Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around Indianthusiasm. Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

Frank Usbeck is  Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Technische Universität Dresden. He earned his Ph.D. at Leipzig University, and his thesis was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies in 2011. He co-edited the collectionParticipating Audiences, Imagined Public Spheres (2012) and has published a number of essays on Indian imagery in Germany and on ceremonial storytelling in American soldier weblogs. Usbeck is a member of the Dresden-Leipzig research initiative Selbst-bewusste Erzählungen.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Image of Indians in German Romanticism and Emerging Nationalism   Chapter 2. Nation-Formation, National Identity, and NationalismChapter 3. Relatives, Allies, or Subjects? Applications of Nazi Ideology through Indian Imagery in Popular Media and Academia

Conclusion

Bibliography Index