As part of the discussion about racism and cultural appropriation in Karl May’s work, the Karl May Society and the Karl May Foundation have now written an open letter to have their say. In it, they not only defend the intentions of the Saxon writer (19842-1912), but also explicitly practice at Ravensburger Verlag. Due to criticism from the left, the latter had stopped the delivery of two new accompanying books for “Winnetou”.t — and thus started a controversial discussion.
“Written against ethnic stereotypes and Eurocentric perspective”
The open letter addresses the criticism on several points – and initially places May’s work in a temporal and cultural context. “As a German writer of the 19th century, Karl May is inevitably shaped by the habitus of a colonial age. When writing his travel stories, he used the knowledge of contemporary ethnography to create exotic worlds of refuge for his bourgeois readership, which at the same time function as fantastic probationary spaces for a literary self that is exaggerated,” the letter says. “Especially his early texts are therefore inscribed with ethnic stereotypes that were common at the time and a Eurocentric perspective. It is the task of literary and cultural studies to work out these critically and to trace them back to their sources.
May shares this worldview with all authors of the past — what is special is his sympathy for the indigenous population: “Karl May’s special feature is that in his depiction of the ‘Wild West’ from the beginning the narrator’s sympathy for the suffering indigenous population is applicable. Their dignity and their human qualities are embodied in ideal figures such as Winnetou, the chief of the Apaches, and the tragic destruction of their material and cultural existence underlies all of May’s North American narratives,” according to the Karl May Society and the Foundation.
“A worthwhile read even for the 21st century”
The letter then addresses Ravensburger Verlag’s criticism that Winnetou had hurt other people’s feelings. “If this is the case, wounds are not healed by simply erasing the polluter – or a historical artist representative on his behalf. On the contrary, an effective and sustainable therapy requires the explicit examination of the causes.” In the last paragraph, the foundation and society advocate looking at May in a differentiated manner. “His extremely influential representation of non-European cultures has long been part of European cultural history and an instructive example of a productive and self-reflective encounter with alterity. Precisely because his texts assume, verbalise, combat and overcome prejudices, he is by no means ‘outdated’, but also worth reading for the 21st century.”
Dissenting voices: “It’s no coincidence that Adolf Hitler and SS chief Himmler were big Karl May fans”
The Hamburg colonial researcher Jürgen Zimmerer, among others, sees things differently. He described May’s work as racist in its “DNA” and speaks of a “white, German superiority”. “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’, as they took them from Karl May’s books. That is inscribed in Karl May’s work. It doesn’t change anything about his person,” says Zimmerer.
+++ This post first appeared on rollingstone.de +++