Hi Ho Hitler...Away!

Karl Friedrich May…a convicted thief, a pathological liar and a fraud.  As an author, his books were said to be stunted in the awkward, stilted prose of the 19th century.  Nevertheless, one of his creations influenced a generation of eager German readers, ultimately changing the way humanity viewed the German nation... 

May was a drifter and a grifter, seemingly causing trouble for himself in every profession he tried and committing petty theft whenever the opportunity presented itself.  May's thieving peccadillos landed him in jail, but continued throughout his life.  He was thrown out of school for stealing of all things, candlewax shavings.  Later on in life, he lost a teaching position for stealing a pocket watch, and from this incident came incarceration.  Karl May never seemed to break this habit.

There was some limited success for May as an author.  However, in his fifties, the product of everlasting success came to fruition...a book about the American West, featuring an Indian chief and his White sidekick, a German immigrant to America nicknamed "Old Shatterhand".  Called Winnetou after the book's main Indian character, this novel became a resounding success, leading to a whole series surrounding the duo.

He never visited the United States, but that didn't stop May from writing romantically on the American West, his Teutonic audience hungry for such adventures.  1893 saw the first installment, the flagship novel, was entitled Winnetou.  Every word of the book was bathed in fantasy and romanticism.  Winnetou, the main character himself was an Apache Indian who later became the Chief of the Jicarilla Apache tribe.  Second was "Old Shatterhand", the noble German immigrant to America, who went out West and befriended Winnetou, the two eventually becoming "blood brothers".  

Interestingly, May really was not interested in real-life Indians.  While working on Winnetou, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was touring Germany.  He had the opportunity to see the show, and probably meet the actual Native Americans touring with the production.  He hid from it, and refused to go.  This was probably due to one of the many lies he had spun.  Karl May sold everyone on his ability to speak a multitude of Indian languages.  He couldn't, and any interaction with the "real deal" would seal his fate and reveal his...un-truths. 

Winnetou made the man.  The first book was a "hit" in Germany and led to many more volumes, making May the best selling German author of all time.  He never dropped the façade, claiming to be a foremost expert on all things Western and Indian.  He even envisioned himself as the living epitome of "Old Shatterhand", photographing himself frequently as the character, buckskin garb and all, wearing a bear tooth necklace around his neck to prove he had "been there". 

Karl May passed away in 1912, but the influence of his fairytale version of America's Western frontier was so far reaching that it lives on today.  Today's Germany is rife with annual Karl May festivals, full of faux teepees, frontier dress and Indian feather bonnets...with a tomahawk or two.  His bestsellers created a fetish in Germany with Native America, particularly with Plains Indian tribes, that has spawned historical reenactments, collectors and a general fascination with all things Native American.  Outside of Germany, May is virtually unknown.  His books were never prolific in English, and the style was not friendly to readers of other nationalities.  It seems Karl May's West was created for Germans, with all the nationalist undertones, a German "West"...for Germans.    

May's books also fascinated such luminaries Albert Einstein, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and perhaps worst of all...Adolf Hitler himself... 

I do not find it surprising that Hitler was deeply intrigued with May's Winnetou series of Westerns.  He was a man steeped in fantasy and false realities, from Wagner operas to his hatred of Jews, whom he blamed for Germany's loss in the First World War among other things.  What does surprise me is the extent of that intrigue and how it absolutely fed into his corruption.  Adolf Hitler always kept an entire set with him wherever he went.  From the Wolf's Lair, his headquarters in Russia  to the Berchtesgaden, his personal mountain retreat, to the halls of his dictatorship in Berlin, Winnetou and Old Shatterhand" were always with him.  For all we know, Hitler's entire career and his Nazi policies were influenced and guided by these books...some of his military strategy certainly was...

According to Albert Speer, Hitler would always retire with and consult the novels when the Nazis' fortunes were suffering a losing streak, as if they were a talisman of sorts, divining the fascist dictator's path to elusive victory.  It's hard to imagine that at least some World War II German military planning, revision and battle strategy actually came from a set of fantasy novels involving cowboys and Indians.  Is it any wonder that Hitler referred the forces engaged on the Eastern Front in this manner...German cowboys and Russian Indians...

The thread of American Old West History runs consistently through Hitler's Third Reich.  From the glamorization by May to Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine creating their very own Western film, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien in 1936.  "The Emperor of California" was shot by the Nazis on location in Sedona, Arizona and is a romanticized and politically charged film about Johann Sutter and his experiences in California before and after the Gold Rush.  Sutter was a leading figure in California history during both the Mexican Period and American Period (after 1847).  In typical Nazi fashion, the film twists historical reality and creates and end product that glorifies Germany, with all that Teutonic superiority, and demonizes America and its Capitalist System.  Sutter himself wasn't even a German national...he was Swiss...but never let the facts get in the way of a good and useful propaganda story.  At least the Nazi filmmakers followed the Karl May tradition of seeing and portraying Native Americans in a sympathetic and noble light...almost putting Indians on a pedestal.

The most lasting impression of Karl May and his series of "Western" novels, in my opinion, is a copy laying on Hitler's nightstand, the last thing he read in 1945, before committing suicide deep below Berlin, his Nazi fantasy, crumbling to ashes above his Bunker, having taken souls by the millions in its wake.

From one fantasy to another fantasy, Winnetou and the Nazi State are comparable and inseparable.  For all the innocence a series set in the American West, written by someone who had never seen it, with undertones of Teutonic supremacy that were taken to fruition a mere 40 years after its first publication, Winnetou and Nazi Germany represent the same thing.  Both, while not completely culpable for the other, created a fantasy that fed into one another...and influenced decisions based on the superiority complex. 

One last thing before I go...some of the imagery in May's Winnetou books shows the swastika in its Native American context.  The swastika is not an evil symbol...its imagery flows through American Indian art and culture, from jewelry, to Navajo blankets to Indian baskets and pottery.  The Third Reich and Hitler made it evil.  One really has to speculate, given Hitler's love of May and Winnetou, where he got this particular idea, and if so, did the most recognizable symbol for hate and destruction come from a Western novel?