He thus interpreted the plight of Naturvölker as the fate of weaker races in the constant struggle of peoples to secure the best environment and resources for themselves. To showcase the advantages of staying close to nature, Mühlmann highlighted the cultural and social organization of Naturvölker to provide evidence for the presence of natural law in human societies. He regarded the term “natural selection” as a tautology since nothing in nature was unnatural. Mühlmann argued that this term went back to Rousseau, who idealized nature as the original state of man, and also identified the individual with nature, which would make any community artificial, and thus morbid. In contrast, Mühlmann maintained that communities adapted to new situations in groups and protected individuals from harm in a dangerous environment. To underscore this point, Mühlmann compared an American homeless person to a member of a hunting community in the bush, contending that the former would starve sooner than the latter.132 This was

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a popular anti-American trope to denounce American capitalism as inhumane and a threat to German culture. In this context, the solidarity, mutual aid, and group cohesion of Naturvölker served as a role model for the group cohesion of the Volksgemeinschaft while conveniently ignoring the strength of the individual in indigenous communities. This example not only demonstrates the Nazi emphasis on the community over the individual, but it also shows the bond Nazis assumed between the cultural understanding of the Naturvölker and Germans with their supposed indigeneity. Finally, Mühlmann promoted racial integrity by taking a stand for purity and against miscegenation due to contact and territorial expansion. He used examples from the Spanish colonization of the Americas to describe racial conflict and show how the elimination of the Natives’ elite weakened their entire racial stock, resulting in the withdrawal of weaker, “more devout” Indians into remote “spaces of retreat.”133 At this point in the history of this racial contact, miscegenation altered the integrity of both the Hispanic (“Mediterranean”) and Indian races, eliminating some character traits and emphasizing others.134 In this racial reading, historical events such as the Spanish Conquista were “but a tiny prelude” to the racial conflicts to come.135 Mühlmann concluded from this: “We consider it a diminishing of the value of the world if a peoplehood cannot come to the full fruition of its potential. This determines our principal stance toward the völkisch liberation movements of such old and great peoples as the [Asian] Indians and the Chinese. The same is true mutatis mutandis for our stance toward the Naturvölker, especially the Africans and the Pacific Islanders.”136 This statement obviously expresses a political agenda. Mühlmann addressed the plight of these exotic peoples to criticize the colonial powers from a safe vantage point, and he emphasized Africans and Pacific Islanders because Germany had colonial claims in those areas. Nevertheless, he once more voiced Nazi German claims to indigeneity and evoked the threat of Western imperialism by placing Germans in the same boat with colonized peoples. The right to self-determination he demanded in this statement links to other indigenous people’s tropes that supported racist policies, and particularly the idea of purging the race of elements deemed undesirable, dangerous, or superfluous. In the course of the reform movements around 1900, racial attitudes had influenced strategies for public health. On the one hand, biologism and an increased interest in nature and its protection called for examples taken from nature to cope with the social problems of rapid urbanization, and to prevent the degeneration of human societies. On the other hand, social Darwinism and genetics, which had inspired racial theories, called for the application of these racial constructs in politics, generating the movement for racial hygiene.137 Eugenics had a longer history and had originally begun as an attempt to breed “perfect” humans. However, proponents in Germany increasingly argued after World War I that “modern medicine, charity, and welfare programs interfered with the process of

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natural selection by artificially sustaining the weak and ‘unfit.’”138 One aspect in the analysis of racial thought and the Indian image in the Third Reich, therefore, is the employment of indigenous peoples as role models for racial consciousness, and thus, for racial hygiene. As Mühlmann noted, the study of foreign peoples, their cultures, and the interaction between peoples was supposed to raise awareness among Germans for the apparently fragile integrity of peoplehood and race. Simply treating one’s natural resources with care did not make them multiply, he emphasized. Hence, a heightened awareness had to be followed by careful measures to increase health and numbers among the Nordic people to give the Nordic race the place the Nazis intended for it: “Just as humanity proceeded from hunting and gathering, that is, from the overexploitation of nature to a care for plants and animals, … it should proceed now to a careful treatment of race, to racial hygiene.”139 By the 1930s, racial hygiene measures had already been publicly discussed for a few decades, and there had been a noticeable shift in public acceptance from so-called positive racial hygiene measures to negative ones. Positive racial hygiene asserted that only healthy people should procreate, and that some problems, such as alcoholism and crime, were not of a social nature but manifestations of genetic predispositions. The most important positive measures were information and propaganda. Negative racial hygiene measures gave states the power to introduce new factors of “selection,” i.e., to sterilize suspected carriers of hereditary illnesses, to control their marriages, or even to kill them outright.140 While proponents of negative eugenics had gained ground during the 1920s, many Germans were not yet willing to accept the harsher measures. For that reason, propaganda, often subtle, was introduced to provide examples and role models. It is revealing how both the ancient Germanic tribes and American Natives were used to explain the necessity and the social acceptability of euthanasia to Germans. One of the most notorious race theorists of the Third Reich, Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1961), argued in his work on the history of the Germanic race that, since the ancient tribes (even the older Indo-Germanic tribes) had apparently been very aware of their superior racial status, they had tried to cultivate their race through deliberate breeding.141 He claimed that they had developed rituals for starving children intentionally so that only those who survived the ordeals would be the “fittest” and allowed to mature.142 He even argued that the Germanic practice of drowning people in swamps for corpore infames (having defiled their bodies), described by Tacitus and evident in archaeological finds, was an active eugenics measure to “sift out”143 homosexuals and other undesirable members of the community.144 Günther concluded that these measures achieved a “constant cleansing of the people … since the hereditary dispositions of such individuals were weeded out of the people’s racial stock.”145 Günther’s depiction showed readers an image of their Germanic ancestors as hardy and ruthless. The allusion to the supposed racial awareness of Indogermans as the epitome of

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humanity reinforced the notion that leadership required stern measures. Yet, this example also emphasized the apparent natural logic of racial hygiene, as nature required these measures to ensure the survival of the group. This argument seems to have been deliberately designed to garner acceptance for these measures among Germans. The examples of Native Americans and Inuit that follow further underpin this basic idea. In 1933, the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter published an anonymous article on racial hygiene among Naturvölker, mainly from the Americas. It explained that the harsh environment they lived in generated the need to preserve food for those who could give back to society and, thus, for euthanasia. Despite its haughty racist tone, the article clearly used Native Americans and Inuit as role models for the Nazi ideology of understanding all life as a struggle: “Only those who keep prevailing in the daily struggle for existence have a right to live. Therefore, Naturvölker do not let mentally retarded or deformed children grow up in the first place, but eradicate them as soon as possible.”146 Explicitly calling the indigenous peoples “savages,” the author explained that they had “instinctively found quite a healthy selection process.”147 Even though he believed that the extension of these measures to albinos for spiritual reasons seemed far-fetched, he added that contemporary scientific knowledge had proved that albinos in tropical areas endured lives of suffering, so that the measures were justified, after all. Other measures included killing the offspring of miscegenation because, as the author argued, the tribes were race-conscious and wanted to preserve the purity of the group. Similarly, an extensive passage explained cases in which old people were killed: “Many Indian tribes are known for killing old tribal members, since they aren’t good for anything anymore, stand around idly, and pose a burden to the tribe, which has to prevail in the gravest struggle for existence, anyway. A researcher once asked an Eskimo why they did not kill dogs instead of old crones, to which he received the characteristic answer: ‘Dogs catch otters; old crones don’t.’”148 One does not need to discuss the ethnological validity of these claims here; it is obvious that the author construed facts and made generalizations to achieve the propaganda aim. It is more important to relate this text to contemporary German methods of eugenics and the ideological need to prepare the German public for the coming euthanasia campaigns. Commenting on the colonial governments’ failure to implement their prohibition of these killings, the author suggested that it was, in the end, perhaps best not to interfere with this natural process: “Maybe it is even wrong to oppose this healthy selection process; especially where the extermination of the irremediably ill, the insane, or of albinos, is concerned.”149 Nonetheless, the author was apparently uncertain whether the German public would support such “brutal” measures because he cautiously reassured readers they were not acceptable in a civilized country such as Germany. However, he justified the supposed killing in indigenous societies and, in

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this way, portrayed them as logical (because they were natural) and necessary for the survival of that race.

Genetic Fellows: Indians as Aryans

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The subconscious of our own essential collective [felt] with all definitude that the current Indianness which had remained in the [technological] Stone Age resembled something congeneric to us, not different from the primeval history of our own peoplehood. Indianness has retained, like an erratic bloc from Stone-Age Über-history, a remainder of our own, pre-Nordic ancestry [Emphasis in original].150 —Otto Muck, “Der ewige Indianer,” 314.

While early racial theory attempted to complement the methods of physical and cultural anthropology throughout the late nineteenth century, German ideologists used academic racism to support their claims of German racial distinctiveness and superiority over others. Many claimed that there was a biological, racial relationship between American aboriginals and Germans (or Aryans in general). They basically postulated a mystical, mutual point of origin and then offered differing explanations for the races’ gradual separation into Germans and Indians. The wider German public never took most of these claims seriously; many came from the fringes of ideological zealotry and gained followers only from among a few heavily indoctrinated outsiders. Still, these claims appeared in some debates on the nature of the German-Indian relationship, and even in the realm of politics. If Germans had biological ties to an aboriginal group in the Western hemisphere, they could, possibly, claim to have a stake in affairs regarding the Americas. Proof of biological relationships soothed racial purists who scoffed at constant references to Indians as role models. At the very least, it backed the story of the nation’s own glorious past, be it Indo-Germanic, Aryan, or Germanic, and thus prepared contemporary Germans to “take back” land they believed had once been theirs. The following section will present a few examples of these claims and discuss the extent to which they presented opportunities for Nazi propaganda in the context of the fellow tribesmen motif. These claims are related to the quest for an ancient master race, from which different racial strands (such as Germanic tribes) would have developed. Some proponents searched for the fabled Atlantis to prove their theory. Others applied Hanns Hörbiger’s (1860–1931) Welteislehre (World Ice theory, or glacial cosmogony), to illuminate the decline of this ancient race. Some scholars searched for the common origin of civilizations by comparing cultural artifacts, symbols (such as the swastika), languages, or sagas. As Franz Wegener explains in his monograph on the Atlantis myth, the idea of a mystical ancient high culture to which European race ideologists could refer as their ancestors “pervades the history of

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right-wing radicalism like a common thread.”151 The assumption of an ancient, godlike master race not only told Germans about the territories their ancestors allegedly once owned that they should now reclaim; it also offered stories on the advantages of racial unity and offered reassurance that leadership and the administration of gigantic empires were nothing new to Germans. Germans, then, were not upstarts but the descendants of great rulers who could repeat their ancestors’ exploits.152 Although there have been differing explanations and suggestions as to where Atlantis, the mystical island of Thule, or the fabled Hyperboreans could be found, many of the proposed spots were located in, or had relations with, the Americas, and thus allowed for the construction of mutual German-Indian origins.153 In this context, Germans could see Indian affairs as family matters. Many Germans believed that they understood indigenous concerns, and their apparent biological proximity to American aboriginals lent far more legitimacy to their critique of the American and Hispanic colonizers. Hörbiger’s Welteislehre had greater influence on the assumptions of the origin of Aryans than many other bizarre claims, prompting even the Nazi leadership to discuss it in political debates.154 Hörbiger argued that, throughout its existence, the Earth had captured a series of planets or planetoids in its gravitational field, which then orbited it as moons for some time before finally crashing into it. Thus, the Earth experienced a succession of moon phases and moonless phases. Hörbiger interpreted moonless phases as golden ages for humanity, in which cultures thrived and prospered without the threat of natural catastrophes such as gigantic floods caused by lunar tides. Wegener adds two important aspects in his historiographical analysis of the theory. First, the theory smacked of medieval scholasticism and could not be sustained against criticism from the natural sciences. Second, the public perception of the theory and its defense by high-ranking Nazi Party officials demonstrates the German right-wing contempt for a rationalistic, mechanistic worldview in favor of what they regarded as a holistic, organic, intuitive comprehension of the studied matter.155 In this respect, the Romantic notions of intuition over rationalism, and of an organic over a mechanistic worldview, that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth century entered twentieth-century academia in what the Nazis called “German science.” Scholarship in Nazi academia mainly served to prove ideological premises. As Michael Kater observes, many German disciplines in the humanities and social sciences had been following ideological trends ever since 1871, and thus had not been striving for objectivity, a tradition that the Nazis could easily appropriate.156 The self-perception of radical conservatives in Germany, backed by conservative scholars, once more led back to the notion of Germans as indigenous people who did not need to dissect nature in order to understand it, since they could intuitively feel its meaning. Scholars and ideologists utilized Hörbiger’s theory variously to prove the existence of the ancient master race in several different places around the globe. A

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very prominent disciple was Edmund Kiss (1886–1960), who wrote four novels on Atlantis and conducted research during his travels in the South American Altiplano. He eventually planned an expedition to South America sponsored by the academic SS foundation Ahnenerbe, though the priorities of the war effort prevented it from ever taking place.157 His 1937 work Das Sonnentor von Tihuanaku analyzed the archaeological site of Tiwanaku (Bolivia), arguing that its inhabitants must have been members of the ancient master race. Their city was apparently destroyed during one of the global catastrophes caused by cosmic events. Kiss reconstructed the probability of such events according to glacial cosmogony.158 His detailed description of the ancient city also mentioned the “perfected, beautifully sculpted portrait of a man of, apparently, Nordic racial stock.”159 Even though Kiss did not suggest these ancient people were actually Atlantians or even Aryans, his entire work implied that there was a biological connection between some inhabitants of the Andean highlands and the Germanic tribes’ early ancestors. Some high-ranking Nazi leaders discussed and supported research promoting similar ideas. Himmler, known for his interest in mystical histories, was aware of the theory and defended it in public. Ernst Schäfer, leader of the 1938 SS expedition to Tibet, related that Himmler once told him about Hitler’s, and naturally his own, ideas about the evidence for the ancient master race: “The Führer has been concerned with the World Ice theory for some time. There are numerous remains of those tertiary moon people, last witnesses of the forgotten, once world-spanning Atlantis culture. In Peru, for instance, on the Easter Island [sic] and, I assume, in Tibet.”160 Himmler also extended political-academic support to a scholar with a declining academic reputation who asserted the racial German-Indian link, Herman Wirth. Wirth’s research focused on a monotheistic ancient religion and on the presumed matriarchal organization of the Indogermans and promoted Atlantis theories about the Nordic origin of all culture. Despite his waning reputation, Wirth’s findings were politically sound enough for Heinrich Himmler to secure him a post in the SS-Ahnenerbe and install him as its first president.161 Concerning his research on ancient religion, Wirth stated that “the Indian tribes [sic] of the Hopis, the culture of the Pueblos, and their descendants, the MexicanMeso-American-Peruvian cultures” were descendants of settlers from the “AryanAtlantian-Nordic race.” He cited the supposedly prevailing “Aryan, monotheistic light cult” and religious symbols, such as the swastika, as evidence. “Many North American Indians with their long skulls and their facial features reminiscent of Norsemen reveal a Nordic-Atlantian element.”162 Wirth is particularly interesting in relation to the discussion of Indianthusiasm and Norsetalgia because his specialty, the study of ancient European cultures and his research on the migration and distribution channels of these cultures, provided a perfect point of comparison between Germans and Indians.163 As a commentator on one of Wirth’s

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speeches remarked, in his work “kinship relations between America and Northwestern Europe are being stated, and cultic and religious connections drawn which had been impossible up to now.”164 Biological ties between German(ic) people and American aboriginals were not merely related to an assumed ancient race. German discussions of pan-American history during the Nazi era highlighted the question of the discovery of the New World. Numerous articles entertained the possibility of racial mixing between pre-Columbian Germanic explorers and the Natives they encountered, or even the racially pure settlement of these explorers on the new continent. This was especially apparent in the 1930s debate on the Panamanian “White Indians.”165 Starting in the mid 1920s, various periodicals related the story of an American engineer named Marsh who, while traveling in the remote region of Darien near the isthmus of Panama, had encountered Natives with white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. A public debate ensued about whether these Natives were albinos, and, if not, whether they could be of Nordic (Viking) origin,166 or even from Atlantis. Readers were informed that such stories were fairly common in the diaries of explorers and Conquistadors, such as Columbus, Cortés, and Vancouver.167 One 1935 article referred to an imminent expedition by Swedish scholar Sven Hedin to locate the tribe and determine its racial origin, but no papers made further reference to his expedition and its outcome.168 Regardless of the actual findings, it is noteworthy that this debate stirred up the media in Germany enough to result in a series of articles. The prospect of meeting distant “relatives” on the other side of the Atlantic obviously appealed to the German audience. This view of Indians—under some circumstances—as Aryans or as distant relatives of Germans must have carried some political implications apart from the obvious opportunity for anti-American propaganda or for underscoring Germans’ place as the natural guardians of indigenous peoples. One incident related in a memorandum from anthropologist Donald Collier to his father John Collier, the Commissioner for Indian Affairs in the Roosevelt administration, in August 1939, points to such political implications.169 In this memo, Donald Collier, though unable to verify the information, relayed the story of the grandson of a Sioux woman and a German immigrant who had been granted German citizenship from a German citizenship office on the grounds that the Sioux were Aryans and, therefore, all his relatives in the Sioux lineage were counted as Aryans.170 As this memo is the only source of information on the applicant, it is almost impossible to reconstruct the process. It must be assumed that the Reich Office for Genealogy at the Department of the Interior171 was the authority in question, as it was responsible for confirming the genealogical status of German citizens and thus issuing the Abstammungsnachweis, a certificate required by the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws to prove Aryan descent and to single out Jews. Department officials often referred to race theory and physical anthropology to justify their decisions.172 Since their documents are registered by applicant’s name, the file of

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this particular anonymous Sioux man and the Reich Office’s verdict cannot be found without further data.173 On a more speculative note, it can be assumed that the Reich Office did indeed use statements by more or less renowned ethnologists and physical anthropologists who may well have included the theories of mutual German-Indian ancestry cited above. Similar statements on Aryan descent were made about the Polynesians, Japanese, Turks, and Mexicans.174 It stands to reason that German (would-be) authorities, as they apparently did in the case of the Mexicans described in Britt’s The Fifth Column, called peoples “Nordic” simply to affirm a vague sense of biological relatedness and thus assert friendly relations with the peoples in question, a practice which is more obvious when claims for cultural or mental similarities are concerned.

Soul Mates: Claiming Cultural and Mental Ties

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One cannot convey culture, which is a general expression of a particular people’s life, to any other people with completely different mental predispositions. This would, at best, be possible in a so-called international civilization, which, however, relates to culture like jazz music to a Beethoven symphony. —Adolf Hitler, Hitlers Zweites Buch, 166.

As many of the claims about biological relations between Germans and Indians were far-fetched at best, proponents of the fellow tribesmen motif needed arguments to support the inclusion of Indians in the circle of appropriate friends and role models for Germans. Basing his claim on James Compton’s 1967 work, Kenneth Townsend argues that Nazi leaders, similar to the racial-ideological flip-flop they had to perform to elevate the status of the Japanese to make them acceptable partners, referred to Hitler’s classification of peoples into culture-founders, culture-bearers, and culture-destroyers in Mein Kampf. 175 Culture-founders, such as the Germanic race, were able to generate culture and progress through invention and evolution. Culture-bearers, such as the Japanese and, by implication, Native Americans, were apparently able to hold a certain level once elevated with the technological and ideological support of a culture-founding race. Culture-destroyers, as Jews were termed, were said to be parasites who could not create anything on their own and who depended on exploiting a host race. This exploitation implied a corrosion process that would eventually exterminate the culture of the host race. Indians as much as the Japanese, says Townsend, were only elevated to the status of culture-bearers because the Nazi leadership needed them as potential allies to destabilize American society.176 However, although the pre-existing Indianthusiast notions were a convenient device for German domestic propaganda, the German perception of Indian imagery in the fellow

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tribesmen motif did not need much elevation of the Indian. Many articles on the similarities in character, cultural practices, and symbols were a reassurance for German readers, not surprising revelations. The idea of collective mental idiosyncrasies associated with race gained importance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when genetics revealed the laws of heredity. Since the so-called German movement had emphasized the individual soul and held that Germans were especially sensitive to matters of emotions, intuition, and the soul, it is not surprising that racial studies developed a subdiscipline centered on the presumed inheritable soul of entire peoples. Rassenseelenkunde, or race psychology, aimed to determine the nature of the souls of different peoples, how they could be distinguished, and the implications a racial soul might have. Race psychology was a common theme in German periodicals of the Nazi era, used to claim similarities between Germans and Indians and to assert the presumed special bond between them. Two features of race psychology are particularly important. The first is the notion of the impossibility of imposing culture on another race due to the incompatibility of various racial souls, which Hitler detailed in his second book. He claimed that the colonial policies of Germans and the English corresponded to their inherent Romantic and pragmatic natures, respectively. Around 1900, the German colonial empire had tried to spread culture to “savages” and failed. The English apparently had been satisfied with conquering and exploiting the colonized peoples but leaving their culture alone, which had ensured tranquility among the Natives. Therefore, the colonial policy of the British Empire had been more effective.177 It is one of the ironies of history that Nazi ideology was often contradictory as the Nazis pragmatically switched between contrasting statements whenever necessary to adapt and sustain power. Whereas the Nazis in some instances claimed that German colonial policy was driven by Romantic racial character traits and thus portrayed it as less effective because it sought to spread German culture to peoples who could not share the same traits, other writings touted that the Third Reich’s colonial policy would be efficient, benign, and beneficial to the Natives once the war ended because it would not impose culture, and instead instituted the segregation of the races. In the latter case, efficiency supposedly derived from the same inherent Romantic notions within the German soul: the German, who remembered his indigenous past, would feel obligated to let indigenous peoples determine their own cultural ways.178 This argument reveals yet another contradiction typical of the ambivalence in applied Nazi ideology. While British segregation is shown as superior to German imperial attempts to transplant culture in Hitler’s example, other texts claimed British (and American) colonialism tried to transplant culture, clearly stating the opposite.179 The pragmatic application of examples to underscore ideological claims frequently generated such contradictions, allowing observant readers to deconstruct the ideology.

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The second relevant feature of race psychology is its application in racial politics, which further exemplifies “German science.” Friedrich Keiter explained what studying the character of a race entailed in the Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde. First, it implied understanding broad patterns and avoiding the pitfalls of trying to distinguish too many different individual features, as the American discipline of behaviorism had apparently done. These broad patterns could be grasped intuitively, and scholars did not need to burden themselves with large amounts of empirical material. “[W]e present the case for a field of character studies that is driven by comprehension and intuition but tested on behavior.”180 This intuitive approach, of course, not only represented the supposed “scientific” capabilities of an inherently Romantic people and was thus a case of racist grandstanding in itself, but also had the advantage of allowing sweeping claims concerning particular peoples’ character traits without requiring sound evidence. Keiter further explained that the broad field of character studies comprised (a) the study of influencing factors, such as long-term learning, and (b) the influence of the environment. Environmental influence is particularly interesting in the context of analyzing the fellow tribesmen motif. The actual discipline of race psychology was described as the study of the third factor: the inheritable predispositions of a people. For instance, race psychology could be applied to explain why certain peoples apparently never developed an ocean-going naval tradition.181 Obviously, the application of empirical data, or of socioeconomic theories, would quickly dislodge these claims. Most important in Keiter’s text is his explanation of how to develop a Charakterbild (character sketch) of a people, and how such a sketch would be useful in sociopolitical terms. Although the field still had to improve its terminology and methodology, in his view, he already laid out the goals for the application of character studies. Character studies, he explained, would illustrate the development of particular attitudes among human groups and thus help a leader determine which of his subjects would excel in and which would be unsuitable for particular tasks: “He wants a demonstration of actual differences in the achievements, and wants to hear by how much a Frisian would probably be more suited to be, say, an officer, than a Thuringian.”182 This being the scope of application for race psychology, it was only a small step further to determine which peoples would be more likely to be docile subjects once conquered, or from whom a conqueror could reasonably expect valuable support services, whether as suppliers for the army or as auxiliary troops.183 Applying race psychology to the presumed special bond between Germans and Indians yielded many more similarities than a biological claim alone. Two major articles discussed the phenomenon of the fellow tribesmen motif by way of assumed similarities between the racial souls of Germans and Indians. While the first text approached the problem from a literary perspective, the other added a sociocultural view. The first text, von Werder’s “Der Rote Mann – rassenpsycho-

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logisch” (The Red Man through the Lens of Race Psychology) utilized literarysociological and literary-anthropological approaches to argue that only Nordic peoples (i.e., Germans and Anglo-Saxons) had produced great literature about Indians because they understood the soul of Indian peoples. Romance peoples, on the other hand, only had an interest in conquering rather than understanding Indians.184 However, this claim ignored both the French literature on Native Americans and the Nazi propaganda practice of blaming Anglo-Saxons for having destroyed Indian cultures. Using the dichotomy of community versus society, the text alluded to the Sonderbewusstsein of Germans and affirmed a commonality between Native peoples, Germanic tribes, and their descendants. The basic argument in this assertion of the fellow tribesmen motif was the alleged common social structure among Germans and Indians, the principle of the cooperative community. This was manifest in cooperative clans and in corresponding leadership structures based on an elder system, on merit, and on experience: “In other words, the Germanic and the Indian concepts of leadership, of social and state organization, reveal essential similarities in significant aspects, regardless of the different cultural and historical fates of these two races due to different levels of talent.”185 German(ic) youth understood Native American resistance to colonization as resistance to alien encroachment, enabling them to empathize with Indians in historical novels. This understanding, said von Werder, increased even more during the first two decades of the twentieth century when German youth supposedly experienced the same encroachment in the form of urbanization, industrialization, and democratization. Von Werder branded these developments as deliberate attempts by Western civilization and liberalism to colonize German culture and weaken its traditions, which culminated in the Great War. He further portrayed this war as the clash between two Weltanschauungen, the Germanic-communal and the Romance-societal. Thus, German youth supposedly experienced the war as their own resistance to colonization and alien oppression, becoming Indians themselves in the trenches of France and Belgium.186 In this example, race psychology reinforced the fellow tribesmen motif as much as the common enemy motif, actively interweaving Indianthusiast predispositions with Nazi propaganda. However, the argument was also contradictory because it identified the enemy generally as “the West,” which included Great Britain and the United States, whereas the racial-psychological assertion pertained to Germanic and anti-French lines, which would count Anglo-Saxons as Germanic, as well. The second text, an article by Otto Muck, “Der ewige Indianer und wir” (The Eternal Indian and Us), which appeared in Natur und Kultur in 1936, similarly asserted the special bond between Germans and Indians by referring to the body of literature on Indians in Germany. Yet, Muck added ethnological “evidence” and claims about prehistorical contact, as well. Karl May and James Fenimore Cooper, he said, did not have to invent the “eternal Indian.” The image impressed

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itself on them because it was apparently vivid among Germanic peoples at all times because of their common ancient history. This again alluded to Atlantis and to common racial character traits determined by life in a northern climate: “The geographical proximity, the early medieval history, and the historicizing myth indicate powerful bonds and interconnections between the European and the American North. It seems that fraternal powers weave between the great peoples on the fringes of the Atlantic.”187 Muck also added that the North and its harsh climate had shaped hard, “male” peoples. Northern Europeans found more similarities and mental correlations with Native North Americans than with Mediterranean peoples, whom he regarded as effeminate due to the mild climate not requiring hard labor or inventiveness for subsistence. Therefore, Muck concluded, Germanic Europeans felt drawn to Indians since they experienced “that fraternal Eros which drove related, equally hard, equally Nordic warriors into the male joy of heroic journeys and autotelic struggles … into the more spacious steppes and forests of the red brother continent.”188 These similar, supposedly male character traits indicated a mutual ancient history in Muck’s eyes. He referred to cultural customs found (or believed to exist) among Native American tribes. Among these, he mentioned tattoos, scalping, and the significance of feathers and of blood, shamanism, and initiation rites. He also presented corresponding examples from ancient Germanic tribes, Scots, and Picts, to illustrate that the similarities were not literary fiction but based on ethnological evidence. Like Werder, Muck observed a “renaissance” of Indian awareness among Germans, manifest in German Indianthusiasm after 1900. This awareness was imminent in the emergence of the Youth movement, he said, in the founding of Boy Scout chapters in Germany, and had now culminated in the Hitler Youth. Muck stated that the legacy of the Indian renaissance in Germany was the Indian spirit that veterans of the Great War passed on to their own children, who now filled the ranks of the Hitler Youth. Praising the autobiography of Buffalo Child Long Lance (Sylvester Clark Long, 1890–1932) and Hans Rudolf Rieder’s introduction to the German translation, Muck called the book a “true German folk book; German because it is about the true, unvarnished, unromantic Indian.”189 Werder’s and Muck’s texts postulated the identity of Indianness and Germanness in its most explicit form, an identity that entailed many of the Romantic notions discussed above, such as untainted naturalism, emotions, adventure, tragedy, and violence.190 In addition to increased anti-urban and naturalist comparisons, the concept of blood and soil was also utilized to postulate similar character traits between Germans and Indians.191 This association was especially conspicuous in the numerous articles on the Indigenism movement of the 1930s in Latin America. In these texts, German authors argued that there was a relationship between the growing self-confidence of Native peoples in Latin America and their struggle for rights and land. Race psychology was not often used as an academic method to prove

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Figure 6. “Participants of a Hitler Youth camp-out.” Undated German postcard, 1930s. Courtesy of Hartmut Rietschel. Note the number of boys wearing feather headdresses, particularly the older boys in back imitating the gestures and stance of the stereotypically stoic Indian.

a similarity in the mental dispositions of Germans and South American Indians. Yet, the Native struggle for land often served as a vehicle to portray Indians as a race who understood the concept of blood and soil well, and thus was to be supported by sympathetic Germans. These articles, however, neglected to mention that most proponents of the movement were non-Natives who appropriated Native history to construct a new sense of national pride in their respective countries.192 Hanswerner Brocatti in his 1943 “Der Indianismo” explained that the Natives of the Andes region did not love their land for its abundance of resources but because of its spiritual significance, which was apparently part of their racial soul.193 Therefore, he interpreted Indians’ love of their natural environment as part of their racial heritage and linked it to the well-being of the community. Such interpretations transferred ideological components from the Nazi movement onto Native communities, often disregarding specific tribal Native experiences or concepts. They especially neglected the inclusive nature of tribal notions of peoplehood and replaced them with their own exclusive notions. Thus, it was easy to portray these peoples’ struggles and arguments as resembling the Nazi agenda.194 These articles found cultural similarities between Germans and Indians not only in presumed character traits but also in cultural symbols and material cul-

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ture. The symbol most identified with Nazism throughout the world today is the swastika. German newspapers and magazines discussed its use in Germany and around the world often in the 1930s, which provided them with an opportunity to link Nazism to Indians. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, both texts and modern symbols were created in the process of inventing traditions, and were then said to represent ancient national traditions. This was the case with national flags but also with the swastika.195 Several scholarly and autobiographical works point to the early nationalists, the völkisch movement, and to Guido von List (1848–1919) in searching for the origin of the swastika’s use among German right-wing radicals. Hitler adopted the symbol from them and claimed it for the Nazi movement because it was presumably used everywhere on the globe except among Semitic peoples, thus representing everything anti-Jewish. Moreover, it connected modern Germans to the old Germanic tribes and their Indo-Germanic ancestors, who were said to have been the first to use it.196 The fact that other peoples, such as Native Americans and Tibetans, used the swastika as well left room for the papers to present soft facts and trivia. This did not necessarily mean that they were postulating a cultural relationship between Germans and Native Americans or Tibetans, yet the symbol’s global distribution at least provided potential for such conjecture. It seems to have been an especially interesting factor in the Nazi exploitation of Indianthusiasm, which authors gratefully picked up. References to the Indian use of the swastika ranged from Hitler to regular newspaper authors and to authors of popular scientific articles.197 These references were sometimes as simple as casual remarks that the Indians used the same symbol, or, in the case of one presumably Native visitor to Hitler Youth boys, entailed bizarre constructions. This visitor, Os-Ko-Mon, explained that the shape of an Indian peace pipe resembled one-fourth of a swastika.198 The occurrence of the swastika in Native North America even made German travelers feel at home away from home, as Figure 7 shows.199 The Radebeul Karl May Museum displayed a global distribution map along with several artifacts adorned with swastikas to show “that the sign which symbolizes the new will of our people was honored and loved all over the globe.”200 The worldwide distribution of the swastika as a symbol of good luck, the sun, or of happiness generated frequent discussions about its presumable origins that gave the Nazis the opportunity to portray the Nordic race as its inventors. Numerous newspaper and magazine articles averred that it first appeared in central Europe, before 2500 b.c. From there, the symbol was handed on to other peoples or traveled to the Middle East, to Asia, and eventually to the Americas via migrants.201 Though it had previously been assumed that the swastika had originated in Asia or America, there was no clear reference to recent scholarly works refuting this. In this sense, their claims to the Germanic (or Atlantian) origin of the symbol followed the typical pattern of describing the Germanic race and their ancestors as harbingers of all culture.

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Figure 7. “Swastika Hotel,” in August W. Halfeld, “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands,” Die Woche 35 (1936): 23. Surprised by this roadside billboard near Raton, New Mexico, the author happily explains that the Native tribes use the swastika in their silversmithing and weaving. The impression this must have made on the German traveler and his readers was probably especially strong since this billboard highlights the swastika by printing it on a white circle, similar to the Nazi flag.

Vaguely equating the swastika’s use in Germany with its occurrence in the Americas implied historical and cultural parallels, but it did not specify them (Figure 8). Not surprisingly, the use of the swastika in Germany and the bland references to its worldwide distribution raised concerns in the United States, with many Native Americans and non-Natives consequently dissociating themselves from the symbol.202 There is no indication that German newspapers addressed these events, which the American media eagerly covered to demonstrate unity in the increasingly anti-Nazi atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

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Figure 8. “Federschmuck mit tieferer Bedeutung,” in Arnold Hagenbach, “Ein Cowboy erzählt von Indianern,” Koralle 29 (1937): 1027. This caption explains that feathers on Native headdresses had the same meaning as rank badges on soldiers’ uniforms. As in Figure 7, the readers’ attention is directed to the swastika on the headband.

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Fellow Victims: Claiming Historical Parallels

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Our youth want adventure; they need ideal images from their imagination. What is more natural than linking Germanic heroism with the Indian’s desperate struggle? Seen from this perspective, poignant parallels evolve. Only the nation that has battled and proven itself worthy of its ancestors is entitled to glory and posthumous reputation. —Bruno Heitz, “Indianergeschichten,” Jugendschriften-Warte (Nov. 1938): 74.

Drawing historical parallels between events in German and Native American history was a fertile propaganda field for the Nazis. It provided much space for the common enemy and the fellow tribesmen motifs. Asserting similar fates, struggles, or tragedies could prove to German readers that Germans were indeed a people in peril, presumably facing the same threats that Native Americans had; it also seemed to prove that Nazi Germany’s enemies, be they American, French, or British, were the embodiment of evil. It even allowed Germans to perceive themselves as a bulwark of indigenous culture against a flood of conquerors. As Hartmut Lutz observed, the ideas of backstabbing and betrayal have always been popular tropes in German collective memory. They are found in the murder of Siegfried the dragon-slayer, in the German Dolchstoßlegende after 1918, in the post–World War II feeling that Hitler had betrayed the German people, and numerous other examples.203 After World War I and the Versailles peace treaty, these events were compared to Native North American history with reference to treaty-making and treaty-breaking, to humiliation, and to glorious battles against all odds. It is interesting to note that the “Indian Versailles” trope developed well before 1933. The Nazis obviously profited from and further stirred up an already widespread notion of defiance and collective self-pity.204 The Romantic notions of doom and tragedy, which had constituted the vanishing race trope for Indians, could readily be applied to Germans after 1918.205 References to historical parallels between Germany and Native America began appearing in Indian novels during the 1920s, for example, in Friedrich von Gagern’s Grenzerbuch.206 Gagern compared German postwar society with the early American republic and the subjugation of the Eastern tribes. In such dreadful times, he argued, the “weak elements” of a people, that is, the weaker individuals within the group, would start to degenerate, becoming prey to addiction, sensationalism, and disorder.207 The solution was a strong leader who could reunite the people. In using this argument to install Tecumseh as a great leader, Gagern was clearly alluding to Adolf Hitler. Haible observes that Gagern’s statements on Tecumseh and his depiction of the Shawnee chieftain as the “Arminius of the Red race,” equating Indians and Germanic tribes in their struggle against an expanding settler empire, reveal his early support for Hitler.208

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Erhard Wittek (Fritz Steuben), the foremost writer of Indian novels during the 1930s, drew further parallels between Versailles and Native American history. Some scholars liken his experience as a refugee from the newly founded Polish Republic in 1919 to the fate of Indians forced from their homes by greedy settlers. While he did not expressly allude to the loss of Polish territory as a German (and, by implication, his own) “Indian experience,” the parallel is clear enough.209 In Der Sohn des Manitu, Steuben argues that Germans could relate particularly well to Indians and their fate: “[The Americans] proceeded in the traditional fashion to insult and denounce the exploited, the abused, and the murdered, to falsely blame them for atrocities, only to go on exterminating them more than ever, and we have no reason to side with the murderers against those who were a hundred times better than their white destroyers. We Germans in particular have the least reason to do so, because we have experienced this kind of making history the hard way, and all too bitterly.”210 Other authors voiced similar ideas in newspaper articles and travelogues. One article on the reservation life of the Lakota-Sioux commented on the events of 1890. The Sioux, said Koch-Wawra, could be treated in a way that “is the plight of those who beg for peace,” that is, incapacitated, forced to live under a corrupt foreign administration, and watching their kin succumb to humiliation, only after their leaders had been killed and their will broken.211 Although the author does not link the killing of Sitting Bull by Indian police to Wilhelm II’s abdication at the hands of revolutionaries explicitly, contemporary Germans would have understood the implied parallel of treason. Referring contemptuously to the miserable conditions on the reservation, the author added, “if Sitting Bull could rise from the dead and take a look at his descendants, he would probably retreat to his grave in a hurry.”212 In 1932, Walter Boje, a commentator on contemporary Indian affairs, highlighted American hypocrisy in the practice of inviting Native Americans to the commemoration of old battles of the “Indian Wars” and then having their photos taken as they shook hands with them. Americans supposedly believed this comprised “a duty of honor.”213 Calling these American events “brutal scorn,” even though most Americans did not seem to realize it, Boje compared them to the German state and Germans’ attitudes toward World War I and suggested it would be like the French inviting German veterans to the commemoration of World War I battles. No doubt, there would be an uproar in German society.214 Finally, the Nazis took up the trope of Versailles. The campaign against the German democrats, who were blamed for the Dolchstoß, had given rise to their movement, alongside the breach of trust Germans felt they had experienced with the terms of the war’s end. They believed that they ended the war under the terms of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and were then faced with the “dictate of Versailles.”215 Hitler used the trope in his speeches, and at one time, he even compared the German delegation in Versailles to Indians being forced to give up their land

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under duress. During the so-called Roosevelt-Hitler duel (Roosevelt’s 14 April 1939 telegram to Hitler and Hitler’s answer during a speech on 28 April), Hitler remarked that Germans had not been treated like honorable warriors who had withstood the onslaught of the whole world for almost four years. Rather, they had been “treated more dishonorably than could have been the case with the Sioux chiefs.”216 In another image, authors subtly compared Germans to Indians by pointing out their common resistance against a wave of invaders. This bulwark motif sometimes openly referred to invading, culture-destroying hordes from the East, yet it also was invoked as an image of a general threat of invasion by vastly superior numbers. It was most explicitly used to denounce the Red Army as another wave of Mongolian hordes and the Wehrmacht as the levee holding evil at bay to save Europe, but references to Indians are conspicuous in many instances.217 Germans appeared as the indigenous victims of an invading force, who had to protect their homeland to save their culture.218 Once more, Erhard Wittek provides a perfect example in his blatant comparison between Germanic tribes, Indians, and the threat of an invasion that the flood/bulwark trope symbolized:

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Imagine that the old Germanic land of the time around A.D. 1, with its primitive means of war, its sparse population, its loose alliances of families, clans, and tribes, had been invaded by people from the time of 1700 or 1800, equipped with all the arms of civilization, with all the brutality, recklessness, and hypocrisy that civilized peoples have so often shown against the defenseless … For 200 years, the Indians fought against the encroaching white flood. Where they were relatively equal in arms and numbers, they often hit the Whites on the head—and righteousness was always with the permanently betrayed, cheated, and preyed-on Redskins.219

This bulwark motif served as a propaganda tool in several ways. It could emphasize heroic resistance in the face of a powerful enemy, helping Germans rally to the flag. It could emphasize the German inferiority complex and fear of encirclement. It could portray Germans as indigenous peoples who only wanted to preserve their culture while invaders (the civilizing, colonizing West) aimed to take their lands and way of life away.220 At the same time, it could depict the Soviet Union as barbaric and subhuman and the German “defenders” as protectors of European culture. The latter image became more obvious during the final years of World War II, when the Red Army was advancing toward the German borders. The mix of images associated with this motif, again, demonstrates Nazi pragmatism in the application of propaganda imagery. To highlight this pragmatism, the following section will discuss a few aspects in the debate among Nazi propagandists and educators over the expedience of Indian imagery and the rigidity of Nazi ideology.

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Fellow Tribesmen or Subhumans? Nazi Quarrels over Indian Imagery

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We members of the Nordic race decline with thanks to be lumped together with Blacks, Reds, Yellow people, or Orientals into one big people’s porridge. —Ottger Gräf, qtd. in Michael Jovy, Jugendbewegung und Nationalsozialismus, 41.

