The debate about cultural appropriation does not stop at Winnetou either: After the Ravensburger publishing house decided to remove two books from the program, a heated argument broke out in Germany. A company spokesman confirmed on Monday (22 August) that the book’s delivery had been halted due to “playing down stereotypes” about indigenous people.
Many see Winnetou as a “work of international understanding”
The head of the Karl May publishing house, founded in 1918, Bernhard Schmid, sharply criticized the decision: “Over the past 130 years, Karl May has repeatedly been the target of false accusations. At the end of the empire, he was accused of being too pacifist and concerned about international understanding. Today he is accused of being a colonialist and a racist. That’s sheer nonsense!” he told the “Bild” newspaper.
The Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder also thinks very little of the sales freeze: he confirmed a Twitter post by CSU politician Florian Hahn with the word “absolutely”. The member of the Bundestag had written: “#Winnetou is a work of international understanding and friendship. Creating a woken shitstorm from this is pathetic enough. But the fact that Ravensburg-Verlag then caved in and took the book off the market is as cowardly as it is absurd.”
Absolutely,,.. https://t.co/WigUBQxzpb
— Markus Soeder (@Markus_Soeder) August 23, 2022
For the Karl May expert Andreas Brenne, the books based on the children’s film “The Young Chief Winnetou” are harmless: “I don’t think it’s right to take such a book out of circulation just because of a shitstorm,” said the art education professor “New Osnabrück newspaper”. It is already made clear in a preliminary remark that the book is to be understood as a fictional story and not as an appropriate representation of the life of indigenous peoples.
According to critics, Winnetou shows a distorted historical picture
In doing so, he took up a core argument of the critics of the Winnetou story. They claim that the stories romanticize the lives of indigenous people: white people use a culture that is not their own. This is particularly problematic when members of the majority society seize individual elements of the culture of a minority, commercialize them and take them out of context.