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- Sascha Pohle
Our hobby, or why we walk around like Indians
A Indian Hobbyist is an adept, something like a „Do it your self“ expert, who is practicing living history. In Germany thousands are organized in more than 100 Indian Clubs.
The first Indian Club was founded in 1896, and the oldest still existing club in 1913. Also in fascist Germany several Indian clubs had been funded, because the Indians were considered to be a unique and noble race. Then after the Second World War many new clubs sprouted around American-Occupation-Zones like in South Germany. In the former GDR especially in Saxony was and still is the highest density of Indian clubs nation wide. There the Socialists funded the Indian hobby, because the Indian represented the repressed red people, versus the white imperialistic cowboy.
But now focussing more on the individual: where does this longing, and the special connection of Germans to the Indian come from? What is that „Indian feeling“?
In pure Cowboy Clubs for example the notion of fun is more relevant, and the idea of being a real cowboy doesn’t seem to be part of the experience. However, Hobby Indians are much more concerned about their Indianness, as if they would look for something elusive like authenticity.
Murray Small Legs, a Native American, who lives in Germany, says that the German interest in everything Native American, is connected to a form of cultural, perhaps cultivated, schizophrenia. Some Germans he said have that Indian feeling: They would believe that they are Germans from the outside, but Indians from the inside.
The German impulse to play Indian traces back to the famous Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill, who came first in 1887 to Europe with his live show of fighting Indians and Cowboys.
Then the curious figure Karl May is probably the most influence trigger and key piece for the phenomenon of German Indianism. Karl May´s life as novelist is very much connected within the historical context. Karl May, living in the dead of Saxony, and other German mass encountered unknown regions and exotic people in ethnological museums, and particularly in human zoos, where they became witness of typical Indian modes of cooking, eating or sleeping.
Karl May’s best-known tale tells the story of a deep friendship between the German wanderer Old Shatterhand and the Apache chief Winnetou. Shatterhand is Mays alter ego. Although May had never crossed the ocean before, he insisted that the stories were based on real experiences and not on a fictitious identity. And by faking photographs, which showed him in Old Shatterhand´s costume and other set ups, he tried to proof, that he is the real German wanderer.
Even if most Hobbyist don’t identify or relate themselves to Karl May, because he wrote more fiction than facts concerning the Indians, I believe that subconsciously there is a relation with Indian Hobbyism and May, which is best described in the tale itself: The blood brotherhood between Old Shatterhand and the Indian chief Winnetou – a bond for life.
The historical extinction of the Indian Nation during the time of Karl May, the actual disappearance, left shadows and created new spaces for projection and fantasy, wherein the Indian just serves as an image of longing for what is absent and out of reach. The Indian is a metaphor, which represents a romantic ideal versus the modern - the Indian is the phantom of a single-sided felt brotherly bond. The German’s romance of nativeness is based on a feeling of a lost of nativeness and the desire probably for something like a sense of belonging and home.
But neither Karl May nor the Indian Hobbyist is searching for real contact with the Indians. The Indian Hobbyist prefers to preserve a historical image of the Indian, like in a living museum, mainly focused on the mid nineteenth-century Plain Indians, who don’t live like this any more. And just because many Native Americans live a more contemporary life, in fact many had lost their cultural background, make some Hobby Indians believe to be more aboriginal than actual Native Americans.