Don’t say “Indians” now
Pierre Brice was yesterday, now “The Young Chief Winnetou” is coming to the cinema, the prequel to Karl May’s blood brothers saga. A case of cultural appropriation? Sure, of course! But that’s not the problem at all.
Dhat is of course completely impossible. That there is a man who was born in Turkey and grew up in Salzgitter with a headdress freshly coiffed from eagle feathers and in brand-new leather robes standing around somewhere in the Andalusian steppe and saying things that we old, white sacks last heard sometime in the cinema in the 1970s .
He babbles about the “Great Spirit”. About the fact that our eyes can deceive us, “but not our heart”. And that we shouldn’t distrust anyone “just because their skin is a different color”.
The great ex-“Tatort” detective Mehmet Kurtulus says so as chief Intschu Tschuna in Mike Marzuk’s Karl May Sage prequel. We are learning again what we old white sacks learned back then in the Croatian Karst from Pierre Brice and his blood brother Lex Barker: what greed and capitalism can do to people, especially white ones, how valuable tolerance is and so on.
In truth, of course, nobody in “The Young Chief Winnetou” has a different skin color. The majority of the Mescalero Apaches in their eight wigwams, including the director himself, would hardly be noticeable dialectally in the “Rosenheim Cops” or in “Hubert and Staller” – Helmfried von Lüttichau, the Staller actor from the ARD evening series, is with the little one Winnetou the sheriff of the lint free western village of Rio Bravo.
So we are dealing with a pure case of cultural appropriation. But before human chains are formed around cinemas that billboard the young Winnetou: There are worse things in the case of this children’s adventure fairy tale. Legally perhaps more relevant.
“The Young Chief Winnetou” is a clear case of coercion. We old, white sacks are supposed to drag our children or grandchildren, who have no idea about Silberbüchse and Silbersee, to the cinema. Should explain who this Winnetou is and this Karl May, that maybe they shouldn’t read the books that we still have in some boxes if they find them, because they’re just not very well written and Karl May a pretty bad fantasist.
Why there’s that little Sam Hawkens at Marzuk who keeps crowing “if I’m not mistaken” that of course the West never looked so clean and freshly swept and was more brutal, more miserable than any cliché they are served up in The Young Chief .
And of course we still have to deal with the cultural appropriation somehow… Admission should actually be free for parents and legal guardians.