One basis of Nazi ideology was the claim that races were equipped with different talents and that white people, especially the Germanic or Nordic race, were superior to all others. How did this claim relate to German Indianthusiasm? Studies focusing on the German image of Indians that have covered the Nazi era, most notably Barbara Haible’s Indianer im Dienste der NS-Ideologie (1998) and Deborah Allen’s dissertation, “The Reception and Perception of North America’s Indigenous Peoples in Germany 1871-1945” (2004), have struggled with this question and detected an ideological debate within the Nazi movement. However, they have not agreed on a common interpretation of the participants’ goals and its outcomes.221 What is clear is that Nazi educators, administrators, and writers debated the dangers of depicting non-white peoples as role models for the German youth but that, nevertheless, Nazi authorities continued to endorse novels about Indians. This section will add an analysis of periodical literature concerning the debate to clarify why Indianthusiasm prevailed over ideological purity in the Nazi years. In her extensive analysis of Indian novels written or republished during the Third Reich, Haible builds on Helga Geyer-Ryan’s observations about censoring adventure books. Nazi purists associated with the Reichsschrifttumskammer222 had several concerns about the use of non-white peoples as role models for German children and youth.223 For one thing, they claimed to fear that adventure novels could instill an adventurous spirit in children and lead to juvenile crime. Haible suggests that the actual rationale behind some of the early book bans was racial criticism, citing articles in the Reichsschrifttumskammer’s publication, the Jugendschriften-Warte, that explicitly condemned any open praise of non-white peoples in literature.224 One of these, by Nazi literary critic and poet Will Vesper, called for the condemnation of literature that praised non-white peoples, such as American aboriginals, for the sake of exoticism.225 In order to protect the awareness of the Germanic race’s superiority, said Vesper, its mental strength needed to be protected by rejecting what he termed Farbigenschwärmerei.226 Even though Vesper explicitly attacked the German tradition of writing and adoring Indian novels, he also stated that other races were respectable: “We of all people realize the significance of the East Asian races of Japan and Manchukuo who are

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inherently Nordic, or the brave race-conscious Turkish and Arabic peoples. We are not against the real colored races but against the lethal miscegenation and the corroded racial instinct throughout the world.”227 Haible’s interpretation of his text neglects this expression of respect. The races Vesper mentioned were either allies of Nazi Germany or peoples who could be construed as allies under the common enemy motif. Nevertheless, the same motif and the idea of the culture-bearing races could include Indians among respectable races and role models. Vesper did not attack Native Americans, nor the Indian image in general, but the “sentimental, thoughtless, and masochistic glorification” of them.228 Consequently, Vesper was not simply anti-Indian and pro-Nordic but favored race consciousness, which could well praise Indians if the appropriate Nazi jargon was applied. Another point several purist authors and educators made about Indian literature that Haible notes was that Germans, as nationalists, should be more self-centered. Thus, they should look to Germanic tribes as role models rather than go abroad with their literary settings, seek out more Germanic examples, and further exploit existing sources.229 Deborah Allen, in her analysis, adds that educators advocated restricting Indian literature to children over ten years of age only, as they believed that younger children needed to establish a stronger Germanic bond and thus required purely Germanic indoctrination.230 It seems that proponents of Indian imagery in literature eventually prevailed since, in Allen’s words, the Nazis exercised “the cautionary use of an ‘approved’ image.”231 Most decision-makers in the departments for controlling writing and journalism in Goebbels’s ministry realized that German Indianthusiasm was too great to suppress, at least consistently. In addition, leading Nazis, Hitler among them, were known to be fans of Karl May’s writings and of his Indian character Winnetou. This popularity opened opportunities for Nazi propaganda and for aligning the populace with Nazi aims and ideology. In short, “[t]he Nazis would have been stupid not to exploit Indianthusiasm.”232 Nazi educators and censors approved of and even endorsed Indian literature because it fulfilled a number of functions in the propaganda machine. It propagated the cult of strong leaders, since most novels portrayed men such as Tecumseh and Sitting Bull as flawless dictators whose abilities outweighed those of the masses they led. The action-packed settings were believed to instill a sense of adventure, heroism, and self-reliance among German children—character traits identified in race psychology as typically Germanic.233 Furthermore, the depiction of the “desperate struggle” for survival would support militaristic aims and portray war as necessary, heroic, and desirable.234 It even promoted the Nazi idea of race war since it emphasized the constant global struggle among peoples for “the globe as a challenge cup,” as Hitler repeatedly expressed it.235 Allen points out that the approved writings, if they did not openly spread Nazi ideology, at least identified with Nazi ideology in the novels’ prefaces. This was

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done by pointing to the German return to natural law and to the supposed tribal roots of Germans, or to the fact that Indians protected their homeland and that Germans were to be sympathetic.236 Works by authors known as Nazis or open sympathizers, such as Erhard Wittek, were endorsed. Haible quotes his open letter to an opponent in the Jugendschriften-Warte, in which he stated that Nazi ideology had to come from the heart and not necessarily be worn on one’s sleeve. Any book that could accomplish this was a good book, in the Nazis’ eyes.237 Literary scholars have debated the degree to which Wittek was aligned with Nazi ideology,238 and Barbara Haible has been criticized for neglecting important sources on the matter.239 In this study, however, I am more concerned with the obvious prevalence of Indian writing during the Third Reich and the Nazi endorsement of such writings as good literature. Both Haible and Allen highlight the Nazi emphasis on historical Indians, and their rejection of early twentieth-century Native Americans as degenerate and miserable shadows of their former selves.240 My own analysis of newspaper and magazine articles supports this observation: many sources mourned the perceived loss of dignity and expressed disappointment with Indians who did not meet Indianthusiast expectations.241 However, ideological Nazi activities were too complex to conclude from this that German writers neglected Native realities. Fiction, popular media, and academic works featuring Native topics at that time displayed a sociopolitical interest in the indigenous affairs of all countries in the Western hemisphere. These affairs were interpreted to employ the common enemy motif, to assert race conflicts, and to discuss plans for the near German (postwar) future. Although those who recognized that Indians had not vanished generally saw the Reservation Era and the efforts at assimilation as the demise of the Indian race, German authors observed the transition in U.S. Indian policy with interest. The Indian New Deal’s reversal of the assimilationist policies, such as granting Native peoples the right to exercise their beliefs and to form communities when they had been forced to be individualistic earlier, seemed to prove the Nazis’ claims. Apparently, Americans had learned that culture could not be imposed on other races, that each people had to be allowed to live according to its talents and dispositions, and that community was more vital than society.242 This interest is another example of the Nazis’ expedient application of propaganda, as American Nazis, apparently aided by German money, branded the Indian New Deal in the United States a subversive plot by the Roosevelt administration to install communism in America through the back door.243 These developments in North America not only seemed to prove Nazi ideals; they also promised to renew Indian strength, which influenced the public debate on Nazi Germany’s foreign policy plans. For one thing, an Indian revival would increase German interest in using Native Americans to weaken the position of the U.S. government.244 Although

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no plots were uncovered involving Indians working as a fifth column245 in the event of a German invasion of North America, the U.S. authorities’ fear of such a plot, as well as links between domestic Nazis and a few Native American organizations, point to the plausibility of such an undertaking. The activities of these organizations were seen as the beginnings of fifth-column work, such that one contemporary American author called the Native protagonists “[r]ed-skinned orators of discontent.”246 Indianthusiasm provided one of many ways for the Nazis to try to destabilize U.S. society. In the words of George Britt: “As Dr. Goebbels remarked hopefully concerning America, ‘We shall be able to play on many strings there.’”247 Nonetheless, an Indian revival seemed more interesting south of the Rio Grande. Numerous articles analyzed the 1930s movement of Indigenism in Latin American countries, which was interpreted as a racial reawakening of indigenous peoples all over the continent. It generally found sympathy in Nazi Germany since a strengthening of Latin American countries would weaken American influence there. At the same time, Germans could expect an Indian revival to increase their own economic and political influence, which, in some cases, was even suggested as a merging of the positive traits of Indian and Germanic races. In addition to the notions of indigenous revival, cultural anthropological studies, including Mühlmann’s, helped general readers understand Nazi race ideology as applied to everyday international relations. “Learning from the other” was a way to combine the Nazi dogma of racism as natural law with a popular depiction of the exotic.248 Mühlmann attacked Nazi purists who insisted on a self-centered study of humans, that is, of Germanic peoples only. He argued that knowledge of one’s own peoplehood was a prerequisite for any scholarship, but ethnology was needed to prevent “unhealthy egocentricity.”249 Learning from other peoples provided insight into their knowledge. When Germans were ready to look up from their own favorite ideas, their own knowledge would increase and become a weapon in the Lebenskampf 250 among the races. Learning from indigenous peoples—that is to say, from distant relatives of a sort—was supposed to clarify Germans’ place in world affairs and help them learn from others’ mistakes. This was also apparent in ethnologists’ and colonial planners’ debates on German postwar development and the history of U.S. Indian policy in that context. Although contemporary indigenous life in the Americas might not have been of interest for authors of Indian fiction in Germany, it was certainly a focus in popular and academic political writing. There were, however, instances of Nazi ideology preventing Germans from identifying with Indians. Biologism, after all, was based on notions of superiority and inferiority. In some respects, Indians could only be portrayed as inferior. Traditional Romantic notions, such as manifest destiny, interwoven with scientific racism, asserted fate as an important factor in life. It went well with Germanic

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assertions of the stronger race conquering the American continent. Historical parallels were used on other occasions to claim that, although Germans and Indians were similar, only Germans had understood that unity and race consciousness were necessary for survival. Even if authors such as Mühlmann, Schoenichen, and Wohlbold constructed an image of Germans as an indigenous people, they did not propose that Germans go back to hunting and gathering. The Nazis, building on the tradition of reactionary modernism, accepted industrialized society as a fact, and Mühlmann said: “Technology is better discussed by engineers than by cultural philosophers. Only he who does not understand anything about it sees it as the meaningless, demonic apparatus that bewitches and enslaves people.”251 These authors portrayed American aboriginals and other Naturvölker as distant relatives on occasion, but as somewhat retarded relatives that one had to take care of. In this sense, Naturvölker needed the protection of a benevolent guardian not because they were incapable of managing their own affairs, but because they had to be protected from Western imperialism and the degenerating influences of civilization. In her analysis of Indian novels, Haible filters out the basic racial arguments that sometimes portrayed Indians as inherently inferior. If one accepted the Nazi dogma of races engaging in a constant struggle for Lebensraum, and accepted that Indian peoples had inheritable racial shortcomings (such as unrestrained passions, lack of a strategic-planning capability, and lack of unity), then one understood their doom as a natural result of the Nordic race arriving on the North American continent. Germans, then, as members of the highest-ranking race who comprised a large proportion of the immigrants to America, could claim to have played a large part in its colonization.252 Similar logic applies to the colonialist and/or racist notions in Karl May’s work, which suggest that Indian characters are only equal to whites when they discard their Indianness and take up Germanic traits. A major reason popular magazines and newspapers gave for the supposed demise of Indians was that Indians were organized in loose tribes that fought each other when, instead, they should have united and fought the colonizers as a race. Haible finds allusions to this blame in Indian novels featuring Tecumseh as the first Native leader who united Indians in a race war.253 Adolf Hitler repeatedly claimed that Germany had become strong under his leadership because the German tribes had finally united.254 Such allusions to the tribal history of Germans reinforced the idea of German familiarity with Native Americans, but the Natives’ apparent inability to unite and understand themselves as a race caused their defeat in the colonial struggle that the Nazis actually saw as a race war. In general, there was no unified Indian image in the German media during the Third Reich. Nazi Gleichschaltung 255 held a tight rein on the press, and Nazi ideology permeated every publication, but depictions of the Indian varied. These

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variations resulted from continuing debates among Nazi purists and pragmatists, but also from the opportunistic application of specific tropes and images. A few examples will demonstrate these debates and varying applications. First, Indians and Germans could be both linked or differentiated by their supposed passion and ecstasy. For example, the Viennese philosophy of Männerbünde prominently linked Germanic ancestors to aboriginals by virtue of shared Romantic traits, such as passion and ecstasy.256 Scholars who could not accept the link of Naturvölker and Germanic tribes attacked this school. One scholar argued that ecstasy and religious experience in male societies might be important factors in social organization “among biologically inferior peoples, but not among healthy Germanic tribes.”257 However, the image of the ecstatic, religiously irrational Teuton worked better than the more placid one within National Socialist ideology because it was based on many communities whose common core was loyalty and leadership through will rather than familial relationships determined by biology.258 Thus, charisma and the ability to entrance one’s subjects were important leadership qualities for Nazis. At the same time, the depiction of Indians as inferior in many novels portrayed them as unrestrained berserkers. Nonetheless, the Vienna school did use unrestrained passion as a positive trait for Germans.259 A second area of apparent contradiction in the application of Indian images and tropes was the comparison of Germans and Indians as tribal people. Hitler portrayed himself as a unifier of tribes, and he kept referring to Germans as tribes. And, although he loathed these mystics and propagators of cultish ideas, men like Herman Wirth and Friedrich Hielscher were able to have an influence on German society; they published, had a relatively wide readership, and even held reputable positions for some time. The Nazi leaders ousted them in various ways from the limelight for their bizarre plans to organize Germans into matriarchal tribes or völkisch corporate clans only when these plans threatened to backfire on the wider Nazi strategy.260 Apart from Indians, the SS also used the German Knights Order and even ancient Sparta as role models.261 The Nazis’ pragmatic approach to propaganda, after all, employed a broad range of role models in a very broad range of possible applications. Nazi propaganda utilized imagery from different historical backgrounds and geographical areas if the parallels thus drawn supported the Nazi cause. Even where Indian imagery was not feasible, Nazi propaganda would come back to tribal imagery whenever it was expedient. Indians were neither portrayed as inherently inferior, nor was the fellow tribesmen motif the primary application of Indian imagery. Race, biologism, Indigenism, and opposition to the West were all criteria that variously influenced the use of Indian imagery in Third Reich publications. Thus, the impression remains that the Nazis successfully exploited the German tradition of Indianthusiasm for their political goals.

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Notes 1. Peter Bolz, “Der Germanen liebster Blutsbruder. Das Bild des Indianers zwischen Realität und Inszenierung,” in Karl May. Imaginäre Reisen, ed. Zeilinger and Beneke, 180–81. 2. Herfried Münkler and Hans Grünberger prefer the term Nation-Genese (nation-genesis or nation-formation) to nation-building, as the latter term implies state-making. Their terminology seems more appropriate for the purpose of this study, as the phenomenon analyzed here emerged significantly earlier than the actual establishment of the German nation-state in 1871. “Nationale Identität,” 218. 3. Tom Holm, Diane J. Pearson, and Ben Chavis, “Peoplehood: A Model for American Indian Studies,” Wicazo Sa Review 18 (Spring 2003): 7–24. 4. Sollors, Invention of Ethnicity, xv. 5. Wehler, “Nationalismus,” 164–67; Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 1–3; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 13–22, 143–44. 6. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 2. 7. Sollors, Invention of Ethnicity, xiii. 8. Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, “Peoplehood,” 2. The scope of this study precludes an in-depth analysis of interrelations between German nation-formation and Indian imagery by way of language. It can be said here that some links were made during the search for common origins of Indo-Germanic and Native languages. Among others, James Mooney analyzed a few German fairy tales and sagas and compared them to Native oral traditions. James Owen Dorsey and James Mooney, Aryan Elements in Indian Mythology. ts. Manuscript 1312, Smithsonian Institution National Anthropology Archives (Washington, DC, 1890), 10; James Mooney and George Ellison, James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (Asheville, NC: Bright Mountain, 1992), 465. A number of German authors and hobbyists have attempted to make a linguistic link, as well. “Indianerwörter in der deutschen Sprache,” Zeiten und Völker: das Weltraumpanorama für Jedermann; Jahrbuch für Volkswirtschaft, Geschichte und Geographie 23 J (1927): 94; O. Wiehle, “Die Indianer,” Pädagogische Warte (1935): 749; C. C. Uhlenbeck, “Thesen über eskimoisch-indogermanische Anklänge,” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 37 J5 (1937): 91. 9. The peoplehood model offers more useful terminology for the concept of “people” than Werner Sollors’s study because it shows more awareness and caution in terms of standard and viewpoint due to its anti-colonial stance whereas Sollors and Anderson are more intent on revealing the constructedness of European nationalist traditions. I prefer the criteria of “religion/ceremonial cycle” over “superstition” as markers. Holm, Pearson, and Chavis explain that Thomas chose the term peoplehood “to transcend the notions of statehood, nationalism, gender, ethnicity, and sectarian membership.” “Peoplehood,” 9. This model, furthermore, incorporates the idea of sacred geography, which refers to the political implications of “homeland” for Native Americans, and which Sollors’s approach necessarily emphasizes less. In addition, the German term closest to peoplehood would be Volkstum, which became part of Nazi jargon—another ambiguity in the discussion of perceived analogies between Germans and Indians from a Nazi perspective, and another indicator for the self-perception of German nationalists as an original, indigenous people. 10. See, Barbar, 83–95. 11. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 172. The permanent exhibition “2000 Jahre Deutsche Geschichte” (German History in Images and Artefacts from Two Millenia) in the Deutsches Historisches Museum similarly suggests a continuity of history from the Germanic tribes up to today. Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin. 2007. http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/ staendige-ausstellung/index.html.

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12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

The numerous television documentaries aired for the anniversary of the battle in 2009 also suggest a continuity that cannot be proven and that clearly supports a patriotic notion of ancient group identity. See Kampf um Germanien—Die Varusschlacht, directed by Christian Twente, DVD, Universum, 2009. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 173. Interestingly, the Hermann statue in the town of New Ulm, Minnesota, faces East, toward Germany, and, in a sense, away from its Dakota neighbors. While this study seeks to explore relations of Germans’ glorification of their tribal past with their enthusiasm for Indians, the statue in the American town distorts the picture. The sponsors of the monument would most probably have found the idea of cordial relationships with Native Americans outrageous, given the town’s fate during the so-called Sioux Uprising in 1862. See Penny, Kindred by Choice, for a detailed discussion of German-American perceptions of this event. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 334, 436, 693, 711. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 173. Münkler and Grünberger, “Nationale Identität,” 211–13. See, Barbar, 11, 14; Lund, Germanenideologie, 11–30. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 173. See, Barbar, 31; Kohl, Entzauberter Blick, 29, 40. See, Barbar, 31–37. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 38–40. Ibid., 44–51. See Harry Holbert Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts, 2nd ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), for a discussion of warrior features among indigenous peoples—a discussion that cannot overcome ethnocentrism as it differentiates between primitive and civilized war, and thus establishes a hierarchy. See, Barbar, 44–51. Ibid., 48–49. See, Barbar; Turney-High, Primitive War; Jürg Helbling, Tribale Kriege: Konflikte in Gesellschaften ohne Zentralgewalt (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), 47–67. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt (Berlin: Verlag Braune Bücher, 1933). Rudolph Herzog, Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist tot! Lachen unter Hitler—Komik und Humor im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Eichborn, 2006), 120–21. Hanfstaengl, Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt, 33. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 174–75. See, Barbar, 83–134. Bolz, “Der Germanen,” 179. See, Barbar, 124–34. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 174. See, Barbar, 61. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 175. See Penny, Kindred by Choice, for a discussion of a “German Kulturkreis,” that is, the influence of transatlantic travel and German immigration on perceptions of Native Americans. Hartmut Lutz, Approaches: Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures (Augsburg: Wißner, 2002), 100. Allen, “Reception,” 53, 59. Ibid., 43–47. This closely corresponds to “virtues of a people.” Hitler meant innate characteristics and idiosyncrasies that peoples have, which cannot be learned or discarded but are bound to blood and race.

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42. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 1, 71–72. In another telling example, Ernst Krieck (1882–1992), one of the foremost Third Reich educators and philosophers, claimed to prove the biological determination of characteristics by saying that if adjustment to environmental conditions was a fact, European colonial administrators in Africa would have become blacks, and African servants in Europe would have turned Caucasian. Ernst Krieck, “Rassenkampf in der Geschichte,” Volk im Werden 41 (1941): 69. To prove his theories, Krieck also dismissed the empirical approach altogether, because a close empirical look at a group, such as Jews, revealed characteristics prevalent in any other group. Therefore, in order to determine group character traits, this group had to be “comprehended intuitively.” Ibid., 70. Proponents of environmental determinism, who claimed that the environment shaped not only the talents and character but also the physical features of a people, opposed these ideas. 43. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 108, 124; Allen, “Reception,” 203. 44. See, Barbar, 193–94, 218–19. Adolf Hitler, assigning “professions” to national character, distinguished the British merchant people from the German soldier people. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 332. Similarly, Werner Sombart grouped Britons and Germans into merchants and heroes in his aptly titled 1915 treatise Händler und Helden (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1915). 45. Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, “Peoplehood,” 14–15. 46. See, Barbar, 61. 47. Qtd. in ibid., 64. 48. Qtd. in ibid., 66. 49. Otto Muck, “Der ewige Indianer und wir,” Natur und Kultur (1936): 311–16. According to Peter Steinsiek, much of the Nazis’ praise of agriculture as a German virtue rested on their argument that the harsh climate in Northern Europe had forced Aryans to be hardy and inventive, while peoples in gentler climates (i.e., the Mediterranean) apparently had no incentive or necessity to learn and be inventive because they lived amid plenty. Steinsiek, “Anmerkungen zur Biologisierung,” 144. 50. Gerhardt Drabsch, Die Indianergeschichte (Berlin: Wiking, 1938), 184. 51. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913). 52. See, Barbar, 62. 53. Ibid., 67. 54. Lund, Germanenideologie, 12–13. 55. See, among others, See, Barbar, 190; Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 36–40; Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, “Wald und Volk,” Germania, 6 June 1937; W. Kirsten, “Deutsche Waldsehnsucht. Baumkultus der Indogermanen,” Gartenkunst 49 J (1936): 139–42. 56. This could be translated as folk history, or more adequately as peoplehood studies. Nowadays, these would probably be called historical ethnic studies, but the modern field of ethnic studies comes with an understanding of cultural relativism and an emphasis on minority interests, while this nineteenth-century invention focused on classifying people through stereotypical group identity markers. 57. Lund, Germanenideologie, 15. The fabled Baron Münchhausen (1720–1797) linked Germanic tribes to Indians during the early Napoleonic Wars when he visited Canada with the poet Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810). He was apparently “deeply impressed when he realized what appeared to be many similarities between the Hurons and his ‘Germanic ancestors.’” Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 34. 58. Fritz Steuben, Der fliegende Pfeil. Eine Erzählung aus dem Leben Tecumsehs aus alten Quellen nacherzählt (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1930), 5. 59. Steuben, “Abenteuerbuch,” Jugendschriften-Warte (Nov. 1938): 69. 60. Peter Staudenmaier, “Occultism, Race and Politics in German-Speaking Europe, 1880-1940: A Survey of the Historical Literature,” European History Quarterly 39.1 (2009): 54–55.

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61. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 13, 236. 62. See, Barbar, 194–95. 63. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 237–38. Los von Rom implied the rejection of the Roman Empire as a model of culture and civilization for uncivilized Germania. Ariosophy is the völkisch expression of Theosophy, the esoteric movement founded in 1888 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891). Ariosophists, such as Georg von Schönerer (1842–1921), claimed the superiority of Aryans on the grounds of a mixture of scientific racism, social Darwinism, and occult assumptions. See Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 47–48; Helmut Zander, “Sozialdarwinistische Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs,” in Handbuch, ed. Puschner et al., 224–51. 64. Manfred Schneider, “Zarathustra-Sätze, Zarathustra-Gefühle. Nietzsche und die Jugendbewegung,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 169; Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 13. 65. Gouldner, For Sociology, 331. 66. Wegener, Atlantidische, 72–73. 67. Ibid., 74. 68. The Blood Flag was supposedly the swastika flag carried during the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It symbolized the blood of the sixteen Nazi dead who were glorified as martyrs during the Third Reich. During mass rallies, it was used to swear in recruits. Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed., under the heading “Blutfahne”; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 124–26. 69. Bolz, “Der Germanen,” 177. 70. Wegener, Atlantidische, 79–80. 71. Kirsten, “Deutsche Waldsehnsucht,” 142. 72. Franz Goerke in Johannes Trojan, Unsere Deutschen Wälder, ed. Franz Goerke (Berlin: Vita, 1926), preface, n.p. 73. Peter-Michael Steinsiek, “Anmerkungen zur Biologisierung des politischen und gesellschaftlichen Lebens im ‘Dritten Reich’ an Beispielen besonders aus dem Land Braunschweig,” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 87 (2006): 148–49, 157–58. 74. For the Männerbund theory, see Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Die Religionen. Ihr Werden, ihr Sinn, ihre Wahrheit. Das religiöse Erlebnis auf den unteren Stufen (Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1923); Lily Weiser, Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und nordischen Altertums- und Volkskunde. Bühl (Baden: Konkordia, 1927); Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (Frankfurt: Diesterweg, 1934). For a discussion of matriarchy in Herman Wirth’s work, see Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 118–22. 75. This old Germanic concept symbolizes self and other, since mitgard means the home environment and the community, and utgard stands for anything and anybody else—the proverbial other. See, Barbar, 214. It could be compared to designations of one’s own tribe as “the people” among many Native American tribes. These notions set apart the home community from all others, as well. The mitgard-utgard dichotomy, even though it might have been a universal concept for tribal societies, fits neatly into the German inferiority complex of constantly being surrounded by enemies, which formed the basis of modern German nationalism, and thus is another example of the constructedness of German national identity. 76. Ibid., 194–96; see Puschner, Schmitz, and Ulbricht, Handbuch zur völkischen Bewegung; Kai Buchholz, Rita Latocha, Hilke Peckmann, and Klaus Wolbert, eds., Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900. Katalog zur Ausstellung auf der Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt 2001, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Häusser, 2001). 77. This corresponds to “fraternity,” but the allusion to war also places it in close relation to “warrior society.” It is no coincidence that Nazi novelists of Indian fiction likened Native American warrior societies to the SS and the storm troopers. See Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 247–60.

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78. Brian Ferguson and Neil Whitehead introduce their theory on state-making with the presumption that indigenous societies under pressure from an expansive settler state tend to centralize, militarize, and develop state organizations of their own. Since Native American warrior societies appear to have been agents in such processes, the German Männerbund theory of the early twentieth century does not seem to be too far-fetched, even though it failed to prove continual historical development from the ancient tribal men’s societies to contemporary Germans. R. Brian Ferguson, “The Violent Edge of Empire,” in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and R. Brian Ferguson (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000), 1–30. 79. See, Barbar, 202–4. 80. Hauer, Die Religionen, 14–15, 344. 81. Ibid., 344. 82. Ibid., 442. 83. Ibid., 200–201. 84. Ibid., 73–74. 85. Weiser, Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen, 7, 77. 86. See, Barbar, 228. 87. Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde, ix. 88. Ibid., 2–5. 89. Lund, Germanenideologie, 50. 90. Although the term “Indo-Germanic” has been replaced by “Indo-European” in English, many German scholars decided not to follow suit in German usage because “European” should include Hungarian and Finnish languages and cultures, which are not part of this historical context. I will use the obsolete English term “Indo-Germanic” because contemporary German ideologists and scholars mostly used it and, in this regard, it also denotes these protagonists’ emphasis on the Germanic roots of European greatness. My thanks to Florian Bast for his comments on the debate in German studies. 91. Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde, 357. 92. See, Barbar, 229. 93. Kater, Ahnenerbe, 28–37. 94. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 106; J. W. Connor, “From Ghost Dance to Death Camps: Nazi Germany as a Crisis Cult,” Ethos (1989): 270. 95. Steinsiek, “Anmerkungen zur Biologisierung,” 158. 96. Ibid., 141–42. 97. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 102. 98. Ibid., 29. 99. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 222–23. 100. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 2, 893–94. Jenseitsforscher is typical of Hitler’s pejorative terms to denounce and ridicule enemies. It described mystics who aimed at Germanizing the ideas of afterlife and rebirth by referring to ancient Germanic and medieval Scandinavian concepts such as Valhalla. The term translates literally as “Seekers of the Beyond.” 101. Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Herf developed the term “reactionary modernism” to denote this transition; Robert Paxton added to it for a comprehensive discussion of all fascist movements in Europe; Philipp Gassert used the concept to describe shifts in the German perception of the United States. 102. Rolf Peter Sieferle, “Rassismus, Rassenhygiene, Menschenzuchtideale,” in Handbuch, ed. Puschner et al., 436–37, 439. 103. Susan D. Bachrach, “Introduction,” in Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, ed. Susan D. Bachrach and Dieter Kuntz (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 2.

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104. Sieferle, “Rassismus,” 438–39. 105. Lutz, Indianer, 14–23; Jörg Becker, Alltäglicher Rassismus: die afro-amerikanischen Rassenkonflikte im Kinder-und Jugendbuch der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: Campus), 1977. 106. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 282–323. 107. Ibid., 323. 108. Daniel J. Kevles, “International Eugenics,” in Deadly Medicine, ed. Bachrach and Kuntz, 55. 109. Sieferle, “Rassismus,” 441. For a comparison of Franz Boas’s and Hans F. K. Günther’s approaches to race, see A. Morris-Reich, “Race, Ideas, and Ideals: A Comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F. K. Günther,” History of European Ideas 32.3 (2006): 313–32. Bernard Mees argues that German antiquarian studies (Germanische Altertumskunde) was a serious subject that increasingly attracted nationalist students becoming radicalized in the early twentieth century. He adds that, in contrast to beliefs about researchers fulfilling the will of the politicians, antiquarians often triggered and fueled political debates on Germanic prehistory, thus being more than mere “grub-street” scientists. Bernard Mees, The Science of the Swastika (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 3–5. 110. For detailed discussions on the reception of both authors among German nationalist circles, see Sieferle, “Rassismus,” 441–43; Lund, Germanenideologie, 21–29; See, Barbar, 15–16, 213; Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 51; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 285–88. 111. Wiehle, “Die Indianer,” 749. 112. Ibid.; Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit. (Stuttgart: Enke, 1934). 113. For an annotated English version of the Wallam Olum, see David McCutchen, The Red Record: The Wallam Olum. The Oldest Native North American History (Garden City Park, NY: Avery, 1993). 114. Franz Schnaß, “Die Rassen der Menschheit. Winke zur rassekundlichen Durchwebung des erdkundlichen Lehrplans, zugleich eine Buchwürdigung,” Pädagogische Warte 42 J8 (1938): 368. 115. Ibid., 368–69. 116. Deborah Allen’s dissertation, “The Reception and Perception of North America’s Indigenous Peoples in Germany 1871-1945,” contains a section on the perception of mixed-bloods as inferior and degenerate that is supported by numerous similar examples from my own research. Allen, “Reception,” 209–11. See also Karl Sapper, “Ein Wort über Rassenstatistik in ibero-amerikanischen Ländern,” Koloniale Rundschau 33 J.’42 (1943): 104; Hans Krieg, “Mischlinge und Weisse im Innern Südamerikas,” Forschungen und Fortschritte (1936): 143; “Rassenproblem in Amerika (Mischrassen zerstören Staatsgefüge),” Universum 50 J (1933): 164–65; Martin Gusinde, “Zur Entwicklung der Menschenrassen,” Reichspost, 28 May 1933. 117. W. Brehm, “Element Blut. Rassenfragen in Ibero-Amerika,” Pariser Zeitung, 11 September 1942. 118. Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 413–19; Hermann Blome, ed., “Bericht über die Arbeitszusammenkunft deutscher Völkerkundler in Göttingen am 22. und 23. November 1940 (Göttingen: Institut für Völkerkunde, 1941), 34–35. 119. Hans Krieg, “Die Indianer des Gran Chaco,” Westermanns Monatshefte 87 J (1943): 215. 120. Schwenkel, “Biologisches Denken und Naturschutz.” Naturschutz. Monatsschrift für alle Freunde der deutschen Heimat 17 J. Beilage zu Heft 7 (1936): 10. 121. A very good example of this argumentation is Schoenichen’s Naturschutz. 122. Schoenichen, Urdeutschland, 11. 123. Friedrich Keiter, “Volkscharakter und Rassenseele,” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 8.1 (1938): 53. 124. The 1936 propaganda film Ewiger Wald (Enchanted Forest) linked the existence of the forest to the existence of the German people, explaining that, together, both the forest and the people would always prevail. This thesis is exemplified in the first line of the voice-over: “Eternal forest, eternal people.” Both the official English title and the literal translation in the voice-over

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125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

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138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

carry the original German meaning of the forest as a mystified Lebensraum. Connor, “From Ghost Dance to Death Camps,” 281; Hans Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Ramrowski, Ewiger Wald, Film Recording, produced by Albert Graf von Pestalozza (Lex-Film, Urania, 1936). Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 405–23. Ute Michel, “Neue Ethnologische Forschungsansätze im Nationalsozialismus? Aus der Biographie von Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann (1904-1988),” in Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht, ed. Hauschild, 161. Ibid., 142–51. Allen, “Reception,” 134. Ibid. Michel, “Neue Ethnologische,” 147–52. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 9–11. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 522–24. Ibid., 524, 526. Ibid., 444. Ibid., 533. Kai Buchholz, “Biologismus, Rassenhygiene und Völkerschauen,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 461; Sieferle, “Rassismus,” 436, 444. Bachrach, “Introduction,” 6. The 2004 exhibition catalog Deadly Medicine gives a detailed history of German racial hygiene, its escalation into euthanasia, and the interrelations between eugenics movements in Europe and the United States. Bachrach and Kuntz, Deadly Medicine. C. Richard King criticizes the work for not clearly distinguishing pseudo-scientific ideology from real science and for portraying racial medicine as “a thing of the past.” He adds numerous instances of the sterilization of Native Americans and African Americans after World War II, as well as coerced adoptions, as examples for continued racial medicine in the United States. C. R. King, “Deadly Medicine Today: The Impossible Denials of Racial Medicine.” Transforming Anthropology 15.1 (2007): 77–84. My own research did not reveal a Nazi discussion of these U.S. practices with regard to Native Americans, but further investigation might be worthwhile, given the Nazis’ close observation of social hygiene policies in the United States. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 540–41, original emphasis. Sieferle, “Rassismus,” 445–46. Hans F. K. Günther, Herkunft und Rassengeschichte der Germanen (Munich: Lehmann, 1934), 141–42. Ibid., 146–47. Mühlmann also used the term Aussieben to distinguish it from the older term “selection,” which implied a natural process excluding developments caused by human interaction. Ibid., 89. Lund, Germanenideologie, 61–63. Lund further relates that the official SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps deliberately used these swamp finds in a propaganda campaign against homosexual tendencies among the rank and file of the SS. Günther, Herkunft, 149. “Rassenpflege.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. This quote provides abundant examples of the intricacies of translating Nazi jargon into English. First of all, it provides two cases of the overuse of superlatives. The discussion of pre-Germanic history to assert mutual German-Indian roots required the invention of ever

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151. 152. 153.

154.

155. 156. 157. 158.

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159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

164. 165.

more spectacular terminological extensions of “prehistory.” In German, the prefix ur- usually denotes something prehistorical, or primeval. Längstvergangenheit is a neologism which, unsuccessfully, attempts to stretch the meaning of ur- even further into the past. “Überhistory” thus seems to be a fitting equivalent to this bizarre superlative. Wegener, Atlantidische, 17. Ibid., 88–89. Here are just a few examples: Eduard Süß claimed in 1888 that Atlantis was located in Greenland. Wegener, 17. Hermann Wieland saw connections between Meso-America and Atlantis; and the Ariosophist Alfred Partzsch said the Toltecs in Mexico were descendants of Atlantians. Karl Georg Zschaetzsch assumed Atlantian settlements in Columbia and Arcadia. Karl Georg Zschaetzsch, Atlantis: die Urheimat der Arier (Berlin: Arier-Verlag, 1934); Wegener, Atlantidische, 21, 24, 38–39; Hermann Wieland. Atlantis, Edda und Bibel. 200,000 Jahre germanischer Weltkultur und das Geheimnis der Heiligen Schrift. Bremen: Roland Faksimile, 2001. Apparently, a German radio broadcast even told Mexicans they were “the Germans of North America by way of their Toltec ancestors, nordics [sic] all and flatteringly admitted to equality with the Germans,” although the Gestapo threatened Germans who married Mexican women. Britt, Fifth Column, 89. The theory was obviously used to make Mexicans feel more comfortable with the Nazis as potential allies. See Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 128, 347, and “‘Welteislehre.’ Theorie zur Entstehung des Hagels von Hans Robert Hörbiger sowie wissenschaftliche Begründung und Anfechtbarkeit der ‘Welteislehre,’” 1938, BArch Berlin, NS 19.1705 (collection on Himmler’s communication regarding the theory at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin). Wegener, Atlantidische, 42–45; “Welteislehre.” Kater, Ahnenerbe, 47–49. See Staudenmaier, “Occultism,” on the interweaving of occultism and scholarship in Germany before 1933, much of which concerns mysticism and pseudoscientific analyses of race. Wegener, Atlantidische, 46–47; Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2007), 119. Edmund Kiss, Das Sonnentor von Tihuanaku und Hörbigers Welteislehre (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1937), 87–108. Ibid., 59. Victor Trimondi and Victoria Trimondi, Hitler, Buddha, Krishna. Eine unheilige Allianz vom Dritten Reich bis heute (Vienna: Überreuter, 2002), 120. Kater, Ahnenerbe, 12–17, 24–27. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 38–39. Wirth even gained some influence among alternative circles in the 1970s. Traditional Hopi elders had told German Indianthusiasts that Indian cultures were American cultures, and that Europeans had to look for European tribal peoples to rediscover their own roots. In the wake of these statements, alternative German youth reclaimed an interest in the Germanic tribes, which had been a cultural taboo after 1945. Wirth, as a specialist on Indo-Germanic religiosity and matriarchy, was invited to give speeches and his papers were republished in left-wing pamphlets. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, 121–22. Hans Herrland, “Rassendämmerung und Urgeschichte,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, 22 October 1930. Similar assumptions were made about the Mandan and a few Native Americans in Arkansas who were believed to be descendants of Vikings. Richard Hennig, “Rassische Überreste mittelalterlicher Normannen bei Eingeborenen Nordamerikas,” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 6.1 (1937): 20–28; idem, “Die weissen Mandan”—“Die ‘weissen’ Mandan-Indianer,” Die Umschau (1937): 798; Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, “Über die Herkunft der blauäugigen Arkansas-Indianer,” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 6 (1937): 105–7.

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166. Th. Steche, “Der weisse Indianer im Staate Panama,” Die Sonne (1937): 187; Bruns, “Auf der Suche nach den weißen Indianern,” Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 6 January 1935; A. von Riha, “Weiße Indianer,” Darmstädter Tagblatt, 10 August 1935; Kurt Severin, “Die weissen Indianer von San Blas,” Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (1934): 1486; Hans Baum, “Weisse Indianer?” Dresdner Anzeiger, 18 February 1932; Hans Eichelbaum, “Weisse Indianer,” Koralle 26 (1926): 10–20; H. Baltzer, “Weisse Indianer?” Die Sonne (1926): 64–73. 167. Eichelbaum, “Weisse Indianer,” 10. 168. Bruns, “Auf der Suche.” 169. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 32–33. 170. Donald Collier, Letter to John Collier “Re: the Sioux as Aryans,” 1 August 1939, National Archives, Washington, DC, RG 75, Collier Files, Box 18. Townsend states that the German authority claimed some “lost tribe of Germanic people had wandered into the New World … and bred themselves into the native population,” Townsend, World War II and the American Indian. 33. Christian Feest, referring to similar statements in Alison Bernstein’s work, American Indians and World War II, 183n15, argues that John Collier deliberately spread rumors about this. See Feest, “Germany’s Indians,” 25–26. 171. Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung beim Reichsministerium des Inneren, after 1940 Reichssippenamt. 172. Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed., see entry on “Abstammungsnachweis.” 173. I would like to express my thanks to Ms. Jana Blumberg, chief archivist of Department R2 (Third Reich documents) at the Berlin Bundesarchiv, who helped me try to track down this file, albeit in vain. 174. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 230; Hans Ernst Pfeiffer, Unsere schönen alten Kolonien (Berlin: Weller, 1941), 110; Collier, “Re: The Sioux as Aryans”; Britt, Fifth Column, 89. 175. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 33; J. V. Compton, The Swastika and the Eagle: Hitler, the United States, and the Origins of World War II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 174–78. Compton speaks of culture-creating races, while the early English translations of Mein Kampf, such as Chamberlain’s, speak of culture-founding races. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 606. The original German terms are kulturschaffend, kulturtragend, and kulturzersetzend. 176. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 31–60. 177. Hitler, Hitlers Zweites Buch, 65–67, 165–66. 178. See Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 533–37; Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 405–23. 179. See Otto Behrens, “Indianer in den USA. Droht dem ‘Roten Mann’ das Aussterben?” Kosmos 42 (1942); idem, “Winnetous Nachfolger. Das heutige Indianerdasein. Ausbeutungsobjekte amerikanischer Geschäftemacher,” Metzer Zeitung, 12 September 1942; “Wiedersehen mit Winnetou. In den amerikanischen Indianerdörfern,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 8 August 1939; Halfeld, “Reise.” 180. Keiter, “Volkscharakter,” 42–43. 181. See Schultze, Meeresscheue; Keiter, “Volkscharakter,” 43. Interestingly, in what appears to be an effort to demean non-Aryans as too untalented or too timid to be able sailors, Schultze praised different American aboriginals’ exploits of interior waterway transportation. Apparently, he wanted to include Indians in the group of industrious and adventurous sailors and had looked hard for examples to deconstruct the common Eurocentric notion that Indians had been discovered, and not vice versa, and thus could not possibly have been great sailors: “I am discussing Indians in greater detail here because in this respect, too, we owe the Red race a vindication of honor.” Meeresscheue, 142. 182. Keiter, “Volkscharakter,” 53. 183. Colonial planners remarked on African natives’ apparent talent as ranchers, which Germans should support instead of trying to impose farming on them. Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1964), 173. Even though leading Nazis often denounced the use of ethnic colonial troops (especially blacks)

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184.

185. 186.

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187. 188.

189.

190.

191. 192. 193.

as barbaric, they apparently respected Native Americans’ presumed fighting abilities. This might have led to German plans for Native auxiliary troops or fifth-column guerrillas in the event of a German invasion of the United States. Ralph Giordano, Wenn Hitler den Krieg gewonnen hätte. Die Pläne der Nazis nach dem Endsieg (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1990), 607, 736. Townsend refers to an article regarding such possible German-Indian collaboration in America. It does not explicitly mention the possibility of using Indians as a fifth column, but the interpretation would fit into the general pattern, especially since Hitler switched between programmatic and pragmatic approaches to colonial planning, apparently based on whatever the problem at hand dictated. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 39; cf. Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Giordano, Wenn Hitler, 666; Saul K. Padover, “Unser Amerika. The Nazi Program for the United States,” 1939, National Archives, Washington, DC, RG 75, Collier Files, Box 18. Werder, “Der Rote Mann—Rassenpsychologisch,” Bücherkunde: Organ des Amtes für Schrifttumspflege bei dem Beauftragten des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP und der Reichsstelle zur Förderung des Deutschen Schrifttums J5 (1938): 480–81. Ibid., 481. Ibid., 482. Apparently, these notions of German-Indian anti-colonial resistance were reciprocal: a Cheyenne man presumably related a tribal story about fighting for freedom to a German magazine reporter, explaining that “[t]he Red man loves the German people and admires the courage with which it battled the entire world.” Wee-Gee-So-Zee-Wie-Ahz, “Ein Wettlauf um die Freiheit.” It remains unclear whether the alleged Cheyenne was relating his true feelings, whether he wanted to be polite toward his German hosts, whether he was cashing in on German Indianthusiasm, such as pretenders like Buffalo Child Long Lance did, or whether the whole story was fabricated. Nevertheless, the gist supports the trope of Germans and Indians as soul mates. Muck, “Der ewige Indianer,” 312. Ibid. Note the homoerotic undertone. Arno Schmidt pointed out similar German-Indian homoerotic notions in his reading of the relationship between Karl May’s protagonists, Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Arno Schmidt, Sitara und der Weg dorthin. Eine Studie über Wesen, Werk und Wirkung Karl Mays (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969). See Lutz, Indianer, 149, for a discussion of homoerotic notions among European-Indian literary pairs. Muck, “Der ewige Indianer,” 315. Muck claimed that Indianness was essentially German when it was unromantic. He probably meant “unromanticized.” Other authors stated Indianness meant Germanness simply because Germans were inherently Romantic. See Halfeld, “Reise.” Painter Elk Eber (Wilhelm Emil Eber, 1892–1941) conspicuously depicted German World War I soldiers, SA storm troopers, and Indians as strikingly similar in his paintings. His war paintings were among Hitler’s favorites. He designed the panoramic mural of a Plains Indian war scene at the Karl May Museum in Radebeul. Thomas Kramer, Micky, Marx, und Manitu. Zeit- und Kulturgeschichte im Spiegel eines DDR-Comics 1955-1990; ‘Mosaik’ als Fokus von Medienerlebnissen im NS und in der DDR (Berlin: Weidler, 2002), 198. See Max Wundt, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Völker (Munich: Lehmann, 1939), 17, 36–41, 50–51; Wohlbold, “Naturbeherrschung.” Ursula Prutsch, personal interview, 6 February 2009. Hanswerner Brocatti, “Der Indianismo,” Deutsche Arbeit. Monatsschrift 43 J9 (1943): 240. Other authors likened the movement’s slogan, which translates to the German Heimatscholle, or “home turf,” to Nazi concepts of blood and soil. G. H. Neuendorff, “Zum Aufstieg der roten Rasse. Die Indianerfrage in Süd- und Mittelamerika,” Christliche Welt (1940): 417–21.

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194. Similar processes still abound among German political groups of the twenty-first century, namely, the so-called anti-German activists, who claim that indigenous movements, such as the Mexican EZLN, or indigenous squatters in Guatemala, are essentially völkisch and apply blood-and-soil ideologies in reclaiming their land. Communal organization and ownership of land, such as the ejido, is branded as a Nazi-like dogma of community interest over individual interest, and the use of the concept of nation by these indigenous groups is seen as evidence of their völkisch approach. Thus, these twenty-first-century activists make the same shortsighted arguments about the racial basis of the communal and land-based organization of indigenous societies as the Nazis did. Neuendorff, “Zum Aufstieg”; no border, “Blut und Boden,” comment to online posting by Rudi, “Räumung von indigenen Gemeinden.” de.Indymedia.org, 20 July 2009, http://de.indymedia.org/2009/07/256536.shtml?c=on#c586551. 195. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, xii. 196. Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien (Munich: Piper, 2004), 298–300; Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 15; Walter Heinzel, “5000 Jahre Hakenkreuz. Vom altnordischen Sonnenzeichen zum Symbol des ewigen Deutschlands,” Chemnitzer Tageblatt und Anzeiger, 11 September 1941. For a historiography of Sinnbildforschung, or ideographic studies, and its relations to right-wing radicalism, see Mees, Science of the Swastika. 197. Glenn Infield, Hitler’s Secret Life: The Mysteries of the Eagle’s Nest (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 240–41; Herbert Hahn, “In der Welt der Rothäute. Das erweiterte Karl May Museum in Radebeul,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 31 March 1937; Erich R. Zorn, “Die Hopi Pueblos in Arizona und ihre Bevölkerung,” Erdball (1926): 108. 198. “Os-Ko-Mon: Indianer von heute. Zur Jugendfunksendung im Deutschlandsender am 5. September, 18:00-18:30 Uhr,” Die HJ, 20 August 1938; Allen, “Reception,” 267. Os-KoMon was introduced as a member of the Yakima tribe who lived on the East Coast of Canada, and his name was translated as “Green Corn.” “Os-Ko-Mon”; Allen, “Reception,” 267. He performed modern adaptations of traditional dances for the Hitler Youth, German radio, and apparently even for the first German television station. 199. Halfeld, “Reise,” 20. 200. Hahn, “In der Welt der Rothäute”; Hans Grunert of the Karl May Museum referred me to this article in the Dresdner Nachrichten, 21 February 1937. 201. See Heinzel, “5000 Jahre”; L. A. Springer, “Hakenkreuz. Geschichte und Verbreitung,” Fränkischer Kurier, 24 December 1935; zb, “Die ältesten Hakenkreuze der Welt. Ein Symbol und seine Geschichte,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 9 March 1935. 202. “Storekeepers Shout ‘No’ at Swastikalike Tiling,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 December 1941; Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 127; “Indians Bar Swastika Design as Protest against Nazis,” Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1940. The 45th Infantry Division, onethird Southwest Native American in its composition, changed its collar patches for the same reason from the old mirror-inverted swastika to another Native symbol, the Thunderbird, in 1939. Michael E. Gonzales, e-mail interview, 13 September 2001. 203. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 174; See, Barbar, 113–18. This corresponds to “stab in the back,” a conspiracy theory initiated by the former imperial military leadership to claim that the German army would have won World War I had it not been betrayed on the home front, namely, by the democratic parties who took over the government after October 1918 and signed the Versailles peace treaty. See Ludwig Ritter von Rudolph, Die Lüge die nicht stirbt. Die “Dolchstosslegende” von 1918 (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz), 1958. 204. J. P. Stern, “Hitler und die Deutschen,” in Nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933-1945: eine Bilanz, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, and Hans Adolf Jacobsen (Bonn, 1983), 731. 205. In an anthropological approach to explaining the emergence of National Socialism, J. W. Connor used studies of indigenous peoples to compare their reaction to colonial pressure to the German crisis after the defeat of World War I. He argues convincingly that Nazism can be

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206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214.

215. 216. 217. 218. 219.

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220.

221. 222.

explained as a revitalization movement or a crisis cult very similar to those of indigenous peoples, such as the Native American Ghost Dance. However, Connor’s comparison and partial identification of Nazis and Native Americans fails to explain the Holocaust and ignores the different perspectives of Native American victims of genocide and Nazi German perpetrators. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 204–8. Friedrich von Gagern, Das Grenzerbuch. Von Pfadfindern, Häuptlingen und Lederstrümpfen (Berlin: Parey, 1944), 448. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 148–61; Lutz, Indianer, 391–94. Winfred Kaminski, “Den Osten im Westen erobernd. Überlegungen zum rassistischen Gehalt der Indianerbücher Fritz Steubens,” in Jugendliteratur und Gesellschaft: für Malte Dahrendorf zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Hort Heidtmann (Weinheim: Juventa, 1993), 110–11. Fritz Steuben, Der Sohn des Manitu. Eine Erzählung vom Kampfe Tecumsehs; aus alten Quellen nacherzählt (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1938), 37. Friedrich Koch-Wawra, “Besuch bei den Sioux-Indianern,” Universum 42 J52 (1926): 1366. Ibid. Walter Boje, “Indianer von heute,” Welt und Wissen 21 J7 (1932): 156. Ibid., 157. The same author claimed that the old White Horse Eagle traveled to Germany so he could meet with the “great warrior Hindenburg.” Ibid., 158. Allen lists him as one of the Great Pretenders, the “Forrest Gump of Indians,” because he apparently was present at all important events in white-Indian history. Important for this study is the tone in his work Wir Indianer, where he addressed Germans as his fellow comrades in suppression and misery: “You, my German brothers, know best what self-determination means for your tribal brethren in Tirol, Silesia, and Czechoslovakia.” Qtd. in Allen, “Reception,” 241. Allen suspects the German editor emphasized the parallel with the Versailles trope. For German perceptions of Wilson as a traitor to the German people, see Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 34–46, 87, 262–66. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 3, 1171. Ibid., vol. 4, 1756, 1919; Halfeld, “Reise,” 24. Similar scenarios were depicted when Germanic tribes were compared to Indians, and when the Roman Empire was compared to Anglo-Saxon conquerors. Qtd. in Heinz J. Galle, “Fritz Steuben,” in Lexikon der Reise- und Abenteuerliteratur, ed. Friedrich Schegk and Heinrich Wimmer, 1st ed. (1990), 5. This notion exists even today: a 2011 YouTube clip draws parallels between Cherokee history, along with the recent debates on the exclusion of the freedmen, and recent German history. Both Germans and Cherokees, says the filmmaker, simply want to keep aliens out in order to enjoy their own culture and determine their own destinies. Both peoples are constantly threatened by encroaching outside interests. The comments voice similar xenophobic concerns employing traditional nationalistic German-Indian imagery in which Germans appear as Indians under attack from all sides. DieClownUnion, “Die Claudia, die Indianer und die Toleranz,” Online posting. YouTube, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QcHzJyabR34. Similarly, commentators in the neo-Nazi forum Altermedia hailed this American clip in which Indians are mockingly portrayed as xenophobic racists and European colonizers as immigrants who overtake Native America with typical liberal arguments about multiculturalism, universal humanity, and the sharing of resources. “Wie Gutmenschen die Eroberung Amerikas sehen,” Comment to online posting “Offene Diskussion,” Altermedia.deutschland.info, 14 July 2012, http://altermedia-deutschland.info/showthread .php/2088-Artikel-Offene-Diskussion-14-07-2012?highlight=indianer. See Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 52–78; Allen, Perception, 254–77. This institution was a branch of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and controlled all publishing and writing operations. It issued blacklists of banned writings

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223. 224. 225.

