Winnetou and its five sequels were written by Karl May. The German May (1842-1912) was a liar, braggart, egomaniac and fraud. He was also an incredibly popular author, the German equivalent of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Old Shatterhand/Winnetou novels are little-known in America, but in Germany their popularity has remained constant for decades. May is the most-translated German author and the best-selling writer of genre fiction in the German language, having sold approximately one hundred and twenty million copies.

Old Shatterhand is Karl, a short, blond, cigar-smoking German (and May's fictional stand-in, his Mary Sue—see Under Two Flags). In the early 1860s Karl emigrates to the United States, moving to St. Louis to be a tutor to the Henries, a wealthy family of German immigrants. But Mr. Henry, a famous gun-maker (based on B. Tyler Henry [1821-1898], the inventor of the Winchester lever action repeating rifle), sees that Karl has the potential to be one of the great Westmänner, “West Men,” May’s name for the frontiersmen of the American West. Mr. Henry makes two special rifles for Karl, Henrystutzen (“Henry Rifle”) and Bärentöter (“Bear-Killer”), and gets Karl a job on a surveying crew for a railroad. The Americans Karl works with are crude and ignorant, lacking the education and wisdom of Karl, and he takes it upon himself to teach them proper German manners. One of the surveyors is Sam Hawkens, another German immigrant who (despite being comic relief) has years of experience on the frontier and becomes Karl’s tutor. Karl readily admits that he is a greenhorn, but because he is a German greenhorn he is a capable student who learns quickly.

During the surveying Karl and the rest of the railway crew are captured by a band of Kiowa. The strongest of the Kiowa warriors challenges Karl to a fight. Karl, who is not only unusually strong but extraordinarily fast, knocks the Kiowa out with one punch—unlike his opponent, Karl was not armed, as he dislikes bloodshed—and gains himself the nickname “Old Shatterhand.” Karl saves the other surveyors from being scalped by the Kiowa, but they are soon captured by a band of Mescalero Apaches and brought to the pueblos of the Mescalero. (The Kiowa didn’t scalp, and the real Mescalero did not live in pueblos, but factual accuracy, for May, was something that happened to other writers). The Mescalero chief Intschu-tschuna and his son Winnetou force Karl to undergo tests of strength, frontier skills, and endurance. Karl passes them, runs a gauntlet, and succeeds in capturing Intschu-tschuna. This earns Karl membership in the Mescalero as one of their chiefs. Winnetou becomes Karl’s blood brother and teaches Karl the lessons of “Indian School,” which includes not only the languages of the “Apache” and “Navajo” (including all of their dialects—Karl speaks forty languages, including German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, six dialects of Arabic, Sioux, Comanche, Snake, Ute, Kiowa, and “Chinese”), but also the tactics of the “Indians.”

Winnetou’s beautiful sister, Nscho-tschi, falls deeply in love with Karl. Karl does not believe in miscegenation, but is willing to marry her if she converts to Christianity and is educated in the ways of white men. Nscho-tschi and Intschu-tschuna are on their way to a white school in St. Louis when they are murdered by an evil Yankee, Santer. Over the next two novels Shatterhand and Winnetou pursue Santer, accompanied by Karl's abnormally intelligent and faithful horse Hatatitla. The trio wanders from St. Louis to San Francisco to Mexico, avenging wrongs and teaching ignorant Americas the proper ways of the Westmänner. Shatterhand, Winnetou, and Santer rescue innocent maidens from bloodthirsty and lust-filled native savages. They bring the law to lawless towns. They fight evil Mormons, degenerate half-breeds, and psychotically evil Yankees. The trio do all the things that fictional heroes of the West are supposed to do. At the end of the third novel Santer has been killed, but Winnetou is mortally wounded. He converts to Christianity before dying. In the remaining two Old Shatterhand novels Karl continues his adventures without Winnetou.

