16913

Native Americans and German national identity

Susanne Scharnowski

Kommentar

Topic: Foreigners, in particular people from the US or Canada, are often astonished when they hear how fascinated Germans are with Native Americans. So-called “hobbyist” events with Germans “playing” at being and dressing up as North American Indians, shows with Native Americans performing traditional dances or other rituals, but also theatrical festivals devoted to stories around the fictional Mescalero Apache Winnetou and his white (German) blood brother Old Shatterhand draw thousands of visitors, and it is still fair to say that most Germans have some memory of playing Indians when they were children. The creator of Winnetou, Karl May, is more widely read than Goethe or Thomas Mann, although the literary value of his texts is disputed. As puzzling as this may be from the outside: For more than 150 years, America and, in particular, North American Indians have played an important role in narratives about German national identity. Examining these narratives, we will discover a complex web of fascination and identification with Native Americans on the one hand, fascination and ambivalence regarding the culture, politics, and economics of the US and white Americans on the other hand. Program: We will study extracts from literary texts depicting Native Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries and analyse films based on Karl May and other others, produced in the FRG and the GDR (West and East Germany). We will study the political implications of images of Native Americans in the context of imperial Germany, in National Socialism, and in the GDR, and we will discuss and evaluate concepts such as the “Noble Savage”, “cultural appropriation” and racial/ ethnic stereotyping and exoticism. As an introduction, students may want to read the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_German_popular_culture Is this the right course for you? The course is open to students from all fields, from the sciences as well as from the humanities. However, you should be able to read English texts at a fairly high level, be prepared to study a wide variety of theoretical as well as literary texts and be interested in the topic as well as in textual and discourse analysis. Workload and Assessment: To obtain 5 ECTS credits, you will have to study and engage with the course materials (an average of 20 pages of academic and/ or literary texts per week), give a short oral presentation, and pass the written exam at the end of the semester. Students must attend at least 85% of the classes (12 out of 14). Some of the materials will be available in digital form on Blackboard; additionally, students have to purchase the reader (a collection of photocopied texts in printed form) from the copy shop at Königin-Luise-Str. 39, near U-Bahnhof Dahlem Dorf. Schließen

14 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mi, 16:00 - 18:00 14 Termine

Mi, 16.04.2025 16:00 - 18:00

Dozenten:
Dr. Susanne Scharnowski