226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233.

234. 235. 236. 237.

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238. 239. 240. 241.

242.

243. 244. 245.

and endorsed other books. The Jugendschriften-Warte consisted of such endorsements and of detailed explanations as to why specific works were not worthy of distribution and had been banned. U. J. Faustmann, Die Reichskulturkammer: Aufbau, Funktion und Grundlagen einer Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts im nationalsozialistischen Regime (Aachen: Shaker, 1995). Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 52–57; Helga Geyer-Ryan, “Trivialliteratur und Literaturpolitik im Dritten Reich,” Sprache im Technischen Zeitalter 67 (1978): 267–77. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 54; Will Vesper, “Schluss mit aller weichlichen Farbigenschwärmerei!” Jugendschriften-Warte 5 (1939): 79. Vesper explicitly addressed a “tiredness about Europe,” the tendency toward counterculture evident in the embrace of exotic and “primitive” cultures that artists throughout Europe had displayed, i.e., Picasso in his references to African cultures, Pierre Gauguin in his depictions of Tahitians and the ensuing enthusiasm for Tahiti in France, or German Indianthusiasm. The term could be translated as “doting over colored people.” Vesper, “Schluss mit aller weichlichen Farbigenschwärmerei!,” 79. Ibid. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 55–57. Allen, “Reception,” 255–56. Ibid., 254. H. Glenn Penny, personal interview, 15 October 2007. See Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Die nordische Seele. Eine Einführung in die Rassenseelenkunde (Munich: Lehmann, 1934). Clauss portrayed Germanic peoples as outgoing, inventive, and curious. Highlighting these features swept away the purists’ anxieties about creating an unruly youth. Heitz, “Indianergeschichten,” 74. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 387; see Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 57–78. Allen, “Reception,” 255–56. Erhard Wittek, “Ein Brief Erhard Witteks an Eduard Rothemund,” Jugendschriften-Warte 3/4 (1940): 19; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 59–62. Galle’s lexicon entry, especially, tries to refute the reading of Wittek as a Nazi author. However, many of Galle’s claims are contradictory and perpetuate clichés about Native Americans and about German Indianthusiasm. “Fritz Steuben,” 6–8, 14, 16. Kramer, Micky, 127. Allen, “Reception,” 255; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 58, 62–63. See Adolf Heilborn, “Ende des roten Mannes” Koralle 3 (1927): 374–78; F. A. Schwarz, “In der Indianer-Reservation,” Der Sammler, Beilage der München-Augsburger Abendzeitung 96 J206 (1927): 3; Anita Iden-Zeller, “Im Büffelpark zu Wainwright,” Reclams Universum 44 J28 (1928): 645–47; Martin Gusinde, “Schicksalsgeschichte der nordamerikanischen Indianer,” Frohes Schaffen (1933): 219–28; Kurt Severin, “Indianermärkte in Peru und Bolivien,” Kosmos 10 (1934): 342; Behrens, “Indianer in den USA”; Behrens, “Winnetous Nachfolger.” See “Neuregelung der Indianerangelegenheiten in USA,” Nation und Staat 9 (1935): 105–7; Wilton Marion Krogman, “The ‘New Deal’ for the American Indian,” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde (1936): 77–81; Florian Panzer, “Winnetou—wie er war,” Kölnische Illustrierte Zeitung 25 (1937): 758. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 42–61; Jere Franco, “Patriotism on Trial: Native Americans in World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1990), 56–101. Townsend and Franco both point out the fears American authorities had in this direction. “Fifth column” means “traitor,” or “enemy within.” It goes back to General Mola’s remarks during his advance on Madrid during the Spanish Civil War that he had four columns marching on the city, while a fifth was waiting in the city to help his troops break through the Republicans’ defenses. Britt, Fifth Column, 3–4.

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246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252.

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253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261.

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 104. Allen, “Reception,” 172. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 4. The “struggle for life” was a typical social Darwinist term used in Nazi ideology. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 538. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 330–51. In applications of the manifest destiny trope, AngloSaxons were no longer denounced as annihilators of Indians but included in the broad category of “Nordic” peoples whose adventurous spirit had conquered the continent. Thus, Germans could see America as their trophy, as well. Ibid., 387–98. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 303, 693–94; Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 1, 29. This term denotes the forced synchronization of all institutions of political and civic life. See, Barbar, 333. Qtd. in See, Barbar, 333. Ibid., 333–36. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2, 29–30, 151–63. Kater, Ahnenerbe, 12–17, 31; Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 118. See, Barbar, 337–40.

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Chapter 3

RELATIVES, ALLIES, OR SUBJECTS? Applications of Nazi Ideology through Indian Imagery in Popular Media and Academia

S I am living naked and alert like a stag in my gorge. —Hermann Hesse on his experience in the Life Reform community Monte Verita, Ascona, Italy, 1907, quoted in Hermann Müller, “Propheten,” 322.

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[These were] adult children who were much more familiar with Karl May, dreams of global conquest, and speculations on the purifying effects of a fourth ice age on the virtues of society than, say, thoughts or even plans about how humanity could or should use the industry which had grown to gigantic proportions in the previous 50 years. —Klaus Theweleit on the generation of youthful World War I veterans and the vanguard of Nazism, Männerphantasien, 2:404.

The important role Indian imagery played in the development of German national identity and, eventually, National Socialist ideology was established in the previous chapter. At this point, we will take a closer look at the different applications of Indian imagery in the early twentieth century, particularly during the Nazi regime. As the internal Nazi debate over Indians in children’s literature revealed, Nazis were pragmatic in their applications of imagery for programmatic ideological goals. So it is not surprising that a wide array of Indian tropes occurred across a range of publications. This chapter highlights a few such tropes and applications to illustrate the diversity but also the contradictions in Nazi ideology. Issues of race sometimes collided with issues of geostrategy. Requirements of self-aggrandizement and the denigration of the fellow tribesmen motif often

Notes from this chapter begin on page 192.

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followed close on the heels of covictimization claims—that is, expressions of the common enemy motif. The following sections will identify the ideological contradictions and reveal the enormous weight of expedience in determining the uses of Indian imagery. The opening discussion will go back to the turn of the century and question the uniqueness of both Indian imagery in German contexts and of the German Sonderbewusstsein. The idea of the primitive was en vogue throughout Europe and the United States at that time, and many German notions of Indianness had parallels in the American discourse on reform and modernity. A surprising number of educators, activists, and artists referred to and influenced each other. Other sections explore where Indianthusiasm failed and where it became an obstacle for propaganda. This was certainly the case when Nazis reinvented and reinterpreted the history of exploration and settlement in the Americas. While German-Indian friendship initially appeared to be helpful in this context, the German(ic) achievements as conquerors of both nature and the human other received much more attention. In direct contrast, typical German anti-American notions ignored the German conqueror and emphasized the victimhood of both Germans and Indians. Racial readings of conflicts between whites and Indians in the Americas usually cast the colonial conquest as the triumph of the stronger race and the “vanishing” of the Natives as the natural consequence. However, racial thought during the Nazi era interpreted contemporary developments— such as the Indigenism movement in Latin America and the Indian New Deal in the United States—as expressions of the Indian race’s revival. These racial (and racist) readings were applied in anthropology, geostrategy, as well as botany and medicine, and proved that, in Nazi ideology, all thinking, activity, and propaganda served the idea of race, which in turn served the goal of retaining power and control.

Reform, Youth Culture, and Primitivism in a Transatlantic Context At the turn of the twentieth century, German Indianthusiasm was in full bloom. Karl May’s Western novels had enjoyed a boom for several years, and the traveling Wild West shows were magnets for visitors in all large and medium-sized German towns. At the same time, sociocultural developments resulting from rapid industrialization and urbanization contributed to shaping future social and political movements in Germany. Among them, the Life Reform movement and the Youth movement developed diverse responses to the social changes during the first two decades of the twentieth century. A few years later, the Nazis appropriated many of these movements’ concepts and practices and shunned others. Indian imagery was present in many of these, with pre-existing notions

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of Indianness and primitivism contributing to these developments. At the same time, similar social changes were underway in the United States (and in other European countries), and the concepts and imagery applied there were often remarkably similar. The Life Reform movement addressed typical problems of modernization in Europe; it constituted a reaction to cultural and social changes triggered by mass consumerism, standardization, and technology. Its diverse strands were concerned with crowded housing and cities; health issues that included food, clothing, and public health; alternatives to restrictive social norms; and alternative approaches to nature and spirituality. A broad movement whose leading figures aimed to reform the individual in order to reform society, its members often formed single-issue groups to target specific problems, such as housing, food, or health care.1 Even within one area of concern, ideas and practices often varied. The movement also continued the conservative nationalist philosophical tradition of shunning rationality and embracing emotionality and intuition, which was reinforced by the contemporary trend toward primitivism and naturalism in the arts. Communal living and mutual aid countered anxieties about alienation and isolation. This led to the establishment of utopian communities, on the one hand, but also to the concepts of the Volksgemeinschaft and blood and soil, on the other. Similarly, dissatisfaction with materialism and mechanistic worldviews spurred many Germans to seek spiritual and philosophical alternatives.2 Therefore, it is not surprising that the Nazis appropriated some ideas from this movement, while it also attracted social utopians and anarchists. Approaches to modern society varied within the movement, as well: some protagonists sought to escape into a premodern past; others aimed to make concessions to modern society and help steer its development in alternative ways. Among the key terms with which Life Reform addressed problems in society were authenticity, honesty, clarity, dignity, beauty, originality, ennoblement, and naturalness. Together, these terms stood for simplicity and the rejection of imitation in art and human relationships. Individuals were supposed to present their true inner selves. While most terms involved beauty in some form, the movement attributed religious qualities to beauty itself, which resembled salvation in the emotional German terminology used around 1900. Leitmotifs and notions of beauty, orderliness, and health were interrelated and mutually dependent.3 It is obvious that these terms served the Indian imagery prevalent at the time. They could invoke the noble savage as much as the child of nature or the ecstatic barbarian. These concepts also laid the groundwork for the future images and various role-model functions of Indians, such as the ecowarrior, the holistic healer, and the spiritual guru. Known as a common practice among American aboriginals, the communal ownership of land had inspired political writers such as Friedrich Engels to use Natives as role models for their alternative societies.4 Natural and holistic healers

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could readily refer to anthropological data on indigenous peoples around the world to point out the importance of an intact natural environment and profound knowledge of herbs and animals for the healthy subsistence of humans. The new image of the human body and its relationship to nature led to an upsurge of nudism and air-bathing, as well as the embracing sexual desire and a Romantic understanding of the procreation of plants and animals as love.5 Emerging neo-pagan religions that saw materialism and rationalism as a “disenchantment of the world,” as Max Weber termed it, sought to re-enchant it by embracing myth, or by assigning religious qualities to abstract concepts, such as the “nation.” This entailed a revival of old German folklore, but it also resulted in an increasing interest in the mythology and sagas of non-European cultures among some reformers.6 These different trends could easily call upon primitivism and Native Americans since the nineteenth-century image of Indians provided similar contexts. The Life Reformers by no means primarily geared their references to foreign peoples and to historical parallels toward Native Americans or to Indian imagery. Völkisch protagonists portrayed their idealized image of Atlantians, whom they regarded as their ancestors, as teetotaling vegetarians.7 Norsetalgia created a general image of the North that offered “new originality, strength of belief, and frugality” in a combination of the light cult with the beauty and romanticizing of nature.8 The scope of this study did not allow for a close reading of typical Life Reform magazines and pamphlets of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and neither the available literature nor communication with experts in the field have revealed an abundance of explicit references to Native Americans.9 Therefore, it is all the more astounding that Life Reform terminology has so many parallels in familiar Indian imagery. Again, one could speak of an ominous absent presence of Indian imagery in many features of Life Reform thought. The most explicit references to Indians occurred, rather, in both early-twentiethcentury arts and the Youth movement in its many expressions, where escapist longing, spirituality, and creativity were evident. Artists inspired by the Life Reform movement began to hail Karl May and use Indian imagery in their works in the first decade after 1900. In 1909, for example, publisher Paul Cassirer (1871–1926) and impressionist Max Slevogt (1868–1932) collaborated to produce a new edition of J. F. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. While both saw this project partially as a respite from pressures and an escape to childhood memories, they also aimed to educate youth about the value and dignity of artful writing and illustration to counter the leveling influence of the Western dime novels popular in Germany at the turn of the century. These new publications contributed to redeeming Cooper’s reputation, which had been suffering from bad translations and low-quality editions.10 Both writers and painters in the emerging Expressionist movement showed renewed interest in Indian topics. Writers Egon Erwin Kisch and Erich Müh-

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sam publicly defended Karl May against his many enemies. Poet Robert Műller (1887–1924) said that Karl May had a “primitive and pure way of telling [stories].” He drew parallels between the noble savage character Winnetou and the “new man,” the Edelmensch, that the new arts movements sought to define: “The Indian Winnetou, who combines the advantages of a sensuous culture with those of a sensible one, would be worth presenting as a prototype to all those who are searching for the new man of nerves.”11 The Dresden-based art collective “Der blaue Reiter” published an eponymous catalog in 1911 that displayed Expressionist works and artwork from nonEuropean peoples side by side and devoid of hierarchical order. In this context, Native American works, such as a Tlingit coat, were understood as “authentic sources of creativity.”12 Contributor August Macke (1887–1914) even claimed to have discovered universal human expressions when comparing the military parades and vaudeville shows of Western countries with the tribal ceremonies and ecstatic rituals of Naturvölker. Many German Expressionists sought inspiration from Naturvölker since their art was presumably unspoiled by civilizing influences and featured the irrational.13 Artists Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955) and George Grosz (1893–1959) used Indian and frontier imagery in their drawings and paintings. Apparently influenced by Wild West shows and the emerging silent movies, they portrayed the West as a lawless, chaotic, and violent place in their works. These images protested against the rigidity of social life in Germany as much as its militarism and chauvinism.14 Playwrights Bertolt Brecht (1898– 1956) and Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) used Romantic notions and Wild West imagery in their plays, as well. From their perspective, the life of Native Americans, like that of the backwoodsmen, is clearly preferable to the restrictions of society in Germany.15 As in other areas of the Life Reform movement, protagonists promoted what they perceived as originality and authenticity to protest the constraints and control mechanisms of imperial German society. Indian imagery provided all of the necessary ingredients for this protest, which found expression both as an active attack on the system and as a passive escape from it. The “hype” of the primitive may, for some, have been an escape, and for others a search for originality, authenticity, and inspiration.16 Yet others looked at Native Americans (and other supposedly primitive peoples) as role models and instructors for practical tips on living in harmony with nature, and for spiritual guidance. In the Life Reform movement, these aspects often took a parallel course, or even merged, as a short discussion of the interrelation between spiritualism, outdoor instruction, and the understanding of Indianthusiast primitivism as a model will illustrate. The philosophy of Ernest Thompson Seton’s (1860–1940) American youth program, the Woodcraft League of America, influenced the German Youth movement and employed the Indian image in a back-to-nature approach. Seton’s image of the Indian was the unspoiled primitive who could teach white children

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the meaning and secrets of life. If children copied Indian practices, he argued, they would learn universal human qualities that began with communal living, the outdoors, and the fascination with fire: “When men sit together at the campfire, they seem to shed all modern form and poise, and hark back to the primitive.” The Indians’ campfire was seen as the “focal point of every primitive brotherhood.”17 The fascination with campfires and campouts was adopted by the Youth movement. The many occasions in which campfires and torchlights were used in Nazi ceremonies during the 1930s indicate that they invoked the same primeval brotherhood. It is no coincidence that ideology-driven scholar Heinz Reichling published his Ph.D. dissertation on Ernest Thompson Seton in 1937, addressing and highlighting features of Seton’s thought such as his reference to primitivism and to Naturvölker, at a time when Nazi organizations and mass rallies made similar references. Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Mukara ins innerste Deutschland, a 1913 novel written within the Youth movement about an African’s ethnological expedition into Germany, conveys similar praise of the primitive role model by reversing the roles of viewer with a superior gaze and the observed primitive and noble savage.18 Horrified and disgusted by fat and unhealthy Germans, the ethnologist Lukanga Mukara eventually finds athletic, beautiful, and playful youth at the influential 1912 gathering of the Youth movement on Mt. Hoher Meissner. Apparently, he recognized the virtue of the youth because their lifestyles were similar to his. Educator and prominent figure of the movement Ludwig Gurlitt explained: “We lack muscles and nerve. Our blood is clogged, our heads are dizzy, our eyes are bleary … True culture is incompatible with beer guts and potato paunches.”19 The reversed roles of civilized ethnologist and of scrutinized primitive object in this novel illustrate the Youth movement’s attempts to use knowledge of “primitive” peoples to regain strength and originality for German society.20 In a similar vein, Adolf Hitler would later comment on the improvement of physical fitness among German men due to the Youth movement’s work. In his 1935 speech when he coined the idiom of the German youth as being “as tough as leather, as swift as greyhounds, and as hard as Krupp steel,” he anticipated the military value of physically able men: “Today, we are glad to see no longer the man who is able to hold his drink, but the weatherproof man. Because it does not matter how many pints of beer somebody can drink, but how many blows he can withstand; not how many nights he can dawdle away, but how many miles he can march.”21 Allen observes that the back-to-nature elements in German society in the early decades of the twentieth century, primarily in the German Youth movement, used Indian imagery and knowledge about Native Americans for role-modeling and instructions on outdoor activities.22 This observation applies to many other currents of Life Reform, as well. However, the ethical-spiritualistic element in Indianthusiasm should not be neglected when discussing social change in Ger-

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many in this period. Public health issues were important, but Indian imagery appealed to the Youth movement not least because of the prevalent longing for alternative spiritualities and ethical principles. The emergence of occultism and nature-mysticism was an international phenomenon around 1900. In Germany, this development occurred in concert with the emergence of the Youth Movement, which was in large part neo-pagan.23 Some examples of proponents of such views include Grey Owl (Archie Belaney, 1888–1938) and Wilhelm Fabricius (1894–1989). Grey Owl, one of the “Great Pretenders”24 who tried to cash in on German Indianthusiasm during the early twentieth century, provided practical knowledge about nature for German children, but he also instilled in them an awareness of the spiritual relationship between humans and nature: “Primitive man, especially the Indian, has no distinct urge to rule … he understood himself as part of nature, not as its lord.”25 Similarly, Fabricius, who had been a Boy Scout leader and forest ranger, promoted an understanding of ecology based on a perception of nature as sacred. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka rate his work as the successful equivalent of Indian traditions since he began to combine ecology and Indigenism with Germanic historical roots after World War II, which made him a link between the interwar Youth movement and postwar alternative and esoteric movements.26 The German Youth movement’s spiritual element and its rejection of rational and mechanistic worldviews were not only important elements in the general reform movements but went on to influence social and spiritual movements during the late twentieth century, as well. In her analysis of the Indianthusiast influence on the German Youth movement, Allen focuses on Anglo-Saxon texts and reformers and on the German interpretations and appropriations of their concepts for youth organizations.27 She addresses Ernest Thompson Seton’s Woodcraft concepts, John Hargrave’s (1894–1982) models of “tribal training,” and Robert Baden-Powell’s (1857– 1941) Boy Scouts. Woodcraft included teaching outdoor activities and physical exercise along with information on Native practices. Indians featured as role models since they symbolized nature itself. Woodcraft organizations did not gain a broad foothold in Germany, yet different youth organizations, such as the Deutsche Freischar, the Neupfadfinder, and the Waldpfadfinder, followed some of Seton’s principles.28 Tribal training, taken up by the German Youth movement leader and writer Franz Ludwig Habbel (1894–1964), included the quasimilitaristic organization of children and adolescents into tribes whose members underwent ascending degrees of initiation. Although these groups variously referred to Indian and Germanic tribalism, the activities remained the same.29 Allen argues that these organizations, which directly referred to Indians, “ultimately faded into obscurity” because copying Indian life did not have enough appeal to reach more than a few youths.30 Furthermore, the same arguments that later divided Nazi educators over the utility of non-white and “primitive”

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cultures as role models made group leaders criticize the Indian element. Robert Baden-Powell claimed that Woodcraft had failed because its “disciples failed to see that this Red Indianism is only a passing phase in a boy’s life of which he quickly tires.”31 Allen argues correspondingly that the Boy Scouts were more successful because they dropped the Indian element. However, the debate over the value of Indian role models included an influential pro-Indian faction. The German Youth movement was more self-determined than the English-speaking organizations, which were often controlled by adult educators. The German movement’s general Romantic notions of cultural pessimism, its escapist urge, and the accompanying cultural interest in the primitive and in originality contributed to the strong presence of Indianthusiast notions among German youth. Baden-Powell may have been right that a boy would grow out of “playing Indian,” but the Indian element, nevertheless, prevailed within the Youth movement, as the following examples will illustrate. The same Romantic notions that provided many opportunities for Indian references among nationalists and conservatives in the late nineteenth century made German youth use contemporary philosophical and sociocultural trends. The potential to use Indian imagery was constantly present, images were readily available, and they were utilized when opportune. Typical Indian tropes can be seen in most of the Youth movement’s statements and in its proponents’ references to Nietzschean ideas, as in the following statement about its Wandervogel strand: “Heroism, a sense of homeland, contempt for the masses, exorcism of the common run, resentment of urbanity and civilization, technophobia, Romantic nature references, absoluteness and the will to embrace will—these features, this range of themes of Wandervogel culture, is not only found in Heidegger, but also among many other Wandervogel youths.”32 While Allen identifies these features as part of the Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft dichotomy, her focus on instruction and outdoor activity ignores the cultural pessimist backdrop that made the Youth movement especially receptive to Indian imagery.33 Many of the organizations, such as the Wandervogel, were integral parts of the conservative revolution around 1900 and shared many of the same influences, like Nietzsche, Paul de Lagarde, and Thomas Mann.34 The movement’s groups did not have to go as far as organizing their own tribes to refer to Indians. Their entire worldview entailed all the core elements of German Indianthusiasm. Thus, it is not surprising to find Erhard Wittek, the writer of Indian novels, and Ernst Jünger, writer of war novels that praised heroism and Germanic character traits, listed among the members of the prominent Wandervogel.35 The Nazis, appropriating all popular movements, declared the Youth movement the precursor of the Hitler Youth, which itself included various applications of Indian imagery. To some writers, the Youth movement was an early expression of a German “Indian renaissance.” The Youth movement had apparently revived an interest in Indians, and thus, the Indian spirit inherent in Germans, and these

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youth had handed over the revived Indian spirit to their own children, who were now Hitler Youth. This generation, argued a pro-Indian writer, “strives to get away from the asphalt of the cities into the more primeval realms of the pagans and the woods, into the uncivilized, still Indian-like, past beyond the urban present, which must be reconquered for the sake of the future.”36 In this context, as in the debate about children’s literature, Nazi purists attacked the use of Indian imagery for the indoctrination of German youth as inappropriate to Nazi ideology standards, a conflict which had already developed among nationalists before 1933.37 While some Nazis actively sought to indoctrinate children by playing on the popularity of Indians, there were youth groups who used Indian imagery to express their opposition to the Nazi regime and the Gleichschaltung of the Youth movement. Employing the image of the wild, fierce, and uninhibited warrior, an anti-fascist resistance group of adolescents in Germany explicitly mentioned in a prohibition declaration in 1939 called themselves “Navajos.”38 The Youth and Life Reform movements in Germany after 1900 constituted attempts to cope with the effects of rapid industrialization in a largely feudal political framework. The conservative revolution underwent parallel philosophical post-Romantic developments that intermingled with these reform movements, so that they influenced each other. Both currents employed elements of Indian imagery that addressed specific German problems, and they both used imagery that either portrayed Germans as quasi-Indians or constructed Indians as role models for improving Germanness. German nationalists insisted on the uniqueness of German culture in Europe, highlighting Germans as an indigenous people or, at least, as a people that had not shed its indigenous traditions. However, industrialization was a global phenomenon. Other countries in Western Europe, as well as the United States, faced similar problems. This begs the question of the extent to which using Indian tropes was a unique feature of the German crisis of modernity. American society experienced rapid industrialization after the Civil War. Following the 1880s, massive immigration waves contributed to urban growth. Industrialization led to the emergence of gigantic corporations that transformed the economy and the financial sector, and at the same time created a huge social gap. The labor class, increasingly comprised of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, lived in crowded city quarters, which eventually made cities the epitome of filth, sickness, and crime. As in Germany, these developments led to reform movements in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Reformers addressed problems, such as public health, but they also re-evaluated the meaning of “American” in a changing society. Similarly, conflicts with immigrant outsiders led to nativist and nationalist notions that employed the primitive versus civilized dichotomy on various levels. As in Germany, both health problems in the crowded cities and industrial expansion’s overexploitation of nature generated concerns about conservation

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and public health. Holistic approaches to public health increasingly dominated, since the interrelation of an individual’s environment and his/her health became focal points. This was soon extended to the land and to whole societies. Proponents argued that, just as a person could become sick in a disturbed environment, a whole society could degenerate if its environment was destroyed.39 American reformers during the 1920s and 1930s developed the corresponding analogy of the “social organism,” but this general idea had appeal in Europe as well. The same principle was applied to assert blood-and-soil ideology in Germany. The apparent correlation between immigrants and urban filth led many American conservationists to take a nativist turn. They believed that the American environment needed protection in order to preserve the American character and, whenever racial and ethnic considerations played a role, to safeguard Anglo-Americans from the influx of “inferior” Eastern Europeans. Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant shared some of these ideas and used environmentalism and public health for racial reasoning and politics, for instance, by supporting the eugenics movement in the United States.40 Eugenics in the United States was eventually used as racial medicine to control or to suppress minorities, such as Native Americans or African Americans, and thus constitutes another parallel to racist practices in Germany. Throughout Westward expansion, American society had followed a doctrine of bringing civilization to the wilderness. Manifest destiny, it was believed, had spread American values and material culture across the North American continent, and Americans meant to spread the achievement of civilization during the Imperialist era, as well. Theodore Roosevelt had justified the conquest and settlement of the continent with the traditional argument that Native Americans had no use for the land on which they lived. Americans believed in their right to take the land, use it, and subject both the land and the Natives to the principles of production and consumption, which they held to be the cornerstone of civilization.41 However, the very same development of civilization also spelled danger for Americans’ self-perception. Industries had emerged rapidly, and the swelling stream of immigrants provided the necessary manpower for the factories. Recent Eastern and Southeastern European immigrants were frowned upon as racially inferior, yet their numbers made economic growth possible. It seemed that civilization was both enabled and endangered by supposedly inferior people. At the same time, the advantages of material wealth generated concern about the spiritual and physical well-being of the people, and triggered a debate on the “barbarian virtues” of Americans. Theodore Roosevelt expressed fears that some effects of civilization might be harmful to the American character: “Oversentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”42

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What Matthew Jacobson calls the “deep irony at the heart of American thinking at the turn of the century” was the notion that civilization, although it was the virtuous way of life to which everybody, even the Natives, had to adapt, led to a degeneration of the people. The “‘primitive’ traits of vigor, manliness, and audacity, in [Roosevelt’s] view, had given way to effete overcivilization among the once-hearty Anglo-Saxon race.”43 Thus, “barbarism,” for Roosevelt as much as for other writers and politicians of the era, must have represented originality, honesty, and strength. An ambivalent notion that could stand for positive character traits when applied to the self, it could also serve as a “salve to the encroachments of modernity.” Applied to the inferior, dehumanized other, it provided the “ready-made rationale for conquest and domination.”44 The same shifting senses of “the barbarian” can be observed in German conservative, and eventually Nazi, uses of the term. On the one hand, German nationalists, followed by Nazi propagandists, constructed the self-image of Germans as an indigenous people. Norsetalgia as much as Indianthusiasm shaped an image of “the barbarian” who appeared either as a pastoral backwoodsman or as a wildeyed berserker when expedient. On the other hand, the subhuman barbarian image was applied to Native Americans whenever the German(ic) contribution to the settlement of America was emphasized. On these occasions, the fellow tribesmen motif was clearly not desirable. In addition, the barbarian image could be applied to Jews as destroyers of the German cultural fabric. In Hitler’s theory of the culture-founding and the culture-destroying races, Jews were obviously counted as inferior barbarians who could not hope to elevate their race on their own. Eventually, the soldiers of the Red Army were identified with the barbarian image of the intruding other. This ambivalence in the Nazis’ utilization of the barbarian analogy is remarkably similar to the “irony at the heart of American thinking.”45 The question of indigeneity merits a comparison between German and American self-perceptions in this regard. Since German national identity was constructed on the notion of continuous German settlement and culture in Central Europe even before the days of the Roman Empire, Germans, disregarding the often bizarre claims and constructions of historical evidence, saw themselves to some degree as autochthonous to their lands. Interestingly, the position of the German/Austrian village at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago seemed to mark American acknowledgment of this perception: it was located in the Midway Plaisance, the part of the exhibition meant to represent the non-Western world, the periphery, the uncivilized peoples, which was organized as a combination of a “freak show” and an ethnological Völkerschau. In this assemblage of stereotypical others, the German village stood across the main walk from the American Indian exhibits.46 Americans, however, were immigrants to the American continent and built much of their national identity on the history of immigration, colonization,

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and Westward expansion by way of superiority. How could they incorporate a positive notion of barbarism into their national tradition? It is no coincidence that Theodore Roosevelt’s remarks about barbarism and the Chicago exhibition’s contrast of civilized material wealth and barbarian exoticism paralleled the emergence of the Frontier Theory. In the early 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner presented this theory on the influence of the frontier on American national character and institutions. The American environment, according to Turner, forced settlers to go back to the most primitive states of humankind, to use the most primitive tools for subsistence, and it took away the more refined European traditions of the settlers. In short, “the wilderness masters the colonist.”47 The continuous recurrence of images about the evolution from primitive hunting and gathering to civilized farming and eventual urban life signified the intensity with which the frontier experience shaped the American national character. The same tasks had to be repeated, the same institutions had to be rebuilt, and during the process, Americans apparently acquired experience, routine, and refinement in using these institutions.48 In this sense, many American colonists underwent the metamorphosis from barbarian to civilized man several times throughout their lives, both stages being equally important parts of the whole character. The “coarseness and strength” Turner praised in the American character obviously resulted from the constant recurrence of presumably barbarian and primitive stages in Americans’ lives on the frontier.49 After 1900, with the frontier closed and the continent settled, this recurring process of evolution ended; the frontier experience—which Turner called the “line of most rapid and effective Americanization”—was no longer available to transform incoming immigrants into Americans.50 If the American wilderness had transformed Europeans into Americans, then these transformed Americans qualified as “naturalized” natives— that is, they could claim some degree of indigeneity because America had taken their European identity away. Even a German-American observer noted in the 1930s that the positive barbarian traits of Native Americans “seem to have been transplanted onto their former white enemies.”51 Similarly, some German authors argued that the American environment had even influenced the facial features of Euro-Americans and used comparative photographs of Native Americans and famous Euro-Americans to support their claim (Figure 9). Consequently, American nationalists could simultaneously loathe the “barbarian” other in the cities and miss the lost barbarian self because, as they saw it, the absence of the frontier precluded the refreshment of the American spirit. Roosevelt’s cultural critique and complaint about “overcivilization” went hand in hand with nativist xenophobia, thus exemplifying the irony in American thought that Jacobson pointed out. This irony offers another perspective on the German Sonderbewusstsein regarding indigeneity. German nationalism suffered from similar ambivalences. Both Americans and Germans utilized the imagery of primitivism and barbarism in

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Figure 9. “Im Schmelztiegel der Rassen: Amerikas ewiges Gesicht,” in Florian Panzer, “Die Rothaut wird weiss,” Koralle 31 (1937): 945. The original caption reads “In the melting pot of races: America’s eternal face.” The text below explains that, currently, it is a sign of noblesse among Americans to have “a few drops of Indian blood.” The author adds that even full-blooded Caucasians developed “Indian” features when their families had lived in America for several generations, as the comparison of full-blooded Native Americans and prominent white Americans in these images was supposed to illustrate. This argument exemplifies the Nazis’ ambivalent mix of biological and environmental determinism in discussions of race.

managing modernity’s effects on society. Both nations deployed positive images of barbarism to assert their own Nativeness and thus reinforce their claim to the land and construct their identity. They both used pejorative images of barbarism to deny these positive associations and the corresponding identity to the excluded other. In the American case, it was Native Americans who were unworthy of inclusion unless they assimilated and gave up their distinct group identities. Pejorative barbarian imagery was directed against immigrant groups seen as racially and culturally inferior. In Germany, it was an internal other, the Jews, who were excluded in conjunction with notions of xenophobia against Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.52 Proponents of both nationalisms insisted that their own unique identity elevated them onto moral and ideological pedestals. Thus, the Germans’ Sonderbewusstsein was an ideological construct that could not hold up to scrutiny. The concepts of originality and

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indigeneity, for which Indianthusiasm provided ideal foils, were not unique: they served other peoples’ nationalisms, as well. While reference to Indians might have been particularly explicit in Germany—more so than in the United States and other European countries—the nation was by no means unique in setting up barbarian, pristine, and unspoiled role models for society.

Dusk or Dawn of Indians: The Vanishing-Race Trope Their völkisch idiosyncrasies and customs and their racial integrity are fading. They are a moribund race. —A. Väth and L. Schwann, “Bekehrung der Indianer Nordamerikas,” Die katholischen Missionen (1937): 40.

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… but then, in unspeakably sad bitterness, they lamented the misery of the present and eventually mentioned their only consolation: the yearning prospect of the “eternal happy hunting grounds.” —Gusinde, “Schicksalsgeschichte,” 221.

The idea of Indians as a vanishing race is one of the most persistent tropes of Indians. In its most popular expression, Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, the main character Uncas symbolically dies for all Indians, taking the noblesse, honesty, but also the primitiveness attributed to Indians along with him. He must yield to civilization. The idea emerged from colonialism since it helped to justify the results of colonial conflict. Non-Native observers could clearly see these results: the massive decline of Native populations due to disease, warfare, and forced relocation, the corresponding loss of common knowledge, and the disintegration of tribal social structures. The “vanishing Indian” variously allowed non-Native settlers to deny responsibility, explain the events as natural, or point accusing fingers at others. The trope served similar functions in Germany. Romantic notions and colonialist longing reinforced the idea, and the Nazis eventually used it in race ideology. However, an analysis of Nazi race ideology opens new perspectives on the perception of Indians in the German media, since they not only repeated traditional vanishing-Indian imagery based on manifest destiny, but also mused about both a cultural and racial Indian revival. Robert Berkhofer described the vanishing Indian as the “most romantic” of ideas because it employed the noble savage trope for readers to take pity on Indians and their demise; it was infused with the Romantic tendency to dwell on tragedy and death.53 “Nothing could be more romantic and heart-breaking than the resigned stare of a man who knows he is going to die,” as Daniele Fiorentino notes.54 This vanishing-Indian image appeared earlier in Europe than in the United States because the memory of frontier warfare and the corresponding images of Indian cruelty were still fresh in America. Germans, having little collec-

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tive history of Indian warfare, had not developed an overall image of Indians as a threatening other, whereas settlers in America had. As early as 1957, Alfred Vagts explained German Indianthusiasm as the envy of colonial latecomers. It was easy for Germans to pity the colonial destiny of Indians because they were already colonized and would never stand in the way of German colonial ambitions.55 German pity for the Indians’ destiny was not only a distraction for Germans’ own consciences from colonial atrocities in Africa and from anti-Semitism at home but also a way to denounce Americans, the Spanish, and the British for their colonial wrongs.56 Within the vanishing-Indian trope, the dispossession, relocation, and eventual extinction of indigenous communities was often regarded as inevitable, and thus natural. Manifest destiny implied that Americans had the right and obligation to settle the American continent and shape it according to their needs while ignoring the interests and claims of the Natives. The assumption was that Native Americans would either die out because they could not cope with civilization or assimilate into the white mainstream. Since American civilization was supposed to supplant Native primitivism, Indians could not be Indians within American society and, therefore, would vanish physically or socially.57 Typical reactions to the concept of the vanishing Indian in Germany were discourses on degeneration and academic attempts to preserve the memory of the dying race by displaying artifacts of their material culture in museums, along with recordings of songs and dictionaries of tribal languages. Both reactions are interrelated since degeneration apparently changed Native cultures so that anthropologists felt a responsibility to preserve an unspoiled image without any traces of acculturation.58 These concepts are evident in the German media before and after 1933, yet the Nazis’ encroachment on and control of publications added new perspectives that highlight their ideological influence. The majority of popular German texts before 1933 used vanishing-race imagery in Glenn Penny’s sense of cliché busting; they stated that the glorious times of Indians were over and that Germans should know how miserably the Natives actually lived. While, during the nineteenth century, the vanishing Indian had been a noble character, images of reservation life added a very negative note. Deborah Allen observed that “[t]he 1920s were a time of reconciling past perceptions of the Indian with their actual circumstance.”59 The Indians’ alcoholism and poverty, but also their desperate attempts to make a living by selling artwork or performing ceremonies and skills for money, aroused not only pity but also contempt among some Germans. This contempt was partially mixed with disappointment because the Indians had ceased to fulfill Romantic German expectations, but also with self-righteous, anti-colonial sentiments against U.S.-Indian policy. Anti-American notions found expression in a 1926 article on Indian history that appealed to a sense of higher justice: “If all guilt on earth shall have dire

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consequences, this national guilt shall have consequences, too.”60 Even though many texts credited the American government for its attempts to administer the reservations and meet its trust obligations, most authors dismissed these attempts as ill-founded and futile since new government policies always seemed to generate new problems: “A tired melancholy of death is hovering over them already, and one begins to understand the Indians’ saying ‘we are like the sinking sun, or like the leaves in the fall, trampled upon by mighty riders.’”61 A less poetic author simply stated the failure of Indian policy and of missionaries among Natives and, regarding the fate of Indians, concluded that “whatever all this means, these peoples increasingly belong to the past, they are out of the question on the future of America.”62 One of the numerous texts about Inuit acculturation in the United States, Canada, and on Greenland describes the destructive effects of making a Naturvolk dependent on Western material culture. The author ironically concluded that “[t]oday we might boast of having brought culture to the Eskimos. However, they will not thank us for it because they perish under these blessings of civilization.”63 More than a few German magazine articles expressed disappointment in Indians who, rather than dying and turning into heroic memories, took every opportunity to make a living. This disappointment was directed against the responsible Americans but also against the Indians, who were expected to be too proud to acculturate. In an article for the popular magazine Die Woche in 1927, ethnologist Walter Krieckeberg claimed that contemporary Indians had degenerated into show figures. He described them as typical American curios, exploited for public diplomacy to grant the title of “chief ” to European monarchs. Since technology was incompatible with the primitive Indian image, Indians seen with technological implements could not be understood as having adjusted their material culture but were portrayed as putting on a show: “They put him into a car or an airplane like a trained monkey—a horrible example to imagine for someone who knows the history of the Indian.”64 Acculturation and cultural adjustment were unacceptable for readers who persisted in retaining the image of the ahistorical, horse-riding Plains warrior (Figure 10). As the previous chapters have noted, likening Indians to nature linked the doom of the Indians to the destruction of nature, as well. Several articles discussed the slaughtering of the buffalo as a process identical to the vanishing of Indians: “And then a new era came, a horrible time for the red man and the buffalo. Strange creatures appeared who sent death over a distance of miles and with terrible speed and who laid iron rails across the country … And the great dying commenced … The whole world knows about the tragedy that took place in the land without soul: the buffalo became extinct. They called them the last of their tribe.”65 It is interesting to note the typical attacks on Americans in this passage in calling the land soulless, which also implies the special bond between Germans

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Figure 10. “Das hätte sich der Rote Büffel nicht träumen lassen!” in Arnold Hagenbach, “Ein Cowboy erzählt von Indianern,” Koralle 29 (1937): 1140. The original caption reads: “The Red Buffalo would never have dreamed that, one day, he would fly over the reservation!” Although Arnold Hagenbach’s depiction is less harsh than Krieckeberg’s, he finds the idea of an Indian in an airplane similarly curious and incongruous.

and Indians as enchanted people. Yet, while acknowledging that Americans were guilty of almost exterminating both Indians and buffaloes, a few German authors granted the preservation efforts of U.S.-Indian policy some degree of merit. “Fortunately and just in time, North Americans have realized the necessity of doing something for the preservation of both of these ‘natural monuments’ and thus prevent their total extermination.”66 Nevertheless, if the last remains of both Indians and buffaloes were preserved in sanctuaries, the public did not perceive these sanctuaries as niches for distinct cultures outside of the mainstream but as open-air museums where static, bygone societies were on display. In the worst case, reservations were understood as open-air prisons, or even “concentration camps”67 that denied Indians social mobility and integration and functioned as mere processing centers on their way to extinction. After 1933, the traditional vanishing-race trope could be found in a variety of texts. Similar to previous allusions to Indians as part of nature, one author called the Sioux reservations a “nature sanctuary for a dying human race.”68 In a summary of Friedrich von Gagern’s popular Grenzerbuch, the discovery and colonization of the Americas was called another Divine Comedy since “the annals of the Indians’ doom surpass everything we knew about Sparta, classical Rome, or Germania.”69 In 1934, Neue Rundschau published an article by D. H. Lawrence apparently because his views, expressed in a poetic and ironic style, matched the German anti-American perspective. His description of a Hopi Snake Dance conveyed the idea of white middle-class tourists visiting Native American ceremonies

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Figure 11. “Häuptlingstochter,” in Adolf Heilborn, “Ende des roten Mannes,” Koralle 28 (1927): 377. The German caption reads: “Daughter of an Indian chief, allegedly from the Mohikan [sic] tribe, most probably a half-breed.” The title (The End of the Red Man) and content of the article and its photographs are typical of Indian imagery. The author presumes that the woman depicted here is not a full-blooded Indian. In addition, the photograph conveys the stereotypical assumption that beautiful Indian women are usually the daughters of chiefs, or outright princesses, as Devon Mihesuah aptly points out in her book (17–19).

for the sheer spectacle of it. His image of tourists in cars and Indians riding into the sunset mirrored many popular photographs and paintings of the vanishing race: “And so they ride off, America’s last aboriginal people, back to their reservations, silently, toward the deep evening sun. The white Americans careening past them in their automobiles make a racket that all the rattlesnakes in the world combined could not match.”70

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The Nazi takeover of power introduced new elements to the vanishing-race trope. Nazi racial doctrine, along with its concepts of the struggle for life and Lebensraum, began to complement the imagery of Indian extinction. Studies on Indian fiction in Germany between 1933 and 1945 have pointed out that the idea of Indians melting away was accompanied by adventure plots in Indian settings that transmitted elements of Nazi ideology, such as völkisch thought, mindless loyalty, and last-stand scenarios reminiscent of Stalingrad.71 German newspapers, popular magazines, and academic journals began to use imagery similarly influenced by Nazi ideology. Manifest destiny was supported by racial thought and, at times, justified American colonization when German achievements could be credited. Discussions of Indian history helped convey these ideological notions to readers while nurturing empathy for Indians through identification with them and asserting the special German-Indian bond. However, they also served as cautionary tales about the dangers of not staying the course dictated by Nazi ideology. Since races were determined by their inheritable talents and their environment in Nazi racial thought, it followed that any race forced to relocate or change its socioeconomic and political structure would be uprooted and become extinct. The side effect of these forced changes was degeneration, which racial mixing only accelerated. From the Nazi perspective, Indians were vanishing because they were no longer able to live their species-specific lives in their ancestral homelands. Academic and popular scientific periodicals and monographs often stressed cultural self-determination in biological, speciesist terminology. These assumptions were especially prevalent among ethnologists and biologists. Wilhelm Mühlmann’s ethno-sociological approach to analyzing the interaction of peoples provided scholarly justification for the Lebensraum theory. By emphasizing a people’s right to self-determination and to its homeland, ethnologists also consciously attempted to strengthen their field in academic politics during the Nazi era.72 American aboriginals exemplified the dire prospects of a people denied its species-specific lifestyle and homeland. Biologist Walter Schoenichen believed that collecting artifacts and skeletal remains to preserve the memory of extinct peoples was insufficient so that National Socialism had the moral responsibility to prevent the vanishing of Naturvölker by applying racial thought and species-specific colonialist policies.73 Popular science magazines and Nazi periodicals echoed these sentiments. A 1944 article warned about the Entvolkung (defolkifying) of Naturvölker.74 Calling upon Mühlmann’s ideas, it chastised settler states for their rigid assimilation and relocation policies. One might speculate that this article was deliberately published right when the Red Army reached the German border in East Prussia, instilling fear of retribution and forced relocation among Germans from eastern provinces. In this context, the article likened Germans to Indians whose livelihood was destroyed by a wave of invaders from the East and played down the German responsibility for atrocities.

