In Europe, and especially in Germany, the Wild West show took an unexpected twist — for many audience members, the domestic lives of Cody’s exotic chiefs and warriors overshadowed their theatrical performances. Tirelessly enterprising, Cody seized this opportunity to expand his show. Audience members were invited to wander among the performers’ living quarters and witness a live exhibit of Native Americans in their “off time.” The Native Americans now found themselves performing twenty-four hours a day, demonstrating “typical Indian” modes of cooking, eating, and sleeping — when they were not acting the part of bloodthirsty savages.

The Native Americans who travelled with the Wild West included such eminent figures as Sitting Bull and Black Elk. In his autobiography, dictated in 1931 to the American poet John Neihardt, Black Elk reflected that he was motivated to join the show by the prospect of learning from the Europeans, the Wasichus across the great water. “I was in despair, and I even thought that if the Wasichus had a better way, then maybe my people should live that way. I know now that this was foolish, but I was young and in despair.” Other recruits faced more pressing reasons for joining. Following the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, Cody negotiated with the army to have one hundred Sioux prisoners placed in his custody as actors in the show’s 1891–92 tour. Fresh from defeat and expropriation, the prisoners were uniquely qualified for his Drama of Civilization; they had already learned its lessons.

Germany proved heartily receptive to the marvels of untamed America. Its special affinity for the frontier was already being nurtured through literature. Before the great age of long-haul tourism, Germans were passionate armchair travellers, and topping the list of imaginary destinations was the American frontier. During the Nineteenth Century, Germany was the world’s leading consumer of American and American-themed novels. In addition to imported and translated works, as many as one thousand titles of fiction based on Native American characters and themes were published in Germany between 1875 and 1900. Earlier in the century, the stories of James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans) and other purveyors of frontier fiction were devoured by Germans. Beginning in the 1870s, they would have their Western dreams realized in the curious figure of Karl May, arguably the key piece in the puzzle of German Indianism.

Punctuated by fraud and theft convictions, including a jail sentence for impersonating a police officer, May’s life story was almost as improbable, but rarely as glorious, as the adventures of his frontier hero, Old Shatterhand. The most widely read German author of all time (over 25 million of his books have been printed in Germany alone), May was admired for his exotic tales of life on the American frontier, which recounted the adventures of a German wanderer and his Apache companion, Winnetou. Although he would not cross the Atlantic until the final years of his life, May insisted that the Shatterhand stories were based on his own Western escapades — that he was, in effect, Old Shatterhand. This confusion of real and imagined experience seems oddly appropriate for the figure who has, more than any other, nurtured the German dream of a special kinship with Native Americans, of an “Indian feeling.” Among the dress-up Indians at Regensburg, May was acknowledged as a vital, if slightly embarrassing, inspiration.

The perverse allure of Karl May is particularly evident in the diversity of his admirers. Both Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler identified May as their favourite author. The more telling of these testimonials belongs to Hitler, who saw in Winnetou the “ideal of a truly noble person.” In the late stages of the Second World War, as Germany suffered crushing defeat on the Russian front, Hitler turned to May’s Winnetou fables for military and spiritual guidance. “I have ordered every officer to carry, besides his sword, Karl May’s books on how to fight Indians; that is how we must fight the Russians,” he said. This sentimental blend of primitivism and nationalism was in evidence in the 1920s. In a 1924 article on Karl May, the author Lisa Barthel-Winkler, who would later become a Nazi propagandist, presented the Indian as an allegory for the German. “In Winnetou, Karl May delineates the Indian drama,” she wrote. “It is also the German drama.…Who has grasped the meaning of the Indian drama, has also grasped the meaning of the German drama.”

This interpretation of the “Indian drama” reflected a widely held belief. So convinced were Germans of their bond with the Indians that they expected Native Americans to take up arms against the Americans during the Second World War. The clash between imaginary and real experience could not have been more violent; not only did Native Americans distinguish themselves in battle as Allied soldiers, they developed anti-German war songs. Translated into English, a typical verse from a Lakota war song reads, “Friends, observe this: I saw the German enemy come charging. / Friends, the German loved his land, / but I made him retreat and turn back.”

The fascist inflection of the “Indian drama” — one that held sway in Germany until the fall of National Socialism — is evident in the German travel writer Hans Rudolf Rieder’s writings on Buffalo Child Long Lance, a presumed blood Indian. “The Indian is closer to the German than to any other European,” Rieder wrote in his 1929 introduction to Long Lance’s autobiography. “This is perhaps due to our partiality to the world of nature. Negroes, Eskimos, peoples of the South Seas do not possess the human qualities to win our friendship and arouse our sympathy.”