While May’s Westerns were influential and have been popular with generations of German readers, the stories and novels carry a distasteful message:

Beginning with short stories in 1875 and culminating with novels such as Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake, 1890) and the three volumes of Winnetou (1892), May helped create Germany’s image of the American West and contributed to what Hartmut Lutz calls “deutsche Indianertümelei— German Indianthusiasm.” May’s Western novels, which narrate the adventures of the German pioneer Old Shatterhand and his Indian blood brother, the noble Apache chief Winnetou, have entertained generations of (mainly) boys and young men. A product of their times, May’s adventure novels offered his contemporary readers an escape from urbanization, industrialization, and the insecurities of the depression that lasted from 1873 until 1896. According to Andreas Graf, by the end of the nineteenth century, the pro-Indian sentiments of May’s readers had already been awakened by James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, but the contemporary historical situation presented a problem. On the one hand, the Native Americans were waging their last wars to keep their lands, and on the other, millions of Germans had already emigrated to the United States and settled on former Indian territories. May solved the problem (as other European authors did during the age of imperialist nationalism) by depicting his countrymen in the West as “noble, helpful, and good” heroes. May thus places the blame on villainous Yankees and absolves the German settlers of any guilt in the extermination of the Indians, which is exemplified by Winnetou's friendship with the whites--that is, the Germans.¹

May’s popularity is not difficult to understand. The Shatterhand novels are entertaining in a basic, pulpy fashion. They are colorful, filled with incident, clearly-drawn characters, and sensationalistic set-piece action scenes. Their themes are lifted from the work of James Fenimore Cooper (see: The Last of the Mohicans) and were familiar to and welcomed by May’s audience. May also makes constant appeals to the nationalistic sentiments and racial biases of May’s audience. In the hands of a more skilled writer these elements could have made for superior popular literature. But the appeal of May’s work, like that of Edgar Rice Burroughs’, will elude readers who did not encounter the novels as a child or teenager. May was undeniably imaginative but lacked the skill to make his novels striking or even particularly good. Plot, description, and characterization are all simplistic. The vocabulary of the novels is limited and has been estimated at around three thousand words. May did an enormous amount of research for his novels, but it did not translate into factual accuracy or even realism. May never visited the areas or met the people he wrote about, and his lack of familiarity with the reality of the frontier and its inhabitants is glaring.

The German patriotism of the novels is strident. Germans are shown to be innately superior to other people, especially white Americans, and all the best Westmänner are German. The western frontier, in the Shatterhand novels, is filled with German immigrants, far beyond the real-life numbers, and they are all stronger, wiser, smarter, and better than other immigrants and other Americans. This appeal to the patriotism of the novels’ readers was accompanied by numerous portrayals of Yankees as wicked, ruthless, and depraved, a more nationalistic version of the anti-Eastern, anti-urban sentiment of the Deadwood Dick Adventures. But May goes beyond constant praise of the Germans and repeatedly congratulating them for their good fortune in being born German and, in the fourth volume of Winnetou, includes a revealing episode in which Karl May and his second wife appear as skilled and resourceful Westmänner, gaining the praise and admiration of Shatterhand.

This latter scene is particularly indicative of May’s psyche, and is part of the reason why the Shatterhand novels are more interesting as a psychological phenomenon than they are as fiction. German readers could (and did) take Shatterhand as a wish-fulfillment figure, but Shatterhand was for May a more personal fantasy. Shatterhand is May’s “Me” character, named after himself, a character who from almost the beginning is a more skilled Westmänner than the long-time natives of the frontier. Shatterhand can out-shoot the cowboys and out-stalk the natives. Shatterhand has superhuman strength and knows everything, from the facts of the flora and fauna of the West to the minute details of history. Shatterhand gained all of this information by reading books in Germany—the same method which May used to write his novels. Shatterhand is a frontier übermensch and a crystallization of Karl May’s deepest desires and of what he wished he could be. May was not psychologically healthy. At the height of his popularity May began appearing in public in Western costume, claiming to have been Old Shatterhand and done all that the books say Shatterhand did, and even displaying what he claimed were locks of Winnetou’s hair. May seems to have believed his own claims. (Unfortunately for May, he set himself up for a fall through his delusions and self-promotion, and the German press obliged him). The Old Shatterhand books are essentially elaborate expressions of May’s power fantasies.

