“Winnetou” debate: “Woowoowoowoo!” – Is Karl May racist?

After the Documenta, there is already another debate in which Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth has to be extremely careful about what she says. And this time she is also biased: the Green politician admitted in an interview years ago that her first love was Winnetou.

When she read about his dramatic death in the third volume of the “Winnetou” trilogy, she became “really ill”. “I cried the whole bed wet.”

Roth has not yet spoken out in the current discussion, but Sigmar Gabriel, for example, has. “As a child, I loved Karl May’s books, especially #Winnetou,” tweeted the former SPD leader and Federal Foreign Minister. That didn’t make him a racist. “And that’s why Winnetou stays on the bookshelf for my children. And we’ll watch the film too.”

Elsewhere on social media, the tone is a little rougher. The opponents insult each other as racists and “woke” Winnetou killers. The Karl May Museum in Radebeul spoke of a “Winnetou cancellation”. One would like to call out to one or the other with Karl May: “The pale face guard its tongue!” It was actually just a children’s film with the innocent name “The Young Chief Winnetou”. To accompany this, the Ravensburger company wanted to bring two books onto the market, but then withdrew them when it realized “that we had hurt the feelings of others with the Winnetou titles”. Since then, accusations of cultural appropriation have been raised. And worse still: that of racism.

Books and films use clichés

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of forms of expression from another culture, usually that of a minority. In an interview on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Carmen Kwasny, the chair of the Native American Association of Germany, criticized the fact that “The Young Chief Winnetou” conveyed numerous clichés, for example in the props with animal skulls and feathers. “With us, you always only see teepees, leather clothing, feather headdresses and that horrible Indian howl,” she complains. “Every time again: ‘Woowoowoowoo!’ Things happened to us that we had guests from the United States, and they were wearing their traditional costumes, and adults walked past us with: ‘Woowoowoowoo!’ There’s no sound at all. “

It is undisputed that the Native Americans are anything but realistic in Karl May’s work. It starts with Winnetou himself: From the description one would place him among the bison-hunting Sioux in the vastness of the North American prairies. But as is well known, he is the chief of the Apaches. But they lived in a completely different climate zone on the border with Mexico.

However, Karl May was not a scientist, but a novelist. His greatest gift was his imagination. He was one of the first to reinvent himself as a fictional character, creating a mediumistic self – the mythical Old Shatterhand, who keeps traveling to the Wild West to have adventures with his blood brother Winnetou. The audience hung on his every word when he told how he recently commanded 35,000 Indian warriors there again – “crawlers”, as he probably said as a real Saxon. His books were perhaps less an image of America than a mirror of German longings in the age of railroads and steamships.

Winnetou is a German hero

One can therefore accuse Karl May of spreading half-truths about foreign peoples in order to make it big himself. But is the result so bad? Culture is ultimately always cultural appropriation, “and certainly never on the level of reality, which hardly exists anyway, but always in the sense of stylization, of deformation,” comments literary critic Ijoma Mangold in the Micky Beisenherz podcast “Apocalypse & filter coffee”. “And then the next step is to question these clichés again.”

As a result of May’s fabulous success – the total circulation is estimated at 200 million today – the American natives were revered in hardly any other country in the world as in Germany. The hero of entire generations of readers – and readers – was not German, but the man in the cream-colored fringed suit, a foreigner from far away. For the average German of the Wilhelminian Empire, the land of the Indians was almost as far away as the “endless expanse” of the Star Trek universe is for today’s media consumers.

“You also have to look: what are the values ​​that are conveyed in Karl May’s books?” says Michael Petzel, manager of the Karl May Archive in Göttingen. “It’s friendship, justice, and also resistance to oppression. Peace love. I’ve spoken to people of advanced age often enough who have said to me: “Karl May not only gave me a huge emotional experience by taking me into another world through him immersed, but he gave me a moral framework that has accompanied me throughout my life.” That always impressed me deeply.”

Hella Brice, the widow of the legendary French Winnetou actor Pierre Brice (1929-2015), sees it the same way. “If Karl May had been racist, he would hardly have let Winnetou and Old Shatterhand become blood brothers and fight side by side for good,” the 73-year-old told the German Press Agency. It was always Pierre’s wish to bring people closer to the culture of the Indians.

Accusation: The history of the indigenous people is being trivialized

Noble be the Apache, helpful and good. But even a positive image can be a stereotype that ascribes certain characteristics to an entire population group. Tyrone White, an indigenous man living in the Rhineland, accuses the Germans of only having room for the imagination designed by Karl May – reality is completely overshadowed by it. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, White says the creators of “The Young Chief Winnetou” trivialized the history of America’s indigenous peoples for entertainment purposes. “It allows non-indigenous people to continue to see us as fantasy figures.”

The ethnologist Markus Lindner sees it similarly: “What is preventing a screenwriter or book author from making fictional books or films that require careful research?” asks the scientist on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The same goes for any crime writer.

Oh dear Manitu – how do you get out of there? The author Hasnain Kazim – not a Winnetou fan, as he emphasizes – recommends the following line: “You can criticize the books, ‘Winnetou’, the word ‘Indianer’, Karl May. But those who criticize it , these books and the film have to endure.”