Pierre Brice (as Winnetou), next to the shooting of the ARD series “Mein Freund Winnetou” from the French television “Antenna 2”, Episode 1 “Blood and Sand” Durango, Mexico, Central America, America, mug, drinking, drink, Indian costume, wig, disguise, actor, PH, 02/01/1979; (Photo by Peter Bischoff/Getty Images)
Photo: Getty Images, Peter Bischoff. All rights reserved.
In the course of the ongoing debate about the life’s work of the Dresden-Radebeul folk writer Karl May in general, and the Apache chief Winnetou in particular, the Hamburg colonial researcher Jürgen Zimmerer emphasized that Adolf Hitler was a great May supporter.
According to Zimmerer, May’s work was “racist in its DNA”. The extensive series of books would once have been part of the Nazis’ “literary experience”. Overall, May’s opus conveys a “white, German superiority”. It was no coincidence that Adolf Hitler and his top party comrades were fans of May’s imaginary adventure stories.
His central statement: “It is no coincidence that Adolf Hitler and SS chief Himmler were big Karl May fans. Parts of their policy of occupying the East, the idea of how German colonialists would be settled there, are based on ideas of the ‘conquest of the Wild West’ that they took from Karl May’s books. That is inscribed in Karl May’s work. It doesn’t change anything about his person.”
“Actually, this debate shouldn’t even exist, it’s all clear”:
The 57-year-old professor is considered an expert in coming to terms with German colonial crimes. In the Winnetou battle, which was conducted via Twitter and all other types of media, Zimmerer now told Bayrischer Rundfunk (BR):
“When I over [den Mediziner und Nobelpreisträger] When I wrote Robert Koch as a colonialist, it was much more violent. But what is striking is the intensity of the debate, the scope. If you think about it, what happened? A publisher has realized that it made a bad business decision by not publishing children’s books. The way that exploded, it’s unusual that so many people react to it. Actually, this debate shouldn’t even exist, it’s all clear.”
Zimmerer recalls the start of the film “Der Junge Chief Winnetou” and the withdrawal campaign by Ravensburger Verlag, which had officially taken its accompanying media off the market. At the core of his expertise, Zimmerer completely opposes everything that Karl May has written about the fictional characters Winnetou, Old Shatterhand and the oriental counterpart Kara Ben Nemsi.
The retrospective reading of May’s work would be a “clear disappointment, according to the motto, how could I be enthusiastic in my youth and not notice the anti-Semitism, the racism in the works. Not to mention the misogyny. If it were about content, I couldn’t understand how a democratic politician could ever defend that. It’s not about content, of course, but about white identity politics.”
People who defended Karl May were basically protecting “good old society”: “When marriage was still a ‘real’ marriage. It is a rejection of the impositions of a more diverse society in every respect.”
<!–
–>
<!–
–>