I went to Tübingen on 6-7 May to hold a guest lecture on Wild West shows in Europe. Tübingen, a small town near Stuttgart in the region of Swabia in Southwest Germany, is one of the reputable traditional university towns. As Leipzig is proud of Goethe’s time as a student at its university (most of which he apparently spent partying), Tübingen is proud to have many German Romanticists, such as Hölderlin and Hauff, as well es the philosopher Hegel, among its former faculty, students, and residents.

The lecture on Wild West Shows addressed several aspects of German perceptions of Native Americans (and vice versa) that I explored in my dissertation, such as German impresarios’, newspaper reporters’, and the audiences’ expectations and reception of Native American show performers, but also a perspective on the Native experience and motivation to join these shows.  My presentation was integrated in Prof. Astrid Franke’s lecture on “Issues in American Literary and Cultural History from the Civil War to the First World War” and was videotaped. I will post a link to the video as soon as it is published. It was a great opportunity to return to my general research interest in German/European representations of Native America. I will probably post more entries in the future to discuss anecdotes and examples of Indian imagery popping up in German history and current everyday life.

Whenever I come to a new town, I like to walk around to get a feeling how it is laid out: what are the distances and major landmarks, how do these landmarks look from different perspectives and how does the structure of the town relate to them (e.g. in the line of view). It is always exciting to see the “underside” and subcultural aspects of a place as well, so I look for graffiti, stickers on lamp posts, and posters, no matter if they advertise festivals, political events, or garage sales. I will take some time in future entries to post pictures of signs from different places I came across and found remarkable.

 “Walking the map” of Tübingen, I happened upon a little bridge, called the “Indianersteg” (Indian’s Footbridge). It’s simply a small pedestrian bridge connecting the southern part of town with an oblong island that parts the Neckar river across from the old town and is laid out as a park.

source: http://www.tuepedia.de/index.php/Indianersteg

Tübingen’s official wiki states that the name comes from children playing Indians at this bridge. The title’s first occurrence in official records is from a 1871 report on an accident. This fits nicely into my presentation topic: Discussing ethnographic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) and Wild West shows, I explained that, although “Indianthusiasm” as a phenomenon developed since c. 1800, these shows helped turn it into a feature of popular mass culture during the 1870s and 1880s. The fact that children met at this bridge to play Indians in the 1860s and early 1870s tells us that this cultural practice was already widespread at a time when the popularity and high frequency of these shows as just starting, several years before Buffalo Bill first toured Germany (1890) and Karl May published his first Winnetou novel (1893).