Winnetou

"In Germany, Karl May is a hugely popular nineteenth-century writer of youth literature. I think his most famous books are this Winnetou Trilogy . These are Wild West novels, even though Karl May actually never travelled to North America. This is the Wild West of his imagination. They’re not very good novels, but they do very much shape every German boy’s imagination. Winnetou himself is the chief of the Apaches, he’s this stereotypical ‘good savage’. He has a white brother-in-arms, whose name is Old Shatterhand. The novels are about the adventures they have together and how they help each other. At the end there is a Christian element. Winnetou sacrifices himself for Old Shatterhand, he takes a bullet and dies. I remember crying, and all my friends were crying. We would discuss Winnetou’s sad fate. It’s really one of the key books that most German boys read at a certain age. I spend my formative childhood years in a small German town by the name of Maria Veen. My father had a job at the local high school there. But when I was about ten my parents decided they wanted to move back to Brazil, where they were born and grew up. They had fled from Brazil in the 1960s because of the military dictatorship. They came as political refugees to Germany and settled there. I was born there and my siblings were born there and we spent much of our childhood there. My parents deliberately brought us up as Germans as they didn’t want us to stand out and feel different. Then we moved to São Paulo, from this small town to this colossal city. It was a tremendous culture shock. Everything was different: climate, social norms, cuisine. I spoke the language, but still, it was something very very strange for me. One of the most traumatic experiences I remember was that nobody in my new class knew about these heroes that shape every German boy’s imagination. Suddenly, this entire cultural frame of reference disappeared. My reaction to that was diaspora nationalism. I idolised everything German. I even forced my parents to go with us to a German restaurant every two weeks, even though we had never eaten German food at home and started putting down everything Brazilian, which was particularly twisted because I have two grandparents who are German Jews who got kicked out of Germany and went to Brazil. In retrospect it’s very embarrassing, the ethnocentric biases of my teenage judgements. But it was also a very clumsy first attempt to defend a certain way of living and a certain way of looking at things. Obviously, I wouldn’t want to go back to that. But I think it was a rather formative experience, an experience of puzzlement. I think I experienced something of what al-Ghazālī describes: the contingency of our beliefs and values. Suddenly what used to be my world became a tiny spot far away and I realised that it’s not ‘the’ world, that you cannot simply universalise. People in other places do things very differently. I think this experience of disorientation, of alienation, and of displacement in some sense laid the foundation of some of these questions that have remained with me and form my book . When I went to Akwesasne, which is an Iroquois reservation on the border between Canada and the US, they asked me ‘what do you know about Iroquois culture?’ I said ‘very little’ and I showed them a photo from my childhood album, where I was actually dressed up as Winnetou. Part of the idea was to not go in there as an expert, but to go in as someone who has prejudices and doesn’t know much and is ignorant and is willing to be challenged and willing to engage in a conversation without claiming any authority and knowledge. So I playfully referred to my childhood passion for Winnetou. They laughed about it and told me they were trying to turn the idea of the noble savage to their advantage. They were offering a week-long immersion into Iroquoi culture, and that the Iroquoi culture they construed was one that none of them lived but was geared towards the Western tourist who wants to have this kind of experience. I think it’s good to inform yourself about the other, but I think it’s not a precondition for engaging in debate. You will never know everything about everything. I think the really non-negotiable prerequisite is that you’re willing to let yourself be challenged by others’ views and in the process learn about others. I think the foreignness and friction that occurs is a good thing. That’s a chance to then revise your views that may have been shaped by Karl May and Winnetou, and see how real Native Americans live and what the real problems they face are. ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS FROM READERS (VIA TWITTER): E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed is also recommended, by me! Wikipedia has a better summary than I can do in 240 characters. But his 4 fields of knowledge offers a unique perspective crossing self and other, objective and subjective—@Tom_Ruen"