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Martin Gusinde exemplified many German ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and historians who published academic papers in journals and recycled these (or had them recycled by other authors) in abridged and simplified versions in popular magazines and for a general readership.75 In 1933, he wrote a popular history of white-Indian cultural conflicts for the magazine Frohes Schaffen, spiced with anecdotes from his fieldwork. His assessment of U.S.-Indian policy mirrored Nazi racial doctrine and anti-Americanism. Assimilation policy, he emphasized, had begun to destroy Native American cultures and ways of life, and it was doubtful that both races could continue to exist side by side due to their different hereditary talents and idiosyncrasies: “A harmonic coexistence between [Indians] and the whites seems almost impossible without one or the other side facing threats to its existence, its economy, its health, or its population strength.”76 The Nazis saw miscegenation as the major threat to racial integrity. Therefore, depictions of Indians as the vanishing race often used mixed-bloods as examples of the onset of the degeneration and disintegration of Indian peoplehood. Mixed-bloods were said to inherit the negative character traits of both races, were typically blamed for ills that befell the full-bloods, and were identified with dirt and alcoholism.77 Numerous periodical articles, both academic and popular, confirm these observations. A scholar who had conducted several field trips in the 1920s, writing about Natives in the South American Gran Chaco region, claimed that “[i]t would be worth highlighting in particular how the old, free Indian people on the periphery of the great Chaco Plains are perishing beyond redemption under the influence of whites and mixed-bloods; how the proud scalp hunters of the wilderness were turned into poor devils, shiftless, without dignity, infested and rotten.”78 Other articles cited economic developments, some mentioned Native American oil millionaires but maintained that the problems of degeneration, poor health, and alcoholism would engulf the entire race sooner or later. These articles usually carried the aforementioned scorn against Indians who destroyed themselves by surviving rather than having died heroically and untainted.79 Miscegenation was, furthermore, a common topic in reporting on South America during the Nazi era. Although race theorists proposed cautious racial mixing to improve the blood of certain races, the German media generally portrayed miscegenation as a source of evil. One article analyzed the racial composition of South American states and contrasted miscegenation between peoples of matching character traits with uncontrolled mixing. The latter, the author indignantly stated, had resulted in a literal racial chaos in some Peruvian areas: “Not a single congenial creature or racial combination could be found there. Under normal conditions, one cannot imagine what kinds of beasts homo sapiens brings forth when cross-bred and cross-bred all over again.”80 The Nazis’ view of the cyclic growth and decline of races and empires entailed a fascination with doom. Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) became a popular template for similar scenarios. The colonization of

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America lent itself to these spectacular doomsday scenarios because it provided many stories of last stands, and it could easily be exploited as an example of race war and Lebensraum struggles. Numerous articles modified the term Götterdämmerung to apply to America. The pragmatists in the Nazi debate over Indianthusiasm had stressed the value of Indian stories for teaching Germans about Nibelungentreue (a loyalty that extends beyond family bonds and even self-preservation), race conflict, and dying with a rending crash rather than a whimper. These notions did not bear any resemblance to Native American reality since most tribal war chiefs surrendered to protect their families rather than dying glorious deaths. The image of the Indian as Wagner’s defiant Hagen81 prepared Germans for war and military drill but also for the eventual collapse of the Nazi empire, which Hitler orchestrated as a gigantic Götterdämmerung. The constant invocation of the vanishing Indian also reminded readers of racial conflict, and it fanned their fears about a possible similar fate for the white race should the Axis forces be defeated. Consequently, some articles referred to American Westward expansion as the Indianerdämmerung (twilight of the Indians), while others coined the term Rassendämmerung (twilight of the races) to denote the defeat of an entire race during racial conflict, which vented the anxiety that the white race might be a vanishing race, as well.82 It revealed the racist fear that Native anti-colonial movements, although useful in propaganda against Great Britain and France, would end the global dominance of white peoples.

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Dusk or Dawn of Indians: The Revolving Door of Racial Revival The Indian of the endless hunting grounds is ultimately a thing of the past; the future belongs to the American citizen of Indian heritage. —H. E. Friedländer, “Sterben die Indianer aus?,” 437.

The 1920s witnessed a transition in German media reporting on American aboriginals. Observations on cultural extinction were increasingly incorporated into the notion of “vanishing” while population numbers of Native Americans were reported as growing. In the 1930s, a new element in the German media discussed the possibility of a renaissance of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Racial thought in the Nazi-controlled media as well as the racial interpretation of events in the United States and Latin America triggered this idea of Indian revival. Many articles during the late 1920s and early 1930s proposed assimilation as the Indians’ future and cited the growing number of Native Americans who received an education in the mainstream and had found middle-class jobs—as physicians, lawyers, or journalists, for example—to support this. Boarding schools for Native children, such authors believed, were institutions for civilizing the Indian. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act served as proof for the emancipation and accep-

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tance of Indians in the white mainstream.83 It is debatable whether the examples cited advocated both acculturation and preservation of Native peoplehood, or if they wanted to merge with the mainstream individually, but the German media around 1930 certainly treated these Natives ethnically as hyphenated Americans: “Today there are no more Indians but only red Americans who have gained their civic and social emancipation.”84 Most articles interpreted individuals’ migration from reservations to cities as successful integration and escape from a life in bondage. A few articles depicted Indians becoming accustomed to white material culture while deliberating racial character: “Buck and squaw have taken off their moccasins and eagle feathers. He wears Plus Fours while she uses a lipstick, but both still show the serious pride, the aloof dignity, of their race.”85 This combination of acculturation with the preservation of racial identity would become more important during the 1930s. After 1933, racial thought generated more discussion about an Indian revival because the racial lens revised traditional German perceptions of Indians and also because Nazis interpreted transitions in Indian policy in the United States and Latin America during the 1930s. A 1932 article, arguing that Naturvölker were usually doomed to vanish once they became dependent on a settler society’s material culture, suggested that this interest in a superior, alien culture’s material goods was an “internal rot” and the actual source of the Indians’ defeat in the colonial struggle, rather than their inferior numbers.86 However, if the settler society abandoned its assimilation policy and Natives realized that their own peoplehood was more important than foreign material culture and concepts, a cautious acculturation could revitalize them as a Naturvolk. Similar combinations of reversals in settler-state policy and indigenous revival movements triggered several articles about the United States and Latin America. After 1935, the German media began to discuss the effects of the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which instituted the so-called federal Indian New Deal policy. The Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde published several articles in English by American anthropologist Wilton Marion Krogman, who explained the government’s measures as resulting from the “fundamental recognition that certain elements of his culture are unique to Indian psychology—he must be allowed to pursue his destiny in accordance with his peculiar bent, adjusted, of course, to a wise administrative policy that harmonizes the old and the new.”87 It must be assumed that publishing an article by an American physical anthropologist, who listed the communal ownership of land, limited tribal government, and the end of the bans on traditional Native religious practices among the “unique elements” of Indian psychology, was supposed to lend authority to the Nazi perspective of inheritable, unique racial character traits. Another article regarded the IRA reforms as the end of attempts to make the Indians “think white,” concluding that “today, the redskin is supposed to worship Manitu again.”88 Even though this article was critical of the inconsis-

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Figure 12. “Das Antlitz des Indianers,” in August W. Halfeld, “Reise in das Land Old Shatterhands,” Die Woche 35 (1936): 21. The German caption reads: “The Face of the Indian. Shuttered and forbearing, full of secret wisdom, extensive in suffering, and restrained in joy—that’s how the Indian meets our eyes. The trapper’s regalia does not disfigure his appearance; he appears less exotic than if he were wearing a chief ’s robe—but by no means less American.” This photograph is an example of a perspective of Indians that accepts material change among Natives as long as the typical Romantic features (i.e., tragedy and aloofness) are retained. .

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tency of American Indian policy, it praised the IRA’s return to what Nazi ideology would interpret as appropriate species-specific treatment of Indians. Several articles discussed the IRA within the context of more general descriptions of American racial legislation. These articles deliberately compared American legislation to the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws, which, among other items, declared that German citizens had to prove their Aryan status and also prohibited marriage between Aryans and Jews.89 It becomes obvious that the discussion of Indians as segregated racial entities on reservations, provided with a degree of autonomy, suited the Nazi ideology of racial purity and cultural determination. Discussions of anti-miscegenation laws in several U.S. states, notably Alabama, were also mentioned. The combination of prohibiting mixed marriages and the Indian New Deal served as a model and justification for Nazi racial legislation, and eventually for racial discrimination. As in many other public discourses on Indian issues, the Nazi-controlled media in Germany did not consistently scoff at mixed-bloods in the Americas. It must be assumed that, as in the debate on Indians as role models for children, practical considerations sometimes led to a more positive portrayal of mixed-blood Indians, especially in Latin America. While some authors emphasized degeneration, and others even spoke of a “peoples-porridge,” others underscored that the potential for Native revival rested on the active support of mixed-bloods.90 Some authors even claimed that deliberate breeding could improve the racial stock of Indian Latin America as long as only the “culture-bearing” Indians were allowed to crossbreed. The elements of distinct peoplehood, in any case, had to be preserved, as one author stated, since “only through the realization of the unique character of a people does the evolution of culture become possible in a people refreshed by crossbreeding.”91 Using mixed-bloods such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), who wrote a history of the conquest of the Incan Empire, as examples, the author explained that crossbreeding had the potential to combine positive character traits of both parent races and thus lead to a generation of future leaders. Miscegenation in South America after the Spanish conquest had generated only inferior results since Peruvian Indians had forgotten most of their cultural heritage and the Spanish had spent their strength through conquest and colonial consolidation. Therefore, the generation of future leaders could only come from a combination of rejuvenated Indian culture and strong, Germanic blood and character traits, a notion loaded not only with racial thought but also practical geostrategic considerations: “This process is not of simple scientific interest for us Germans. It is also significant for our cultural and economic relations. The Plateau Indians who will gradually merge with the Cholos, the carriers of the new culture, have in some character traits, in their taciturnity, their restraint, and their tendency to embrace hardship, more similarities with us. Therefore, both groups feel more sympathy for the essence of Germanness than the white Peruvians, who favor the Romance countries, especially France.”92

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The call for revitalizing awareness of peoplehood and race among Latin American Natives was echoed by many authors who saw this awareness as the key factor in the future development of the continent. One Latin American author, writing for the political magazine of the German minority in Latin American countries, the Ibero-Amerikanische Rundschau, highlighted the role he believed Indians would play: “I believe that the Indian, who seems to be a dividing element today, will be the link between all countries of Central America and South America one day.”93 Another article explicitly discussed the potential impact of mixed-bloods’ rising racial awareness on future developments, along with the possibility of a slow “Aryanization” of South American countries.94 It also included an analysis of the Latin American Indigenism movement of the 1930s. Finally, the influence of Nazi ideology on the German debate about the future development of American Natives could also be seen in the assumption that cultures undergo cyclical developments. Authors based their statements on the theory of the “morphology of civilization,”95 which Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) promoted as the director of his eponymous institute in Frankfurt, and on Oswald Spengler’s (1880–1936) Decline of the West.96 With varying degrees and interpretations, both approaches assumed that culture underwent a “revolving door” of stages of maturation and aging: primitive stages stood for youth and strength; more refined and technologically superior stages of development then followed, representing maturity, which naturally carried the seed of destruction, since refinement led to decadence and degeneration.97 Spengler, in particular, applied these assumptions to the conquest of the Americas, arguing that aboriginal American empires had been too old and degenerated to withstand the young and energetic Conquistador culture.98 Increasingly, the revival of Indian culture in the 1920s and 1930s was viewed within this context of the cyclical development of cultures. While Spengler saw the end of a cultural cycle in the European conquest of America, proponents of a new race, such as Ernesto Quesada (1858–1934), saw a new beginning. Quesada’s works were published and discussed throughout German media.99 In one interpretation, South America had the potential to have a great future if Indian character and soul were combined with European technology and ways of thinking: “Emotive Indian fatalism and the formal thinking of Romance peoples would, indeed … be complemented by another way of thinking which, as in essential Germanness, emphasizes objectivity and a superiority of content over form.”100 One author observed that many Latin American proponents of Indian revival believed Spengler’s theory meant that the colonial era had ended, and that a new Indian Age would begin.101 Similarly, Mühlmann argued along racial lines that Mediterranean blood had a tendency to dilute when mixing heavily with other races even though Mediterraneans could flood the genetically stronger Indian race with their civilizing attributes. The influx of European material culture would support the ongoing revival of Indian culture

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and mentality, and ring in a new era. Consequently, Mühlmann proposed that Latin America’s future would involve a mix of Indian blood and Mediterranean material culture, and Mediterranean passion would blend with Indians’ moral dignity, stoicism, and sense of honor. Nonetheless, he concluded that “the Latin Americans will depart more and more from the ‘Power Sphere of the Mediterranean’ and from the Mediterranean ideal of civilization.”102 The Frankfurter Zeitung used the images of paint peeling off and exposing an older layer, and of a receding flood laying bare a rock that had seemed to disappear when the flood had rushed in.103 In these interpretations, the older Native cultures became new because they had persisted in essence and reawakened on account of the colonial power’s inability to take root in America and to extinguish them. A final example will demonstrate the increasing racial interpretation of indigenous revival in the German media in the 1930s. A 1936 article by Christoph Obermüller praised the United States as the symbol of technological progress and revived the stereotype of settlers turning the wilderness into the most modern society in the world. However, Obermüller stated, the Great War had marked the end of white global dominance; Indigenism in Latin America and the IRA in the North proved that American aboriginals were reawakening as a race: “America seems to be about to metamorphose back into an Indian hemisphere.”104 While the Spanish conquest seemed to herald the doom of aging empires, new life was visible in the positive reference to ancient civilizations in contemporary Latin American societies. Native individuals all over the Americas demonstrated their talents and eagerness to reclaim their status. Obermüller presented the Oklahoma pilot Wiley Post (1898–1935), the first pilot to fly solo around the world, as the most prominent example and contrasted him with Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974).105 It seems no coincidence that Obermüller emphasized stereotypical racial character traits to underscore Indian revival and assert Indians’ ability to succeed as a race in a changed technological environment in his description of Post’s success: “The old Indian virtues, manly bravado and tenacity, have been challenged in his person by the most sophisticated weapon of technology, and have proven themselves. And so he, the one-eyed Indian who contested Lindbergh’s, the blond and blue-eyed son of the North’s, glory as America’s most popular airplane pilot, is probably the anticipation of a future character: The Indian as the ruler of technological weapons who, without requiring any further European support, will shape the appearance of his own hemisphere.”106 Observing the slow recovery of Native populations in the Americas and the revival of Native pride, the German media interpreted it through the racial lens as the Americas’ original inhabitants reclaiming them. This reinterpretation of and adjustment to contemporary events was not merely an expression of Nazi racial thinking; it also indicated increasing geostrategic planning among the Nazi leadership. These plans entailed both active attempts to interfere with political affairs in the Americas and domestic propaganda to justify Nazi foreign policy.

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Indian policies and Native movements abroad provided ample material for these propagandistic efforts.

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Dusk or Dawn of Indians: Indigenism and Nazi Geopolitics Beginning with the Mexican Revolution (1911–1917), Latin America experienced a revival of, if not indigenous peoples, at least indigenous topics and symbolism. Indigenous motifs were used in the arts and architecture, and indigenous historical figures, such as the last Aztec leader Cuauhtémoc and the Incan emperors, became symbols of nationalism in their respective countries. Reform movements addressed indigenous communities, proposing a revival of old indigenous customs, such as the communal ownership of land, to improve education and agriculture and to strengthen the primarily agrarian indigenous majority in states such as Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Although the scholarly literature now argues that this movement was first and foremost “an elitist, non-Indian construct,” the German media at that time reacted positively not only to the nationalism but also to the indigenous symbolism.107 Indigenism was vividly discussed in German political magazines and newspapers. Articles made a point of explaining that the poverty of most Natives in Latin America was not a result of degeneration, but of oppression and economic dependency.108 The movement’s emphasis on ethnic relations made it suitable for comparison with Nazi racial doctrine. Debates on the racial composition of Latin American states allowed for both the derisive scoffing at intermarriage and the presumed degeneration that would result, as well as the potential for racial regeneration and renewal. The Indian element in these debates added exotic peoples and historical pathos and made it possible to draw upon the fellow tribesmen motif and nurture Romantic notions. The prospect of merging Indian and German character traits, especially, seems to have been an appealing theme. Some of the typical features in this context included assertions of blood-and-soil ideology and deliberations on the nature of the Inca Empire. The movement’s nationalism provided ammunition for anti-American notions and triggered political speculations about pan-American currents directed against the United States, which Nazi Germany approved and supported. Most German observers and Latin American guest authors interpreted Indigenism as the awakening of Indian political and racial self-awareness. While mixed-bloods had usually abandoned their Indian heritage and oriented themselves toward white principles, they argued, most mixed-bloods were now rediscovering their Indian talents and siding with the full-blooded Indians, which shifted power relations in Latin American countries dramatically. Writers and artists with partial Indian ancestry began to promote indigenous values and refer to historical Indian heroes and political figures.109 Natives and Creoles alike used

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Diego de Riviera’s (1886–1957) description of the Spanish conquest of Mexico as the “white terror,” and the 400th anniversary of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa’s execution in 1933 to celebrate indigenous traditions.110 Concerning race development, it was pointed out that the influx of Africans to America had stopped and that the birthrate of mulattoes was declining, so that full-blooded Natives and mestizos were the fastest-growing group on the continent.111 One author argued that for a real South American peoplehood to emerge, a strong Indian element based on Indian historical awareness and character traits was needed, since Creoles and mestizos were mere “imitators” who could not create culture.112 In her article for the Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, Edith Faupel noted that some saw the crossbreeding of American Natives with Germans, thus merging Indian and German character traits, as the combination with the most potential. This idea was not new. In the fourth volume of his Winnetou series (published as a serial in 1909–1910), Karl May had already suggested that North American Indians would become revitalized with German help, and that a new IndianGerman race would emerge.113 Proponents of the Indigenist movement had discussed similar concepts of crossbreeding and racial rejuvenation.114 Writer Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) described Indians in Central America as degenerate, and stated “that such a degenerate ‘race’ had only one opportunity for survival: The massive cross-breeding with a healthy white ‘race,’ determined by values such as family, husbandry, morality, honesty, labor, and honor—as one could find them in Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Bavaria, Württemberg, or Tirol.”115 My research did not reveal any references to Asturias’s ideas in the German media, but their similarity to independent proposals for German-Indian intermarriage reflect the popularity of such considerations. Further study is required to find out whether the Nazi leadership found such plans worthwhile. Regardless of whether these journalistic ideas found expression in Nazi political planning, the arguments and measures of the Indigenist activists gave German propagandists ample opportunity to invoke the Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft dichotomy, praise their blood-and-soil ideology, and point out apparent similarities between Indian and German racial psyches. Indigenist-oriented economic and political reforms seemed to match some of the Nazis’ suggestions for National Socialism. In addition, the Peruvian movement’s reference to the Inca Empire triggered comparisons of the ancient political system to that of the Third Reich. Germany’s coverage of the Indigenist movement gave commentators many opportunities to borrow traditional imagery from cultural pessimism to denounce democracy and liberalism and to establish an emphatic mental link between Nazi Germany and the Indigenist movement among the German readership. Contrasting emotive and mystical Germans and Indians to the rational United States, one article called the United States the “land of limited impossibilities”116 whose “increasing demystification of man and nature, along with a lack of social care,

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ensure that the skyscrapers, just like the Tower of Babel, do not reach the sky.”117 In Latin America, however, where Indians still made up the majority of the population, the link between nature and humans was still intact: “In [the Indians’] existence, linked in part to savage, in part to domesticated nature, emotions and instinct still rule over coldly calculated, intellectual thinking.”118 Colin Ross (1885–1945), one of the chief informers for the Nazi government on American affairs, connected riots in Mexico, Indigenism, and the assassination of Huey P. Long (1895–1935) in the United States, and concluded that people all over the continent were dissatisfied with democracy. He regarded the “awakening of the colored peoples in the West Indies and Central America” as a sign of the downfall of liberalism and capitalist imperialism.119 Another author criticized the view of Indigenism as mere “pastoral Romanticism of the Rousseau era,” while liberals and Marxists saw Indians as oppressed individuals who had a right to be free. He argued that these approaches ignored the perspective of Indians as carriers of valuable genes and cultural potential.120 Indigenism was not important for Latin America because it wanted to end oppression but because it had finally acknowledged the value of the Indian racial psyche. The German media’s positive response to Indigenism addressed ideological criteria such as the notion of blood and soil but also economic factors. One text stated that the movement used the economic struggle as a lever to achieve the higher goal of racial revitalization. The slogan “huasipungo,” translated as Heimatscholle, or home turf, supports this analysis. The movement was directed against the Catholic Church and its control over most of the land, which German commentators were glad to emphasize, and promoted a return to older forms of communal land ownership, such as the Mexican ejidos, or the Peruvian aillus. One author conceded that these resembled Soviet collectives but stressed their older tradition and said these communal lands would be advantageous for Indian communities once they had shed the individualism they had grafted on and returned to their traditional sense of community. His description evoked the Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft once more.121 Another author said that leaving Indians uneducated on poor family farms and uninterested in politics was a “waste of Menschenmaterial.”122 Similarly, using Indians as cannon fodder in civil wars and denying them a chance to participate in and contribute to national identity posed a threat to the modern state. Therefore, educating, and thus refining, Indians, worked toward state security and helped develop a “truly American” identity.123 Many authors emphasized that traditional indigenous economies, the communal ownership of land in organic local communities, and the individual tribute to the authoritarian state leaders were advantageous features.124 In the context of Indigenism, it is particularly interesting that many articles noted the movement’s frequent references to Inca history and tried to evaluate the importance of ancient knowledge for contemporary state organizations. My research uncovered approximately forty articles that mentioned Incas between

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1930 and 1945, of which about one-third discussed the Indigenist movement and/or the application of presumed ancient Inca traditions in the modern world. Many of these articles, such as one in the Hitler Youth paper Die HJ, speculated about whether the political structure of the Inca Empire constituted an ideal (national) socialist model. The HJ article praised “the domestic and foreign institutions of the Sun Empire, which was probably the first and only autocratic and, at the same time, socialist state, and thus one of the most ingenious state creations of all time.”125 In addition to ideological and economic deliberations, German media reports on Latin America during the Nazi era discussed political events, such as the Chaco War. American observers were wary of German subversive activities in Latin America and suspected plans for a German takeover that first would affect Latin American economies and eventually result in the establishment of German-friendly or outright Nazi governments.126 With the Nazi emphasis on Native themes, it stands to reason that there would be a connection between these subversive activities and Indigenism. At least a few newspaper articles, such as Colin Ross’s frequent and prominently placed leads, suggested the employment of Indigenism for propaganda against supposedly imperialist U.S. interests in Latin America, although these sources contradict each other on the role Indigenism would play. Colin Ross was an Austrian globetrotter who published a series of popular travelogues but also a political journalist and adviser for Hitler on American affairs. Most of his work featured vague pan-American concepts directed against the United States, and discussed a revived sense of Indian racial awareness as a major factor in transnational American developments.127 He denounced the colonial powers as obsolete and decadent and promoted a fresh Germanic-Indian start: “This does not mean that a Teutonic America should fill the shoes of the Anglo-Saxon one, but the creation of a true America out of European blood and American soil, out of Aryan and Indian traditions.”128 While Ross interpreted Indigenism as an expression of transcontinental, anti-democratic, and antiAmerican feeling, other authors argued that the United States sponsored it to weaken Latin American governments in their stance against U.S. dominance.129 Obviously, the decline of U.S. influence in Latin America was the common denominator in these articles, even though they expressed uncertainty about the role Indigenism was to play. In at least one instance, German interests in Latin America influenced Indigenism directly. The Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB), also called the Green Shirts, was a political movement intent on seizing power in Brazil. Ursula Prutsch describes it as “an amalgam of Portuguese Salazarism and Italian fascism based on a corporatist state model. It was anti-Semitic and racist, but rendered homage to a pseudo-indigenist Romanticism.”130 On 11 May 1938, the Green Shirts attempted an unsuccessful putsch. Investigations revealed that the Green Shirt

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troopers had been trained by the cultural attaché of the German embassy, Henning von Cossel.131 The movement’s reference to indigenist notions did not necessarily stem from Nazi influence; it was probably a tactical move to profit from existing ideological currents in Latin American societies. Yet, the combination of Indigenism and autocratic government was a feature that matched several observations of German political authors. These examples show that Indigenism was not a genuine parallel to Nazism, nor was it a movement that necessarily lent itself to Nazi ideology. It was an opportunity for propagandists to assert Nazi ideology in political examples from abroad. That these examples could be aligned with typical Indianthusiast imagery made them all the more useful for domestic propaganda, and the opportunity for anti-American gibes added to their value. Indigenism was one aspect of the Nazi agenda. It transformed the traditional vanishing-race theme into an image of racially conscious, authoritarian, and anti-colonial aboriginals. This image,

Figure 13. “Zweierlei Rot,” in A. E. Johann, “Zweierlei Rot in Mexico. Grundherr oder Bauer, Moskau oder Mexiko?” Koralle, vol. 5, 26 (1937): 905. The German caption reads “Red versus Red. During demonstrations against Moscow, an Indian rides a donkey that carries a caricature of the Red General Calles on its head. The poor peons are fed up with constantly having to foot the bill for Moscow. Yet, as little as they want to serve foreign agents, they are equally unwilling to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the big landowners. They are struggling for a new Mexico that will give them land.” This argument explicitly praises Indigenism because it opposed both communism and the liberal capitalism inspired by U.S. economic interests.

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in turn, allowed the propaganda machine to assert similarities between these natives and the equally race-conscious, authoritarian, and anti-colonial German aboriginals. The similarities allowed Germans to empathize with Latin American developments, underscored the opposition to—primarily American—imperialism, and emphasized the importance of racial thought at home.

“America, Keep Your Own House in Order!” Anti-Americanism and the Common Enemy Motif

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Granted, the whole world got worked up over alleged German atrocities during the Great War; granted, the Allied enemies decided that the cultured nation of Germany was not worthy of keeping her colonies, but nobody thought about the Indians and about the manner in which they were treated throughout the centuries of American history. And, if someone thought about that, he will have smiled to himself and kept quiet because America, the big brother with his purse full of dollars, had sat at the conference table up in Versailles and would have been terribly miffed about such an allusion. —Proskauer, “Das Reich der Rothäute,” Die Woche (1925): 358.

The German image of Indians was very useful to the Nazi leadership for attacking the United States in its propaganda.132 It gave Nazis a moral high ground from which to judge America’s Indian policies. The moralist argumentation stemmed from older traditions of perceiving America with a mixture of fascination, contempt, and envy. Accusing Americans of the genocide of Native Americans, which utilized both the fellow tribesmen and common enemy motifs, helped Germans deal with their colonial inferiority complex, at least unconsciously. With the childish gesture of turning the table and loudly proclaiming “you, too,” German propagandists could draw attention away from racism and unfolding genocide at home. Blaming white Americans for the way they treated the indigenous population is a traditional anti-American trope that has been popular in Germany from the late nineteenth century up to today, and it is not limited to right-wing extremist argumentation, either.133 Historian Dan Diner observes that the history of white-Indian relations in North America is a traditional source of anti-American criticism among Germans.134 The Nazis were quick to employ this device as it provided ready ammunition for their propaganda battle with the United States—a battle that increased in scope, pace, and ferocity in the late 1930s. The utilization of Indian imagery for anti-American propaganda was embedded into a sophisticated system of directed and controlled propaganda efforts. The documentation of Nazi publication regulations and directives of the 1930s reveals that there were detailed measures concerning issues that could be used to

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denounce foreign powers. Daily Propaganda Ministry press directives told editors which issues to publicize, the degree of prominence to give an issue, and whether to present the mere facts or make venomous comments of varying degrees.135 These directives were geared toward the current state of relations between Germany and a particular foreign country. In his study on the perception of America in the Third Reich, Philipp Gassert identifies alternating phases of restraint and attack in German propaganda toward and about the United States: 1937–1939, 1940–1941, and 1942–1945 were phases of increasing anti-American propaganda, while propaganda efforts in the early 1930s evidently showed restraint in allowing reporters to publish with relatively little inhibition. Several months from 1939 to 1940 marked another phase of restraint in which propaganda directives restricted negative reporting about the United States in order to prevent the United States from entering into the war in Europe at a bad time.136 The Indian-atrocity trope features prominently in German anti-American publications, but an analysis of the publications, propaganda efforts launched by Goebbels’s ministry, and phases of anti-American propaganda reveals that German publishers and authors employed it independently. For the period from 1933 to 1939, during which Sänger’s collection of propaganda press directives was assembled, Indians were mentioned explicitly only once, and in only one other instance were journalists told to discuss a source that included a reference to Indians. Both occasions were related to the pogroms of 9 November 1938.137 More often, the directives referred to the American economy, or the racial conflicts between African Americans and whites. The ethnic groups mentioned most often in the press directives were Palestinians and Asian Indians, a choice pointing toward Great Britain as a more promising propaganda target during the 1930s. The scarcity of references to Native Americans in the Propaganda Ministry’s press directives leads to the conclusion that the theme of Native genocide was so ingrained in the German popular perception of America that publishers did not need additional prodding to employ it. Articles featuring Americans as victimizers can be found over the entire period analyzed for this study. There is no indication that, after 1933, the Nazis exerted particular pressure to emphasize this theme; they merely added racial thought and militarism to the argumentation. One change, however, was evident after the U.S. entry into the war in December 1941. Although no collection of press directives for the war period is available, the rising number of articles denouncing the United States as a warmongering imperialist in 1942 support Gassert’s observation of phases of heated anti-American propaganda. These phases apparently corresponded to the international response to the 1938 pogroms and to the period when U.S. entry into the war became unavoidable in 1941.138 The newspaper and magazine articles featuring the Indian-atrocity trope can be classified into two major groups. First, there were direct references to Native Americans that typically discussed U.S.-Indian policy and the history of the

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Indian Wars. This served as a springboard for denouncing Americans as racist, hypocritical, brutal, and inhumane. These articles appeared throughout the entire Nazi period and often employed traditional anti-American, Romantic imagery of tragically abused Indians and treaty-breaking Yankees. The second group of articles used images of the Indian atrocity mostly indirectly or as snippets in long lists of accusations against the United States. They focused on U.S. military history and on the Monroe Doctrine to highlight the imperialism in U.S. foreign policy. While blaming Americans for assuming power over the entire Western hemisphere, they demanded that Germany be allowed to pursue a similar doctrine for Europe. In this reading, the United States had no justification for joining the war on the Allies’ side.139 Such articles appeared with increasing frequency after December 1941, when the German populace needed to be prepared to view the United States as an enemy and when the German declaration of war against the United States had to be justified domestically and internationally. In most texts about Indian policy and colonial warfare, treachery, brutality, and hypocrisy are the foremost descriptors of Anglo-Americans. Time and again, authors sought historical examples to compare the American treatment of Indians to European contexts, mostly to establish the fellow tribesmen and common enemy motifs. One author referred to Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico as an appropriate parallel to the treatment of Indians, “which was executed in Anglo-American colonial practice in the most extensive manner. After all, the North American Indians have been almost totally exterminated by this colonial policy, which is unparalleled in its perfidiousness, breach of promise, betrayal, and covetousness.”140 Authors constantly pointed to the encroachment of white settlers onto Native lands, and to the resulting Native retributions to expel these settlers, as the causes for Indian wars. In their descriptions of white maltreatment of Indians, authors often engaged in cliché busting. A 1941 text for Koralle, for example, claimed that scalping was not a traditional Native American custom but had been introduced to the Americas by English colonial governors who paid bounties for Indian scalps.141 It is interesting to note that, in such instances, the deconstruction of a cliché was favorable to propaganda, while in other instances propagating a cliché was more likely to achieve the desired propaganda effect. Such criticisms of white colonial policies implied condemnation of the national character of Americans, as well. To underscore these claims, authors cited Karl May’s similar claims from forty years before. For these Nazi authors, Karl May not only seemed to prove the correctness of their statements, but his writings seemed to be adequate for a true National Socialist worldview. Accordingly, one text written for the Bücherkunde, the Propaganda Ministry’s periodical for recommending and blacklisting literature, emphasized the wickedness of May’s English-speaking characters: “The Americans and Englishmen, who May depicted as Christians as well, act differently and are abysmally evil, so that even

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nowadays in World War II we cannot create a better description of them than May’s from decades ago.”142 Adding to these simplistic distinctions was May’s portrayal of all German characters as good-natured and superior, which the Nazis eagerly exploited.143 In this case, Karl May’s popularity was beneficial to the propaganda effort because he, like the propaganda, denounced Americans and depicted Germans as friends and protectors of Indians. Anti-American arguments had dominated the discussion of Indian policy even before 1933. Reservations were described as large open-air prisons, preventing the Indians from fulfilling their supposed racially motivated roaming nature. While German authors often failed to understand the intentions of U.S. reservation policy, they decried its visible effects and accompanying paternalism, exclaiming, for example, “Alas! The Great White Father was a cruel father to them.”144 One author, Otto Willi Ulrich, concluded in 1931 that “no word is related to so much misery, betrayal, and sorrow, as the word ‘reservation.’”145 Ulrich’s text exemplifies the many historical overviews of Native-white relations from early settlement to the 1930s that were published in popular magazines and in the weekend feature pages of daily newspapers before and after 1933. Most of these teemed with factual errors and stereotypes,146 and they often featured a very casual and ironic tone that sometimes attacked Americans for their treatment of Natives and sometimes gazed contemptuously at the effects of this treatment. The following statement about the U.S. allotment policy of 1887–1932 is worth quoting at length as it illustrates this haughty tone: “In practice, [U.S. allotment policy] means that, for twenty-five years, the Indian has been unleashed on a piece of land on probation, whose cultivation under supervision must feel like irksome forced labor to him. Once probation is over, Mr. ‘Citizen’ sells this land immediately in order to forget the memory of his days as a half-slave there … Whoever has not been allotted a piece of land by today, and that is an overwhelming majority, is still a prisoner on his reservation, even if he is three-quarters white.”147 Other texts attacked the paternalism of the trust relationship the federal government assumed toward Native American tribes. Gerhard Venzmer, author of several books and features about the United States, pointed out the discrepancy between Americans’ self-perception as guardians of self-determination and the government’s policy of denying these rights to Native Americans. He added that the money held in trust for the tribes served only the interests of white tourists. Most of these projects were opposed by tribal members, who faced “severe prison terms” if they openly resisted. The title of this article, “America’s Red Disgrace,” speaks for itself and exemplifies many similar articles employing the same accusing tone. The authors of these texts did not seem to realize—or even care—that the tone in which they criticized American paternalism was itself paternalistic.148 These notions of Anglo-American responsibility for the Natives’ degeneration continued after the Nazis took control over the press. Racial thought added the explanation of miscegenation and American ignorance of species-specific Native

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necessities to the reproaches. A reviewer of Friedrich von Gagern’s Western novels declared that “the accrual of North America to the Anglo-Saxon race, and [the emergence of ] the United States’ peoples-porridge, creamed with so much leftover scum and yeast,” had to be judged as “a first-rate historical injustice.”149 This lamentation reflected not only sympathy for Indians but also a degree of self-pity for Germans who were denied such a chance for empire (Figure 14, Figure 15). The most successful move in the propaganda effort was the publication of texts in which American authors criticized their own culture and history. In November 1938, the press directives documented by Fritz Sänger urged German journalists to keep up the attacks against Americans whose media had loudly protested the pogroms in Germany in the preceding two weeks. On 23 November, a directive referred to a text by American journalist and writer Fletcher Pratt that had been published in American Mercury. The Propaganda Ministry’s representative Alfred-Ingemar Berndt (1905–1945?) told the journalists that, in Pratt’s article, “a mirror was held up to the Americans, they were shown that the entirety of American history is paved with murder, arson, robbery etc.… It was an answer

Figure 14. “Ein weitblickender Engländer.” Poster Collection, GE [3837], Hoover Institution Archives. German propaganda poster, c. 1942, stating that a “foresightful Englishman” had made the enclosed cartoon in 1909 and that Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz had anticipated in 1885 that Jews would prosper in America. The poster concludes that these predictions had come true because, apparently, Jews had usurped power in the United States. The propagandists proclaim: “We [Germans] will make a stand against this” and “pull the plug on the rule of Jewry.”

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Figure 15. “History of the United States.” Poster Collection, GE [3837], Hoover Institution Archives. The cartoon enclosed in the German propaganda poster (Figure 14) provides insight into typical anti-American and anti-Semitic imagery: Slyly pushing the proud Indian off the cliff, Uncle Sam takes his position (and his land) but is eventually pushed off himself by an equally sly Jew.

to the Americans from an American source, which preempted a necessity for our own answer.”150 Consequently, the Berliner Börsenzeitung and the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten published long reviews gloating on Pratt’s accusations of hypocrisy.151 These articles cited Pratt’s list of American atrocities to portray the United States as the leading rogue state because the American media usually failed to mention “the countless political and military atrocities, of which America is guilty to an extent that neither Louis XIV, nor Genghis Khan, nor the Roman Empire, much less Germany under Adolf Hitler, has ever reached … Today, the world quite rightly sees Americans as the chosen race of hypocrites.”152 Pointing to similarities between the treatment of Indians during treaty negotiations and of Germans during the Versailles peace talks, the Börsenzeitung quoted Pratt’s description of the “chain of broken treaties” and highlighted the custom of American negotiators getting Native delegates intoxicated to heighten their willingness to sign treaties. The author further pointed out that Americans were victorious in the battle of Tippecanoe (1811), in which the future president William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) defeated an army of allied tribes under Tecumseh’s brother Tensk-

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watawa, only because they had invaded Native lands in peacetime and, thus, had not played fair. Special emphasis was placed on the Cherokee removal crises of the 1820s and 1830s.153 The removal debate marked a milestone in U.S.-Native relations because the status of Native tribes as independent foreign nations was put to the test, and Chief Justice John Marshall (1755–1835) declared Native Americans to be “domestic dependent nations,” which granted the tribes some degree of autonomy but nevertheless declared the federal government’s authority over them.154 It is especially revealing that the German papers emphasized these events because this argument accused Americans of encroaching on the domestic affairs of the sovereign Cherokees in the 1820s, and of encroaching on German domestic affairs in 1938, once more subtly establishing a notion of fellow tribesmen and of Americans as the common enemy. These attacks did not go unnoticed in the U.S. media. A number of American newspapers remarked on German comparisons of minority policies in the United States and Germany, revealing that many more than the two articles cited above either took up the Propaganda Ministry’s directives on raising Indian policy as an issue, or introduced the Indian topic independently.155 On 28 October 1938, almost two weeks before the pogroms, the Chicago Daily Tribune published an article titled “Remember Fate of Indians, Nazis Tell Roosevelt.”156 It referred to texts in the Völkischer Beobachter and in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt and admonished that “Mr. Roosevelt should ‘remember the Indians when sobbing about the Jews.’”157 In addition, reacting to the government-driven wave of anti-American articles in the German press two weeks after the pogroms, the Washington Post cited an editorial in the Montagspost on 21 November 1938. Apart from pejorative comments about American racial conflicts and lynching, the German editor had said, “When Americans speak of the measures we are taking, we are in a position to reply by pointing out, for example, the systematic campaign of violation that the Yankees conducted against the Indian tribes under the motto ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian.’”158 A few days later, another story titled “The Shameful State of the Indians in the United States” was cited, although the German source of that particular text was not mentioned. In this article, the author “angrily told the democracies to mind their own business and stop expressing sympathy for Germany’s Jews.”159 Thus, the Nazis framed the public discussion of U.S.-Indian policy as a propagandistic boomerang in the international media battles before the outbreak of the war. On a broader scale, the Indian wars, massacres, and broken treaties were items in the long lists German papers compiled during the 1940s to comment on America’s entry into the war. American military history, imperialism, and racial policy were major issues the Nazis used to signify the United States as a traditional aggressor. Essay titles such as “Atrocities, Hereditary Vice of the USA” abounded in German papers and sounded the general theme.160 Colin Ross’s essay “Against Whom Is the USA Rearming?” had already pointed in this direc-

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tion back in 1936 in claiming that the United States had never fought a defensive war and that the increase in military spending and the boom in the American arms industry during the New Deal indicated plans for new aggression.161 In the following years, newspapers cited historical and political studies to lend authority to their claims about the United States, and renowned scholars published similar essays for newspapers and magazines. A 1943 article referred to a study by one Gerhard Jentsch who had identified 164 acts of aggressive war in American history between 1783 and 1941, sixty of which were counted as “Indian and frontier wars.” Using quotations by American presidents to underline the statistics, the author called the United States a “rogue state,” contrasting it with an apparently much less aggressive Prussia.162 He also differentiated between Prussia’s “defensive” wars and America’s alleged aggression: “It is, of course, a fundamental difference if, say, Prussian-German politics was compelled during the nineteenth century to press home the unity of a disrupted people and its Lebensraum by force, or if an economically and territorially saturated nation went from aggression to aggression in order to expand again and again in all directions.”163 Interestingly, America’s constant aggression was explained as a consequence of American national character, “whose rowdyism stands in blaring contrast to the nonviolence and peace that the leaders of this country proclaim again and again.”164 Returning to Fletcher Pratt, the author concluded: “The transcript of its history, even the most recent, makes the USA the most successfully quarrelsome, the most unreasonably rowdyish power in the world.”165 Importantly, in thus reproaching the United States for being aggressive nation on account of Americans’ character and failure to see reason, the author clearly suggested that being unreasonable was a negative trait, whereas Germans’ rejection of reason was usually portrayed as a positive trait within the context of notions of German exceptionalism. America’s racial conflicts and treatment of minorities had troubled Americans’ self-perception for a long time. Similarly, contradictions between U.S. aspirations and the reality of race relations were always levers for anti-American arguments. The Nazis picked up on this tradition of anti-American reproach in Germany because they could easily combine it with German Indianthusiasm and thus reinforce it. Both America and Germany blamed the other empire for its repression and genocide of minorities, often as a means of imperial competitors to veil their own crimes toward Native Americans and Jews, respectively.166 Whether the Nazis deployed stereotypes or keenly observed and appropriated academic findings on U.S. Indian policy, practices that used different images of Indians and employed different styles of reproach, the intention and effect were the same: to turn attention away from German crimes, to instill hatred against the American and the Jewish other, and to justify war against the United States. The anticolonial stance of these accusations vanished entirely whenever there was a chance of German self-aggrandizement, as the following observations will reveal.

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There First! Germanic Claims to the Discovery of America

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Ethnology provides information about the Europeanization of the world since the beginning of the Age of Discovery, reveals the German cultural pioneers’ contribution to the opening of all continents and to the knowledge about their inhabitants and, especially, serves to retrieve the honor of the German people regarding its colonial policies. —Krause, “Bedeutung der Völkerkunde,” 8.

