This is the first post in a series (hopefully) about my current research and lecture tour through California and the American West and Southwest. The main occasion to spend time in the US was the 2014 American Studies Association’s annual meeting in Los Angeles, which I will cover in the next post. This tour will serve to promote my forthcoming book on the representation of Native American imagery in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and to do research on current projects.

I started this trip at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where I met colleagues in Native studies as well as American and German studies. At OU, I gave two lectures. The first was held at the English Department on 31 October and was titled “Fellow Tribesmen. Perceptions of Indigeneity in German Nationalism and Nazi Ideology.” It emphasized the role of Indianthusiasm in German intellectual history and emerging nationalism. The colleagues in the audience were particularly interested in comparing the perception and representation of Jews and Native Americans in German nationalism and Nazi ideology. I also had the opportunity to engage in discussions about Thomas Mann’s gloomy 1918 perspective of World War I as an onslaught of imperialist international civilization against German culture, and his eventual break with nationalism during the ascent of the Nazi movement. These debates brought home once more the binary oppositions of (German) culture versus (Western/international) civilization of which German nationalists were so fond and which lent themselves to a German nationalist understanding as the “soul mates” of Native Americans.

In the second presentation, “Brothers in the Struggle against Imperialism,” I focused on Indianthusiasm during the GDR. The talk was held on 3 November and organized by the German Department and the College of International Studies and served as part of OU’s special series commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I drew from Glenn Penny’s recent book Kindred by Choice to discuss the roles of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and the GDR state film company DEFA’s series of “Indianerfilme” (sometimes called “Eastern Westerns” or even “Osterns”) in presenting contemporary Native American cultures and their struggle for sovereignty in relation to East German Indian hobbyism.

Giving these two presentations quasi back-to-back, the longue durée of Indianthusiasm emphasized by Penny became very prominent. Especially so since major ideas, such as anti-Americanism, the German inferiority complex, or the longing for communality among modern Germans, were present in both talks and discussions but individually highlighted the respective Nazi and Communist perspectives, arguments, and examples. This turned out to be a very interesting comparative experiment that should prove fruitful for teaching German perspectives of (Native) America in the future.