The Wild West in the German East

This morning I woke up and finished packing my bag for Jena and then went to breakfast before we met up to leave for the train station. The trip was rather uneventful and I spent the majority of the time reading on my kindle. As soon as we got to Jena there was a truck at the train station to take our luggage to our Hostel so that we could all go to the University of Jena right away. Jena is a very small German town, with a fourth of the population being University students. There weren’t really any historically significant landmarks, and although there were a few old buildings, the majority of the buildings seemed modern. I did take a few pictures of some of the sights around Jena, but for the most part it is a normal little town.

The first order of business was getting lunch at the Mensa, which seems to be what they call the cafeteria’s at a University. It was not the most extravagant food I’ve ever eaten, but it was cheap and did the job of filling me up. After lunch we were led to one of the buildings on their campus where we would be having class for the rest of the week. Once there we met the university students that would be presenting to us the next day, and the program coordinators who organized all of the events we would be doing in Jena. Once the introductions were finished we went straight into the topic that we would be looking at for the next few days, which was Native American influence in Germany. I had no idea that Germans had such a fascination with the Native American culture and history, but it was really quite prominent during the time of the cold war and while the Wall was up. One of the major contributors to the introduction of Native Americans to Germany was Karl May, who was a German author who did research on Native Americans then wrote wild western-esque novels that captivated the attention of the German nation. One of his most famous stories is about Shatterhand, who was a white man who became blood brothers with a Native American called WInetou. The whole story was written in a way that made Native Americans the protagonist and the stereotypical white man as an antagonist who oppressed and tried to steal all of the land from the Native Americans. The stories and films that were made in Germany during that time about the ‘Indians in the Wild West’ were severely stereotyped, with all the prominent Indians being warriors that wore buckskin, eagle feathers, and rode horses defending against the white Americans who were trying to take over their land. The citizens of West Germany were allowed to read the stories of Native Americans and watch the films freely and propel Native Americans into pop culture. The East Germans were even more so enthralled by the Native Americans, however it was discouraged for East Germans to read the novels or see the films on Native Americans. The East Germans sympathized with the plight of Native Americans, and despite their oppression by the GDR, they sent care packages to Native American tribes regularly, created their own representative tribes, and re-inacted Native American rituals. When the walls came down, many East Germans traveled to the United States to visit reservations, only to be disappointed that the Reservation that they had fantasized over does not exist today, and due to the historical inaccuracies, never existed in the past.

After the introduction to the topic and some discussion, we took a coffee break before starting the movie Der Söhne der Großen Bärin. This was a movie that was so popular that in West Germany it was on the tv every Sunday and the actor who played the lead Indian was on the cover of BRAVO, a popular teen magazine, over 60 times. The movie was so bad that the only way to get through the movie was to laugh at the horrendous problems with the movie. The part of the movie that was the most difficult to ignore was that the actors were not at all Native American. They were mainly Indians and Caucasian-Germans who had their faces and bodies painted to look like Native Americans. However, the inaccuracies of the film can’t be entirely blamed on the Germans misunderstanding because they based the film off of American Western movies, which were also corny and full of stereotypes and misrepresentation.

Once the movie was over we finally were given free time to go to our hostel and unpack our things. At this hostel we were put into rooms with five people or three people, and I chose a room of five with four of my friends. We were given our sheets and keys and we went into our rooms. There was a table for five in the middle and three bunk beds. Each of us chose a bed, then we made them all up and went to connect to the wifi only to find that the internet wasn’t working. It was extremely frustrating to us that we were in another hostel that also didn’t have internet connection, but we didn’t have too much time to stew over that before we had to meet for a group dinner. We had 25 people in total at the dinner, and it took over three hours for everyone to order, get food, eat, order dessert, eat, then pay. Mira, Hannah, and I had all hoped to do laundry at a laundromat that night, but by the time we got back to the hostel and sat down we had made up our mind that we would save that chore for another day.