Column | Virtual book burning – NRC

I would prefer to unpack about the performance now The Underground in the Amsterdam Forest. There are ferocious costumes and dancing and classic clown tricks. There’s Sanne den Hartogh – an actor who deserves the Louis d’Or (I’ll just mention it). The base is Dostoevsky. A Russian. Who gets to interpret our sad current affairs. How is that possible? Well…

But no. I am sent into the woods by Winnetou. The series of novels about him and his fellow hero Old Shatterhand has been taken off the market by the German publisher, the Dutch publisher Meulenhoff hastily followed suit. And I’m lost. How can publishers do that in the month when the book trade is championing Salman Rushdie, badly injured by a hater of his devil’s verses?

The argument is: those books are out of date. That’s right. Part 1 is from 1893. And in yet another time, when I was about thirteen years old, I dived into the series. The Rock Fortress in Sonora I liked the most. The Death of Winnetou I skipped—not seeing me, I had cried enough when Nsho-tshi, Winnetous sister-cum-Old Shatterhand’s bride, was murdered.

And now the entire series has been sentenced to virtual book burning. The reason? It’s bubbling in the guts of entrepreneurs and this measure is the fart that makes them fly. They are afraid. “Outdated” does not mean “old-fashioned” but “a romanticized image with many clichés” that would be inconsistent with contemporary sensibilities.

I think those sensitivities were not touched by those books, but by sauerkraut westerns and Wild-West junk à la John Wayne. In those films, the racism against Native Americans runs rampant. You cannot blame the Winnetou series for such things. Last Saturday, philosopher Ger Groot already analyzed in NRC that these novels are based on a strict idea of ​​equality. The Nazis figured that out. They wanted to ban the books because author Karl May showed that he did not like the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races. The Nazis did not dare to ban, Winnetou was too popular.

Now the Winnetou books are accused of cultural appropriation and neglect of the genocide of the Native Americans. Well. In parallel with Winnetou, I read the Joop ter Heul series at the time, feasting on their romanticized image of the upper class in The Hague in the 1920s. They pay no attention to the appalling conditions and humiliating position of the domestic workers. Is that still of this time? I’m just hoping for the publisher’s right back.

If publishers do not stand up for their fund but give in to a breath of headwind, then writers are outlawed. Wanted, dead or alive.