In the exploitation of Indian imagery by the Nazis, a number of scenarios precluded the application of the fellow tribesmen or common enemy motifs that had so often served to proclaim similarities between Germans and Indians. As the primary goal of domestic propaganda was to strengthen Germans’ national pride and their loyalty to the Nazi leadership, the praise of Germanness and German achievements sometimes called for a hierarchical distinction between Germans and Indians as superior and inferior peoples. These demands seemingly contradicted Indianthusiasm. Colonial envy and the notion of Germanic peoples as the master race turned the perception of Native Americans into a reflection on Indian insufficiency that made German historical achievements shine brightly in comparison. These moments often stood in clear contrast to Germans’ drastic anti-American statements siding with Indians. Once Germans posed as colonizers, the achievements of the colonial protagonist usually became more important than the fate of those who had been discovered, explored, and colonized. A number of events and developments during the twelve years of the Third Reich helped the German media turn the discovery and colonization of the Americas into a subject of public discussion. Archeological findings triggered an interest in the original settlement of America, and, among other things, prompted the development of the Bering Straits migration theory during the 1930s. Other archeological discoveries seemed to provide evidence to further challenge Columbus’s claim to discovery. The German popular media published large numbers of texts on pre-Columbian discovery scenarios during the 1930s and 1940s. Both the 1935 international conference of American anthropology in Seville, Spain, which was dedicated to the question of discovery, and the 450th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage in 1942 supported this media interest.167 As in other areas, scholars of the discovery and settlement of the Americas published in academic journals and provided abridged and simplified versions for popular magazines, or were referred to by editors in the academic and human interest sections of newspapers.168 These publications focused on German achievements during the discovery and colonization of America and German contributions to pre-Columbian exploration. Texts appropriated the Viking expeditions as proof of Germanic skills and discussed the patterns of settlement of the Americas. While it may seem that a historical or ethnological discussion of

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American settlement and colonization would have provided scholars with a niche for conducting their research in relative isolation from the pressures of Nazi ideology, the popularity of their topics guaranteed Nazi interest, as the regime saw an opportunity for Nazi propaganda. It is difficult to determine whether scholars highlighted Germanic achievements in their fields because they actively sought to promote Nazi ideology or because they needed to include a few token concessions for the sake of securing their academic positions. One such scholar was Leipzig ethnologist and director of the Museum für Völkerkunde Fritz Krause. Among historians and ethnologists, all variants seem to have occurred.169 Whether heartfelt or unintended, the results of their research, nevertheless, lent themselves to the praise of national virtues, to the construct of continuous Germanic history, and to the claim of German racial and cultural superiority. Thus, they served the overall interests of the Nazi leadership by employing Indianthusiast themes. Most texts on German colonial achievements emphasized German participation in the discovery, exploration, and conquest of the Americas. One author presented a detailed list of individuals, such as missionaries, pioneers, investors, scholars, and chroniclers, as well as institutions.170 His and other similar articles gave an overview of German participation in colonization but also seemed intent on revising the colonial canon, that is, offering their readers a different picture than mainstream history had hitherto provided: new expeditions appeared on the historical atlas. The achievements of leaders of the better-known expeditions were reinterpreted to grant German participants more importance. Examples of these exploits include a shift of emphasis from popular Conquistador missions in Mexico and Peru to the contract colonies of the merchant houses of Fugger and Welser. These colonies enabled the Nazis to assert land claims in Brazil and Venezuela. The explorations and missionary work of Fray Eusebio Kino (1644–1711) on the Pacific coast and in the Sonoran desert and of other individuals, such as Samuel Stalnaker’s (1705–1768) exploration of the Cumberland Gap, also received new attention.171 Great emphasis was placed on the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470–1522), who had come up with the name “America.” According to most of these texts, Americans ought to be grateful to Germans for their contributions to the nation’s exploration, naming, and settlement.172 Americans, likewise, should embrace Germanness as an integral part of their own national heritage, and they should not let Great Britain use them as pawns in a conflict that did not affect American interests.173 These reinterpretations of colonial history even prompted some authors to claim that the ethnic composition of America included about 40 million Germans or Americans with Germanic blood. America was, thus, essentially a Germanic continent. Exclamations of “Our America” and speculations about German-friendly attitudes among the U.S. populace abounded and raised the ire of many American observers.174 During the early twentieth century, historical debates about evidence of pre-Columbian expeditions to America increased. The German media eagerly

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picked up on these debates, especially since they offered opportunities to emphasize German participation or leadership. Articles that appeared in this context often likened the expeditions to nations competing in a sport. Highlighting pre-Columbian (Germanic) expeditions suggested that the colonial powers did not have a legitimate claim to the trophy of discovery and conquest, which provided a valve for reducing German colonial envy. These challenges to legitimacy were usually combined with claims about national character traits. Authors claimed that the Norsemen’s expeditions to North America around a.d. 1000 were of greater value than Columbus’s voyage because their equipment was less sophisticated, and thus their voyages had been more challenging.175 One author pointed out that Columbus had sailed West because he had heard about the Viking voyages and, therefore, was not a genuine explorer as his risks were considerably lower.176 Egmont Zechlin quoted Georg Friederici’s 1936 work Der Charakter der Entdeckung in which Eric the Red, the founder of the Viking settlement on Greenland, was called the “first state-founder on American soil.” Zechlin compared Columbus unfavorably as a person to Eric the Red, declaring that the “raucous, pagan German appears to us in a completely different greatness than Colon who, even regarding all his accomplishments, was not a man of formidable qualities, lacked a strong character and was a failure both as a colonizer and as an administrator.”177 Discussions of pre-Columbian contact between America and other hemispheres ranged from debating the value of various expeditions, highlighting accidental contact, and finding similarities in sagas that could point to prehistoric migrations. The 1471–1473 voyage of Hans Pothorst and Didrik Pining in a joint Portuguese-Danish endeavor featured prominently among the expeditions discussed.178 Typical arguments for pre-Columbian contact stressed evidence of presumably Christian iconography in Mesoamerica.179 These arguments and speculations attracted interest as they were exotic and mysterious. Since speculations could not be proven, they invited overt praise of Germanic features and achievements, even though such arguments did not clearly reflect a propaganda effort. It must be assumed that editors found the publication of such texts to be a “safe,” lower-risk measure than discussion of current affairs. Speculations about a pre-Columbian biological exchange between Germans and American aboriginals and attempts to appropriate Columbus and the Conquistadors as “Nordic” types, on the other hand, reflected more obvious propaganda aims.180 Possible pre-Columbian Germanic expeditions to America and intermarriage between these explorers and the Native population supported several German claims to discovering and contributing to America. First, German(ic) people could claim the trophy of discovery. Second, peaceful intermarriage between Germanic settlers and Natives set a positive example for colonization without genocide. Third, if Germanic people had contributed to Indian cultures, the Indians had to be counted as quasi-Germans. Therefore,

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these discussions allowed Germanic people to stake a claim to American land and to believe they had proven the Indianthusiast notion of having common biological, cultural, and mental traits with Indians. These claims were primarily based on explorers’ stories about “white Indians,” on archeological artifacts indicating a pre-Columbian presence of Norsemen in the interior of the North American continent, and on Native stories about strange visitors the respective tribe had encountered long before.181 Conspicuously, the texts that spread these speculations interpreted intermarriage as generating improvement in the cultural customs, technology, and physical beauty of the Native group.182 Naturally, these judgments came from a Eurocentric viewpoint. For example, many early stories these claims were based on described remote tribes whose members were blond and blue-eyed: Eurocentric attributes of “physical beauty.” It was similar with the ideas of “skilled craftsmanship” that the texts propagated. Contemporary German media did not question these Eurocentric assumptions and backed the claims with reference to archeological findings. The Viking expeditions to North America and Greenland had great appeal in the German media between the 1920s and 1940s. In part, this reflected archeological discoveries and academic debates about their authenticity, as in the case of the so-called Kensington Rune Stone, but colonialist longing also played a large role in the popularity of these topics.183 The travels of Eric the Red and his son Leif Eriksson were a fertile field, spawning a wide range of publications from academic papers and newspaper articles to magazine features about archeology, ancient sagas, nautical issues, and even manuals for teaching history in elementary schools. Whether the German media and popular historians fell victim to hoaxes is irrelevant to this study. Instead, it is important to note that the public debate on the possibility of a Norman exploration or even colonization of North America stirred up widespread interest among the populace and delivered starting points for propaganda. Writers based their essays about Viking exploits in North America on two pillars: on the medieval sagas, reports, and logs of early explorers, and on archeological findings, many of which remain contested today. While most newspaper articles only mentioned the two major sagas about the voyages to Vinland in passing, Felix Genzmer’s book Germanische Seefahrt und Seegeltung dedicated two chapters to a detailed discussion of the Erikssaga and the Greenland Saga and their legacy in the historiography of the Vinland voyages.184 Genzmer’s discussion of both texts included a critical analysis of their production, and of their authors’ probable intention in publishing and distributing them within the context of ancient Germanic culture. This source criticism gave Genzmer ample opportunity dogmatically to denounce Christianity, as he could blame the monks who wrote down the hitherto oral Erikssaga for having distorted the story. Genzmer pointed out that the monks had included divine miracles and interpreted setbacks in the expeditions as God’s punishment for pagan rituals. In this source

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criticism, Genzmer was clearly following neo-pagan and anti-Christian notions in Nazi-dominated German academic history.185 While his critical approach constituted a sophisticated academic analysis of ancient stories whose content could not yet be backed by archeological evidence, he also revealed a propagandistic slant toward overt praise of Germanic exploits, as well. He portrayed Vikings as “Northern Germans,” thus appropriating Scandinavian history for Nazi depictions of Germanic greatness.186 Archeological findings discussed during the 1930s seemed to add authenticity to the claims of pre-Columbian Viking settlements in and expeditions to North America. Among the most important and most widely discussed finding was the Kensington Rune Stone, discovered near Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898, by a Swedish-American farmer. The stone bears rune symbols indicating that an expedition of eight Swedes and twenty-two Norwegians had camped at the site where the stone was found in 1362, about ten days’ travel away from where they had left their main force along with their large boats.187 The fact that a European expedition apparently had visited areas so far inland seemed to suggest that Viking voyages to North America had been conducted over a long time span and on a regular basis, thus indicating systematic exploration and contact with Natives, which further supported claims of Germanic discovery. By conveniently ignoring that the Viking era had long since been over by 1362, authors revealed their penchant for using snippets of historical knowledge and academic debate for propaganda as long as these snippets promised to confirm what doctrine prescribed. The debate on the location of Vinland, the place where Leif Eriksson had wintered on his first American expedition in a.d. 1000, further strengthened these claims. Although the German media did not settle on a particular location, the constant mentioning of place names ranging from Labrador to Florida created a sense of widespread Viking exploration.188 The discussion of Viking artifacts such as weapons, coins, and tools that had been found (sometimes after having been placed by hoaxers) at different sites along the East Coast and in the Great Lakes area nurtured this perception.189 With artifacts found in so many different locations, along with climate and rune markers indicating many different locations as possible landfall sites, the “Germanic” exploration of North America appeared to be almost comprehensive and could not be dismissed as isolated and coincidental sightings of strange coast lines. One thing that is clear from these texts is that the media were interested in presenting an image of systematic Germanic exploration. But to what end? A major propagandistic aim, as the following examples will show, was to prove that Germans had indeed been “there” first. One author had already interpreted the Viking expeditions as proof of the “energetic” character of the Nordic peoples in 1928, a traditional claim that was continued in the 1930s and 1940s.190 Hitler argued in his second book that a people confined to a small homeland had to exchange exported goods for food, or try to expand through conquest or colonization. The Nordic race, as evident in

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the Vikings’ expansion, had used its racial talents (energy, adventurous spirit, and ferocity) to escape the barren mountains of Scandinavia. In doing so, the expanding race had had to carefully maintain contact with the entrepreneurs on the forefront of such expansion, Hitler added as a warning, or risk losing the valuable blood elements they offered as their ties would be severed to the mother country. The Vikings, in Hitler’s eyes, had proven themselves worthy of such expansion by their success but had been unable to exploit this expansion and squandered their historical chance.191 Another text pointed out that “the unscientific Vikings, of all people” had managed to establish a seafaring tradition and contribute to a majority of early European discoveries. The author emphasized that a German named Tyrkir, who was a member of Leif Eriksson’s crew, identified wine plants in the new country. Thus, the name Vinland was a German coinage for the new continent as well as the name Amerika.192 These texts make it apparent that although Germany had not been a colonial power in the Americas, authors in the Third Reich followed the colonial tradition of naming a place in order to own it. Such texts emphasized the racial talents of Germanic sailors as much as the unsophisticated technology and the harsher conditions of travel in the Northern Atlantic, which presumably dwarfed Columbus’s achievement in comparison.193 Once the Germans and their ancestors were established as outstanding sailors and explorers in the German media and in popular history, questions arose as to why Germany had not emerged as a leading colonial power, why these early Nordic expeditions had petered out, and why the small colonies had been abandoned. These debates revealed the deep inferiority complex and colonial envy that many Germans felt and which the Nazis exploited. They also provided opportunities for propagating Nazi arguments about the Germans as a master race, about the necessity for racial unity and race-consciousness, and for the presumed lacking will for power among medieval Germanic leaders. A few texts analyzed the reasons why the American and Greenland settlements had failed and drew broader cultural-historical conclusions about these failures. One argued that these settlements had been too small to serve as footholds against the much more populous Native population, especially after the Natives had been alienated and the first colonial conflicts over resources and trade had broken out. These texts referred to both Native Americans in general and to the Inuit who migrated East to Greenland in large numbers during the fourteenth century. The Norsemen did not differentiate between Eskimos and Indians more generally and summarily called both groups of Natives Skrælinger (weaklings).194 These discussions bore no traces of the fellow tribesmen motif, and their tone was primarily one of mourning Germanic colonial failure. They postulated that the Norwegian kings’ main interest in exploiting the Greenland settlement through the Norwegian trade monopoly and by imposing high taxes on the settlers caused this failure. Both of these practices resulted in a lack of manpower and ships for further settlement in and expeditions to America, and slowly strangled the Greenland settlements as

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well.195 Thus, the Norwegian kings were to blame for having squandered a chance to develop an early Nordic empire and, indirectly, for having caused the troubles of contemporary Germans. The notion of a squandered historical chance led some authors to speculate about alternative histories with successful Germanic settlement. “How were the Norwegians supposed to realize at the turn of the millennium that America provided them with a chance to sow the seeds of a world empire?” one author demanded to know.196 Instead of supplying the young colonies with settlers and ocean-going vessels, the Norsemen busied themselves with conquering the British Isles, which was only partly successful, and forcefully suppressing the Norse religion. Thus, they had “frittered away their energies” and opened the door to foreign encroachment. This ignorance continued over centuries, since “even when Hakon Hakonson [sic] extended his reign over Iceland and Greenland during the thirteenth century, he did not realize that now, close to him, a gate stood open through which he could have led his people into a steep rise ending only at the summit of world dominance.”197 Musing on what might have been, another author developed a vision of a transatlantic Germania that would have prevented the threats that twentieth-century Germans presumably faced from Romance/ Mediterranean civilization. These threats entailed the entire range of cultural pessimist notions from anti-Christian sentiments to the rejection of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: “However, the transatlantic continent, in a development based on the foundations of ancient Germanic culture, would have evolved into a Greater Iceland and would have strengthened all these forces that have been preserved in ‘Ultima Tulhe’ [sic] in opposition to Mediterranean culture.”198 The various expressions in the debate on the discovery and settlement of America revealed a continued German interest in the American continents. They constitute an exception in the otherwise almost continuous line of applications of the fellow tribesmen motif. However, they exploited typical notions that also nurtured the fellow tribesmen and the common enemy motifs on other occasions: they mixed colonial envy and opposition to “the West” with public praise for Germanic explorers and settlers and with an emphasis on the Germanic world’s missed chance for greatness of 1,000 years before that Germany would now seize.

Unity and Race Consciousness: Germans and Indians in Comparison Let us young ones treasure the memory of the Indians as men worth their salt. Besides, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the Indian race had to become extinct because it did not discover this inner determination which a people absolutely needs to retain its freedom and its rights. —Werner Kallmerten, “Der Untergang der Azteken,” 15.

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The question of unity was paramount in German concepts of identity, in German interpretations of historical events, and in the nation’s discussion of Native Americans. Of course, unity was needed to form the German empire as a nationstate in the nineteenth century, but thoughts about unity persisted thereafter, as well, permeating the discussion of World War I and its catastrophic aftermath. In the 1920s, the German media deliberately made a link between the Treaty of Versailles and treaty-making on the frontier, so it is not surprising that unity also played a role in comparisons of Germans and Indians. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the idea of unity was taken up in the Volksgemeinschaft of the Nazis, and reflections on race consciousness complemented the discussion of unity. The history of colonialism in the Americas was interpreted through the racial lens. Since the different Native peoples were often understood as one race, the demise of Indians in their struggle against European colonizers could easily be explained as resulting from a lack of Indian race consciousness that had prevented Indian tribes from unifying under one leader into one single entity. These reflections occurred mostly in popular media, Indian fiction, and in political treatises, but they sometimes leaned on academic essays that stressed similar points.199 Discussions of unity and race consciousness offered opportunities for employing the fellow tribesmen motif but also for asserting Germanic superiority: the Indians’ colonization generally served as a cautionary tale about helplessness, which Germans supposedly had escaped by uniting under Nazi leadership. In 1923, Jakob Hauer portrayed Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh’s brother and the prophet of a religious revival movement, as one of the first pan-Indian unifiers. The prophet, along with his brother, condemned alcohol and alien witchcraft as well as Native infighting.200 Tecumseh’s pan-Indian movement was very popular among German writers as the idea of uniting formerly quarreling but related tribes under charismatic leaders lent itself to comparison with Germany. In such a comparison, the German “tribes,” and the opposing German classes, could be described as being in need of a similarly charismatic unifier. Authors looked to the Germanic tribal past to find examples of such historical unifiers, zeroing in on Arminius, for example. Parallels between him and Native American leaders abounded, as in Eckstein’s text on Sitting Bull. This comparison is remarkable because it exemplifies typical German interpretations of frontier history as a self-inflicted Indian failure. Because many great Native leaders were killed by their own people, the stab-in-the-back motif was employed once more.201 Christian Feest states that the pan-Indian movements under Pontiac and Tecumseh might indeed have been related to German identity-formation and nationformation, either in consequence of the ideas spreading to German nationalists, or because they were seen as related by German observers.202 A 1924 text about Karl May’s Indian character Winnetou by Lisa Barthel-Winkler supports this interpretation as it identified the Indian drama with the German one: “The Indian drama is also the German drama. Winnetou is the noble man of his

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race—he knows about the purity of blood, the longing, and the hope of his brothers, but they have to founder because they are worn down by discord … This is Indian, this is also [typically] German.”203 Adolf Hitler likewise took up the notion of German tribalism and compared Germans to Indians. He constantly reminded Germans of their tribal ancestry and of the dangers for disunited tribes. Disunity meant weakness, so unity had to be achieved even if the process was violent and brutal.204 Since this process had lasted so long, Hitler argued, several disadvantages had befallen the German people. First, Germans had “come too late as a people,” which meant that the small principalities’ insistence on maintaining their particular privileges had prevented Germany’s rise as a colonial power.205 Second, the lack of a national identity and the continuing loyalty to small principalities had made it easier for Americans to integrate German immigrants into the American mainstream and thus dilute these immigrants’ sense of Germanness. Hitler even made a direct comparison to Native American history by suggesting that, in order to destroy the sense of unity among conquered Russians, the German occupation authorities should prohibit the establishment of any unifying umbrella institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church, and only allow local institutions. In his eyes, each Russian village needed to be as distinct as possible from others so that all the villages could be ruled more easily: “It could only be in our own interest if every village had its own sect and ideas of god. Even if this meant that some villages developed shamanic witch doctor cults such as the Negroes and the Indians, we could only appreciate it as it would increase dividing moments in Russian space.”206 In his analysis of the German Youth movement and its appropriation by the Nazis, Michael Jovy points out that Youth movement publications always related their essays and short stories to some morals compatible with Nazi doctrine when non-Aryans were featured.207 As a result, the 1938 story “Der Todeskampf der Sioux” featured the Götterdämmerung motif of heroic Indians who preferred to fight despite poor prospects and vastly inferior numbers and die rather than surrender, and also interpreted it as a cautionary tale: the Sioux people had not been “strong and unified enough to withstand the advance of the whites.”208 Similar notions led back to Tecumseh and to internal Nazi debates about the eligibility of Indians as role models for the German youth. In his defense of Indian fiction, Erhard Wittek explained that the issues of unity and race consciousness that came up in these works provided important lessons for German children. Tecumseh, he said, had to fail “because he did not have a people behind him and no true entourage, but clans, families, individual tribes, or leagues of tribes; the Indians were a race—but not a people.”209 Friedrich Schauwecker presented an overview of the history between whites and Indians in North America in a newspaper article in 1938. A number of similar articles were published in the late 1930s and 1940s, all of which appear to be collections of stereotypes, historical misinterpretations, and anti-American

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sentiments. Schauwecker emphasized the lack of unity among Indians as the reason for Tecumseh’s failure. In his text, the Nazi identification of race with nation and the interpretation of the frontier as a race war becomes obvious as much as the social Darwinist notion of life as struggle and as the constant competition for Lebensraum among peoples: “After the last great attempt of the Indians under the Shavanno Tecunseh [sic] failed between 1806–1811, one could regard the Indians’ attempts [to maintain] their independence as a national entity and their right to the North American continent as their own as ultimately having failed. That sealed the Indians’ fate. The rallying cry ‘America to the Indians,’ even though it was never sounded in this fashion, faded unheard and without results.”210 Following the typical argumentation, Schauwecker contended that these results should not be mourned because they were the Indians’ manifest destiny, but at the same time he employed Romantic notions that called for mourning and sentimentality. Admitting that Indians still existed on reservations, he contemptuously dismissed alcoholism and poverty as natural results of racial degeneration and added that, under these conditions, Indians were even less capable of any “united achievements.”211 Yet, the German media was not consistent in their portrayal of Indians as disunited and lacking race consciousness, which led to contradictions between texts on indigenous issues. Some texts reveal the typical pragmatism in presenting foreign and contradictory issues to readers. In the article in Völkischer Beobachter about the Indians’ eugenic practices discussed above, it was in the interest of the argument to claim that indigenous peoples were indeed race conscious; otherwise, examples of indigenous infanticide could not have been presented as active measures for preserving racial purity, and they could not have been exploited as role models for euthanasia.212 Similarly, as the earlier observations on Nazi assumptions about a Native revival have illustrated, some writers asserted that Natives in South America were (re-)learning to appreciate the power of race consciousness. They attributed the current weakness of the “Indian race” to shortcomings similar to the weaknesses in pre-imperial Germany, as “it was due to the same mistakes to which our own ancestors owed their political impotence, namely, the lack of unity and race consciousness … Throughout history, Indians have been pitted against Indians as much as Germans against Germans.”213 Another author added that education would reawaken race consciousness organically since the traditions and customs of Native communities were still alive in Latin America.214 On numerous occasions, propagandistic reflections on unity and race consciousness among Indians offered helpful lessons for Germans. The history of Native-white relations showed that disunity led to defeat, a notion Germans could relate to regarding their long process of nation-formation before 1871, and their internal strife after World War I. These notions were advantageous for Nazi propaganda because they could instill fear by referring back to the dark history of both Germans and Indians; at the same time, they could ensure loyalty by point-

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ing out that Hitler and the Nazis had ended that period for Germans. In general, we can conclude that the uses of both tropes of praising Germanic achievements in the discovery and settlement of the Americas and representing unity among Indians and Germans point to inconsistency in the Nazi application of Indian imagery. The fellow tribesmen motif was not always useful for ensuring loyalty to the leadership among the populace. Therefore, the expedient application of Indianthusiast tropes followed the main goals of propaganda, namely, to ensure loyalty, to justify policies, to instill national pride, and to raise opposition to the ideals and policies of foreign powers.

Warrior Ethos, Playing Indian, and the Indian Scout Syndrome

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Our boyhood dreams of the Karl May era have become reality here; complete with stalking, killing from ambush, sudden raids and punitive expeditions. Instead of war bonnets in our hair we wear silver oak leaf collar patches; only for scalping have we not found a suitable substitute. —Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Free Corps volunteer, in Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 1:468.

The image of Native Americans, in Germany as elsewhere, always included notions of war and fighting. Characterizing them as presumably able fighters was used to denounce or to idealize them. In the United States, a prolonged history of frontier conflict, augmented by corresponding popular frontier myths, has resulted in a collective memory of Indians as fighters. Eventually, the warrior cliché became independent of Native American realities, and warrior terminology came to be applied to virtually anyone regarded as an outstanding fighter, thus fostering a mental link between “Indian” and “war.” This identification of Indians with fighting allows for an extension of Holm’s notion of the Indian Scout Syndrome—the assumption that Native soldiers must be good fighters on account of their cultural, or even racial, heritage215—to everyday language, since it employed preconceptions and clichés about Native fighting abilities to discuss general soldierly achievements. Recurring in front reports by correspondents in German (and American) newspapers, warrior terminology illustrates the use of Indian imagery for war propaganda. The cultural practice of playing Indian was linked to pre-military training during the Nazi era, further exploiting warrior images for the propaganda effort. The mythologization of frontier conflicts through popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic incorporated Indian warfare terminology into colloquial American English and into German in ways that have persisted up to the present. The remarks of government officials during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina crisis that citizens were waiting for the cavalry to come to the rescue decoratively illus-

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trate this.216 In Germany, similar colloquialisms developed because of Indianthusiasm and its manifestations. Seeing real Indians in Wild West shows perform the plots known from Western novels prompted many German children and adolescents to re-enact them in their own games. With little effort, one could make an “Indian” outfit, and “become an Indian.”217 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Indian warfare idioms are alive and well in German language and media. Most prominently, German Federal Minister of Finance Peer Steinbrück (SPD), in attacking the Swiss for aiding German tax dodgers in 2009, called the Swiss “rogue Indians” who could only be intimidated into submission by the “financial cavalry,” that is, international financial regulatory institutions.218 Although most Germans never had any direct contact with Native Americans, the German language gradually adopted Indian warrior terminology.219 Germans were at ease burying the hatchet (das Kriegsbeil begraben) and smoking the peace pipe (die Friedenspfeife rauchen) after having returned from the warpath (Kriegspfad). German children learned early on that an Indian never cries (ein Indianer weint nicht) because he does not know pain (ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz). These idioms and terms constantly reaffirmed Indian warrior stereotypes. At the same time, German children, on all social levels, practiced the role of “Indian” by spending their free time out in the woods or in urban parks waging “Indian wars” against each other. Indian warrior imagery was then carried on from childhood into adult life, namely, into the armed forces. It appears that, with the advent of Indianthusiasm, Indian terminology entered the German soldiers’ lexicon, as well (Figure 16). Several dictionaries of soldier jargon from World War I to today’s Bundeswehr document Indian references. While one would expect most of the warfare expressions mentioned above to have been incorporated into soldier language, however, none of them were listed in the dictionaries. German-speaking soldiers throughout the twentieth century were known to have called a company commander “Chief ” [Häuptling] (probably due to its similarity to the pronunciation of Hauptmann), and they invented diverse nicknames alluding to the Blackfeet tribe when labeling the infantry. Predictably, surgeons and corpsmen were called “medicine men.”220 Some cloaked the boredom of peeling potatoes during kitchen detail by talking about “scalping the ones in Field-Grey.”221 Oakleaf insignia on collar patches were called “eagle feathers,” and a feigned illness was an “Indian disease,” referring to the Native Americans’ reputation for ruses of war.222 When English-speaking pilots during World War II warned each other of approaching enemy planes over the radio, they would call out “bandits!” Their German counterparts cried “Indianer!”223 The interrelation of playing Indian and training for war is further revealed in the German soldier’s coinage of “Indian game” for field training, “Indian village” for training camp, and “prairie” for the actual training grounds.224 These few examples apparently cover the scope of recorded “Indian” terminology in the realm of soldiering, yet the image of the

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Figure 16. “Freilichttheater an der Front.” German World War I field postcard, c. 1916, courtesy of Karl Markus Kreis. It depicts a scene from the front stage play “We Savages Are the Better People, After All,” referring to a popular slogan of the Wandervogel movement and to Johann Gottfried Seume’s poem “Der Wilde.”225 The sign in the background explains that the structure shown in the photograph is the “Wigwam of the Jelly Indians,” including a jelly jar from a field kitchen.

cunning Indian scout and fierce fighter was present in German army life even without being recorded in the dictionary. On the other side of the Atlantic, the frontier myth had turned the Indian warrior into a stock character. Fighting traits, such as cunning, stealth, superior vision, and endurance, were attributed to Native Americans (and later adopted by white frontiersmen). This image has persisted up to the present, having been applied, for example, to soldiers in the Vietnam War. In his study on the Native experience in Vietnam, Tom Holm, himself a veteran of that war, coined the phrase “Indian Scout Syndrome” to describe the common practice he observed of Native American soldiers being assigned to particularly dangerous tasks on the grounds of their cultural heritage. Indianness, apparently, predestined an individual to be qualified for soldiering. Holm and others refer to similar experiences of Native veterans in other wars, especially when irregular warfare was involved.226 Several dignitaries in World War II praised the alleged fighting abilities of Native Americans. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, for example, ascribed to the Indian warrior: “… endurance, rhythm, a feeling for timing, coordination, sense perception, an uncanny ability to get over any sort of terrain at night, and better

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than all else, an enthusiasm for fighting. He takes a rough job and makes a game of it. Rigors of combat hold no terrors for him; severe discipline and hard duties do not deter him.”227 With the German adoption and reinforcement of the Indian warrior image through Romantic literature, Wild West shows, and playacting, it must be assumed that the Indian Scout Syndrome, at least to some extent, was transferred onto the German popular perception of what being “Indian” entails. Anecdotes told by Native veterans of World War II demonstrate that Germans tended to be apprehensive when encountering “real Indian warriors.” Kenneth Townsend, in an analysis of Native Americans in World War II, cites a case of a German general warning his troops during World War I that “the most dangerous of the American soldiers is the Indian.”228 Hitler supposedly told his soldiers on the Eastern front that Russians fought “like Indians.”229 Regardless of whether Hitler actually uttered these remarks in public, it is clear that German soldiers’ upbringing in the Indianthusiast environment and their familiarity with Indians in popular culture made them anticipate something typically Indian when contemplating an encounter with Native American GIs. In other words, they suffered from their own sort of Indian Scout Syndrome like the American officers in expecting ferocity and savagery simply because their adversary was Native American. Just as the military on both the German and Allied sides assumed special soldierly qualifications of Native Americans, the media on both sides likewise equated “Indian” with “efficient soldier” in particular settings. Indian ideas could be applied to underscore the superior fighting skills of the winning side or the merciless massacre of the losing side. Regardless of who was labeled “Indian” and for what type of setting, the practice of labeling demonstrates the presence of the warrior stereotype both in the American and German media and among American and German readers who were supposed to understand and appreciate the allusions. A common scenario depicted one side as Indians because of the soldiers’ ferocity, their irregular approach to warfare, or their ability to use terrain to their advantage. An American article from 1942 informed its readers that German general staff officers admired the Soviets’ fighting spirit, despite official German propaganda declarations to the contrary. The author explained that “German soldiers spread among themselves legends which are almost superstitions about Russians in forest fighting, attributing to them power supposedly possessed by the American Indian, such as detecting the stir of a blade of grass a mile away.”230 Clearly, these German soldiers were affected by their memories of similar exploits in Karl May’s novels and were harried by the prospects of fighting an enemy they perceived as extremely dangerous. The American editor reproduced this German image of Russians as Indians, obviously finding it suitable for interpreting the situation. Given the parallels in everyday language, in the perception of Native Americans as warlike peoples and of alleged, typical “Indian” fighting styles in Ameri-

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can and German popular culture, one would expect the German media to have appropriated the warrior image in war reports to a similar extent. However, there are very few explicit references to the Indian warrior that hint at a German appropriation of the Indian warrior image in front reports.231 In one example in the aftermath of D-Day, an infantry captain quoted foreign sources saying the Allied forces were having great troubles with German snipers. He praised the sniper as a soldier of superior qualities and training who, “quite Indian-like, stalks the terrain and thus has become some kind of ‘Leatherstocking of the Infantry.’”232 The author was obviously pleased with the Americans’ awe at the Germans’ ability to fight in ways that both sides would know from Indian novels. German papers used references to the warrior cliché chiefly in reports on irregular, especially guerrilla, warfare in the USSR, Italy, and the Balkans, or on particularly rough combat conditions.233 Fighting on mountains and in forests, ambushes, night patrols, and hand-to-hand combat related to the typical image adopted from Indian and Western settings. In Italy, rugged terrain provided for many of these surprising combat situations, and the ethnic diversity of troops deployed there further lent itself to the brutal savage trope. Describing how Allied troops easily infiltrated isolated German positions and suddenly attacked from the rear, one Nazi correspondent concluded: “This kind of Boy Scout warfare suits the Americans fine, and especially some of the aboriginal peoples [i.e., Gurkhas from the colonial East Indian troop contingent] whom the Allies have roped into doing the dirty work.”234 Superhuman qualities, though, enabled Germans to overcome all these difficulties, the correspondent continued, since “in the end, it is neither the rain nor the malice of the canyons that block the enemies’ advance, but only the bravery and endurance of our soldiers.”235 As in Westerns of both American and German making, this reporter assured readers, the white race would “out-Indian” both the Asian and the American Indians. The image of the Wild West was always present among the German soldiers and public; they were told to expect lawlessness, brutality, and insidiousness from American soldiers as part of the American cultural heritage, and from Soviet soldiers as part of their racial heritage and their nature as Communists.236 Denouncing American preparations for war as criminal, one article quoted a Baltimore Sun report on soldier training: “We need to teach our youth not to say ‘sorry’ when they cut loose, but to creep up to the evil, slimy … enemy from behind and kill him.”237 Germans had been the first to ruthlessly ignore the Geneva and Hague warfare conventions during their campaigns in Poland and Russia, yet Nazi authors likened the combat style of Soviet soldiers and American “terror bombers” to banditry and gun-slinging on the American frontier. But, as one author said, German-dominated Europe would not “perform as Indians for these … scalp-bounty-hunting boys.”238 These examples show how easily the label “Indian” could be switched from Russians to Germans or to Americans, change

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meaning from fierce soldier to helpless victim, and thus lost any correlation to the people and situations it originally signified. Terrain and climatic conditions inspired German soldiers to apply knowledge from Westerns and other stories about Native Americans and even the Inuit. A number of German papers showed soldiers in snowshoes; one article claimed “You can learn even from the Eskimos!” and described how mountain rangers built igloos for shelter.239 This example shows the Nazis’ pragmatism in applying cultural traits of “primitive” peoples for the sake of winning the war. By adopting Inuit technical knowledge such as that involved in making igloos and snowshoes, the German army followed the parallel tracks of high technology and borrowed traditional methods, often with bizarre results. Harsh conditions were often invoked to explain to the home front why the series of Blitzkriege had ended in Russian mud.240 On the one hand, they offered an opportunity to praise Germans’ effortlessness in meeting the challenge—the quality of German soldiers’ was contrasted with inferior Russian barbarism. On the other hand, portraying Russians as Indians could justify the German soldiers’ sudden lack of efficiency whenever such adverse conditions needed explanation. Depicting the other as primitive and close to nature, in this case, expressed both an excuse for one’s own soldierly shortcomings and one’s admiration for the primitive, the natural-born warrior. The following passage, using almost the same wording as Harold Ickes in his description of Native American GIs, demonstrates how arbitrary the application of the primitive warrior stereotype became: “The peoples of the East … are, by nature, warlike, accustomed to hunger and hardship, comparable to no European in their contentedness, and they have the excellent eyesight of people who are more at home in the forests and fields than the large offices and high-rises of the asphalt cities.”241 When the German Landsers’ apparent transformation into “Indians” in Italy and Normandy is compared to German depictions of Soviet and Yugoslav partisans and regulars as Indians, one cannot but wonder about the ease with which the Indian warrior label was slapped onto so many different soldiers in ever-differing settings. It is part of the more general ambivalence in the German appropriation and exploitation of Indian imagery. Given the Nazis’ pragmatism in their application of propaganda and warfare methods, it is not surprising that the Indian warrior label casually switched meaning from hero to villain and from warrior to victim, and even crossed the officially strict ideological borders of racial purity. Otherwise, heralding non-Aryans as role models would have been impossible. With everyday German language, and even soldiers’ jargon to some extent, laced with Indian terms like American English and soldier slang, why did German war reports not explicitly use Indian terminology just as often? It would seem that such allusions would have drawn notice and helped the populace understanding and support the cause. There are two—partially overlapping—

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possible answers.242 On the one hand, it was simply unnecessary, since the mental link from certain types of warfare to Indian images occurred automatically. In dozens of autobiographies, German veterans commented on the memories of childhood games that their actual combat experience stirred.243 On the other hand, there may have been some reluctance toward adopting Indian references in the context of warfare because many would have regarded playing Indian as childish, and thus as unfit for the serious realm of military issues, propaganda, and politics. Deborah Allen’s reflection on Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts discussed in the above section on the Youth movement suggests such a reluctance.244 While newspaper feature articles or editorial comments would have allowed for such allusions to virtually everybody’s childhood memories, the language of German war reports, although picturesque, avoided comparisons to Indians more often than not. It seems that imagining, performing, and discussing Indian warrior topics was interwoven with the process of maturing. In the academic debate about the influence of Indianthusiasm on German politics, and especially on the Nazis’ effort to radicalize the German youth, many scholars have pointed out similarities between playing Indian and preparing for war. Most notably, histories of the reception of Karl May’s novels have been part of this controversy. Barbara Haible included a section on playing Indian in her analysis of Indian novels in regard to militarization.245 The number of primary sources addressing the youth and the memorandums of educators illustrate how important the Indian Scout Syndrome and corresponding customs of playing Indian were in World War II and its preparatory phase. They reveal that playing Indian was more a directed, graded, and playful preparation for war than harmless horseplay. The common practice of playing Indian could easily be infiltrated and exploited in approaches to propaganda and militarization after 1933. Since these experiences were shared beyond the children of active Nazis, all layers of society could be reached. The continuum of people affected by such childhood memories ranged from Adolf Hitler through the works of several famous authors, writers, and journalists, to common people such as David and Arnold Weininger, two Jewish boys from Leipzig, whose reverence for Karl May made them don Indian costumes for the Tauchischer Jahrmarkt.246 Children playing Indian were such a common sight that the theme was even used for commercial advertisements (Figure 17). In a 1930 feature, the Illustrierte Zeitung published a telling example of boys acting out Indian games. In other settings and with other regalia, this could easily be construed as gang riots or war games and was representative of all social levels.247 Detailed descriptions of the games’ plots in the article “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt” reveal typical Karl May and Wild West show themes, such as the stake, tomahawks, captivity, rescue, Indians wearing war bonnets, and the council fire (Figure 18). It is interesting to note how the author recognized “law and order” in “the old games” of contemporary youngsters. Children, “roaming

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Figure 17. “Nix wie ran.” Newspaper advertisement for a soft drink featuring children playing Indians. In Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (29 May 1938). This 1938 commercial advertises a product that does not have any relation to Native Americans or even to playing Indians, but the ad assumes that mothers throughout the country can relate to the depicted situation: thirsty children coming home from playing Indian.

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Figure 18. “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt (Wild West at the Edge of the City).” Scenes from a feature about urban children playing Indian. In G. Haase, “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt,” Illustrierte Zeitung (30 April 1930).

the area in packs,” revived “times and conditions long forgotten.”248 The picturesque language of this feature also notes a similar “poetic quality” in the children’s games. Typical for Indian novels, this style was apparently used to make the piece somewhat more colorful, but the narrator’s voice also carried a tone of superior adult haughtiness. The other striking feature in the text was the obvious ease with which the transformation from boy into “bloodthirsty redskin” seemed to take place—the author took for granted that readers would automatically assume that “becoming an Indian” meant that the impersonator would “feel the insurmountable thirst for blood awaken inside.”249 When children spent their free time this way, they did not realize that concerted attempts to turn these innocent games into preparations for war would commence after 1933. As Haible points out, the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps promoted the value of Karl May’s stories for a playful preparation for war in 1937.250 May’s characters Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were described as ideal Military Phys-

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ical Education teachers because they combined adventure with instruction.251 Numerous articles transmitted to children that playing Indian was a basis for future soldiering, and soldiers often remembered Karl May stories and reflected on them being advantageous in combat.252 Karl Otten, a contemporary American author, explained in 1942 that May’s invincible characters made German children strive to achieve the impossible. In his view, having played Indian as a child fortified a German boy for the rest of his life against weakness and desperation, since May proved the unending success of German will and inventiveness.253 The Waffen-SS used the same claim to invincibility when touring the Reich on drives for new volunteers.254 Apart from all adventure and playfulness, the positive references to playing Indians and war conveyed a system of order and suggested a graded initiation to soldiering among German children in which Indian games played a decisive role. In a 1941 article, Franz Schauwecker related the story of a young German soldier in France who was suddenly struck by his childhood memories: One day, while playing Indian, he had happened upon a column of marching soldiers.255 Enthralled by the splendor and precision of lines of marching men, he lost track of the time and returned home late, fearing an austere father’s punishment. Much to the boy’s surprise, he was not reprimanded. Instead, his father took him aside and told him stories of his own front experience in the trenches of World War I, as well as other ancestors’ war stories. These stories made the boy “forget his games as … Indian so that the only thing he could do is listen.”256 After such an initiation to manhood, the boy was determined to become a soldier, go back to France one day, and finish the job his father had been unable to complete, namely, capturing the city of Reims. This incident clearly demonstrates a perceived process of maturing that might help explain the absence of “Indian talk” in German war reporting. Although a popular pastime among German children across the social stratum, Indian games were expected to mature into real soldiering, which belonged to the realm of adults. While there was nothing wrong with playing Indian at a young age, a boy had to move on and become a man through serious military training. The image of the Indian scout served as a link between childhood and adulthood, between playful games and the civic duty of military service. Although the games ended at some point, the “Indian spirit” would accompany a soldier into the trenches, complemented by systematic military training. In a 1938 series of articles about Indians for the Hitler Youth magazine Der Pimpf, a fictitious boy and his father discussed the boy’s tinkering on an Indian outfit for his younger brother. He explained to his father that mere playing was good enough for little children, whereas the Hitler Youth played on an advanced level: “We conduct much more elaborate war games with our squad out there! We actually fight already. But Fritzchen and the other cubs, they just play Indians.”257 However, the younger one’s play was not considered idle by his adolescent

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brother: “Well, why shouldn’t they play Indian? It’s teaching them things for later … They sneak up on each other, tie each other to the stake, fence with wooden swords, make tents out of old blankets and sacks, and if you tell them about Karl May, they even forget dinner.”258 Playing Indian in the Nazi era, therefore, was seen as a necessary, early phase in a future soldier’s training and promoted in official periodicals of the Hitler Youth, such as Der Pimpf and Die HJ. Not coincidentally, the author of a 1938 article on scouting games, in explaining to his adolescent readers the interrelatedness of theory and practice, stated that one had to be literate in order to read, and enjoy, Karl May’s stories.259 Similarly, he argued, one had to learn how to “read” the terrain in order to succeed in a scouting game and thus learn for life: “After all, we don’t do these scouting games merely to determine the winners and losers. That would be superficial and, in the long run, boring. The emphasis is on ‘scouting,’ not on ‘game.’”260 In this argument, playing Indian, along with the fun of assuming roles, involves teaching children how to take advantage of terrain, to camouflage troops and conceal their movements, to lie in ambush, to outflank enemy positions, and the like. Casually mentioning the usefulness of these skills for the “serious business ahead,” the author instructed his squad leader readers in how to use play to strategically point out military methods and concepts to their units.261 At the next level of military training, the camouflage training and tactics sessions were practiced systematically, with more emphasis on the requirements of modern warfare and mass armies. A 1935 teachers’ manual provided very sophisticated game plans and training methods. This manual did not include explicit reference to Indians but nevertheless conveyed that youthful joy should spring from these activities. Gradual intensification of the games would add an element of sportsmanship and prepare the youth for actual fighting. Camouflage would be practiced in the woods at decreasing distances between camouflage teams and observers. Afterwards, the same tasks would be repeated in an open field, and eventually on a snowy plain, to increase the level of difficulty. The manual’s author was convinced that “only in a scouting game will a lad realize the value of good camouflage training and do everything to improve his skills.”262 The clichés of the Indian scout and the ferocious Indian brave were prevalent among German men who had grown into full soldiers. The morning scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) propaganda film Triumph of the Will shows a gigantic tent city with SA storm troopers and Hitler Youth playing games and splashing in water. Describing the scene as a gathering of “orderly German Indians,” Klaus Theweleit states that “the Romanticism of Karl May/the Germanic tribes” was an “anti-familial game of the unrestrained life. Laughing men, beautiful in their ugliness.”263 The great Wehrmacht field exercise near Bad Nauheim in 1936 made similar impressions on American observers such as Walter Millis. Having accidentally stumbled into the midst of a concealed position, he saw young German soldiers camouflaged and, unlike American soldiers on maneuver,

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who apparently could not forget they were part of a simulation, pretending to be in a real combat situation. “It seemed no problem with these strapping German youngsters, obviously having the time of their lives and playing war with all the deadly serious happiness and precision of 10-year-olds playing Indian.”264 What was dreadful about the war game of this new German army, said Millis, was the enthusiasm of the young soldiers who, at one moment, marched like an army of synchronized robots, and a moment later appeared as “healthy, cheerful, and individual German boys, hard at work and having the time of their lives.”265 As these examples illustrate, the Nazis’ attempt at merging the Indian warrior spirit with the requirements of a modern mass army proved successful. The gradual transition from horseplay to military instruction also came to the fore when front officers uttered informal remarks in the presence of young soldiers, as an autobiographical short story by writer Erich Loest suggests. A group of Hitler Youth, recruited into the short-lived and ill-fated Nazi guerrilla organization Werwolf, was dismissed from a briefing with the order to “go out there and prove you didn’t read Karl May for nothing.”266 This officer’s comment functions as an example of similar, more anecdotal references to soldiers reminiscing about Karl May’s bedtime stories. However, it could also be read as a sign of the late-war resignation of a career soldier having to work with children instead of seasoned veterans. At this point, we can reflect again on the proud report of German snipers in Normandy scaring American GIs: it gains more importance as it comes back full circle to scouting games and to early childlike horseplay. While snipers needed some “natural talent” to excel, the training efforts by both SA storm troopers and the Hitler Youth ensured the success of the massive deployment of sniper teams on the front most efficiently.267 This 1944 report read as if the Hitler Youth scouting game manuals were used as a model; the same skills and concepts practiced in the mid 1930s were now praised as war-winning skills of soldiers who might have been among the children playing only a few years before. Indeed, practicing these skills had proven useful for the former Hitler Youth in the “serious business” that they faced. If one started out assuming the role of “Indian” as a child, Nazi organizations would gradually help mold this individual into a fully trained, teutonized warrior, feared by the old cowboys’ descendants. Regarding the numbers of Indian novels issued to Wehrmacht personnel, Allen warns about “misinterpret[ing] the selection as a promotion of a warrior ethic. Such was not the case.”268 Given the numerous examples of the Indian warrior ethic accompanying German males from boyhood to adult soldiering, of the custom of playing Indian being purposefully directed toward military training and exercise, and of Indian fiction promoting soldierly virtues, her conclusion does not hold. The Nazis actively employed Indian warrior imagery to profit from Indianthusiasm and to propagate militaristic ideals. The Indian scout and warrior were role models for German children as well as for soldiers, as

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much as they were concrete images among German war correspondents. They were employed to denote exceptional soldiering in German war reports, and they served as models for propaganda images depicting both heroes and helpless victims in Nazi Germany.