Predictably, the racial politics of the novels are retrogressive. Like his predecessors, Karl Postl (see: Tokeah, or The White Rose) and Friedrich Gerstäcker (see: The Regulators of Arkansas), May was heavily influenced by the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper. But May lacked Postl’s and Gerstäcker’s personal experience on the American frontier and substituted a pulp fantasy version of the land and its inhabitants for the simpler, reality-tinged editions of the earlier stories. May also took Postl’s and Gerstäcker’s repetition of Cooper’s basic themes and warped them. May filtered the themes through his own ideology. Like Cooper, May is relatively sympathetic to Native Americans, and Winnetou is as noble and heroic as Old Shatterhand. Like Cooper, May is on some level mournful over the destruction of native cultures by the white settlers. But Winnetou’s deathbed conversion to Christianity is representative of May’s treatment of Indians: sentimentalized, but equal to whites only when they adopt the culture of whites, particularly Germans. Winnetou is noble and heroic in part because of his innate qualities but mostly because he is willing to alter his own personality and culture in favor of the best elements of German culture.

Old Shatterhand is May’s power fantasy, but he is also the next evolutionary version of the Hawkeye character type and the direct predecessor of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Old Shatterhand is a white man who goes a foreign country largely inhabited by non-whites and who proves himself to be the superior of the non-whites in innate abilities and learned skills. Shatterhand is a better hand-to-hand fighter than the strongest, fiercest Kiowa warrior. Shatterhand endures the tests and gauntlet of the Mescalero better than any of the Apache could have and is immediately made one of their chiefs. In the space of a few weeks Shatterhand learns enough to be the superior of natives who had been living on the frontier all their life. This character originated, in American fiction, with Hawkeye, but Karl May eliminated the plausible aspects of Cooper’s character and exacerbated its racist elements.

May’s treatment of blacks is similar to his treatment of Native Americans. May is clearly well-intentioned toward African-Americans. Shatterhand is true to his Christian beliefs and treats former slaves so well that the Ku Klux Klan pursues Shatterhand, forcing him to fight them. One of Shatterhand’s companions across the Winnetou novels is “Negro Bob.” But Negro Bob, like the other blacks in the Shatterhand novels, is a racist stereotype, an illiterate, ignorant, superstitious figure whose primary purpose is to provide comic relief for the stories.

The sexual politics of the novels deserve mention. Shatterhand, as the perfect Westmänner, is the object of Nscho-tschi’s desire. But May was not interested in having Shatterhand marry Nscho-tschi and killed her off as quickly as possible. This sprang from both May’s opposition to miscegenation (and half-breeds are always villains in May’s novels), but also because May was not interested in having women spoil his fantasy. Many women fall in love with Shatterhand, but none are allowed to linger in the stories. The world of Shatterhand and Winnetou is a homosocial one, and women are either objects to be rescued or impediments for the male heroes’ further adventures. The poor light in which women are shown in the series, the long, loving descriptions of Winnetou’s physique (“an earnest, manly, beautiful face, the cheekbones of which barely stood out; it was almost Roman, and the color of his skin was a dull, light brown, with a breath of bronze floating over it”), May’s obvious worship of his heroes—these all have led modern German critics to describe May’s world as one of “ideal homosexuality.”

Like May, Shatterhand is a committed Protestant. Shatterhand attempts to live a Christian life, forgiving his enemies and avoiding killing whenever possible; his efforts to shoot only to maim leave many enemies still living who return in later volumes to plague him. May, through, Shatterhand, preaches the Lutheran ideology with such earnestness that many ministers wrote May to thank him.

Print: Karl May, Winnetou, transl. David Koblick. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1999.

¹ Franz A. Birgel, “The Only Good Indian is a DEFA Indian: East German Variations on the Most American of All Genres,” in Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin van Riper, eds., International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2014), 46.