Buffalo Child Long Lance was many things, but he was not what Rieder thought. Born and raised in the American South, Long Lance, a.k.a. Sylvester Long, was himself of mixed white, Native-American, and black ancestry, a fact he carefully concealed in his autobiography. Leaving his ‘coloured’ past behind him, Long renamed himself and began a brilliant career as a noble savage, dazzling European audiences with a metaphor of their own devising.

At more or less the same time that German nationalists began courting the Native American as a figure of fascist propaganda, a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague produced a short meditation on the myth. This elegant text returns us to the experience of longing that sustains the hobbyist romance. What are the Germans (or anybody, for that matter) really longing for when they are, in the words of Franz Kafka, Longing to be a Red Indian?

Oh to be a Red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one’s galloping mount, leaning into the wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs, for there were no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there were no reins, and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that horse’s neck and horse’s head were gone.

Not only is Kafka’s Red Indian “instantly prepared,” he is in constant motion, racing forward as if hovering just above the ground. The disappearance of spurs, reins, and, ultimately, of the horse, heralds his arrival in a world composed entirely of speed and motion. But this is not the only disappearance at stake in this fable. When Kafka published this text, in 1913, the romantic image of the Native American was heightened by predictions of impending extinction. The shadow of extinction hangs over this fable and inhabits the longing it portrays; it is a longing for what is absent, for what is just out of reach.

The longing to be a Red Indian has changed very little since Franz Kafka reflected on the subject in the early Twentieth Century. What has changed is the expectation of realizing it. For Kafka and his contemporaries, the Native American had only recently stepped from the pages of adventure novels into the choreographed frontier of the travelling Wild West Show. The romance of nativeness was an enchanting force, but neither hobbyism nor, more recently, cultural tourism had joined it to a promise of real contact. What hobbyism did for the dress-up Indians of post-war Germany, cultural tourism is doing for a new wave of Indianists.

Upon my return to Canada, an ocean away from the cultural delirium of underclothed, overtanned, tomahawk-wielding Deutschen, I found that I really wasn’t that far away. Germans are looking to explore the cultural and geographical roots of their Indian feelings, and they are looking to Canada. In 2001, according to a report from Tourism BC, Germans were the highest-spending visitors to British Columbia, responsible for forty-four percent of all European revenues. German tourism had almost doubled in the preceding ten years, to become an annual $450-million industry. Aboriginal tourism is expanding at an even faster rate, with initiatives such as the 2001 convention held in Vancouver by Dertour — Germany’s top-selling North-American tour operator — pushing the industry forward by as much as thirty percent annually. The spectrum of aboriginal cultural tourism is extremely wide, ranging from mass tourist sites such as the Indian Village at the Calgary Stampede to immersion experiences in remote reserves. Siegrid Deutschlander, who is completing her PhD on Germans and the aboriginal tourism industry at the University of Calgary, remarked of her experience at locations such as the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, “What is noticeable is that, if there are international visitors at these sites, there are lots of Germans. Go to a powwow and you always hear German.”

Like their immigrant predecessors of the early Nineteenth Century, German cultural tourists are leaving their homeland with great expectations of the western world, and of its aboriginal occupants. Trina Mather, president of Turtle Island, an Ottawa company that offers “aboriginal experiences,” has grown accustomed to the expectation among German visitors that her employees will be exotically sealed in the past. To counteract this image of a museum culture, the performers at Turtle Island greet visitors in their everyday clothes. “We are a modern people,” Mather commented, “and we are going to be wearing pants.” For tour groups anticipating a latter-day, first-contact experience, this emphasis on the contemporary often leads to confusion. Mather says that one of the first things she heard from German groups in the early days of her business was, “Where are the Indians?”

If Europeans are still wondering where the Indians are, it is not for lack of effort on the part of aboriginal tourism promoters. During the past decade, organizations such as the Aboriginal Tourism Association of British Columbia and the Northern Ontario Aboriginal Tourism Association have probed the desires of European tourists with ferocious enthusiasm — generating dozens of studies, outreach missions, and trade programs. Of all European tourists, the study found Germans are most likely to take an interest in authentic Aboriginal cultural experiences. David Grindlay, the marketing director for Northwest Territories tourism, spends much of his time on the European tourist-and-trade fare route, where it is not unusual to find handsomely appointed Indianists inquiring about the pleasures of the North. Germany, he says, is currently the fastest-growing European market for the area, and Germans who travel to the Canadian North, while often knowledgeable about native culture, are generally “fascinated by the pre-contact era, and the era after contact with Europeans.”