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Indian Medicine Men in Directed Nazi Scholarship Throughout the Nazi era, leaders went to great lengths to incorporate knowledge from foreign countries, exotic peoples, or alternative and unorthodox sciences to gain an edge in war production and technological progress. Naturally, ideological specifications shaped this quest; that is, Nazi ideology interfered with and influenced the aims, processes, and presentation of scientific research. Michael Kater’s study on the SS research institution Ahnenerbe illustrates the Nazi leadership’s practices of predefining desired research outcomes and demanding that scholars employ scientific methods to support these ideological presumptions. Scientific proof of German superiority was the overall purpose of such institutions. As such, this system of directed scholarship built on longer traditions in the humanities and social sciences. Similarly, the Nazis’ approach to science was the radical result of earlier deviations from mechanistic and rational principles. Nazi scholarship praised organic systems of epistemology, shunning specialism and always interpreting particular phenomena in the context of a larger “whole” entity.269 This reference to the whole mirrored the Nazis’ preference for the community over the individual, but also their preference for the irrational over the rational. Thus, “the carefully balanced assessment of a particular issue yielded to the sweeping general prejudice which was oriented on popular clichés.”270 In this context of directed scholarship, a number of scientific projects evolved that blended the Nazis’ integration of high technology with traditional conservative mysticism. Projects featured bizarre methods such as the use of divining rods to find water and raw materials, and some sought to profit from “Indian wisdom” by studying plants and healing practices of Native South American tribes.271 My research in the Bundesarchiv, along with an analysis of medical journals of the Nazi era, reveals that these projects were not always the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, who had a reputation for absurd research demands. Some were also proposed by adventurers or scholars who hoped to gain financial security through the professional protection of a party institution, or even to avoid serving on the front by convincing Nazi leaders that their work was critical to the war effort.272 One such example was the plan to send an expedition to South America to collect medicinal plants and thus boost German medicine and pharmaceutical production.273 In 1941, Himmler’s wife met one Captain Emmerich von Moers, who told her about his adventures and accomplishments among Native South Americans. Himmler, “very interested in old customs, languages, medicines,

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etc.,” asked his chief of staff, SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff, to gather more information on Moers’s experience with medicinal plants.274 In the following months, an animated correspondence between Moers and several Ahnenerbe officials ensued, resulting in plans for a postwar expedition to South America. Moers was asked to provide details on his experience and issued a 106-page report detailing his life in South America in the early 1930s.275 Embroiled in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–1935), Moers had volunteered for the Paraguayan forces where he learned about the colonization plans of the Bolivian commander, the Prussian general Hans Kundt. Kundt had hoped to settle the Amazon headwaters with approximately one million German farmers and then use his reputation to become commander of the entire Bolivian army. After the war, Moers received a land grant in gratitude for his service. He started a farming cooperation with fellow veterans and worked to execute Kundt’s colonization plan. During the work on his farm, Moers had contact with members of the Guarany (Chamacoco) tribe and won their trust by saving a mother and her newborn from an infection, and through the “seemingly miraculous tying-down of sunbeams with a burning lens, followed by other hocus-pocus.”276 Moers immediately betrayed this gained trust when he used his healer reputation to wrest the secrets of tribal medicine from its traditional doctors. As a result, Moers learned of various plants and their uses for medicine and food and assembled a herbal collection of over 180 different plants. Unfortunately, it was confiscated en route to Germany by a British patrol ship after the outbreak of World War II. Philipp von Luetzelburg, the Ahnenerbe botanist who assessed and annotated Moers’s report for Himmler, stated that he had tried to learn herbal secrets from Native South Americans himself, albeit without success since they were so suspicious of strangers. Moers was apparently the first European to have gained such detailed knowledge about these native plants.277 Among the studied plants was one for treating malaria that provided a full cure and thus surpassed any contemporary treatments known in Europe and the United States. In addition, Moers learned about a plant that had a sweetening effect 180 percent more potent than sugar that could easily be cultivated in wet, tropical climates (possibly stevia). Further items in the collection were plants for the treatment of syphilis, skin diseases, and several aphrodisiacs and contraceptives.278 Both Moers and Luetzelburg emphasized the economic importance of these plants. The malaria plant, said Luetzelburg, would ensure the “ultimate decontamination of immense areas … and Germany could take hold of the absolute monopoly for the redemption of the greatest and most horrible scourge of the tropics.”279 German chemist and industrialist E. Merck had already analyzed the sweetening plant and denigrated its value as Germany’s chemical industry could produce similar sweeteners artificially. Luetzelburg remarked—probably appealing to Himmler’s interest in traditional knowledge—that this rejection illustrated the industry’s rigorous competition with natural products. Since the U.S. tobacco

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industry needed this plant’s active ingredient to balance the taste of cigarettes, Luetzelburg added, Germany could gain a foothold in this branch by providing the plant and replacing rum, sugar, and honey, thus reducing the production costs of cigarettes by 80 percent. He used this example to name other instances of German industries squandering chances to profit from natural products while foreign entrepreneurs had taken up the ideas and enriched themselves. To end such wasting of good German ideas and to improve the German economy by any means possible, Luetzelburg concluded: “If only we started to unearth these treasures systematically, many a gap in raw materials could be bridged.”280 Luetzelburg also considered Moers’s suggestion to colonize the Matto Grosso area but rejected the plan, favoring economic exploitation over German settlement, “since we need all our German people without exception in our own country and cannot spare a single one of them as culture-fertilizer abroad.”281 With this argument, Luetzelburg participated in the ongoing debate among Nazis about the assets and liabilities of colonial expansion, which will be discussed in the following pages. It will become clear that Indianthusiasm helped trigger scientific inquiry into the issue because Himmler liked to hear stories about Indians and of audacious expeditions. The ultimate goal behind the involvement of the Ahnenerbe, however, was to compete economically and militarily with the United States.282 Heinrich Himmler was very interested in Moers’s proposal, ordering the preparation of a postwar Ahnenerbe expedition to South America since the current war situation did not allow for an immediate project.283 Moers was to function as an adviser and as principal researcher. Though he asked and was originally promised to be drafted into the Waffen-SS in pursuing this project, this was delayed because SS scrutiny revealed unfavorable details concerning adultery and embezzlement in his biography. Eventually, although Himmler wanted the expedition plans to proceed, the SS leadership realized that it could not tolerate Moers as its expert leader due to its reputation as a faultless elite order of Nazi party soldiers, yet its success depended on him. All these questions became moot when Himmler postponed further planning until after the war.284 Other medical research projects displayed consideration of economic value and competition in military technology. In 1938, an article by Rudolf Ganz in the Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift discussed Ganz’s travels and research trip through South America, in which he not only observed racial politics and habits of the Native population but became interested in an uncanny ability among Peruvian highland Natives. They could carry heavy loads on their backs across mountain passes over huge distances without any signs of fatigue or hunger, which he believed was linked to their custom of chewing coca leaves. He then detailed his medicinal study of the effects of chewing coca on the human body, linking better physical performance to high altitudes and the effect of the ingredient. Ganz’s evaluation of the findings related directly to the war effort. He suggested issuing highly potent cocaine “power pills” to the Wehrmacht in emergency situa-

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tions to supplement or even substitute for their rations. Such situations included spearhead troops who had charged too far ahead of supply trains or troops caught in pockets and cut off from supplies. Unfortunately, he added, a colleague had unsuccessfully proposed a similar scheme during World War I already, and military experts had expressed reservations about the military use of drugs. Therefore, he suggested the pills be used only in extreme emergencies in mountain warfare to ensure it would only have the positive effect he had observed among mountain-dwelling Natives.285 Ganz must not have been involved with current military-pharmaceutical planning because he was apparently not aware that the Wehrmacht had already started a large research program resulting in the mass production of Pervitin. This drug, which later developed into the party drug Ecstasy, became a standard ingredient in chocolate (known as Panzerschokolade or Fliegerschokolade) for pilots, flak crews, and soldiers on prolonged expeditions.286 Moers’s planned expedition to South America for medicinal plants and Ganz’s observations about coca-chewing Natives in Peru are just two of many examples of anthropologists and colonial planners utilizing knowledge about Native communities and exploiting scholarship opportunities for political purposes.

The Devil’s Advocates? Anthropologists in Colonial Planning

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We want to make it better than the Spaniards, to whom the world was but the shavelings’ slaughterhouse, and different than the English, to whom it became a toy shop. We want to make it German and magnificent. —Richard Wagner, 1848, in Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 398.

To what extent did the American system of Indian reservations serve as a model for German colonialism, and to what extent did German Indianthusiasm influence colonial plans to institute a more benign system? Deborah Allen first introduced these questions.287 Although most of her sources were Wilhelmine ethnological treatises or discussed them, one also revealed information on colonial planning from a conference of ethnologists during World War II.288 Allen states that a thorough analysis of these possible influences would require the study of the documents of the Reichskolonialamt or the Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (KPA), but a number of other sources uncovered for the present study already illustrate that ethnologists actively participated in colonial planning.289 The Nazi emphasis on racial thought and the claim to German indigeneity played a critical role in these interrelations of scholarship and politics during Hitler’s reign. In the KPA-issued Schulungsbriefe (instruction memos), planners detailed how future Nazi colonial policies should be structured once the territories lost in the Treaty of Versailles were reinstated. These memos implied not only the Kolonialschuldlüge, but also the Rassenschuldlüge.290 While foreign powers saw Nazi

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Germany as unable to “guide aboriginals appropriately toward civilization” after the decree of the Nuremberg Race Laws, KPA planners argued that exactly these laws prepared the way for a benign colonial policy.291 After all, they apparently imposed “racial respect” (Rassenachtung) since National Socialism aimed to “preserve the peoplehood and the idiosyncrasies of any race, regardless of its color or religion.”292 Within this framework, National Socialism was portrayed as the protector of indigenous peoples in their future reserves because its colonialism would allow for education and the parallel preservation of aboriginal culture without the pressure of assimilation. Scholars in anthropology and ecology endorsed these claims, reflecting the struggle to justify their existence under the Nazi leadership. The pressures of securing public support for an academic discipline in a society whose leaders openly despised intellectuals, along with the urge to carve out niches within directed academia to protect positions and funding, led to ideology-driven endorsements of ethnology. Eventually, ethnology promoted colonialism to justify itself. This promotion had a practical context. Reinstated colonial property would ensure numerous opportunities for ethnologists to conduct field research; it would make expeditions cheaper and less dependent on foreign bureaucracy.293 The public justification, however, concentrated on the state doctrine of racial thought and exploited notions of indigeneity. The prominent ethnologist Wilhelm Mühlmann demanded that, whenever race and the interaction of societies were being discussed, the ethnological perspective should be applied. “Because it has the widest horizon and enables the broadest perspectives it is, to the best of my belief, especially our European and German task and weapon.”294 Ethnology, said Fritz Krause, director of the Leipzig Museum für Völkerkunde, had educational value in teaching Germans that peoples were different from each other, echoing the Nazis’ emphasis on racial distinction in contrast to Marxist and liberal notions of equality. It illustrated the historical interaction between peoples and thus taught a people how to retain a strong peoplehood and group integrity. Moreover, it introduced the people to civics and to the relationship between individual and community and between citizens and leaders.295 Krause added that applied ethnology helped the general populace realize the “problem of fate,” which referred to the reintegration of all classes into society, the reanchoring of families in the consciousness of the people, and the reintegration of individuals into the Volksgemeinschaft. Consequently, it involved “overcoming materialism and quixotic individualism in favor of an obligation and reverence for the people and of a new idealism.”296 This interpretation of ethnology encompassed the entire problem of cultural pessimism, the crisis of modernity, and German national identity. All these preliminary applications of ethnology and social anthropology culminated in Krause’s vision of Nazi Germany’s role in a future colonial system that would overcome the current challenges of cultural change due to culture contact, the Christian mission, and transnationalized economies. It is worth quoting at length as it highlights the view of Germany as a preserver of

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native cultures: “Once, as can be expected, the German people reclaim their place among the colonial powers, it will suddenly be confronted with this whole array of questions … We have reason to believe that the foreign peoples can be saved from exploitation through the capitalist economy and from the extermination at the hands of European civilization particularly by the new German attitude, which is reinforced by ethnological findings—a future task for the German people that has impact on the history of humankind.”297 To prepare for the moment when Germany would regain its African colonies, German ethnologists held a conference in Göttingen in 1940 at which they discussed the possible tasks of anthropology in the German colonies and the influence the field might have on colonial policies. At the same time, the KPA formulated guidelines for these policies that largely matched the ethnologists’ suggestions. Article Five in this “Colonial Catechism” once again underscored Germany’s role as a preserver of culture: “The principle of the separation of races applies in the German colonies. Aiding the welfare of the natives is one of the primary tasks of all German colonial activity. The separate folkish [völkisch] nature of the natives, their customs and mores and legal institutions, will be honored insofar as they do not offend the German concept of morality.”298 The ethnologists’ expression of the parallel idea was most eloquently phrased by Hans Plischke (1890–1972). Arguing that colonies in tropical areas, especially, depended on Native labor, he saw it as the task of ethnologists to preserve the native workforce and willingness to work (and thus the colonizers’ profits) by exercising culturally sensitive methods of treating Native populations. The Natives’ propensity to work could “only be ensured with the aid of a care for the Natives that works to do justice to their cultural necessities and idiosyncrasies, and that enables a trustful attitude of the Native to his white master by fostering the cultural conditions appropriate to the nature of these Natives.”299 Colonists needed extensive knowledge of Native customs and cultural necessities to ensure an attitude of trust. Since National Socialism had educated Germans to respect their own peoplehood, it likewise was “in the interest of a National Socialist Native policy to respect the racially different nature of the colored people and their resulting culturally determined ways of life.”300 A German colonial system needed “government ethnologists” who supported the colonial administration with their expertise and who could work as cultural brokers between the administration and colonized Natives. They were not to be stationed in colonial centers but were needed as fieldworkers.301 This latter demand coincided with other remarks made during the conference that revealed practical goals behind the academic policies advocated by ethnologists: they wished to protect as many colleagues from the draft as possible and steer the government toward opening more professorships for ethnology at German universities and museums.302 Another highlight of the conference that underscored the Nazi belief in preserving racial culture was a talk by Franz Termer (1894–1968) of the ethnological

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museum in Hamburg. He gave a presentation on the history of U.S.-Indian policy in which he described the white settlers’ custom of pushing Native Americans off their land through negotiation. While he did not criticize that practice or suggest that the German colonial administration should pursue a similar policy in Africa, he analyzed and criticized U.S. policy in the Reservation Era heavily. The Dawes Act of 1887, he said, had been a “fundamental mistake” because it eroded the Natives’ culture and led to their resignation.303 Although Indian policy after World War I had exercised more care for and interest in Native Americans, it had disparaged them by turning them into showcases for tourists. The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) had marked a turn in policy. It re-endorsed the communal ownership of land, tribal cooperatives, the revitalization of cults, and parallel vocational training.304 These features, Termer argued, seemed to mirror the Nazis’ concepts of blood and soil and of the Volksgemeinschaft and were thus favorable developments that German colonialism should consider adopting in Africa. Unfortunately, Termer added, German ethnologists had no confirmation about whether IRA policy had had the desired effect of fostering economic progress and reviving Native American culture at the same time since the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was “very reserved on the matter of exchanging materials.”305 The conference papers provided no information about the manner in which German ethnologists attempted to acquire materials on the IRA from U.S. authorities. One anecdote from the Tuscarora Reservation in New York suggests that German researchers—or even Nazi Party officials—visited reservations as private individuals without the permission or invitation of the BIA during the early 1930s. In at least one incident, German visitors approached Chief Clinton Rickard (1882–1971), a prominent Tuscarora political activist, and inquired about U.S. policies toward Native Americans and about the effects of U.S. repression and exploitation. A similar visit may have occurred on a Shoshone reservation.306 Only oral history in the Rickard family alludes to these visits, which have yet to be confirmed by documents. The Collier files at the National Archives in Washington, DC, include no trace of such visits, although one would suspect that reservation superintendents would have informed the BIA headquarters if German research teams had appeared on a reservation. In the case of Colin Ross, who was suspected of being a Nazi spy, U.S. authorities were very alert and the communication between Collier and his superintendents about Ross’s planned visits to reservations in 1938–1939 was frantic.307 German documents may eventually uncover information, but, as the visitors’ identities remain unknown, possible places to search for such documents range from the intelligence services of several military branches to the KPA, to scholars tasked by the Auswärtiges Amt (State Department) with a spying mission. Nevertheless, we can conclude that German institutions were very interested in information about U.S.-Indian policy and that this information was supposed to contribute to German colonial planning. The Göttingen conference participants agreed on the importance of “the study of

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the Americans’ mistakes and their gradual elimination,” and of replacing “democratic liberalism’s principle of exploitation and oppression” with German colonial policy.308 The actual plans for German colonies in Africa integrated the American, English, and French colonial experience with blood-and-soil ideology and racial thought. African natives were to be allowed to retain their traditional economies, be they based in farming or ranching. Farming was to be organized in mandatory cooperatives to support the natives’ group-oriented economy. Strict segregation and anti-miscegenation laws were to preserve the purity and racial integrity of both the colonized natives and the colonial masters. Christian missionaries were to be restricted to very small numbers in order to prevent assimilation pressure and to reduce native interest in adopting white culture. Yet, a few of them were necessary to prevent the expansion of Islam in Africa. Restrictions on migration would be enforced to avoid urbanization and detribalization among natives as much as to help control the workforce. Several native tribes were to be treated as superior to others to ensure divisiveness among Native communities. Some tribes deemed to be very primitive were to be issued reserves to isolate them from whites; researchers would be the only authorized visitors to ensure that the natives were exposed to white culture in a gradual and controlled manner, thereby preventing rapid cultural change and tribal disintegration.309 However, German ethnologists, in promoting the benign treatment of indigenous peoples under the principles of racial thought, could not ignore colonialism’s primary orientation toward economic exploitation. Some ethnologists seemed to have understood their task as ensuring the most efficient way to exploit colonial resources by maintaining the Native labor force.310 Others used their positions as experts to thwart demands for ruthless economic exploitation, and they hoped to use their future positions as colonial government ethnologists to protect indigenous peoples on-site from military rule and economic exploitation. Since a system of totally segregated reservations would have stalled economic exploitation and thus diminished the value of these future colonial acquisitions, officials in the Nazi Party, in the industries, and in several government agencies opposed radical segregation. When the Reich Ministry of Labor inquired about the employability of African Natives, ethnologist Hugo Bernatzik (1897–1953), who worked for the KPA, referred to the question as “one of the most complicated issues in colonial ethnology,” one that required thorough reflection and planning.311 To emphasize the problem, he provided the death tolls for American aboriginals exploited by the Spanish in mines and for Native American tribes affected by forced removal: “During the removal of the Cherokees alone, the Americans killed 40 percent of the entire tribe … Ethnologists have been struggling with the problem but have not published [any results] because they were afraid of powerful interests (missions and industrial corporations) in the colonies. Under these circumstances, it is utterly out of the question that a single individ-

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ual could currently provide correct information about these problems regarding all of Africa.”312 Thus, Bernatzik sensitized the government to the problem and delayed a decision by claiming a lack of information. Bernatzik’s biographer observes that, like many other ethnologists who originally had relatively liberal attitudes, Bernatzik became entangled in Nazi politics by engaging in politics himself to wrest advantages for his academic discipline and protect his objects of study from the Nazi leaders: “Hugo Bernatzik’s attempts to use ethnology to protect the Natives from the ‘damages of civilization’ and, at the same time, avoid withholding the expected profit from the colonizer, conveyed the ineradicable contradictions of the contemporary discipline’s self-understanding as ‘applied ethnology,’ which the professionals did not realize at the time.”313 Eventually, as the examples of Bernatzik, Krause, and other anthropologists who attempted to influence official policies illustrate, many toed the party line and provided the “scientific results” that the Nazi leadership demanded.

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Notes 1. Wolfgang R. Krabbe, “Die Lebensreformbewegung,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 25. 2. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 23–24. 3. Kai Buchholz, “Begriffliche Leitmotive der Lebensreform,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 41–54. 4. See Hartmut Lutz, “Cultural Appropriation as a Process of Displacing Peoples and History,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 10.2 (1990): 167–82; Allen, “Reception,” 79–83. 5. Wolfgang Riedel, “Homo Natura. Zum Menschenbild der Jahrhundertwende,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 105–7; Krabbe, “Die Lebensreformbewegung,” 28. 6. Justus H. Ulbricht, “Die Reformation des 20. Jahrhunderts. Religionswissenschaftliche Anmerkungen zu bildungsbürgerlichen Orientierungsversuchen in der ‘klassischen’ Moderne,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 189–90. 7. Wegener, Atlantidische, 79–80. 8. See, Barbar, 17; Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement, 1900-1945: An Interpretative and Documentary History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 23. 9. It might be worthwhile to conduct an analysis of magazines such as Speerwacht (the term could be translated into Spear Patrol) or Das Lagerfeuer (The Campfire), because their titles already indicate a potential for Indian references. 10. Barbara McCloskey, “Von der ‘Frontier’ zum Wilden Westen. Deutsche Künstler, nordamerikanische Indianer und die Inszenierung von Rasse und Nation im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in I Like America, ed. Kort and Hollein, 309–11; see Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 11. Sudhoff, “Wunsch,” 255. “Man of nerves,” in this case, cannot adequately convey the German meaning, as Nervenmensch itself is a neologism denoting a human who bases life more on intuition and the senses than on rationalism.

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12. McCloskey, “Frontier,” 311. 13. See J. Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 14. McCloskey, “Frontier,” 312–18. 15. Sudhoff, “Wunsch,” 259; McCloskey, “Von der Frontier zum Wilden Westen,” 319. Apparently, Zuckmayer even named his daughter Winnetou. 16. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), especially the fourth chapter, “Natural Indians and Identities of Modernity.” 17. Qtd. in Heinz Reichling, “Thompson Setons Woodcraft Idee,” (Ph.D. diss., Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1937), 29. 18. Hans Paasche and Franziskus Hähnel, Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Mukara ins innerste Deutschland: geschildert in Briefen Lukanga Mukaras an den König Ruoma von Kitara (Hamburg: Fackelreiter-Verlag, 1913). 19. Joachim Radkau, “Die Verheissungen der Morgenfrühe. Die Lebensreform in der neuen Moderne,” in Die Lebensreform, ed. Buchholz et al., vol. 1, 55. 20. The same perspective of ethnic role reversal was used in the 1992 mockumentary Das Fest des Huhnes (The Feast of the Chicken), which parodies ethnographic television documentaries about exotic primitive peoples and their strange customs. The premise involves an African researcher explaining the customs of Alpine village people in the region of Upper Austria to his African audience. He interprets Austrian country fairs and beer festivals as animist elements in a transformation of Christianity because roasted chicken replaced the lamb as a symbol for Christ, and because he sees the beer festivals as ritualistic re-enactments of the killing of Christ. Walter Wippersberg, Das Fest des Huhnes, DVD, BMG Ariola Austria, 1992. 21. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 2, 532. 22. Allen, “Reception,” 279–80. 23. Ibid., 101. 24. Allen, “Reception,” 232–47. 25. Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde, 37. 26. Ibid., 253–55. 27. Allen, “Reception,” 216–31. 28. Ibid., 216–20. 29. Ibid., 221–23; Christoph Schubert-Weller, “Kein schönrer Tod…” Die Militarisierung der männlichen Jugend und ihr Einsatz im Ersten Weltkrieg 1890-1918 (Weinheim: Juventa, 1998), 298–305. 30. Allen, “Reception,” 224. 31. Qtd. in ibid., 227. 32. Schneider, “Zarathustra-Sätze,” 172–73. 33. Allen, “Reception,” 216. 34. Stachura, Youth Movement, 14–18. 35. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1, 29–30; Galle, “Fritz Steuben,” 2; Schneider, “ZarathustraSätze,” 173. 36. Muck, “Der ewige Indianer,” 315. 37. Jovy, Jugendbewegung und Nationalsozialismus, 41, 138. 38. Ibid., 164. Since the 1980s, a number of radical-left pamphlets have been published under the pseudonym “Geronimo”; for example, Geronimo, Feuer und Flamme: Zur Geschichte der Autonomen. 6th ed. (Berlin: Id-Verlag, 2002). 39. Greg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American History,” Environmental History 10.2 (2005): 186–88, 194. 40. Ibid., 200–201; see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Madison

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

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55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (York, SC: Liberty Bell, 1916); Susan A. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917-1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Apparently, Grant’s Passing was one of the first English books to be published in German translation after 1933. It was public knowledge that Hitler owned an original; he referred to Grant several times in his speeches and interviews. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 51. Qtd. in ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., 5. See Penny, Kindred by Choice, 154–55, 236–38, for a similar discussion on ambivalent transatlantic notions of colonization. Brenda Hollweg, Ausgestellte Welt. Formationsprozesse kultureller Identität in den Texten zur Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 45–47, 81–82. Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 39. Ibid., 38–42. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 39. Apart from that, most immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had stayed in the Eastern cities, where the demand for unskilled factory labor offered them the few job opportunities open to them in the United States. The frontier would not have been an option for them even if it had still existed. Winold Reiss, “Bei den Schwarzfuss-Indianern,” Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte 52 JI (1937): 128. For a comparison of Native Americans and Jews as the victims of one empire who were romanticized by the other empire, see J. Boyarin, G. Sarris, and M. Prywes, “Europe’s Indian, America’s Jew: Modiano and Vizenor,” Boundary 2 (1992): 197–222. This essay is especially revealing because it conducts a critical analysis of the pitfalls of comparing, and thus relativizing, genocides. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 88. D. Fiorentino, “‘Those Red-Brick Faces’: European Press Reactions to the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” in Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 407. Alfred Vagts, “The Germans and the Red Man,” American German Review 24 (1957): 13–17. This notion, of course, relates to state-sponsored colonization. See Penny, Kindred by Choice, especially the second chapter, for a detailed discussion of Germans’ colonial frontier experience during the 1862 “Minnesota Sioux Uprising.” Weaver, “An Übermensch among the Apache,” 79; see Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 180; Boyarin, Sarris, and Prywes, “Europe’s Indian.” For general and specifically German perspectives on Indian imagery and manifest destiny, see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian; Feest, Indians and Europe; Kort and Hollein, I Like America; Lutz, Indianer. For a description of how the concept of the vanishing race influenced the development of the ethnological museum in Berlin, see Bolz, Indianer Nordamerikas, 9, 32–35. Allen, “Reception,” 68. S. Waitz, “Völkerfragen Nordamerikas,” Das Neue Reich 8.47 (1926): 961. Gerhard Venzmer, “Amerikas rote Schmach,” Das Neue Reich 13 (1931): 327. Waitz, “Völkerfragen Nordamerikas,” 961. “Die Eskimos. Sterbende Rasse,” Schlesische Zeitung Breslau, 29 July 1930. Note that, unlike most cultural pessimists, this author does not differentiate between culture and civilization. W. Krieckeberg, “Bürger-Indianer in Neu-Mexiko,” Die Woche (1927), 190. Iden-Zeller, “Büffelpark,” 646.

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66. D. von Leuchtenburg, “Gerettete Naturdenkmäler. Indianer und Büffel vor dem Aussterben bewahrt,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 21 September 1932. 67. Britt, Fifth Column, 103–4. 68. Wiehle, “Die Indianer,” 751. 69. Gregor Heinrich, “Beginn der Neuen Welt—die indianische Tragödie,” Hochland 32 J1 (1935): 564. 70. D. H. Lawrence, “Indianische Mysterien,” Neue Rundschau (January 1934): 94. 71. See Lutz, Indianer, 363–410; Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 75–78, 126–31. 72. Michel, “Neue ethnologische,” 141–67. 73. Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 405–23, esp. 407–8. 74. This term denotes the destruction of peoplehood either by physical extinction or by (coerced) assimilation into a settler society. 75. See Martin Gusinde, “Heilkunde und Medizinmannwesen bei den Indianern Südamerikas,” Jahrbuch der katholischen missionsärztlichen Fürsorge 14 (1939): 103–8; idem, “FeuerlandIndianer,” Illustrazione Vaticana (1934): 498–501; E. Oberhummer, “Die Feuerland-Indianer,” Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften 77 J (1940): 36–51; Gusinde, “Menschenrassen; idem, “Bei den Indianern Nordamerikas,” Anthropologischer Anzeiger 6 (1931): 348–53; idem, “Nordamerikas Indianer—einst und jetzt,” Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft Wien 60 B.II/III (1930): H8. 76. Gusinde, “Schicksalsgeschichte,” 228. 77. See Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 355–97; Allen, “Reception,” 36, 209–11. 78. Krieg, “Die Indianer des Gran Chaco,” 216. 79. Behrens, “Winnetous Nachfolger”; Behrens, “Indianer in den USA.” 80. Alfredo Hartwig, “Im Reich der Azteken, Tolteken, Mayas und Inkas,” Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung (11 June 1944). 81. Hagen, one of the key figures of the Song of the Nibelungs, is compared to Indians because he prefers to remain loyal to his king and die with all his followers rather than give in to the demands of Siegfried’s widow Kriemhild. 82. Heinrich, “Beginn,” 566; see Herrland, “Rassendämmerung”; Astel, “Rassendämmerung, die Schicksalsfrage der weissen Völker,” Allgemeine Thüringer Landeszeitung (25 January 1935); idem, “Rassendämmerung und ihre Meisterung,” Völkischer Beobachter (25 January 1935); F. Burgdörfer, “Sterben die weissen Völker?”Preussische Lehrerzeitung [Magdeburg] 30 (1934): 943; Benito Mussolini, “Weisse Rasse stirbt,” Neue Freie Presse, 26 August 1934. 83. See Ludwig May, “Der Rote Mann stirbt nicht” Die Woche (1929): 1368–70; Heinz Eckstein, “Romantik ist tot—der Indianer lebt,” Universum 17 (1929): 409–13; Felix Baumann, “Das begrabene Kriegsbeil. Die Indianer Nordamerikas auf den Pfaden der Zivilisation,” Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig, 22 May 1930; Friedländer, “Sterben die Indianer aus?”; Th. Thomas, “Indianer schreiben Bücher,” Die Literatur 35 J. February, 5 (1933): 247–48. 84. Eckstein, “Romantik ist tot,” 413. 85. May, “Der Rote Mann stirbt nicht,” 1370. 86. Georg Sticker, “Einschleppung europäischer Krankheiten in Amerika während der Entdeckungszeit (Teil II),” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 6 (1932): 224. Interestingly, Sticker estimated a Native population of over 15 million in North America at the time of first contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans. Since the debate on the pre-Columbian population is still heavily politicized today, it is revealing that a contemporary German source did not offer the usual one-million estimate generally agreed upon in scholarly literature until very recently. The number at the time of contact is important for comparison with the 1890 census count of Natives as approximately 250,000 in the United States and approximately 150,000 in Canada. Whether the German source offered a larger number to highlight the population decline and thus blame the Americans remains unclear. Native scholars and activists have argued since the

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87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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98. 99.

100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

1970s that many white politicians and scholars insist on the estimate of one million in order to minimize the difference between the original numbers and the nadir of the Native population around 1900, thus minimizing colonizer guilt. Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr., “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in The State of Native America, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End, 1992), 23–53. Krogman, “The ‘New Deal’ for the American Indian,” 80. Florian Panzer, “Die Rothaut wird weiß,” Kölnische Illustrierte Zeitung 31 (1937): 943. H. Krieger, “Rassenrecht in den USA,” Verwaltungsarchiv 39 B (1934): 316–34; “Rassenrecht in USA,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 July 1936; “Rassenrecht in USA,” Germania, 10 August 1938; J. von Leers, “Rassenrecht in USA,” Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift 68 J39 (1942): 967–70; “Neuregelung.” Nürnberger Rassengesetze is a collective term for the laws issued on 15 September 1935. They included the Gesetz zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre (Act for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor), and the Reichsbürgergesetz (Reich Act on Citizenship). Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed., see the entry on “Nürnberger Gesetze.” Hartwig, “Im Reich”; Heinrich, “Beginn,” 566. Edith Faupel, “Indianerfrage,” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv (1933): 119. Ibid., 126. A. Rojo, “Präkolumbische Kulturen Amerikas und die Indianerfrage,” Ibero-amerikanische Rundschau 10 (1937): 291. Neuendorff, “Zum Aufstieg,” 417–18. The German term Kulturmorphologie emphasizes culture, not civilization. Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1922). For a discussion of the morphology of civilization, see Kramer, “Einfühlung”; Streck, “Entfremdete Gestalt. Die Konstruktion von Kultur in den zwei Frankfurter Denkschulen,” in Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht, ed. Hauschild, 103–20. Even though the Office for Racial Policies in the NSDAP opposed the views of Frobenius’s institute, its approach to race psychology influenced the standing of ethnology within Third Reich academia. Byer, Der Fall, 316. For Spengler’s works on the aging of American cultures, see his “Amerikas Kulturen,” and idem, “Das Alter der Amerikanischen Kulturen,” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv (1933): 95–102. See Spengler, “Amerikas Kulturen.” In 1928, Quesada bequeathed his private library and manuscript collection to Prussia, which eventually led to the foundation of the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) in Berlin in 1930. Many of the articles located for this study referred to Quesada and used sources from the IAI. Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz: “Quesada, Vicente Gaspar (1830-1913) / Quesada, Ernesto (1858-1934),” (2007), http://www.iai.spk-berlin.de/en/ library/papers-manuscripts/individual-collections/quesada-vicente-gaspar-1830-1913-quesa da-ernesto-1858-1934.html. Alfred Lehmann, “Die Zukunft Latein-Amerikas. Ernesto Quesada gewidmet.” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv J7, 1933/34 (1933): 116. In this case, objectivity was identified as a positive German character trait while, in other instances, Germans and Indians were said to be alike because of their instinctiveness and subjective emotionality. Brocatti, “Der Indianismo,” 239. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 522, 525–26. “Wiederkehr der Indianer. Anzeichen und Fernsichten,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 December 1934. Obermüller, “Amerikas indianisches Antlitz,” Deutsches Adelsblatt (1936): 1192. Wiley Post was the first pilot to fly solo around the world in 1931. According to the Annals of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, newspaper reporters invented the rumor of his Native American ancestry during the media craze about his flight around the world. This rumor must

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106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

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117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123. 124.

125.

have found its way to Germany. Stanley R. Mohler and Bobby H. Johnson, “Wiley Post, His Winnie Mae, and the World’s First Pressure Suit,” Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Annals of Flight, No. 8 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971). Obermüller, “Amerikas indianisches Antlitz,” 1193. Graham et al., eds., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 82–83. The authors argue that both economic and political nationalism in the wake of the 1910 independence centennial awakened white politicians in many Latin American countries to the “Indian Problem,” since increased contact between Natives and non-Natives raised awareness of economic problems but also of the potential for state-building and national identity. Faupel, “Indianerfrage,” 120–23. See “Zum Aufstieg der roten Rasse. Die Indianerfrage in Süd- und Mittelamerika,” Zeit im Querschnitt 9 (1941): 268; Neuendorff, “Zum Aufstieg”; Lehmann, “Die Zukunft.” “Zum Aufstieg,” 268; E. von Ungern-Sternberg, “Auferstehung des Inka-Reiches?” Dresdner Anzeiger, 3 July 1934. Neuendorff, “Zum Aufstieg,” 417–18. Brocatti, “Der Indianismo,” 239. Bolz, “Der Germanen,” 182. The German völkisch term is aufnorden, which literally means “to northify.” The term implies both the influx of Nordic blood and the conviction that this influx would improve the features of the cross-bred race. Michael Rössner, Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Paradies. Zum mythischen Bewußtsein in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1989), 202. The German expression entails an untranslatable pun because the negation of Möglichkeit (opportunity or possibility) denoted both the lack thereof and a colloquial way of declaring “outrageousness.” Lehmann, “Die Zukunft,” 111. Ibid. Colin Ross, “Amerikas Schicksalsstunde. Die Schüsse von Mexiko und Louisiana.” Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 19 September 1935. Again, Ross’s argument included anti-colonial propaganda that placed Germans in support of colonized indigenous peoples, but it also implied a racist fear that decolonization would end the dominance of the white race and lead to worldwide race wars. See Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 439–40, 444. Brocatti, “Der Indianismo,” 239–40. “Zum Aufstieg,” 268. Brocatti, “Der Indianismo,” 237. The German term corresponds to “human resources.” Because of the Nazi usage, and the Nazis’ obvious identification of humans with material objects that could be used (up) and discarded, the German term is far more politically explosive than its English counterpart and is avoided as politically incorrect. Ibid., 237–39. Although the article “Wiederkehr der Indianer” in the Frankfurter Zeitung proved this newspaper’s continued opposition to the Nazi regime, and although it stated that one could not speak of “an awakening, or even of an attack of the Indians as a race,” the author mirrored the elements of Indian description typical among other, more loyal papers: revitalization of Indian communities, acknowledgment of their social and economic traditions by the state, and authoritarian leadership as solutions to current problems. “Wiederkehr”; Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen, vol. 1, 96–102. Hans Reiser, “Das Rätsel der Inkasteine. Geheimnisse um zertrümmerte Kulturen,” Die HJ, 18 February 1939. The scope of this study did not allow for an in-depth analysis of deliberations by Nazi authors about the compatibility of Inca institutions with National Socialism,

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126.

127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132.

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133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

but it would be worthwhile to explore the inspiration of Inca history, or clichés about Inca history, in Nazi ideology. Such a study would be especially promising in connection with the claims of Atlantis mystics and World Ice theorists that the Incas were the offspring of an ancient Aryan super race. See Britt, Fifth Column; Uwe Lübken, “‘Americans All’: The United States, the Nazi Menace, and the Construction of a Panamerican Identity,” American Studies/Amerikastudien 48.3 (2003): 389–409; Ursula Prutsch, Creating Good Neighbors? Die Kultur- und Wirtschaftspolitik der USA in Lateinamerika, 1940-1946 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 200). See Colin Ross, “Der Weiss-Schwarz-Rote Doppelkontinent,” Deutsche Arbeit. Monatsschrift 40 J.’40 (1942): 247. Colin Ross, “Panamerikanische Idee und und das amerikanische Deutschtum,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 23 June 1935. The large number of articles on Indigenism and panAmericanism can, once more, be related to Ernesto Quesada, who was a member of the Pan-American Union. Brehm, “Element Blut.” Prutsch, Creating Good Neighbors, 135–36. Britt, Fifth Column, 82–83. In 1941, renowned Americanist and journalist Alfred Wollschläger (A. E. Johann, 1901–1996) published an essay in the popular magazine Koralle, denouncing the United States as the “world policeman,” and interpreting the Monroe Doctrine as “America for Americans and Europe for Europeans.” The United States broke this supposedly silent, mutual agreement on the division of the world into spheres of interest when it interfered with the war in Europe. The subheading of this section on the American atrocity trope corresponds to the title of Johann’s article: “Amerika kehre vor deiner eigenen Tür,” Koralle, Neue Folgen 9 (1941): 786–87, 806. The phenomenon could be observed as early as 1890, when Rocky Bear (1836–1910), a Lakota performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, gave a speech for the Anthropologische Gesellschaft in Munich, led by professor Johannes Ranke (1836–1916). Attacking the U.S. government for its treatment of Indians, Rocky Bear was received with great interest and sympathy by the scholars. Ames, “Seeing the Imaginary,” 223–24. Today, neo-Nazis refer to the genocide of Native Americans when commemorating the bombing campaign against German cities during World War II. See Galland (No. 123), “Aktionsbündnis gegen das Vergessen: Nur wenige Stunden—Letzte Infos und Auflagen zum 13. Februar,” comment to an online posting, 12 February 2009, Altermedia.deutschland.info, http://de.altermedia .info/general/aktionsbundnis-gegen-das-vergessen-nur-wenige-stunden-letzte-infos-und-au flagen-zum-13februar-080209_22659.html; Wurster, Sebastian, “Adolf Hitler Vollender des Reiches,” online “troll” posting, de.indymedia.org, 24 September 2011, http://de.indymedia .org/2011/09/316704.shtml. Dan Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans (Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 1996), 44–46, 133, 145. Fritz Sänger, Politik der Täuschungen. Mißbrauch der Presse im Dritten Reich. Weisungen, Informationen, Notizen, 1933-1939 (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1975); Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 104–15, 183–322. Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen, 6.3: ZSg 102/13/40/42 (2), ZSg. 102/13/54/42 (4). Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 258–67, 288–89. For Gassert’s detailed analysis of German appropriations of the Monroe Doctrine, see ibid., 264, 273–75, 296–322. F. Berber, “Entdeckung der ‘Neuen Welt’ und Entstehung des modernen Völkerrechts.” Monatshefte für auswärtige Politik 9 (1942): 883.

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141. “Amerikanischer Imperialismus. Wie in einem Jahrhundert die USA entstanden.” Koralle Neue Folgen IX, 1941, 330–32. 142. Stölting, “Winnetou und Kara Ben Nemsi,” 253. 143. See Manfred Kremer, “Edle Wilde im ‘Dritten Reich?’ Zur Rezeption der Indianer-Romane Karl Mays und Fritz Steubens,” in VIII. Internationaler Germanisten-Kongress. Begegnung mit dem “Fremden”: Grenzen-Traditionen-Vergleiche, ed. Eijiro Iwasaki and Yoshinori Shichiji (Munich: 1991), 445; Hamerski, “Fatal Attraction,” 217–20. 144. Kurt Faber, “Bei Winnetou,” Die Gartenlaube 31 (1925): 618. 145. Otto Willi Ulrich, “Die nordamerikanischen Indianerreservationen,” Der Erdball. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Gebiet der Länder- Menschen-, und Völkerkunde (1931): 18. 146. Ulrich cited Helen Hunt Jackson’s classic work but presented it as an anonymous book by a male author. Ibid., 20–21. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (Boston: Roberts, 1885). 147. Ulrich, “Die nordamerikanischen Indianerreservationen,” 23. 148. Venzmer, “Amerikas rote Schmach,” 327. 149. Heinrich, “Beginn,” 566. 150. Bohrmann and Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen, ZSg 110/10/154. 151. “Blutige Hände. USA.-Journalist enthüllt Yankee-Heuchelei,” Berliner Börsenzeitung (23 November 1938); “Amerika soll nicht heucheln! Ein Amerikaner hält seinen Landsleuten den Spiegel vor,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 24 November 1938. 152. “Blutige Hände.” 153. Ibid. 154. See Ward Churchill and Glenn T. Morris, “Key Indian Laws and Cases,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End, 1992), 13–21. 155. The American articles also reveal gaps in Dietrich, because it did not list the articles to which the American texts refer, even though the topic was of enormous media interest at that time and although the German papers mentioned in the American articles, such as the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, were prominent publications. 156. Sigrid Schultz, “Remember Fate of Indians, Nazis Tell Roosevelt,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 October 1938. 157. Ibid.; “Roosevelt Talk Cheers British Opposition,” Washington Post, 28 October 1938. 158. Ralph W. Barnes, “Nazis Seeking Latin America Outlet for Jews,” Washington Post, 21 November 1938. 159. “Nazis Levy 1-5 of Jews’ Fortunes,” Washington Post, 24 November 1938. 160. J. Stoye, “Schandtaten—ein Erbübel der USA,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 6 August 1943. Dietrich listed the article, yet it is not included in the microfilm of that respective newspaper issue. Neither my own research nor that of supportive library staff located it anywhere else, which leads to the conclusion that this missing article is either another error in Dietrich’s listings, or that archive personnel creating the microfilms decided to leave out several pages from the original paper. However, the article’s title is symptomatic of the propaganda aim in question, and it can justifiably be assumed that this article would have included typical accounts of American massacres or maltreatment of Native Americans. 161. Colin Ross, “Gegen wen rüsten die USA?” Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 26 February 1936. 162. “Gewaltstaat USA.” Similar references to Indian wars in the list of American aggressions occur in other articles, such as “160 Kriege geführt” by renowned Americanist Friedrich Schönemann, and in political books. Friedrich Schönemann, “160 Kriege geführt. USA als Gewaltstaat,” Hannoverscher Kurier, 25 May 1943; Otto Schäfer, Imperium Americanum. Die Ausbreitung des Machtbereichs der Vereinigten Staaten (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1943), 163. “Gewaltstaat USA.”

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164. Ibid. Colin Ross argued in 1938 that Americans had an intuitive aversion to Germanness, for which they were ashamed. Therefore, outbreaks of American anti-German notions were usually followed by periods of praise for German achievements and culture. American propaganda never attacked Germans as a people, but only German leaders. “Amerika und Deutschland,” Bremer Nachrichten, 9 December 1938. This argumentation fit into the domestic antiAmerican propaganda as it explained to Germans that Americans were true enemies who wanted to divide the German people from its Nazi leadership. 165. “Gewaltstaat USA.” 166. See Boyarin, Sarris, and Prywes, “Europe’s Indian.” 167. W. S. Förtner, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt?” Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 3 October, 1935; Walther Lehmann, “Deutsche Verdienste um die Erforschung der altindianischen Hochkulturen,” Völkischer Beobachter, 10 April 1935. My research in Dietrich yielded approximately twenty articles on the discovery in 1942 alone, and more than 150 articles for the period 1925–1945, ranging from daily newspaper articles and essays in popular magazines to academic journals. 168. The most influential and most widely published German scholars of American discovery and settlement were Richard Hennig (1874–1951), Egmont Zechlin (1896–1992), and Karl Sapper (1866–1945). 169. In a discussion of pre-Columbian discoveries in the Historische Zeitschrift in 1936, Richard Hennig even criticized some claims of German accomplishments as “national vanity” and “nationalist jealousies.” Richard Hennig, “Atlantische Fabelinseln und die Entdeckung Amerikas,” Historische Zeitschrift 153 B (1936): 489–90, 500. Whether these statements in an academic journal provoked reprisals against the author is unknown. His other texts, and the over one hundred remaining German articles on the discovery, praise German achievements more openly, and thus fall in line with ideological doctrine. 170. Rudolf Grossmann, “Deutsche Beteiligung an der Erschliessung Amerikas in der Kolonialzeit,” Ibero-amerikanische Rundschau 8 (1942): 68. 171. Egmont Zechlin, “Charakter der Entdeckung und Eroberung Amerikas,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 September 1937; Giordano, Wenn Hitler, 73; Grossmann, “Deutsche Beteiligung,” 68; Heinrich Lentz, “Gold, Gewürze und Pelze, Erschliessung Nordamerikas,” Kölnische Volkszeitung, 17 January 1937. 172. Hans Härlin, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt?” Kosmos 10 (1937): 349–52; Eitel Kaper, “Ein Deutscher nannte es ‘Amerika.’ Unbekannte Wahrheiten zum Gedenktage der Entdeckung einer neuen Welt,” Fränkischer Kurier, 11 October 1942. 173. See Gassert’s discussion of the “German Monroe Doctrine” as a propaganda tool against the United States. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 296–323. 174. See Colin Ross, Unser Amerika. Der deutsche Anteil an den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1941); Saul K. Padover, “Unser Amerika. The Nazi Program for the United States,” (1939), National Archives, Washington, DC, RG 75, Collier Files, Box 18. 175. See Günther, Herkunft; Paul Herrmann, “Normannen entdecken Amerika,” Der Pimpf. Nationalsozialistische Jugendblätter (February 1938): 23–30. 176. Förtner, “Wer hat.” 177. Qtd. in Zechlin, “Charakter.” This text includes an Indianthusiast element because both Zechlin and Friederici pointed out that all the achievements of conquest and inland exploration rested on Native help so that “in many cases, America was not conquered by Europeans, but by Americans.” Ibid. It remains unclear whether this remark was meant as a tribute to Native Americans or carried the typical race-conscious tone of condescending pity for Indians who helped the racial other conquer their homeland. 178. Richard Hennig, “Die erste Entdeckung Amerikas,” Lasso. Deutsch-Südamerikanische Monatsschrift 6 (1939): 748; idem, “Die These einer vorcolumbischen portugiesischen Geheim-

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179. 180.

181. 182. 183.

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188.

189.

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kenntnis Amerikas,” Historische Vierteljahrschrift (1938): 548–92; H. Winter, “Kontroverse Hennig—Zechlin im Lichte der Kartographie (vorkolumbische Entdeckung Nordamerikas durch dänisch/portugiesisches Unternehmen),” Historische Vierteljahrschrift (1937): 57–72; Zechlin, “Charakter”; Emil Carthaus, “Wie oft ist Amerika entdeckt worden?” Daheim 48, 1935; Kaper, “Ein Deutscher”; Förtner, “Wer hat.” Zechlin and Hennig intensively debated the deliberate attempt to reach land in the West Atlantic and the actual route in both academic journals and popular magazines; the debate was commented on, as well. Carthaus, “Wie oft”; Richard Hennig, “Kreuz und Christentum in Amerika. Vorkolumbische Spuren,” Universum 28 (1925): 618–19. Brehm stated that most of the Conquistadors of the Inca Empire had been described as tall and blond, thus appropriating the Spanish as descendants of the Goths. Brehm, “Element Blut.” Härlin explained that Amerigo Vespucchi’s Christian name derived from the German “Almarich,” which turned America into a German name. Härlin, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt?” Hennig, “Die ‘weissen’ Mandan”; “Die Runen von Minnesota. Überlandreise von 30 Europäern 130 Jahre vor Kolumbus,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 April 1937; Carthaus, “Wie oft.” In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Lisa Barthel-Winkler wrote Indian novels that explained the virtuous traits of the Native characters with their Viking ancestry. Weaver, “An Übermensch among the Apache,” 77. Scholars have hotly debated and repeatedly challenged the authenticity of the artifacts, but some locals and scholars who seem to have a political or patriotic interest in them still defend them. For a few examples of texts from the debate, see Jeffrey R. Redmond, Viking Hoaxes in North America (New York: Carlton, 1979); Brigitta L. Wallace, “Some Points of Controversy,” in The Quest for America, ed. Geoffrey Ashe (London: Pall Mall, 1971), 155–87. Genzmer, Germanische. Ibid., 291–93. Ibid., 294. Walter Anderssen, “Die zweite Entdeckung Amerikas vor Kolumbus,” Der Tag, 10 January 1933; Redmond, Viking Hoaxes in North America; Rudolf Goldschmit-Jentner, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt? Teil II,” Kölnische Zeitung, 19 May 1940. In fact, the location has still not been confirmed beyond doubt today. Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad discovered a Norse settlement on Newfoundland in 1960 in L’Anse aux Meadows, but it is still debated whether this site is the location of Leif Eriksson’s landfall. Anne Ingstad and Helge Ingstad, The Norse Discovery of America: Excavations of a Norse Settlement at l’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, 1961-1968 (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1985); E. Christiansen, “Review of The Norse Discovery of America by Anne Stine Ingstad and Helge Ingstad,” The English Historical Review 104.413 (1989): 1006. See Karl Theodor Strasser, “Wikinger fahren in die Welt,” Völkischer Beobachter, 24 April 1930; Gustav Neckel, E. Kohlschuetter, and Fritz Krause, “Wo ist das Weinland zu suchen?” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 January 1935; Zechlin, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt?”; Förtner, “Wer hat”; Hennig, “Erste”; Gerriet E. Ulrich, “Die Amerika-Fahrten der Wikinger,” Monatshefte für auswärtige Politik 42.X (1942): 888–93. Carl G. Cornelius, “Amerikafahrten der Vikinger,” Der Erdball. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Gebiet der Länder- Menschen-, und Völkerkunde (1928): 21–25. Adolf Hitler, Hitlers Zweites Buch, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: 1961), 124, 131. Härlin, “Wer hat Amerika entdeckt?,” 349–50, 352. See Herrmann, “Normannen”; Genzmer, Germanische; Schultze, Meeresscheue. Genzmer, Germanische, 313–15; Ulrich, “Amerika-Fahrten,” 893. Genzmer, Germanische, 308, 313–15; Ulrich, “Amerika-Fahrten,” 893. Genzmer, Germanische, 316. Ibid., 316, 320.

