It seems that Germany has gotten so deeply caught up in a debate about the continued validity of the Saxon writer Karl May and his chief figure? attempt at reconstruction.
When does a debate actually gain social weight? The answer should be simple: if it deals with an issue that affects many people. Your everyday life, your life, your connections to other people. Something we need to agree on as a society, something we should agree on. But we live in complex times. The fact that ultimately everything is somehow related to everything else is not new – but is being recorded by social networks on the Internet in new places as randomly as it is highlighted. And since everyone with access to this network is also a broadcaster, a debate can be started from a wide variety of directions, which for some seems to be about life and death, for others about the emperor’s beard.
The currently simmering debate about Winnetou shows – once again – how hopeless one can gallop oneself: Along the currently often badly inflamed breaking points of society, all known front lines have straightened up immediately and the possible thing quickly lost sight of . And who tries to insert differentiated nuances? Is immediately stamped with “black” or “white”.
What happened? The starting point is a children’s film that hit the cinemas on August 11 and has been living in the shadows ever since. According to the distributor, “The Young Chief Winnetou” only had around 110,000 visitors by the beginning of this week. That’s not much for a flick that was intended to be a family magnet and has a very prominent character. Such productions are considered to be reasonably successful with more than one million viewers; Cinema hits such as “Wickie and the strong men” or “Bibi and Tina” exceeded this after a week. The fact that this didn’t happen in this case is due to the fact that the actually nice idea of working up a prequel to “Winnetou” from the childhood of the famous Apache warrior in a contemporary way goes completely to waste. Instead, the film focuses heavily on the satire “Der Schuh des Manitou” from 2001, which was enormously successful with twelve million cinema viewers, but largely dispenses with its humor density. Instead, there are a few wooden punch lines along the lines of, “What’s your real name?” “Nscho-chi.” “Health!” And the bad guys need to pee before the misdeed. Her boss “Aunt” Todd Crow is in turn copied from the pirate Jack Sparrow, but his stilted joke doesn’t fit the pathos Indians around Intschu-Tuschuna.
The names from the famous book are the only parallels to Karl May in this dreary patchwork quilt: The film Apaches live in tents (!) like they come from a toy shop and are dressed in random-looking costumes with carnival charm. The supposedly pacifist message at the end: there will only be peace if the tribe does without guns and turns to the white sheriff with problems. You can find that sort of thing in a children’s film today quite forgetful of history and racist – especially since the cinematic portrayal of Native Americans has been critically questioned again and again since the 20th century: Marlon Brando had already protested against such disrespectful distortions by winning his Oscar in 1973 for “The Godfather” and had the explanation read out by the Apachen Sacheen Littlefeather.
However, “The Young Chief Winnetou” was apparently only noticed when criticism of two accompanying children’s books written in the same style was voiced on the Internet, which Ravensburger Verlag then took off the market. Carved into internet-ready bits of excitement, that made waves. It was remarkable to observe how new shortages, exaggerations and admixtures of opinions developed their own crude momentum. A possibly real struggle over which image of Native Americans should be shown today and what role Karl May could play in it, despite or precisely because of his stereotypes due to the time of origin? No chance. “The schematism with which these debates are being conducted is now, above all, spreading a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia, of paralyzing intellectual weariness. That’s why the news that Winnetou has now also gotten it immediately creates a certain trepidation,” writes the literary scholar Johannes Franzen in his essay “Lost Innocence”: “In this case, a deeply felt fear of loss can be observed in the outcry over an alleged Winnetou ban, which provides insights into the relationship between youth literature, cultural socialization and a utopia of political innocence.”
That’s true, but still short-sighted. Because there are reasons for the state of mind that leads to this reflex: We live in a kind of social fluidum in which many values are renegotiated. Minorities that have been oppressed for decades use new levers to position their issues with a hitherto impossible volume. Accusing them of precisely this while the large lobby groups are roughly pushing through interests is strangely irrational, but also quite understandable: the large number of concerns leads to a state of limbo that is difficult for many to endure in its permanent uncertainty. Especially since stakeholders from all sides use all the tricks to saddle up on every bubbling topic.
How little response there is to the supposed core concern is then shown on the side: Although the hashtag “#winnetou” is currently making waves with over 51,000 posts on the Instagram social media platform, the Karl May House Hohenstein-Ernstthal currently has it there just 62 followers, the Karl May Museum Radebeul 75.
Winnetou book taken off the market: That’s what Karl May experts say about it
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