German "Indians" adopt Plains culture

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The chief hands the pipe to a warrior and then folds his arms. He nods his head and the circle of bare-chested braves in moccasins, clanging beads and buckskin pants begin to chant and dance around a campfire. They don't seem to notice the crowd of 150 or so staring at them.

The Indians are extremely serious as they hop on their left foot and then their right - now shrieking up at the sky. A second look reveals blue eyes and blond strands of hair sticking out beneath the black pony tails. The scene is in Germany, not North America.

When the dance ends the onlookers applaud, yet the Indians ignore their cheers and retire to their tipi. Later when they get into the car park, they may let slip names like Helmut or Horst, and the fact that they may be respectable insurance agents or bank clerks but spent their weekend as "hobby Indians."

"Iroquois" fighting land claim

One such tribe, the Iroquois of Eiche, outside Potsdam, is fighting to prevent a west German supermarket chain from taking its land. Essentially they are fighting for their right to be weekend Indians. In East Germany's communist times, the Iroquois built their Long House on what was then no-man's-land and no one seemed to care. Now the developers are moving in.

The Iroquois of Potsdam are part of a growing phenomenon of "hobby Indians" - German men and women who dress in authentic Indian garments, dance, perform rituals and powwow. Some even emphasize that their dress is more "authentic" than that of today's Native Americans.

There are 85,000 Teutonic Indians in Germany, and at least 35,000 in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) alone. Related industries are thriving: some 5,000 customers a year spend hundreds of thousand of Deutechmarks in Munich's Hudson Bay Trading Company; the Verlag fur Amerikanistic has issued the 14th edition of its best seller, Das Handbuch fur Indianer (The Handbook for Indians), and 6,000 white Indians with 700 tipis attended this year's 42nd annual powwow in Hessen.

Most of Germany's Indian Clubs identify with the Plains Indians. The Iroquois of Potsdam prefer to set themselves apart. In their Long House, they avoid using electric light, and dress in hand-made clothing. Some west German Indians buy clothing from catalogues but most easterners make their own.

"Buying from a catalogue is superficial; it's fake. It's against the whole purpose of being an Indian," says Claudia Ruckbarn, an Iroquois maiden.

Another Iroquois says that he does not like the west German Indians. He feels that west Germany ruined the GDR by making the east "based on money and elbows. We want to live here without money. If possible, year-round - forever."

But when the bulldozers arrive to build the supermarket, the Iroquois will be gone. This time they want to venture deeper into the woods and find a place for their Long House that will not be disturbed by developers.

West invading urban Indians

The urban Indians of Prenzlauer Berg in east Berlin are also against developers. Prenzlauer Berg, proud to be known as the area of "alternative culture", is under siege. West Berlin city planners have decided to build a highway through its centre and to replace housing with hotels. Squats have been evicted, others made into city-sponsored projects; and many feel threatened, not just by unemployment but also by rapidly rising rents and transportation costs.

Some people in Prenzlauer Berg call this invasion by the West. And the urban Indians recently called on the "Indigenous people" of the East to go on the war path and fight western real estate spectators.

The urban Indians are mostly squatters and anarchists and not affiliated with the Indian Club movement, nonetheless their imagery remains the same. A red, white and black poster of an Indian with a tipi recently called on east Berliners to defend their "Indigenous culture." Nordic young people with tomahawks, war paint and drums danced around a totem pole in a playground in Friedrichshain Park n the hope that the demo would be the signal for an "Indigenous uprising."

East Berliners, a speaker emphasized, are being thrown out of their "villages" and forced into "glass and concrete reservations."Villages to the young squatters are the neighborhoods of east Berlin - slated to become upper-income housing.

Indians express national identity

Using stereotypes of Indians to express Germanness has a long tradition, going back to the writer Karl May and the immense success of his 60 novels about a German named Old Shatterheand and his Indian companion named Winnetou. Karl May, who

died in 1912, is claimed to be the most read author in the language.

He embodied and also created a whole branch of populist German romanticism that idealized Native Americans. Indians in his books are pure, rooted, and brave, and most important, untouched by commerce or urban life. What German intellectuals found

in the ancient Greeks, Germany's common main found in the Indians of Karl May.

Since the 19th century, many have turned to Indians to express a confused sense

of national identity and Karl May has been the most articular spokesman of the fight.

Outside Dresden in the town of Radebeul is the Villa Shatterhand where May wrote his novels and which today houses the Karl May Museum. Johannes Huetnner,

also known as Chief Powder Face, is respected here for helping to found the first Dresden Indian club in 1928.

Walking through the museum, he said it was the values that he learned in the Indian Club as a child that helped him survive eight years of a Society POW camp near Stalingrad. Remarking on the human scalps on display in the museum, he says that scalps are to an Indian what an Iron Cross is to be German.

His Dresden tribe earns money by performing tribal dances, rituals and tomahawk fights for audiences. Huettner emphasizes the ethnographic value of his work and proudly tells the story of his close friend Adolf Hungry-Wolf who married a Native American woman and now teachesNative Americans about their customs.

Huettner sees it as his life's mission to dispel prejudices about Indians being savage people. Just as, he adds, Germans are not all terrible people. There are good and bad everywhere, he says.

Author's Indian a German prototype

There is no mention in the museum that Karl May was Adolf Hitler's favorite writer or that Karl May's wife was known to be a Nazi supporter. And although some Indian Clubs were banned during the Nazi period, others flourished. The connection of Nazism with Mary's novels about a German trapper and his Indian friend may seen far-fetched but it was not so for the Nazis.

In 1910 May explained that his Indian character Winnetou was "the prototype of

a Germanic-Indian race" that the "world will be saved by," and thus it was not without reason that Klaus Mann called May "Hitler's literary mentor". The Potsdam Iroguois have little in common with storm troopers and beer halls. They seem soft and more inclined to self-exploration than to world domination. They learn politically toward the Greens and want to contribute to saving Germany's environment.