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198. Adolf Rein, “Die europäische Ausbreitung in Amerika,” Monatshefte für auswärtige Politik 42.9 (1942): 838. 199. See Karl Sapper, “Geographische Bedingtheit von Altamerikanischer Hochkultur und Kulturstaat,” Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen (1931): 245–46. Sapper argues that American cultures cannot easily be compared with early cultures in the Middle East, such as the Babylonians, because the former were loose political agglomerates of otherwise autonomous entities. The argument that Indians had no states worked to explain their defeat during colonial conflict in the popular media and in fiction because it meant that they lacked the firm state organization and leadership structures that Europeans expected as prerequisites to successfully waging wars of extinction. 200. Hauer, Die Religionen, 476. 201. Eckstein, “Romantik ist tot,” 412. 202. Feest, “Germany’s Indians,” 27–28. 203. Qtd. in Weaver, “An Übermensch among the Apache,” 77. 204. Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 1, 29; Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 693–94. 205. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 693–94. 206. Qtd. in ibid., 303. 207. Jovy, Jugendbewegung und Nationalsozialismus, 138. 208. Rudolf Jacobs, “Der Todeskampf der Sioux,” Der Pimpf. Nationalsozialistische Jugendblätter (October 1938): 3. 209. Wittek, “Ein Brief Erhard Witteks,” 19. 210. F. Schauwecker, “Ende einer Rasse.” Berliner Börsenzeitung, Beilage Volk und Kultur, 21 May 1938. 211. Ibid. 212. “Rassenpflege.” 213. Rudolf Ganz, “Eindrücke und Probleme in Südamerika, Teil II,” Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift 64 J43 (1938): 1551. 214. Faupel, “Indianerfrage,” 126. 215. Tom Holm, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 88–89. 216. Alasdair Roberts, The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 81–82; newton2013, “Katrina Files- Sept 04 Aaron Broussard,” online posting, 14 August 2006, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=o9dJjAEVZ4g. A Google search for a combination of the terms “New Orleans,” “Katrina,” and “cavalry” reveals a surprisingly high number of entries employing this idiom. The same is true of “circling the wagons.” 217. Kreis, “Indians Playing,” 201–2. 218. Gerd Zitzelsberger, “Steinbrück: Streit mit Schweiz—Nervöse Indianer im Steuerreservat—Politik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung Online, 18 March 2009, http://www.sueddeutsche .de/politik/447/462067/text/; Mathieu von Rohr, “Indianer-Vergleich: Steinbrücks Wildwest-Rhetorik erzürnt die Schweizer,” Spiegel Online, 17 March 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/ politik/ausland/0,1518,613853,00.html. 219. It is quite possible that what Penny calls a “transatlantic German Kulturkreis”—the flow of information, visitors, migrants, ideas, and cultural practices between Germany and North America—contributed to these language adoptions. Penny, Kindred by Choice, 300n60. 220. Hans Commenda, Die Deutsche Soldatensprache in der K. u. K. Ősterreichisch-ungarischen Armee, Bad Neydharting (Austria: Verband Ősterreichischer Privat-Museen, 1949), 59, 73; Heinz Küpper, Von Anschiss bis Zwitschergemüse. Das Bundessoldatendeutsch von A-Z (Munich: Heyne, 1986), 84; Kurt Ahnert, Sprühende Heersprache. 2000 witzige Soldatenausdrücke aus der Weltkriegssprache (Nürnberg: Burgverlag, 1917), 58.

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221. Ahnert, Sprühende Heersprache, 65. 222. Küpper, Anschiss, 5, 93. 223. Guido Knopp, “Luftschlacht um England,” Episode 4, Der Jahrhundertkrieg, DVD, produced by Ralf Piechowiak and Alexander Tewes. Universum, 2004. 224. Küpper, Anschiss, 93. 225. Jürgen Ubl, Online review of Helmut Harringa by Hermann Popert. Überbündischer Stammtisch Allenspacher Hof, 14 June 2008, http://home.arcor.de/rover_1/lebensreform/1.2%20 Harringa%20-%20Rezension%20nach%2098%20Jahren.pdf. 226. Holm, Strong Hearts, 137. 227. Harold Ickes, “Indians Have a Name for Hitler,” Collier’s 113.15 January (1944): 58. 228. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 136–37. 229. Townsend claims that remarks like these were heard among both American and German soldiers, yet he admits that hardly any of them can be verified. My own research of Hitler’s speeches has revealed a few direct comments on Native Americans but none explicitly on their qualities as fighters. However, Hitler’s descriptions of Soviet combat styles often resembled typical “Indian prose.” Ibid., 136; see also Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 4, 1764, 1775, 1917; Alex Small, “Finds Nazi Staff Admires Russian as Fighting Man,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 July 1942. 230. Small, “Finds Nazi Staff.” 231. Once digitized, full-text German newspapers become available, this finding may be reversed. At this stage, a search in one German newspaper, the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, revealed only scant results. LNN was listed by Dietrich as the daily newspaper with the highest frequency of front reports by war correspondents from the “propaganda companies.” I reviewed all narrative war report features that went beyond the typical High-Command press releases in the period from 22 June 1941 to 17 April 1945, when the last issue was published before American troops captured the city of Leipzig. 232. Hauptmann d. R. Borsdorff, “Deutsche Scharfschützen. Die Elite des Einzelkämpfers.” Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 16 June 1944. The original reads “Lederstrumpf der Infanterie.” The main character in Cooper’s novels was used in this text as a synonym for the frontiersman who combines European technology and adopted Indian training to become a superior fighter. 233. See Josef Vidua, “Kriegsmarine in den Engpässen des Balkans.” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 13 April 1941. 234. Enz, “Neue Flammenzeichen.” Among the Allied forces in Italy, there were not only colonial Indian troops in the British Army but also the 45th U.S. Infantry Division, which was about one-third comprised of Native Americans from the Southwest. German troops were aware of the Native component in this division. Norgaard, “Airmen”; Lee, “Sicily.” 235. Walter Enz, “Neue Flammenzeichen über der Süditalienfront,” Strassburger Neueste Nachrichten, 15 May 1944. 236. This was also due to the Nazi propaganda effort to portray GIs as gangsters and murderers pressed into the army. In this case, Germans donned the Indian victim cliché. The gangster cliché was a common theme in anti-American propaganda. See Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 240. 237. “Das sind Roosevelts Kampfmethoden und Soldaten!” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 22 November 1942. 238. Oskar Ullrich, “Wild-West und Wild-Ost.” Strassburger Neueste Nachrichten, 28 May 1944. The original mentions “amerikanische Skalpjäger-Boys [sic].” 239. “Selbst von den Eskimos kann man lernen!” Illustrierte Zeitung, 20 February 1941. 240. See Domarus, Hitler, Reden, vol. 4, 1917. 241. Günter Kaufmann, “‘Saprali!’ Der Sowjetsoldat und der politische Kommissar.” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 6 July 1941.

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242. A third answer leads to the aforementioned debate between Nazi purists and pragmatists on whether Indians were acceptable as role models or not. Since the “pro-Indian faction” prevailed and Nazi educators actually promoted the writing of Indian novels for the German youth, I will disregard this debate in my analysis of the warrior image. 243. Kramer, Micky, 126–27, mentions the writers Martin Walser, Dieter Noll, and Erich Loest, all of whom worked Karl May references, adolescent playacting as Indians, and soldier experience into their autobiographies. 244. Allen, “Reception,” 223–24. 245. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 116, 119–23. 246. Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 21; Arbeitsgruppe Stolpersteine Leipzig, “Salomo Weininger.” 247. G. Haase, “Wildwest am Rande der Großstadt,” Illustrierte Zeitung, 30 April 1930. 248. Ibid. 249. Ibid. 250. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 119–20. 251. “Wer war uns Old Shatterhand?” 252. Haible, Indianer im Dienste, 120–23; 25 Jahre Schaffen am Werke Karl Mays (Radebeul bei Dresden: Karl-May-Verlag, 1938); Hans Franke, “Der Vater ‘Winnetous.’ Zu Karl Mays 100. Geburtstag,” Stuttgarter Neues Tageblatt, 24 February 1942; Jenkner, “Er lebt, wenn ich nicht irre. Karl May zum 100. Geburtstag,” Der Angriff, 26 February 1942; Vidua, “Kriegsmarine”; Horst Kanitz, “‘Karl May in Libyen.’ Anzeige des Karl-May-Verlages,” Jugendschriften-Warte 11/12 (1942): 96. 253. Karl Otten, A Combine of Aggression: Masses, Elite and Dictatorship in Germany (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942). 254. “Die Waffen-SS ist immer vorn.” Neue Leipziger Tageszeitung, 17 February 1942. 255. F. Schauwecker, “Triumph der Jugend.” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 13 April 1941. 256. Ibid. 257. Jacobs, “Der Todeskampf der Sioux,” 3. 258. Ibid. 259. “Parole: Hadschi Halef Omar!” Die HJ, 12 February 1938. The title of this article alone suggests a military setting in combination with Karl May: the German Parole means “password,” and Hadschi Halef Omar is the Arab equivalent of the Native character Winnetou in May’s Western novels. 260. Ibid. The German term Geländespiel is a compound of terrain and game, thus enabling allusions to scout training, even though the whole exercise could justifiably be described as a war game. 261. Ibid. 262. Hugo Zinfinger, “Wie lernen unsere Jungen im Gelände sich tarnen?,” Pädagogische Warte 42 J9 (1935): 419. 263. Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1, 469. 264. Walter Millis, “The New Europe,” Washington Post, 30 November 1936. 265. Ibid. 266. Qtd. in Kramer, Micky, 127. 267. Borsdorff, “Scharfschützen.” 268. Allen, “Reception,” 258–59. 269. Kater, Ahnenerbe, 47–50. 270. Ibid., 49. 271. Ibid., 222. 272. Similar observations can be made about ethnologists’ efforts to promote colonial planning. 273. Another such project was the famed German Amazon-Jary expedition under Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel in 1935–1937. It triggered the so-called Guyana-Project, a prewar plan

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274. 275. 276. 277.

278. 279. 280. 281. 282.

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283.

284. 285. 286.

287. 288.

to conquer French Guyana, gain a military foothold in South America, and threaten the United States through the back door via the Panama Canal. An ethnographic documentary produced by UFA praised the supposed achievements of these Germans as explorers and cultural brokers; it was a blockbuster in 1938. See Jens Glüsing, Das Guayana-Projekt: Ein deutsches Abenteuer am Amazonas (Berlin: Links, 2008), 190–214; Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, Rätsel der Urwaldhölle. Das Filmdokument der dt. Amazonas-Jary-Exedition v.d.l. Süd-Nord-Durchquerung Brasilianisch-Guayanas auf d. Jary-Fluß, film recording (Berlin: Ufa, 1937); idem, Rätsel der Urwaldhölle: Vorstoß in unerforschte Urwälder des Amazonenstromes (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1938). Wolff, letter to Moers, 28 July 1941, Tgb. Nr. 17/76/41. Philipp von Luetzelburg, “Auszug aus Moers’ Bericht.” 10 August 1942. BArch Berlin, NS 19.3048. B/121/m 3. Ibid., 5. Philipp von Luetzelburg, letter to Heinrich Himmler, “Re: Rücksprache mit Hauptmann E. von Moers in Lüttich.” 3 February 1942, 2–3, BArch Berlin, NS 19.900, TgbNr A/17/76/41 He/Gr. In addition, Moers was given information on ancient golden statues, supposedly the remnants of Inca treasures, which he planned to find and secure. Luetzelburg, Report to Himmler, “Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen von Moers’ in Südamerika, insbes. in Bezug auf indianische Arzneipflanzen, Heilmittel und Drogen.-Übersendung eines Berichtsauszuges mit Kommentierung durch das ‘Ahnenerbe,’” 10 August 1942, 8–10, BArch Berlin, NS 19.3048. Luetzelburg, “Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen,” 9–11; idem, letter to Himmler, 3 February 1942, 3. Luetzelburg, “Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen,” 9–10. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 15. The 1966 edition of Michael Kater’s work on the Ahnenerbe mentioned that Ahnenerbe researcher and anatomy specialist August Hirt received one gram of curare poison for experiments from his superior Wolfram Sievers, but the 2006 edition does not address this incident. Ibid., 508. Kater points out that the research task presumably derived from Himmler’s interest in developing new torture methods. Plans for an Ahnenerbe expedition to Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were scheduled for 1940. Himmler postponed this expedition in late August 1939, presumably because of the impending war. Himmler to Sievers, Re: Expedition des “Ahnenerbes” nach Südamerika (1940). Edmund Kiss was involved in planning this expedition and tasked with finding proof for the World Ice theory discussed earlier. It is possible that Himmler collected plans for South America and hoped to combine the herbal collection and the World Ice research into one expedition after the war, but the available documents do not as yet confirm this interpretation. Ibid. Wolff, Letter to Sievers, 5 October 1942. Ganz, “Eindrücke und Probleme in Südamerika, Teil II.” Sönke el Bitar, Schlaflos im Krieg—die pharmazeutische Waffe, produced by Radio Bremen and Arte, 2010. However, Ganz’s suggestion contrasted starkly with a 1933 article by Edith Faupel, a German researcher who apparently was not a trained physician. She claimed that the poverty and poor diet among Native communities forced people into vegetarianism which, in turn, made them susceptible to cocaine addiction. Faupel, “Indianerfrage,” 122. My research has not unearthed any indication as to whether Propaganda Ministry officials reprimanded the author for this conclusion, which might easily have led readers to link Hitler’s vegetarianism to drug addiction. I am grateful to Gorch Pieken of the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden for his helpful comments on the issue of drug research in the Wehrmacht. Allen, “Reception,” 172–74. Blome, “Bericht.”

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289. Klaus Hildebrand’s 1969 study on colonial politics in the Third Reich, based on documents of the KPA, is comprehensive. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. 290. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 411. Kolonialschuldlüge would translate as “denial of colonial guilt.” In this notion, Germans claim that the German colonies had not exploited and oppressed the colonized peoples before 1919, while the other colonial powers had. Rassenschuldlüge denies that German racial policies after 1935 in Nuremberg oppressed minorities or would oppress future colonized peoples. 291. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 411. 292. Ibid., 412. 293. Byer, Der Fall, 298. 294. Mühlmann, Rassen- und Völkerkunde, 4. 295. Krause, “Bedeutung der Völkerkunde,” 7–8. 296. Ibid., 10. 297. Ibid., 11. 298. Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 161. 299. Qtd. in Blome, “Bericht,” 2. 300. Ibid. 301. Ibid., 17. 302. See ibid., 7–9; Byer, Der Fall, 308–9, 316–18. 303. Qtd. in Blome, “Bericht,” 34. 304. Ibid. 305. Qtd. in ibid., 35. 306. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 45. 307. “Colin Ross.” 308. Blome, “Bericht,” 14–15, 35. 309. Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 168–76; Schoenichen, Naturschutz, 413–23. 310. Blome, “Bericht,” 1–2. 311. Byer, Der Fall, 303. 312. Ibid. 313. Ibid., 310.

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CONCLUSION

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S When I encountered a study on Native Americans in World War II for the first time in 2000, the author’s discussion of Nazi broadcasts echoed my puzzlement: “How could the Indians think of bearing arms for their exploiters?” a 1942 U.S. article quoted a German broadcaster asking.1 While the existing (Native) American scholarship explored diverse facets of Native American participation in World War II, researchers often lacked access to the bulk of German sources, and the question remains of what the Nazi leaders aimed to do about this Native involvement in the American war effort.2 In addition, the much-quoted Nazi broadcast has not even been located yet. My own research on Indian imagery in German print media, fiction, and academic publications of the Nazi era illustrates the use of Indian imagery for propaganda, and it reveals that a combination of German racism and Indianthusiasm need not be an oxymoron. By exploring the employment of Indian imagery for ideological purposes, this study extends the understanding of National Socialism as a popular movement that thrived on the exploitation of desires, longings, and conflicts across the social and political spectrum in German society. Scholarly debates on the nature of National Socialism abound, and the debate about the extent to which the Nazis’ pragmatism overpowered their programmatic implementation of ideological doctrine is still raging. My own study of the application of one cultural phenomenon, Indianthusiasm, illustrates that the Nazis utilized expedient alterations and reinterpretations of ideological doctrine to fulfill their primary goal of retaining power. The analysis of print media in the Third Reich reveals that more than one reading of “the Indian” was possible in Nazi Germany, and that different agents within the German power structure employed distinct aspects of Indianthusiasm to achieve their aims. Indianthusiasm provided a niche for writers to publish without political pressure from Nazi censors, but it also served to spearhead propaganda efforts launched by the higher echelons of the Nazi leadership. In this expedient juggling of images for propaganda purposes, the media used both traditional tropes of Indian imagery, such as Notes from this chapter begin on page 214.

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the vanishing Indian, and new interpretations tailored to suit the Nazi doctrine of racial consciousness, of social Darwinism, or of anti-Western Indigenism. Because it interweaves the analysis of images, ideologies, and social movements, this study provides a multidisciplinary contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its observations on Romantic notions and cultural despair as influential factors for Indianthusiasm highlight the ideological roots of National Socialism. The broad range of sources scrutinized for this work allows for a general overview of German media history from 1925 to 1945: analyzing topics such as “Indians,” “Indigeneity,” Naturvölker, and German-American relations, it elucidates developments and detects patterns in the German national media landscape in both the popular sector and academic publications. Its range of more than 1,200 articles from over 250 periodicals demonstrates that Indianthusiasm was fully enmeshed in German popular culture and everyday life, that it thrived throughout the early twentieth century, and that its expressions were by no means limited to adventure novels and children’s literature. This extended source base refutes earlier studies’ claims that Indians naturally had to be portrayed as inferior in a system based on scientific racism and white superiority. “Indians” actually served to promote racism rather than cloak it. They could be and often were seen through a positive racial lens. Indian imagery, while it could be presented in traditional, ahistorical, and cliché-laden settings, frequently served as a vehicle for concrete and contemporary political arguments in international and domestic propaganda. Political events, such as the Indian New Deal in the United States, were interpreted as role models for the Volksgemeinschaft and blood-and-soil ideology for a domestic audience, yet were denounced as a Jewish-Communist conspiracy for an American, particularly Native American, audience. My comparison of the perception of U.S.-Indian policy and Latin American Indigenism in Germany adds a hemispheric perspective to German Indianthusiasm that encourages further study of political interests, cultural diplomacy, and international relations across the Americas. The broad range of sources in this study, furthermore, made it possible to compare the use of Indian imagery in various genres, elucidating the extent to which academic writers utilized its popularity for a variety of purposes, such as boosting the distribution of their publications, or currying favor with the Nazi leadership. The diversity of sources also illustrates the expedient alternation between subtle interpretation and pompous metaphors in propaganda to spread Nazi ideology and thus secure the Nazis’ own power base. I will conclude with some reflections on how other scholars could apply this study’s approach to help connect more dots, open new German sources for the study of Indian imagery, and, thus, eventually link up with the work of American scholars who started discussing the role of Native Americans in World War II in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Jere Franco and other scholars have aptly described the U.S. government’s anxiety about Nazi spies working among Native Americans and about German support for American Nazi organizations during World War II. In this context, it would be valuable to find out exactly which German organizations funded and organized these efforts in the United States, and how they implemented imagery in ideology, as discussed in this study. Knowledge about the background of Nazi espionage among Native Americans would enable scholars to assess the importance to the Nazi government of destabilizing U.S. society and to put these efforts into the context of general Nazi subversion and plans for military occupation abroad. The debate about possible German espionage efforts to conduct what ought to be called “preemptive anti-code-talking” measures would be one area to explore. Studies on Native American servicemen have pointed out that the U.S. government and reservation superintendents were very suspicious of Germans who visited Native communities during the 1930s and sought to establish friendly relations in order to learn their languages. They suspected that these Germans would later serve as specialists for deciphering messages should the U.S. use Native Americans as code talkers, as they had begun to do during the last months of World War I.3 If this was indeed an issue in Nazi espionage, future research would have to track down possible spies and retrace their activities to the various funding organizations because there are too many possible sponsors to be considered. One could speculate that the Nazi government funded ethnological field trips for individual scholars who were to report back, or that different branches of the military sent out spies, or that the Auswärtiges Amt organized such efforts.4 The notorious institutional rivalry in Nazi Germany could even have prompted parallel efforts by all these institutions. Research on these travelers could also confirm the story about the Nazis who visited Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard to inquire about reservation life and Indian policy. My own spot check on cultural anthropologist Günther Wagner does not suggest that he was a spy, which he was suspected of as he conducted research among the Yuchi and Comanche tribes. The Yuchis were a group of speakers too small to be useful as code talkers, and Wagner’s research among the Comanches did not concern language much. In addition, Wagner apparently tried desperately to avoid having to return to Germany during the 1930s. This could mean that he had no interest in working for the Nazi government, but there is no definitive evidence.5 This anecdote, however, proves that the anxiety about Nazi spies often led to suspicions that were not necessarily grounded in hard facts. As my own research has pointed out possible interrelations between Nazi political and economic interest in gaining footholds in Latin America, further research into unpublished sources might reveal the extent to which the Nazis hoped to utilize Native issues in this regard. Once Nazi destabilization of and

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encroachment into the Western hemisphere is thematized, research should also include German plans to invade and occupy the entire Western hemisphere. Such a research track would have to consult the Militärarchiv in Freiburg i. Br., a branch of the German Bundesarchiv, to locate plans in general staff documents or in intelligence services. A discussion of invasion and occupation plans would possibly put German Indianthusiasm to the test, as it might overturn the fellow tribesmen motif once German authorities came in contact with, and gained power over, Native communities. If Indianthusiasm included the love for the other “from a safe distance,” master race attitudes may well have replaced the fellow tribesmen motif once that distance began to shrink.6 On the other hand, if Nazi government institutions indeed planned to use Native Americans as a fifth column, they might have made plans to divide et impera, as well, and attempted to exploit American aboriginals to help hold down the occupied disloyal white population in the United States or in Latin America.7 As the previous chapter suggested, similar conflicts between Indianthusiasm, racial thought, and governmental practice might have occurred in Nazi colonial planning. The proceedings of the 1940 anthropological conference in Göttingen show that ethnologists discussed U.S. Indian policy as a role model for German colonial planning in Africa. Research in the Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP and in Reich government institutions concerned with plans for colonial administration, military and civil security, and economic exploitation could uncover the degree to which the scholars’ suggestions were taken seriously. It might also reveal whether events such as the Germans’ visit to Clinton Rickard’s home on the Tuscarora reservation resulted at least partly from the Nazi government’s plans to utilize a revised model of Indian reservations in colonial Africa, or even in Siberia. The analysis of German Indianthusiasm in the Third Reich could expand into other media, as well. Deborah Allen began investigating textbooks and ethnological museums in 2004, a study that could be deepened and extended. The scope of my study precluded the inclusion of radio sources, but further research might eventually unearth the radio broadcasts mentioned earlier. One could analyze Nazi efforts to reach Native communities directly via shortwave radio, the background knowledge and propaganda sophistication involved, and the committed funding, time, and staff in relation to the desired effect. A preliminary inquiry at the Rundfunkarchiv (radio and television archive) exposed extensive Nazi radio use for foreign propaganda, and showed that the United States was targeted, as well, although pertinent literature does not mention any programs directly aimed at Native Americans by the prominent station KWS.8 In terms of German Indianthusiasm, the Rundfunkarchiv, the documents of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft in the Bundesarchiv, or those of the Propaganda Ministry might offer some information about Indian references in German radio programs for German listeners. My preliminary research unearthed only one direct reference in radio magazines collected in the Rundfunkarchiv.9

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Interestingly, the Hitler Youth magazine Die HJ chronicled this incident, the visit of Os-Ko-Mon to the German radio station Deutschlandsender in 1938. The article also mentioned that Os-Ko-Mon participated in the Karl-May-Festspiele in Rathen, Saxony, starring as a medicine man. In addition, Die HJ informed readers that Os-Ko-Mon, who toured Europe as a dance performer, had appeared on the first German television station where he gave an interview and performed Native dances.10 This television show and any coverage of the Karl-May-Festspiele by the Wochenschau newsreels could contribute to the scholarship on visual representations of Native Americans in Germany. Future research might profit greatly from improved service at the German National Library. The Leipzig site hosts a collection of more than 14,000 posters and official pamphlets from World War I, and approximately 5,000 posters, fliers, and official leaflets from World War II.11 Unfortunately, the collection lacks funding for restoration, and most of the items are not yet cataloged, making systematic research impossible at this stage. However, as the chance find of the anti-American/anti-Semitic propaganda poster in the Hoover Institution Archives (Figure 14, Figure 15) demonstrates, posters were an important part of Germany’s propaganda efforts in the early twentieth century. Their analysis could contribute to scholarship on visual representations of Native Americans in Germany, as well.

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***** When Hans Schemm, the founder of the Nazi teachers’ association, announced in January 1934 that the German youth should exhibit a “Karl-May attitude” rather than “school-prissiness,” German Indianthusiasm had already been evident for more than a century.12 Long before Karl May published his first Indian novel, German readers and show spectators were fascinated by American aboriginals. The interest in, and fascination with, all “things Indian” accompanied German popular culture and intellectual history throughout the entire nineteenth century. For German observers, the Indian other reflected German problems, longings, and fears, thus alternating between role model, cautionary tale, and object of escapist longing. These reflections changed their attire as German society evolved into a modern, industrialized, urban culture, and they varied within different interest groups and classes in Germany. However, they did not change their meaning. The Indian as a reference point has prevailed up to this day, even though general interest in Native Americans may be dwindling. As my study illustrates, the image of Indians in nineteenth-century Germany helped Germans invent their national identity, which worked toward the German nation-state and culminated in its founding in 1871. Remnants of earlier Romantic notions promoting intuition, emotionality, and originality as genuinely German features were identified as familiar traits when Germans compared themselves to Indians. The emergence of Germanic antiquarian studies

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contributed to an understanding that contemporary American aboriginals, seen as equally emotional, intuitive, and original, could be understood as reflections of early stages of tribal German peoplehood. Studying and being euphoric about Indians, then, helped Germans embrace what they believed to be their own ancient history. Many of the German images of Indians were based on clichés and generalizations, and the application of this imagery to Germans’ own history meant that these clichés and generalizations served to invent a Germanic tradition of peoplehood. This image of Indians in Germany also served to promote German national identity and nationalism. Thus, German nationalism and Indianthusiasm are pages from the same book; they tell similar stories, and apply similar styles. Both are constructions that served ideology and that were, and still are, often taken at face value. Along with changes in German society, Indian imagery evolved and was applied to new contexts and concepts. It helped conservative nationalists claim the German Sonderweg and instill the notion of uniqueness among many Germans. The fellow tribesmen and the common enemy motifs established Germans as European Indians whose culture was endangered by Western civilization as much as Indian culture had been endangered by Western civilization in the Americas. Merging the Indian other into a German-Indian self allowed German nationalists to portray European and Euro-American rivals as the proverbial other. Liberalism, urbanity, capitalism, democracy, and other aspects of modernity could be summarily rejected as alien, un-German, and threatening to German cultural integrity. Among other foundations, National Socialism took root in this attitude of cultural pessimism, which it employed to take and retain power. Thus, along with its function as a vehicle of popular culture and its promise of profits among publishers and show impresarios, Indianthusiasm was also a vehicle for the negotiation of power during the Third Reich. The Nazis, as descendants of völkisch conservative nationalism, appropriated the imagery and terminology of the preceding conservative generation and integrated Indianthusiast and Norsetalgic imagery into their ideological catalog. The German claim to indigeneity, taken up by Nazi proponents of militarism, euthanasia, colonialism, and social Darwinism, had hitherto offered an alternative to modernity that permeated different social groups but was mainly a fringe phenomenon. Since the Nazis took up German indigeneity, education, science, and propaganda measures turned the notion of Germans as an indigenous people related to other indigenous peoples into a state doctrine. The Nazis’ claim to German indigeneity promoted the Sonderweg, it promoted notions of racial and cultural superiority, and it reinforced the belief in the fundamental otherness of “the West.” Nazi ideology also appropriated concepts and images from other movements if they promised ideological and political profit. Thus, the Youth movement and the Life Reform movement provided Nazi ideology with images that further sup-

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ported Indianthusiasm in Germany. Neo-pagan alternative spiritualities, a return to natural foods, natural healing methods, public health, and holistic approaches to the relationship between humans and nature appeared in Nazi propaganda. These green roots of National Socialism employed Indian imagery, which, in turn, promoted references to the Germanic ancestors. The appropriation of these broad cultural movements provided the Nazis with a broader base of loyal supporters. Indianthusiasm, therefore, worked as one device for gaining and preserving loyalty to the Nazi leadership among diverse social groups. “Playing Indian” has been a popular pastime among German children, adolescents, and hobbyists since the era of the Wild West shows. Not confined to any particular social group, these games became subject to deliberate preparations for war. Playing Indian introduced basic fighting skills to children and promoted endurance and heroism. Nazi educators could rely on such comfortable customs to intensify military training by way of scouting games in the Hitler Youth and the SA storm troops. Therefore, reference to Indians as fighters was present at all levels of preparing and conducting war. Indianthusiasm had embedded the Indian Scout syndrome into notions of fighting so thoroughly that military instruction as well as war reporting drew upon a broad array of Indian images, concepts, and terminology related to Indians and to the traditional German perception of Indians. Expanding the scope and the source base of earlier analyses of German Indianthusiasm, this study further provides insight into the employment of Indian images in political activities of the Nazi regime, backed by National Socialist academia. The Indian was not merely a literary image that drew its impulses from Karl May or from the Indian novelists of the 1930s. Political events in the Americas evoked Nazi interest, and the image of Indians, reinforced by racial thinking, helped Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies begin subversive activities to destabilize societies and state organizations throughout the Western hemisphere. Talk about the revival of the Americas as a “Red” continent did not mean that Nazi Germany aimed to be the vanguard of decolonization in the Western hemisphere, although the texts often seem to indicate as much. It simply supported subversive activity by closely observing social and ethnic conflicts in these countries. The fact that Nazi propaganda used the Indian image to destabilize societies in South and North America illustrates the position of German Indianthusiasm in the general perception of the United States in Germany. Indianthusiasm has always been part of the German mix of fascination with, and contempt for, America. Propaganda with Indian imagery could perfectly express anti-American notions.13 German Indianthusiasm could safely criticize U.S. Indian policy and the expropriation of Native lands, it could use the common enemy and fellow tribesmen motifs to express contempt for the alleged lack of culture in American civilization, and it could rebuke Americans as destroyers of nature and culture while praising both Indians and Germans as their protectors. In reports about

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Indigenism in Latin America, the image of Indians could be used to denounce American imperialism and to promote the benign efforts of German developers. Indianthusiasm, as a way of identifying with the victims of American imperialism, is an aspect of a long anti-American tradition that probably will also have a future in Germany. As long as Germans feel compelled to defend themselves against accusations regarding racism and the Holocaust, many will be tempted to turn the table, point fingers, and refer to U.S. Indian policy in order to deflect critical attention, as the ongoing accusations in online neo-Nazi forums and the expressions of beer-hall racism in the German mainstream exemplify. The interest in Native American topics as such is diminishing as Indians become less exotic, with increased opportunities for true contact, as Glenn Penny has observed, and quite possibly also because of the increased pace of media trends, ranging from dinosaurs, medieval markets, and Harry Potter to World of Warcraft and beyond.14 Yet, abridged and generalizing representations of American aboriginals will continue to be employed, nevertheless. Given the increasing environmental crises, the images of the Indian eco-warrior and holistic healer will most likely prevail. Thus, Nazi appropriation of Indian imagery is not to be seen as a unique phenomenon isolated in space and time but merely as an individual, distinctive, and particularly bizarre phase in the longer tradition of German perceptions of (Native) America. Nazi interpretations of indigenous cultures in the Americas illustrate German self-perception, but they also provide insight into, explain sources of, and allow speculations about the ongoing process of perceiving both the Native and the Euro-American other across the pond.

Notes 1. Richard Neuberger, “The American Indian Enlists,” Asia and the Americas 42 (Nov. 1942): 628; Townsend, World War II and the American Indian, 36. 2. Cf. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian (2000); Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Franco, “Patriotism on Trial”; Tom Holm, Code Talkers and Warriors: Native Americans in World War II (New York: Chelsea, 2007). 3. Franco, “Patriotism on Trial,” 89–90; William C. Meadows, Comanche Code Talkers Talkers of World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 30–31. 4. Among these, the Amt Ausland/Abwehr in the High Command of the Wehrmacht would have been a likely sponsor. 5. Cf. Udo Mischek, Leben und Werk Günter Wagners (1908-1952). Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Ethnologie (Gehren: Escher, 2002); Jason Baird Jackson, telephone interview on Günther Wagner and other German scholars, 24 November 2007. 6. Lutz, “Indianthusiasm,” 180. 7. Britt, Fifth Column.

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8. Andreas Dan, e-mail interview on reference to Native Americans in German radio shows, 25 August 2008. 9. Ibid. 10. “Os-Ko-Mon.” 11. “DNB, Plakatsammlung,” Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, 12 March 2009, http://www.dnb .de/sammlungen/sondersammlungen/plakatsammlung.htm; Barbara Trettner, telephone interview on the poster collection in the DNB, 30 July 2012. 12. Qtd. in Hamerski, “Fatal Attraction,” 213. 13. Diner, Feindbild Amerika. Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments (Munich: Propyläen, 2002), 218. 14. Penny, “Elusive Authenticity,” 816–17.

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Wee-Gee-So-Zee-Wie-Ahz (Roaming Bird), “Ein Wettlauf um die Freiheit,” Die Gartenlaube, 8 July 1926. Wegener, Franz. Das atlantidische Weltbild. 2nd ed. Gladbeck: KFVR, 2003. Wehler, Hans Ulrich. “Nationalismus und Nation in der Deutschen Geschichte.” In Nationales Bewusstsein, ed. Berding, 163–75. Weiser, Lily. Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und nordischen Altertums- und Volkskunde. Bühl, Baden: Konkordia, 1927. “‘Welteislehre.’ Theorie zur Entstehung des Hagels von Hans Robert Hörbiger sowie wissenschaftliche Begründung und Anfechtbarkeit der ‘Welteislehre.’” 1938. BArch Berlin, NS 19.1705. Wenzel, Andreas. “Tendenzielle Meinungsbildung mittels sprachlicher Manipulation in der rechtsradikalen Publizistik—Eine kritische Untersuchung der Propagandamethoden der ‘Deutschen National-Zeitung’ im Vergleich zum NSDAP-Parteiorgan ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.” Ph.D. diss., Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1981. “Wer war uns Old Shatterhand?” Das Schwarze Korps 13.1 (April 1937): 16. Werder. “Der Rote Mann—Rassenpsychologisch.” Bücherkunde: Organ des Amtes für Schrifttumspflege bei dem Beauftragten des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP und der Reichsstelle zur Förderung des Deutschen Schrifttums J5 (1938): 480–83. White Horse Eagle. Wir Indianer. Erinnerungen des letzten grossen Häuptlings White Horse Eagle (Weisses Pferd Adler). Trans. Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli. Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1929. “Wie Gutmenschen die Eroberung Amerikas sehen.” Comment to online posting “Offene Diskussion.” Altermedia.deutschland.info, 14 July 2012. http://altermedia-deutschland .info/showthread.php/2088-Artikel-Offene-Diskussion-14-07-2012?highlight=indianer. “Wiederkehr der Indianer. Anzeichen und Fernsichten.” Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 December 1934. “Wiedersehen mit Winnetou. In den amerikanischen Indianerdörfern.” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 8 August 1939. Wiehle, O. “Die Indianer.” Pädagogische Warte (1935): 746–51. Wieland, Hermann. Atlantis, Edda und Bibel. 200,000 Jahre germanischer Weltkultur und das Geheimnis der Heiligen Schrift. Bremen: Roland Faksimile, 2001. Williams, Daniel E. “Until They Are Contaminated by Their More Refined Neighbors: The Images of the Native American in Carver’s ‘Travels through the Interior’ and Its Influence on the Euro-American Imagination.” In Indians and Europe, ed. Feest, 195–214. Williamson, George S. The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Winter, H. “Kontroverse Hennig—Zechlin im Lichte der Kartographie (vorkolumbische Entdeckung Nordamerikas durch dänisch/portugiesisches Unternehmen).” Historische Vierteljahrschrift (1937): 57–72. Wippersberg, Walter. Das Fest des Huhnes. DVD. BMG Ariola Austria, 1992. Wittek, Erhard. “Ein Brief Erhard Witteks an Eduard Rothemund.” Jugendschriften-Warte 3/4 (1940): 19. Wiwjorra, Ingo. “Die deutsche Vorgeschichtsforschung und ihr Verhältnis zu Nationalismus und Rassismus.” In Handbuch, ed. Puschner et al., 186–207. Wohlbold, H. “Naturbeherrschung—Naturverwandlung.” Naturschutz. Monatsschrift für alle Freunde der deutschen Heimat 17 J6 (1936): 121–24.

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Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. A aboriginal culture, preservation of, 81–82, 188 acculturation, racial identity preservation and, 137, 144 adoptions, coerced, 85, 115n138 adventure German longings for, 48 novels instilling sense of, 104 adventure books censorship of, 103 function of, 68–69 Nazi ideology transmitted in, 141 African Americans controlling and suppressing, 132 as display objects, 24–25 sterilization of, 85, 115n138 whites, conflicts with, 155 African colonies atrocities against, 137 German regaining of, 189, 190 plans for, 191–92, 210 African natives, 93, 117n183, 150, 191 afterlife, Germanizing ideas of, 76, 113n100 agriculture, 60, 67, 75, 111n49 Ahnenerbe (research foundation), 7, 184, 185, 186 albinos, 86, 90 alcoholism, 85, 137, 142, 171 Allen, Deborah, 6, 18, 21n34, 23, 80, 103, 114n116, 128–30, 138, 178, 183, 187 allotment policy (U.S.), 157 alternative histories, 168 alternative societies, 47, 125 Amazon-Jary expedition, 184, 204n273 America. See also North America

Africans, influx of, 150 conquest and settlement of, 132, 142–43, 164, 200n177 contact with other hemispheres, 149, 164–65, 167, 197n107 discovery of, 11, 162–68 German-Indian collaboration in, 93, 118n183 German interest in, 43, 213 German leaders versus people, attitude toward, 161, 200n164 German perceptions of, 4–5, 7, 107, 122n252 landscapes, 38, 41 name, origin of, 164, 167, 201n180 pre-Columbian expeditions to, 162, 163–66 route for reaching, 11, 80, 162, 164, 201n178 American aboriginals, 8–12, 19, 38, 43, 80, 103, 141, 147–148, 191 German biological proximity to, 88, 164–65 German relationship to, 87, 90, 107 (see also German-Indian relationship) representation of, 12–14, 16–17, 82, 214 American character, 134, 161 American Indian studies, 8–9, 57 American Nazis, 105, 209 Americans attacks on, 138–39, 156 in literature, 156–57 self-criticism by, 158–59 self-perception of, 132, 157 American West. See Wild West Americas. See also North America; South America conquest and colonization of, 4, 84, 139, 147, 162–63, 169

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discovery and exploration of, 124, 139, 162–63 mythical places connected with, 88 politics in, 19, 148–49, 213 Andes, Natives of, 89, 96 Anglo-Saxons, 39, 94, 107, 122n252, 133 animals, 66, 73, 126 animist religions, 70, 75 anthropologists, 18, 78, 187–92 anthropology, 13, 124 anti-American notions common enemy motif and, 154–61, 213 Indians and, 137–38, 139–40, 142, 170–71 Latin American developments and, 149 Nazi era continuation of, 11 pre-Nazi era, 137–38 anti-American propaganda, 17, 19, 34, 90 anti-Christian sentiments, 69, 168 antiquarian studies, 79, 114n109, 211–12 anti-Semitism, 65, 137 aphrodisiacs, 185 Arabic peoples, 104 archaeological findings, 17, 162, 165–66 Ariosophy, 69 Arkansas, Native Americans in, 90, 116n165 Arminius (Hermann) (Germanic hero), 40, 58, 100, 169 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 45, 71 arts, 37, 125, 126 Aryan descent, 90, 91, 146 Aryans Indian chiefs possessing traits of, 78–79 Indians as, 87–91 origin of, 77, 79–80, 87–88 religious reference to, 67, 70 Asian Indians, 155 Asian races, 103–4 assimilation effects of, 105, 142 extinction or, 137, 141, 195n74 policies regarding, 82, 142 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 150 Atlantis in fiction, 89 inhabitants of, 23, 126 myth of, 87–88

Atleo, Richard, 45, 53n98 atrocities, German responsibility for, 137, 141 B Babylonians, 169, 202n199 Baden-Powell, Robert, 129, 130, 178 Baltic nations, peoples of, 5, 20n5 banned writings, blacklists of, 120–21n222 barbarians classical clichés, 60–61 depiction of, 45, 60–64, 62, 125, 133–34 Germans as, 44–45, 60, 68 images of, 43, 47, 54n110, 134–35 virtues of, 37–38, 132–33 Barthel-Winkler, Lisa, 165, 169–70, 201n182 Becker, Jörg, 78 Beer Hall Putsch, 70, 112n68 Bella Coolas, show of, 24, 49n12 Bering Strait migration theory, 11, 80, 162 Berkhofer, Robert, 8, 38, 42, 136 Bernatzik, Hugo, 191–92 Berndt, Alfred-Ingemar, 158–59 biological determinism, 9, 66, 111n42, 135 biologism, 84, 106, 108 Blackfeet tribe, 173 Black Hawk (Native American chief ), 38, 51n69 Blavatsky, Helena, 69, 112n63 blood, symbolism of, 70 blood-and-soil ideology, 75–76, 78, 95–96, 125, 132, 149, 150, 151, 190, 208 blood brotherhood, 30, 64, 70 Blood Flag, 70 boarding schools, 143 Bolivia, expedition, planned to, 186, 205n283 Bomans, Godfried, 30, 31 book bans, 103 bourgeois, 29, 30, 37 Boy Scouts, 129, 130, 178 in Germany, 95, 129 Brazil, 152–53, 163 British merchant people, 66, 111n44 Britt, Georg, 91, 106

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Brünhilde (mythical character), 64 brutal savage trope, 176 buffalo, 138, 139 Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), 24–25, 27 Buffalo Child Long Lance (Sylvester Clark Long), 94, 95, 118n186 bulwark motif, 100, 102 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 190 C Caesar, Julius, 156 camouflage training, 182 capitalism, 37, 51n58, 84, 151, 189 Cassirer, Paul, 126 Catholicism, 27, 45, 59, 76, 151 Catlin, George, 24, 25, 65 Central America, colored peoples in, 151 Century of Dishonor, A (Jackson), 157, 199n146 Chaco War, 185 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 79–80 characters, fictional. See literary characters character traits, 3, 63 charity, natural selection versus, 84–85 chauvinism, protest against, 127 Cherokee tribe, 102, 120n220, 160, 191 Cheyenne tribe, 94, 118n186 children charter traits, instilling in, 104 disabled, 86 games, 1 (see also playing Indian) race, sense of, instilling in, 78, 80 sense of invincibility in, 35 starving, rituals for, 85 war, preparation for, 11, 83 children of nature, Indians as, 41, 125 children’s literature, 12, 78–79, 104, 131 Chile, expedition, planned to, 186, 205n283 Chinese Boxer Uprising, 45, 53n99 Cholos, 146 Christianity alternatives to, 69, 71, 76 rejection of, 70, 165–66, 169 May, K. appraisal of, 32 National Socialism relationship to, 75 Christian mission, 18, 82, 188, 191

Circus Sarrasani (Dresden), 27 circus shows, Native American performers in, 25, 27 civilization dangers of, 107, 132–33 resentment of, 4, 46–47, 130 as Western feature, 45 Clauss, Ludwig Ferdinand, 104, 121n233 cliché busting, 5, 16, 56–57, 137, 156 coca chewing, 186–187 cocaine, 186–87, 205n286 code talkers, 209 Cold War, 2 Collier, Donald, 90 Collier, John, 90 colonial envy, 2, 43, 47, 137, 162, 164, 167–68 colonial longing, 29, 35, 43, 165 colonial planning, 187–92, 210 colonial powers, criticism of, 84, 137, 187, 206n290 colonization German views and policies on, 65, 107, 151, 162, 164, 197n119 colonized people, German racial policies impact on, 84, 187, 206n290 colored peoples, 151, 189 Columbus, Christopher, 11, 34, 162, 164, 167 Comanche tribe, 209 common enemy motif America discovery and settlement, discussions combined with, 168 American civilization versus German culture distinction reinforcing, 4–5 anti-Americanism and, 154–61, 213 drawbacks and obstacles to applying, 123–24, 162 German identification with Native victims through, 11, 43, 47, 58, 59, 212 May, K. works and performances employing, 32 in Nazi propaganda, 94, 100 overview of, 4 communal living, 47, 125 Communists, 176

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communities individuals protected in, 83–84, 184 past, idealized image of, 38 community versus society (dichotomy), 40, 45, 46, 94, 105 concentration camps, 63, 139 Connor, J. W., 100, 119–20n205 Conquistadors, 163, 164 conservation, 131–32 conservatism, 7, 9, 36, 38–39, 44, 48, 131 conservative nationalism, 24, 77, 125 conservative revolution, 131 consumerism, 125 contraceptives, 185 Cooper, James Fenimore, 13,17, 41, 65, 94, 126, 136, 176 Counterculture, 41, 59, 69–70, 103, 121n225 cowboys and Indians (children’s game), 1. See also playing Indian craniology, 79 creation myth, 10, 48, 57–59 crime, 35, 85 crossbreeding, 150 cruel savage, 41–42, 45, 46, 61 Cuauhtémoc (Aztec leader), 149 cultural anthropology, 12, 18, 87, 106 cultural despair, 6, 22, 208 cultural determination, 11, 146 cultural pessimism argument of, 44, 46, 47–48, 150 causes and rise of, 2, 24 Germanic colonial failure and, 168 German movement fed by, 47 National Socialism and, 212 Romantic tradition of, 36, 40 in Youth movement, 130 cultural relativism, 68, 74, 111n56 culture versus civilization (dichotomy), 40, 45, 46, 47–48 cyclical development of, 147 imposing on other race, impossibility of, 91, 92, 105 threats to German, 84, 94, 102 culture-bearers, culture-destroyers, and culture-founders, 91, 104

culture contact, 42, 188 curare poison, 186, 205n282 D Darré, Walther, 75 Darwin, Charles, 78 Dawes Act, 1887, 190 decolonization, racist fear of, 151, 197n119 deforestation, dangers of, 68 degeneration Anglo-American responsibility for Native, 157–58 discourses on, 137, 141, 142, 146, 149 de Lagard, Paul, 130 de las Casa, Bartolomé, 68 de la Vega, Garcilaso, 146 democracy American practice of, German view of, 4 criticism of, 64–66, 150 Latin American dissatisfaction, presumed with, 151 de Riviera, Diego, 149–50 Deutsche Bewegung (German movement), 39, 43, 47, 52n73 deutsche Wesen, das. See Germanness (das deutsche Wesen) Dietrich (Internationale Bibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriftenliteratur) America discovery coverage in, 162, 200n167 gaps in, 160, 199n155 May, K., articles on listed by, 34 overview of, 12–14 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 43 doomsday scenarios, 38, 42, 51n66 drugs, military use of, 186–87 Dutch as “tribal brothers,” 5, 20n5 E Eber, Elk (Wilhelm Emil Eber), 95, 118n190 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 73 Eckstein, Heinz, 169 ecology, 129 ecowarrior (Indian role model), 125 ecstacy (concept), 72, 73, 74, 75, 108 Ecstasy (party drug), 187

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Edda songs, 64 Eickstedt, Egon von, 80 ejido, 96, 119n194, 151 emotion, 38, 43, 47 emotionality, 37, 39, 69, 125 empathy, 39, 40, 41 Engels, Friedrich, 23, 125 Englishmen in literature, 156–57 Enlightenment rejection of, 6, 10, 37, 38, 43, 168 sun, emphasis on, 71 environment adaptation to, 81, 83 as peoplehood marker, 57 social and political institutions linked to, 67 environmental determinism, 66, 67, 111n42, 135 equality, criticism of, 66, 188 Eric the Red, 164, 165 Eriksson, Leif, 165, 166, 167 escapism expressions of, 29–30 Indian image and, 43 longing, 126 past, interest in as form of, 37 Romanticism and, 38, 41 in Youth movement, 130 Eskimos, 167, 177 espionage, 15, 209 ethical principles and standards, 63, 129 ethnic colonial troops, denunciation of use of, 93, 117–18n183 ethnic minorities, Nazi persecution of, 11 ethnic relations, indigenism movement emphasis on, 149 ethnic studies, historic versus modern, 68, 111n56 ethnocentrism, war and, 60, 110n23 ethnographic exhibitions, 12 (see Völkerschauen) ethnology, 13, 106, 188 eugenics, 79, 84–85, 115n138 Euro-American encroachment, Native American resistance to, 38, 51n69 Euro-Americans, facial features of, 134, 135

Europe cultures, migration and distribution of ancient, 89 nationalist traditions, constructedness of, 57, 109n9 European-Indian relations, history of, 22 “European Indians,” Germans as, 43, 48, 212 Europeans, German differentiation from other, 1–2, 3–4, 23, 44, 48 Euthanasia, 85–86 Nazi proponents of, 212 promotion of, 19 racial hygiene escalation into, 85, 115n138 Evolution theory, 78 exoticism, 17, 35, 38, 48, 103, 214 exotic peoples, 38–39, 83–84, 149, 184 Expressionist movement, 126–27 extermination (Nazi trope), 42 extinction, European wars of, 169, 202n199 F Fabricius, Wilhelm, 129 Fasching (German carnival), 25 Faupel, Edith, 150, 187, 205n286 Feest, Christian F., 22, 29, 169 fellow tribesmen motif American civilization versus German culture distinction reinforcing, 4–5 American discovery and settlement, absence in discussions of, 167–68 anti-Americanism and, 160 anti-American sentiment combined with, 213 cultural similarities invoking, 77 denigration of, 123–24 drawbacks and obstacles to applying, 133, 162 environmental and racial explanation for, 67 forms of address, 48, 54n113 German and Native American similarities postulated in, 3, 39, 40, 59, 79, 212 Latin America and, 149 May, K. works and performances employing, 32

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nationalism promoted through, 57 Native American genocide and, 154 Nazi propaganda in context of, 87, 100 racial souls, similarities between, 93–95 fellow victims, Germans and Indians as, 100–102, 124 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 45 fiction, Native Americans in. See Indian fiction fifth column (term), 106, 121n245, 210 Flemish as “tribal brothers,” 5, 20n5 folklore, 68, 71, 126 forest, 23, 38, 67–68, 71, 76, 82, 114n124 founding fathers, German, 58 France, 4, 37, 45, 47 Franco-Prussian War, 58 Frank, Patty (a.k.a. Ernst Tobis), 27 French-German relationship, 39 French Guyana, plan to conquer, 184, 204–5n273 French Revolution, 38, 168 Friederici, Georg, 164 Frobenius, Leo, 147 frontier, 41, 127, 172, 174, 176 Frontier Theory, 134 Fugger, merchant house of, 163 G Gagern, Friedrich von, 100, 139, 158 Galle, Heinz J., 105, 121n238 gangster cliché, 176, 203n236 Ganz, Rudolf, 186, 187, 205n286 Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft dichotomy, 130, 150 genetics, 84, 92 Geneva warfare convention, 176 genocide, 135, 161, 164, 194n52 geography, sacred, 10, 56, 67 81 geostrategy, 148, 123–24 German-American relations, 12, 163 German character, Romantic ideals ascribed to, 43 German citizens, genealogical status of, 90 German civil war, 48, 54n113 German colonies, postwar, 12, 187–92 German Empire, 65, 169 German explorers of America, 17, 22, 90

Germanic claims, 162–68 pre-Columbian expeditions and exploration, 11, 162, 164 Germania (Tacitus), 37–38, 58, 59–60 Germanic customs, pre-Christian, 25, 71 Germanic past, ancient continuity of, 37, 38–39, 40, 51n63, 72, 79, 87, 163, 114n109 Germanic people construct of, 5, 20n5, 212 literary portrayal of, 104, 121n233 Germanic race, 97, 104, 106 Germanic tribalism, 129, 170 Germanic tribes, ancient continuation of, 46, 57–58 Germans, modern as descendants of, 48, 54n113, 59, 105 Native Americans compared to, 3, 34, 40–41, 67 Naturvölker link to, 108 origin of, 74, 89 portrayal of, 56, 59–60, 64–65, 68 post-World War II interest in, 89, 116n163 religious practices, 71, 72, 74 Romanticism-inspired interest in, 36, 37, 38, 182 German identity formation, 23, 44, 169 Indian image reference points for, 43, 56, 58, 73 German immigrants, 170 German-Indian comparisons anti-colonial resistance, 94 character traits, 95, 149, 150 climate and environment, 67–68, 95 cultural connections, 89–90, 95, 96–97 fellow tribesmen motif and, 40 fellow victims, 100–102 Nazi perspective, 57, 66, 109n9 Nietzsche ideas role in, 44–45 organic community, sense of, 47 paintings, 95, 118n190 passion and ecstacy, 39, 108 religion, 73–74, 89–90 social structures, 94 unity and race consciousness, 168–72 warlike tendencies, 34, 44, 45, 63, 66

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240 | Index

German-Indian relationship belief in, 10, 39, 41, 47 biological ties, theories concerning, 70, 77, 87–91, 164–65 bond, 78, 93–94, 138–39, 141 cultural and mental ties, 91–98, 165 Germans as Indians’ protectors, 157 homoerotic undertone, 95, 118n188 soul mates, 94, 118n186 German Knights Order, 108 German movement, 39, 43, 47, 52n73 Germanness (das deutsche Wesen) American aversion to, 161, 200n164 defined, 56–58, 63–66 preservation of, 68, 81 Germans collective identity of, 56 construction as oppressed and endangered indigenous people, 56 fictional portrayal of, 30–31, 34, 157 as forest peoples, 68, 82, 114n124 as protectors of nature, 82 as sailors and explorers, 167 soldier people, 66, 111n44 tribal roots of, 72, 105, 107 German snipers, 176, 183 German superiority fictional portrayal of, 30–31, 34 in Nazi ideology, 80, 103, 162 racist assertion of, 71, 83, 87 Germanthusiasm, 5, 38, 51n63, 70, 72 German uniqueness/ German exceptionalism, 4, 10, 36, 39, 43, 48, 64, 212 Germany atrocities, 137, 141, 159 as colonial power, 65, 170 emergence as nation-state, 35, 211 history of, 100–102 Ghost Dance, 100, 119–20n205 Giel, Alfred, 27 Gobineau, Arthur de, 79–80 Goebbels, Joseph, 14–15, 106, 155 Goethe, 45, 58 good/evil distinctions, 32, 35, 38, 51n66, 156–57 Götterdämmerung motif, 170

Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (Wagner), 64, 142 Graetz, Heinrich, 158 Gran Chaco region, 142 Great Britain, 4, 92, 155 Greenland, 164, 165, 167–68 Green Shirts (Açáo Integralista Brasileira) (AIB), 152–53 Grenzerbuch (Gagern), 100, 139 Grey Owl (Archie Belaney), 129 Grosz, George, 31, 127 group markers, 9, 68, 111n56 Guarany (Chamacoco) tribe, 185 guerrilla warfare, 176 Gugenberger, Eduard, 37, 69, 76, 129 Gunther (mythical king), 64 Günther, Hans F. K., 85 Gurlitt, Ludwig, 31, 128 Gusinde, Martin, 142 Guyana-Project, 184, 204–5n273 H Habbel, Franz Ludwig, 129 Hagenbach, Arnold, 139 Hagen von Tronje (mythical character), 63, 143 Hague warfare convention, 176 Haible, Barbara Gagern, F. von pro-Hitler views noted by, 100 Indian novels analyzed by, 6, 44, 77–78, 178, 180 nonwhite races, attitudes analyzed by, 104 racism analyzed by, 79–80 Hakonson, Hakon, 168 Hanfstaengl, Ernst “Putzi,” 61–63, 62 Hargrave, John, 129 Härlin, Hans, 164, 201n180 Harrison, William Henry, 159–60 Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 73–74, 169 Haushofer, Karl, 19 Hedin, Sven, 90 Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm, 172 Hennig, Richard, 162, 163, 164, 200n168, 200n169, 201n178 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 38, 40, 45, 51n63, 68

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hereditary illnesses, 85 hereditary laws, 92 Hereros, 65 Herf, Jeffrey, 77, 113n101 Hermann (Arminius) (Germanic hero), 40, 58, 100, 169 Herodotus, 60 heroism, 4, 30, 35, 104, 130, 184 Hesse, Hermann, 31, 123 Hielscher, Friedrich, 75, 108 Himmler, Heinrich, 7, 75–77, 89, 184–86 Hirt, August, 186, 205n282 Hitler, Adolf, 15, 17 ancient master race, theories on, 89 Arminius glorified by, 58 atrocities, 159 betrayal of German people by, 100 in cartoons, 61–63, 62 colonial planning, 93, 118n183 democracy criticized by, 65–66 fellow tribesmen motif used by, 48, 54n113 German unification claimed by, 107–08, 170 May, K. works read by, 31, 34, 104 nature, views on, 75 on Nordic race, 166–67 paintings liked by, 95, 118n190 physical fitness advocated by, 128 playing Indian, memories of, 178 religious beliefs, 76 Russians’ fighting ability described by, 175 speeches, collection of, 15 swastika symbol adopted by, 97 Tecumseh, comparison to, 100 as vegetarian, 187, 205n286 Versailles trope invoked by, 101–2 on Vikings, 167 works, 15, 91, 92 Hitler Youth, 72, 95–96, 130–31, 182 military training for, 182, 183, 213 Native American dances performed for, 97, 119n198 publications, 16, 18, 152, 181–82, 211 Hobbes, Thomas, 23 hobbyists, ix, 25, 27, 30, 70, 213

Höfler, Otto, 74–75 holistic healers, 125–26 Holocaust, explaining, 55, 100, 120n205, 214 homeland, 41, 130 homosexuality, 85, 95, 115n144 Hopis, 89, 116n163, 139–40 Hörbiger, Hanns, 87, 88 human development, 3, 67–68, 79–80 human nature, 40, 45 human societies, 73, 78, 79, 82–84 Humboldt, Alexander von, 23 Huns, Germans as, 45 Hurons, 68, 111n57 Hurricane Katrina, 2005, 172–73 Hutten, Ulrich von, 58 I Ibero-American Institute, 147, 195n99 Ickes, Harold, 174–75, 177 identity (See also national identity), 6, 75, 135, 169 immigrants, 132–34, 194n50 imperialism, 4, 47, 84, 107, 151,154, 214 Inca Empire, 149–52, 164, 201n180 Indian-atrocity trope, 155–56 Indian Citizenship Act, 1924, 143–44 Indian costumes, 25, 26–27, 96 Indian fiction children’s novels, 78–79, 94 fairy tales and sagas, 16 French literature, 94 German perceptions, 12, 68, 100, 103, 107, 176 Indian inferiority and, 107 Indians and Germanic barbarians compared in, 68 militarization and, 178 Nazi endorsement of, 44, 73, 104–5, 112n77, 178, 183, 204n242 settings, 68 warrior societies, 73, 112n77 Indian image and imagery in anti-American propaganda, 154–55 applications of, 6, 9–10, 12, 15, 24–25, 36, 46, 58, 102, 123, 154, 184, 208, 213, 124–35

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242 | Index

in arts, 126, 127 concepts and terms, 125 construction of, 23–24, 43, 48, 55, 63, 73 contradictions in use of, 10, 107–8, 124 dissemination sources on, 6, 24 Hitler, Adolf in, 62, 63 influences on, 6, 22, 23, 35, 55, 82, 108 language and, 57, 109n8 mysticism and cultish rituals related to, 76 national identity and National Socialism relationship to, 10, 29, 32, 211, 212 nation formation, relationship to, 6, 10 nature, 69, 128 Nazi appropriation of, 9, 48, 85, 131, 162, 214 Nazi quarrels over, 103–8 precursors for European, 23 as primitive, 127–28 Romanticism influence on, 10, 22, 36, 40, 41, 56, 65 terminology stemming from, 172–74, 177–78 Indian massacres, 17, 160, 199n160 Indian medicine, 184–87 Indian New Deal, 11, 16–17, 105, 124, 144, 146, 208 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), 144, 146, 148, 190 Indian revival, 105, 106, 124, 136, 143–49, 171 Indian role models, 125, 127–29, 131 for children and soldiers, 183–84 debate on, 87, 146, 178, 204n242 viability of, 7, 77, 130 Indians acculturation of, 138, 144 as Aryans, 87–91 assimilation, 82, 105 143–44 defeat of, 144, 169, 202n199 demise, reasons for, 107, 168, 169, 171 destiny of, 72, 137 display of, 25 (see also Wild West shows) dusk or dawn of, 136–54 education for, 143, 151 education sources on, 80 fighting for lost cause, 42, 170

German identification with, 48, 65, 105, 141 notions of inferiority of, 42, 44, 66, 78, 79, 106, 107, 108, 162, 208 maltreatment of, 156, 160, 199n160 modern survivors, German attitudes toward, 137, 138, 142, 145, 171 nature, relationship to, 82, 96, 138 origin of, 11, 80, 162 psychology of, 144, 151 race consciousness among, 169, 171 racial classification of, 80 racial psyche of, 151 stereotypes (see stereotypes, Indian) technology and, 138, 139, 148 term usage, 8, 208 tropes, 35, 123, 130, 131 (see also specific trope, e.g.: vanishing race trope) Indian Scout syndrome, 172, 174, 175, 178 Indianthusiasm America discovery and, 163, 164, 200n177 components of, 40–41, 128–29 development of, 23–24 Indian inferiority at odds with, 78–79, 162 indigeneity, originality and, 135–36 influences on, 36, 37, 38, 51n66, 55, 70, 208 national identity and, 16, 23–24 nationalism, relationship to, 56, 212 in Nazi propaganda, 94, 97, 103, 106, 108, 183, 207, 213–13 primary sources on, 12–19 racism and, 7, 207 tropes of, 10, 172 (see also specific trope, e.g.: vanishing race trope) Indian Wars, 25, 101, 155–56, 161 Indian wisdom, 12, 16, 184 indigeneity, concept of, 135–36, 188 indigeneity, German claims of, 3–4, 6,10, 23, 77, 79, 81, 83, 100, 102, 107, 133, 187, 212 Indigenism movement, 11, 95–96, 106, 108, 119n194,124, 129, 148, 149–54, 208, 213–14 indigenous cultures Nazi interpretations of, 214

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revitalization and reinvigoration of, 11, 148 indigenous people, Germans as, 57, 88, 109n9 indigenous peoples, 8–9, 12, 23, 38, 43, 82–83, 85, 90, 125–26, 143, 151, 188, 191, 197n119 indigenous societies external pressure impact on, 73, 113n78 killing in, 86–87 Männerbünde as social fabric in, 73 organization of, 96, 119n194 individualism, 37–38, 46, 51n58 Indo-Germanic languages, 57, 109n8 Indo-Germanic tribes, 85, 87, 97 Indogermans, 79, 85–86 industrialization consequences of, 2, 38, 124, 211 response to, 37–38, 63–64, 131 inferiority complex, German, 2, 4, 38, 47, 58, 65, 154 enemies, sense of being surrounded by, 72, 102, 112n75 Ingstad, Anne Stine, 166, 201n188 Ingstad, Helge, 166, 201n188 instinct, 23, 38–39, 73, 104, 151 intellectualism, Romanticism versus, 38 intermarriage, 146, 149–50, 164–65 international relations, 106 intuition, 37–41, 43, 88, 69, 125 Inuit, 86, 138, 177 irrationality, 38, 44, 184 J Jackson, Helen Hunt, 157, 199n146 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 71 Japanese, 82, 91, 103–4 Jentsch, Gerhard, 161 Jews, 39, 60, 64, 66, 68, 78, 09–91,111n42, 133, 135, 146, 158–61, 194n52 Joan of Arc, 58 Jugendschriften-Warte, 103, 105, 121n222 Jünger, Ernst, 44, 130 K Karl May Museum, 27, 95, 97, 118n190 Kater, Michael, 7, 88, 184, 186, 205n282 Kensington Rune Stone, 165, 166

Kino, Fray Eusebio, 163 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 31, 126–27 Kiss, Edmund, 89, 186, 205n283 Kolonialpolitsches Amt der NSDAP (KPA), 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 210 Kosovo, Battle of, 58 Krause, Fritz, 163, 188, 192 Krieck, Ernst, 66, 73, 111n42 Krieckeberg, Walter, 138 Krieg, Hans, 80 Krogman, Wilton Marion, 144 Kulturvolk (term), 39, 52n74 Kundt, Hans, 185 L Lakota (Sioux). See Sioux land, communal ownership of, 125, 144, 149 landscape, 60, 67 language, 57, 109n8 L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, 166, 201n188 Latin America German interests in, 147, 152, 154, 209–10 Indian policy in, 144–49, 197n107 movements in, 95–96, 106, 124, 148, 149, 208, 213–14 Lawrence, D. H., 139–40 Leadership, 3–4, 30, 59, 64, 79, 86, 94, 108, 146 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 41, 126 Lebensraum, 9, 34, 82, 107, 114–15n124, 141–43, 161 Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (newspaper), 14, 16, 17, 21n24 Lenni Lenape (Delaware) creation history, 80 liberalism, 45–46, 94, 150–51, 191 life as struggle (Nazi trope), 34, 42, 65–66, 86, 141 Life Reform movement, 69, 72, 76, 123–28, 131, 212–13 Lindbergh, Charles, 148 List, Guido von, 97 literary characters, 29–32, 35, 156–57, 176 Locke, John, 23 Loest, Erich, 178, 183, 204n243

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Long, Huey P., 151 Long, Sylvester Clark (Buffalo Child Long Lance), 94, 95, 118n186 Luetzeburg, Philipp von, 185, 186 Lund, Allan, 38, 51n63, 74 Lutz, Hartmut, 2–3, 5–6, 12, 23–24, 38, 58, 65, 78–80, 100 M Macke, August, 127 magazines, popular, 14, 19, 126, 192n9 malaria, 185 Manchukuo, 103–4 Mandan, 90, 116n165 manifest destiny, 11, 106–07, 122n252, 132, 136–37, 141, 171 Mann, Klaus, 31 Mann, Thomas, 46, 47, 130 Männerbünde, 73, 75, 108 Männerbund theory, 72, 73, 75 Marshall, John, 160 master race (concept), 11, 65, 77, 87–89, 162, 210 Matto Grosso area, 186 Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Prince, 23, 65 May, Karl blood-brotherhood trope of, 70 characters in novels, 29–31, 32, 35, 156–57 colonialist and/or racist notions of, 107 good versus bad Indians distinguished by, 65, 156–57 homoerotic themes, 95, 118n188 influence and legacy of, 12, 25, 27, 29–35, 124, 126–27, 169, 175, 178, 180–81, 183, 204n243, 213 May, Klara, 27, 31 mechanistic worldview, rejection of, 70, 88, 125, 129 medicine, 12, 18, 76, 84–85, 124, 184–87 Mediterranean, peoples in, 67, 111n49, 147–48 Meinert, Hans, 80 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 15, 91 men’s societies, 73, 74, 113n78 Mesoamerica, Christian iconography in, 164

Mexico, 80, 88, 91, 116n153, 149–51, 163 Middle East, early cultures in, 169, 202n199 militarism and militarization, 10, 34, 63, 127, 178, 212 military technology, medical research projects promoting, 186–87 military training, 173, 181–83, 213 Millis, Walter, 182–83 Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 103, 120n222 Minorities, 12, 68, 32, 111n56, 160–61, 187, 206n290 miscegenation, 80–86, 104, 142, 146, 157 mitgard versus utgard dichotomy, 72 mixed-bloods, 80, 114n116, 142, 146–47, 149–50 modernization, 37–38, 40, 45–47, 68–70, 124, 131, 188 Moers, Emmerich von, 184–85, 186, 187 Monroe Doctrine, 154, 156, 198n132 Montaigne, 41 Montesquieu, 67 moon, 70–71 Mooney, James, 57, 109n8 Muck, Otto, 94–95 Mühlmann, Wilhelm Emil, 82–84, 106, 107, 141, 147–48, 188 Mühsam, Erich, 31, 126–27 Müller, Heiner, 47 Müller, Robert, 127 Münchhausen, Baron, 68, 111n57 mysticism, German, 30, 38, 40 51n66, 184 myth, 30, 69–70, 126 N nation (concept), 36, 39 national character, 10, 60, 64–67, 111n44 national character traits, 39, 59–60, 63, 64 national identities, 39 national identity construction of, 23–24, 48, 55–58, 61, 72, 112n75 Indian imagery and National Socialism relationship to, 10, 30, 32, 211, 212 Indianthusiasm, interrelation with, 16, 19, 23–24, 35 Romanticism influence on, 10, 22, 40

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nationalism ambivalences in, 134–35 basis of modern German, 72, 112n75, 212 construction of, 48, 55, 71 Indian imagery and, 2, 9, 10, 19, 22, 29, 56 National Socialism as applied biology, 81 blood symbolism in, 70 ideological roots of, 9, 45, 75, 208, 212–13 Inca institution compatibility with, 152, 197–98n125 Indian imagery and national identity relationship to, 10, 29, 76 as natural religion, 72, 75 national unity, 56, 67 nation-building, 48, 55, 109n1 nation formation, 6, 55–59, 109n8, 169, 171 Native Americans American Anglo relations with, 11, 58, 84, 110n12, 132 barbarians, comparison to, 61, 134–35 as culture-bearers, 91, 146 demography of, 136, 143–44, 195–96n86 fighting abilities of, 93, 117–18n183, 174–76 genocide against, 100, 120n205, 154, 155 German contact with, 22, 30, 105 Germans, attitude toward, 94, 118n186 Jews compared to, 135, 194n52 land, struggle for, 95–96, 132 Nazi spies working among, 209 Nietzsche ideas, reception among, 45, 53n98 as performers, 25, 27 as quasi-Germans, 3–4, 47, 67, 164–65 racial character traits of, 34, 61, 80–82 religious practices, 70, 90, 119n198, 139–40, 144, 169, 211 relocation of, 4, 42, 136–37, 160, 191 representation of, 6–7, 10, 12–14, 38–39, 57, 105, 121n238

resistance to colonial encroachment, 25, 34, 38, 51n69, 65, 94 as soldiers, 61, 174–75, 176, 177, 203n234, 209 sterilization of, 85, 115n138 swastika use by, 97–99 as Viking descendants, 90, 116n165 warrior societies, 73, 113n78 Native Americans in fiction. See Indian fiction Native cultures, 38, 95, 137, 169, 188–90, 202n199 Native headdresses, 96, 99 Native languages, 57, 109n8 Native topics, 16–19, 34, 105, 126–27 nativism, U.S., 132, 134 natural healers, 125–26 naturalism, 11, 71 natural law, 81, 105, 106 natural selection, 83–85 natural state of man, 61, 67, 83 nature, 36, 38, 48, 69, 71–72, 77, 81–84, 88, 124–29, 131–21, 138 nature, relationship to, 3, 37, 59, 66, 81–82, 126–27, 129 Naturvolk, 39, 52n74, 81, 138, 144 Naturvölker, 9, 72–73, 82–84, 86, 107–08, 127–28, 141 Nazi foreign policy, 148–54 Nazi ideology agriculture in, 75 America discovery in, 163 contradictions in, 92, 123 cult and ritual in, 75 German self-perception and, 39 Indian imagery appropriated in, 5–6, 10, 32, 37, 47–48, 51n58, 55, 76, 79, 141, 212 Indigenism and, 153–54 May, K. work, aligning with, 32 nature worship appropriated in, 71–72 Norsetalgic scholarship, incorporation into, 74, 212 race and, 80–81, 106, 124, 141 Romantic influence on, 36, 76, 77 in scholarship, 15, 18, 184–92 Nazi jargon, 87, 115–16n150

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Nazi leadership, 75, 78, 169, 188 Nazi party, 7, 18, 74 Nazi pragmatism, 75–76, 108, 124 Nazi propaganda, 4–5, 18–19, 35, 38, 51n63, 108, 163, 171–72 Indian imagery applications in, 7, 11, 48, 57, 79, 94, 123 Nazi racial legislation, 90, 146, 188 Nazis agriculture praised by, 67, 111n49 alternative spiritualities embraced by, 69–70 generalizations, avoiding in discussions of, 9 genocide by, 100, 120n205 May, K., attitudes toward, 31–34 movement concepts and practices appropriated by, 124–25 self-portrayal of, 63, 81 neo-Nazi forums, 214 neo-paganism, 69–70, 126, 213 Newfoundland, Norse settlement on, 166, 201n188 New Ulm, Minnesota, 58, 110n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44–46, 69, 73, 130 noble savage, 41–42, 45–46, 61, 65, 67–68, 125, 127–28, 136 Noll, Dieter, 178, 204n243 non-Aryans, 117n181, 170, 177 nonwhite peoples, 103–4,129–30 Nordic race, 3, 56, 75, 79, 85, 89, 97, 103, 166–68 Nordic sagas and mythology, 64 Norsemen, 164–168 Norsetalgia, 3, 5–6, 18, 20n5, 38, 51n63, 64, 68, 70, 72, 74, 89, 126, 133, 212 North America Pre-Columbian exploration of, 164–67 German invasion, potential of, 106 nudism, 123, 126 Nuremberg Race Laws, 1935, 90, 146, 188 Nuu-Chah-Nulth shamans, 45, 53n98 O Obermüller, Christoph, 148 occultism, 69–70, 112n63, 129 Odyssey, understanding, 40

Oktoberfest, 25 Old Shatterhand (fictional character), 30–31, 65, 95, 98, 118n188, 145, 180–81 origin of man, 67–68, 70, 76 Os-Ko-Mon ( Native impostor visiting Germany), 97, 211 othering, 42, 45 Otten, Karl, 181 outdoor instruction, 127 P pacifism, 32 Palestinians, 155 pan-American currents, 149 pan-Indian movement, 169 Pantheism, 70 Partzsch, Alfred, 116n153 Penny, H. Glenn, 5–6, 12, 56–57, 137, 214 peoplehood, 36, 39, 48, 56–58, 67–68, 82, 84–85, 87, 96, 106, 109n9, 141, 188–89, 195n74, 212 peoples characteristics traits assigned to, 65–66 classification of, 68, 78, 91, 111n56 development, theories on, 60, 83 Peru, 146, 163, 186–87, 205n283 Pervitin, 187 phrenology, 79 physical anthropology, 18, 87, 90 Picts, 95 Pining, Didrik, 164 Plains Indians, 25 Plants, 70, 72, 76, 85, 126, 167, 184 Plateau Indians, 146 playing Indian, 11, 25, 30, 172, 178–80, 181–83, 213 Plischke, Hans, 189 pogroms, 1938, 155, 158, 159 Poland, 101, 176 Political Romanticism, 36, 51n56 Polynesians, 91 Pontiac (Ottawa chief ), 169 popular culture, 12, 15, 16, 19 Post, Wiley, 148 Pothorst, Hans, 164 poverty, Native, 137, 149, 171

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Pratt, Fletcher, 158–59, 161 primitive (term), 39, 124, 127, 130 primitive peoples, 39, 52n74, 60, 72, 74, 81, 83, 129–33, 177 primitivism, 11, 38, 65, 124–25, 128, 134–35 print media, 12–19 Propaganda Ministry, 155, 158–59, 160, 187, 205n286, 210 public health, 11, 84, 131–32 Pueblos, 89

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Q Quesada, Ernesto, 147 R Rasse (concept and term usage), 9 race canonization of, 75–76 collective mental idiosyncrasies of, 92 concept and criteria of, 9, 36, 79, 92 environmental influence on, 81 hierarchy based on, 79 Indian imagery influenced by, 108 nineteenth-century tradition of, 78 segregation, 92 race consciousness, 85, 104, 167, 169, 171, 208 race ideology, 136 race psychology, 39, 81, 92–96 race relations, 13,17–19, 82, 161 race war, 5, 104–07, 143, 151, 197n119 racial breeding, 75 racial character traits, 61, 70, 80, 144 racial classification, 80 racial conflict, 42, 84, 143, 155, 160–61 racial degeneration, 171 racial doctrine, 17, 141–42, 149 racial hygiene, 19, 79, 84–86, 115n138 racial policies, German, 13, 187, 206n290 racial purity, 80, 84, 146 racial rejuvenation, 143–51 racial souls, 93–95 racial studies, 7,13, 79, 80–81 racial theory, 59, 78–79, 84, 87, 90 racial thought, 6–7, 10–11, 85, 141, 144, 154, 1157–58, 87–88, 191

racism, 9–10, 39, 43, 79, 87, 106, 132, 207–08, 214 racist practices, American and German compared, 132 rationalism, 37, 69, 88, 125 reactionary modernism (term), 77, 113n101 reason, 10, 37–38, 40, 43, 46–47, 69, 76, 161 Red Army, 102, 141 reform, American discourse on, 124 reform movements, 11, 129, 131, 149 Reichling, Heinz, 128 Reich Office for Genealogy, 90, 91 Reichskolonialamt, 187 Reichsschrifttumskammer, 103 religion, 10, 23, 56–67, 65, 69–76, 89, 109n9, 169 relocation, 136, 137, 141 Reservation Era, 105, 190 reservations, 16, 138–39, 144, 146, 157, 187, 190 revival movements, cyclical reappearance of, 47, 54n110 Rickard, Clinton, 190, 209, 210 Rieder, Hans Rudolf, 95 Riefenstahl, Leni, 182 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 68, 82 rituals, 48, 56, 69–76 Rocky Bear (Lakota performer), 154, 198n133 role-playing, 1, 30 Romance peoples, 45, 47 Romans, ancient, 39, 45, 59–60, 65, 69, 112n63 Romanticism German science and, 88 Indian imagery and, 9, 10, 22, 39, 52n75, 56, 152 Indianthusiasm and, 19, 55, 70, 208 influence and legacy of, 36–42, 43–44, 48 in literature, 36, 38, 41, 51n66, 68 national unity sought with aid of, 56 Native spirituality and, 70 nature references in, 130 Nazi ideology and, 36, 76, 77 peoplehood, sense, influence on, 24

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Roosevelt, Franklin D., 102 Roosevelt, Theodore, 132–34 Rosenberg, Alfred, 7, 75 Ross, Colin, 19, 151, 160–61, 190 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23, 61, 67, 83 Rundfunkarchiv (radio and television archive), 210 Russians, 170, 175–77 S sacred history, 10, 56–57, 59–64 Sänger, Fritz, 14–15, 155, 158 Sapper, Karl, 162, 169, 200n168, 202n199 savages (term), 39, 52n74, 86 scalping, references to, 156, 172, 173, 176 Scandinavians, 3, 5, 20n5 Schäfer, Ernst, 89 Schauwecker, Friedrich, 170, 181 Schemm, Hans, 31, 81, 211 Schickalsgemeinschaft (community of fate), 66 Schlichter, Rudolf, 127 Schmidt, Arno, 95, 118n188 Schmitt, Carl, 36, 51n56 Schoenichen, Walther, 43, 68, 81, 82, 107, 141 Schönemann, Friedrich, 18, 161, 199n162 Schönerer, Georg von, 69, 112n63 Schultze, Ernst, 93, 117n181 Schulz-Kampfhenkel, Otto, 184, 204n273 science, 19, 37–38, 76, 85, 115n138 scientific racism, 9–10, 39, 69–70, 77, 112n63, 106, 184 scientific research, Nazi ideology impact on, 184 Scots, 95 scouting games, 182–83, 213 secret societies, 74 secularization, 46, 69 See, Klaus von, 6, 60–61, 68, 73–75 selection (term), 85, 115n143 self-aggrandizement, German, 56, 65, 123–24, 161 self-determination, 84, 141, 157 self-empowerment, 70 Semitic peoples, 97 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 127–28, 129

settlement historiographies of, 16 patterns of, 19 settlers, German in America, 17 settler states, assimilation and relocation policies of, 141 Seume, Johann Gottfried, 68, 111n57, 174 shamans, 45, 53n98 Shoshone reservation, 190 Siegfried (mythical dragon-slayer), 58, 63, 64, 100 Sievers, Wolfram, 186, 205n282 silent movies, 127 Sioux, 24–25, 27, 49n12, 58, 90–91, 102, 110n12, 139 Sitting Bull, 101, 104, 169 “Sitting Bull Indians,” 24, 49n12 68ers (global movement), 47 skin diseases, 185 Skraelinger (weaklings) (term), 167 Slevogt, Max, 126 Snake Dance, 139–40 social Darwinism, 66, 69, 84–85, 112n63, 208, 212 social hygiene policies, 85, 115n138 social organism (concept), 132 social progress, 74 social sciences, 88, 184 society, class reintegration into, 188 socioeconomic theories, 93 soft drink advertisement, 179 soft news, Native Americans as, 15 soldiers, jargon of, 11, 15, 173, 177 Sombart, Werner, 66, 68, 111n44 Sonderbewusstsein, 43, 46, 58, 64, 69, 71, 94, 124, 134–35 Sonderweg. See also German uniqueness, 39–40, 58, 70, 73, 212 Song of the Nibelungs (national epic), 34, 58, 63–64, 143, 195n81 soul (concept), 40 South America expedition, planned to, 184, 185, 186, 187 German minority in, 18 military foothold in, 184, 204–5n273 Natives in, 142, 184

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Soviet Union, 102 Spain, 137, 148, 150, 164, 201n180 Sparta, 108 Spengler, Oswald, 147 Spicer, Edward H., 57 spiritual guidance, Native American role in, 127 spiritual guru (Indian role model), 125 spirituality, 59–76 alternative approaches to, 125, 129, 213 alternative sense of, 70, 76, 77 in arts and youth movements, 126 Germans and Native Americans compared, 3, 25 Indianthusiasm and, 127 spiritual movements, 129 SS, 73–74, 112n77, 108 stab-in-the-back motif, 100, 119n203, 169 Stalnaker, Samuel, 163 state-building, 73, 75, 113n78, 149, 197n107 state organizations, 67, 151–52 state-sponsored colonization, 137, 194n55 Steinbrück, Peer, 173 Steinsiek, Peter-Michael, 67, 75, 111n49 stereotypes, anti-American sentiments and, 157, 170–71 stereotypes, Indian, 5, 18, 35, 173–77 sterilization, 85 Steuben, Fritz (Erhard Wittek), 68, 101, 102, 105, 130 storm troopers, 73, 95, 112n77, 118n190, 183 supernatural beings, 25, 71 survival of the fittest, 65–66 Süß, Eduard, 88, 116n153 swastika symbol, 70, 89, 97–98, 98, 99, 112n68 Swiss soldiers, 15 syphilis, 185 T Tacitus, Publius Cornelius customs versus laws, commentary on, 67 folk traditions from time of, 68 Germanic naturvolk described by, 39, 52n75

Germanic tribes studied by, 59–60, 74, 85 noble savage image employed by, 39, 41 works by, 37–38, 58, 59–60 Tauchischer Jahrmarkt (Tauch’scher), 25, 26–27, 178 technology, 17,37, 82, 77, 107, 125 technophobia, 130 Tecumseh (Shawnee chief ), 38, 51n69, 100, 104, 107, 159, 169, 170, 171 Tell, William, 58 Tenskwatawa (Shawnee prophet), 159–60, 169 Termer, Franz, 189–90 terminology usage and issues, 8–9 terrain, 176–77, 182 territory, 57, 60, 67 Teutoburg Forest, Battle of, 58 Teutons descriptions of, 59, 60 fighting tactics of, 61 religious practices of, 59, 69 Theosophy, 69, 112n63 Theweleit, Klaus, 44, 48, 54n113, 182 Third Reich America, representation of, 7 Inca Empire compared to, 150 Indian images in media during, 6 May, K. interpretation during, 29 media of, 13 Thucydides, 60 Thule, mystical island of, 88 Thunderbird symbol, 98, 119n202 Tibetans, swastika use by, 97 Tippecanoe, battle of, 159–60 Tiwanaku (Bolivia), 89 Tlingit coat, 127 tobacco products, 185–86 Tobis, Ernst, 27 Toltecs, 88, 116n153 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 46 tragedy, 38, 42, 46, 51n66 transnationalized economies, 188 trapping and trading in fiction, 30 travelers as Indianthusiasm sources, 23 tribal cultures, belief systems of, 72 tribal disintegration, 191 tribal government and autonomy, 144, 160

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tribalism, Norstelgia application in notions of, 5, 20n5 tribal languages, dictionaries of, 137 tribal medicine, 185 tribal men’s societies, 73, 113n78 tribal social structures, disintegration of, 136 tribal training, models of, 129 Triumph of the Will (propaganda film), 182 Turks, 91, 104 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 134 Tuscarora Reservation, 190, 209, 210 Two-Two, Edward, 27, 28 Tyrkir (member of Leif Eriksson’s crew), 167 U Übermensch (concept), 45, 53n98, 69 Ulrich, Otto Willi, 157 Uncas (fictional character), 136 United States common enemy motif as propaganda device against, 4 criticism of, 150–51 eugenics in, 85, 115n138, 132 foreign policy, 156 German invasion of, 93, 118n183 German perception of, 77, 113n101 history of, 13, 159 Indian imagery in, 16 Indian policy of, 17, 18, 82, 106, 137, 138–39, 142, 144, 146, 157–58, 160, 161, 190, 208, 210, 213, 214 industrialization in, 131–32 pan-American concepts directed against, 152 race relations in, 1, 17, 18 racial policies of, 79 social hygiene policies in, 85, 115n138 swastika, dissociation from, 98 urban growth, 130–32 urbanization aversion to, 68–69 consequences of, 38, 84, 124, 211 utopian communities, 125 V Vagts, Alfred, 137 Valhalla (concept), 76, 113n100

vanishing Indian trope, 208 vanishing race trope, 11, 41, 42, 100, 124, 136–43, 153 vegetarianism, 187, 205n286 Venezuela, 163 Venzmer, Gerhard, 157 Versailles, Treaty of, 100, 159, 169, 187 Versailles, trope of, 101–2 Vesper, Will, 103–4 Vespucchi, Amerigo, 164, 201n180 Vietnam War, 174 Vikings American expeditions of, 162, 164, 165–67 artifacts, 166 era of, 166 Native Americans as descendants of, 90, 116n165, 165, 201n182 as Northern Germans, 166 Vinland, 165–67 violence acceptance of, 45, 72 allusions to, increasing, 64 justification of, 56 in Romantic literature, 38, 51n66 as virtue, 44 virtues, German(ic) continuation of, 39 fictional portrayal of, 35 Völkerschauen (ethnographic exhibitions), 24, 35, 133 Völkerkunde, 13, 83, 162–63, 188 Volk in Waffen (people under arms), 60 völkisch (term usage), 9, 31, 50n39 Völkischer Beobachter (newspaper), 17, 86, 160, 171 völkisch movements, 43, 70, 84, 97 völkisch-nationalist ideology, 31, 212 Volksgechichte (term), 68, 82 Volksgemeinschaft capitalism, struggle against, 37, 51n58 group cohesion of, 84 Indian New Deal and, 208 individual reintegration into, 188 Nazi ideal of, 151, 190 promotion of, 74, 125 unity and, 169

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Volkstum (term), 57, 109n9 W Wagner, Günther, 209 Wagner, Richard May, Karl compared to, 30 operatic works by, 64, 142, 143 Waldseemüller, Martin, 163 Walser, Martin, 178, 204n243 Wandervogel culture, 130 war literary portrayal of, 104 preparation for, 17 primitive versus civilized, 60, 61, 110n23 war criminals, 35 war games, 11 warrior as role model, 183–84 warrior cliché, 172, 176 warrior ethic, promotion of, 183–84 warrior motif, 11, 44 warrior names, 30, 49n25 warrior society, 73, 112n77 Weber, Max, 126 Wegener, Franz, 87, 88 Wegner, Richard Nikolaus, 80 Wehrmacht drug distribution proposed for, 186–87 field exercise, 182–83 personnel, 183 Weimar Republic, 13 Weininger, David and Arnold, 178 Weiser, Lily, 74 Welser, merchant house of, 163 Weltanschauung (term usage), 9 Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), 87, 88, 186, 205n283 Werder, von, 93–94, 95 Werwolf (Nazi guerrilla organization), 183 Western civilization German colonization attempts by, 94 German culture versus, 47–48 German rejection of, 45 Germany as victim of, 47 opposition to, 64 Western Europeans, Germans against, 44 Western hemisphere American power over, 156

German encroachment in, 209–10, 213 German perceptions of, 7, 11 German political claims in, 19 indigenous affairs of, 105 Natives of, 18 Western material culture, 138 West Indies, 151 Westward expansion, U.S., 132, 134, 143 Wheeler-Howard Act, 144, 146 White Horse Eagle, 101, 120n214 white-Indian relations, 124, 142, 154, 171 White Indians, 90, 165 White Man’s Burden, 81 white people barbarian traits of, 134 superiority of, 103 Wieland, Hermann, 88, 116n153 “Wilde, Der” (poem) (Seume), 174 wilderness civilization, bringing to, 132, 134 Europeans Americanized by, 134 impact on colonist, 134 preservation of, 81 wild men, 23 Wild West, 12, 29–30, 176 Wild West shows artists influenced by, 127 Indian games inspired by, 173, 178, 213 Indian warrior image reinforced through, 175 overview of, 24–25 popularity of, 35, 124 Wilhelm, Emperor, 45 Wilhelm II, 101 Wilhelmine ethnological treatises, 187 will, force of, 43–44 Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 101 Winnetou (fictional character), 30, 33, 42, 95, 104, 118n188, 127, 169–70, 180–81 Wirth, Herman, 89–90, 108 Wohlbold, H., 107 Wollschläger, Alfred, 154, 198n132 Woodcraft concepts, 129, 130 Woodcraft League of America, 127, 129, 130 World’s Fair in Chicago, 1893, 133, 134

Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,

252 | Index

World War I aftermath of, 100, 148, 169, 171 analysis of, 48, 54n113 cataclysmic experience of, 46 causes of, 94 conditions leading to, 2 German attitude concerning, 101 German defeat explained, 66, 100, 119n203 German role in, 46–47, 48 military drug distribution schemes during, 187 Native Americans in, 209 postcards, 174 revenge for defeat, 2 soldiers, paintings of, 95, 118n190 veterans, 44, 95, 123, 181 World War II German cities bombed during, 154, 173, 198n133 German veterans, 178 “Indian” label use in, 176–77 Native Americans in, 175, 176, 203n234, 207, 208 troops, ethnic diversity of, 176 U.S. entry into, 155

Z Zechlin, Egmont, 162, 164, 200n168 Zschaetzsch, Karl Georg, 88, 116n153 Zuckmayer, Carl, 127

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X xenophobia, 135

Y Yakima tribe, 97, 119n198 youth Indianthuiast notions among, 130 literature aimed at, 47 topics targeting, 17 Youth movement, German analysis of, 170 emergence of, 129 Indian awareness in, 95, 126 Indian imagery used by, 128, 129, 130 Indianthusiasm influence on, 129, 130 influences on, 127 Nazi appropriation of, 11, 212–13 physical fitness promoted in, 128 publications of, 170 self-determination of, 130 social changes, response to, 124 youth movements, 71 youth subcultures, cyclical reappearance of, 47, 54n110 Yuchi tribe, 209

Fellow Tribesmen : The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn Books,