German History Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 274–279 doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghv059 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. DISCUSSION American Indians and German Peculiarities Dieter Langewiesche* Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800. By H. Glenn Penny. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013. xvii + 372 pp., 35 igures. $45.00 (hardback). Kindred by choice? A revealing encounter challenged my initial scepticism. Six of us had gathered for lunch. Hanging on the wall was a picture of Pierre Brice as Winnetou, drawn by a grandson of the host. On previous occasions I had paid little attention to the image, but now, having read Penny’s work, I was drawn to it. Each of us at that lunch recognized Karl May’s hero, and in our youth all of us had read books by May and had seen ilms based on those books. My lunch companions were also aware of other individuals such as Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, whom Penny presents as a point of access to North American Indian culture. None of us, however, had heard of the powwows held by German hobbyists (Hobby-Indianern). Penny’s book begins with an account of one such event, held in 2006 near Cottbus and attended by nearly 1,000 people. Hundreds of tepees had been erected. Tourists in everyday dress were not permitted, a rule that guards dressed as ‘Cheyenne Dog Soldiers’ enforced. Penny’s interpretation of the event, which I recounted, surprised the Karl May connoisseurs at lunch: that for over two centuries, German culture had been marked by ‘a striking sense of ainity for American Indians . . . which stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate’ (p. xi). The author’s intentions in this work are twofold. The irst is to trace through two centuries, up to the present day, the intense German interest in the history and culture of the Indians of North America, establishing how information was transmitted and disseminated, and how each party perceived and responded to the other. Of course, Penny is particularly concerned to see how perceptions and patterns of action have altered, and how political caesuras played out in this relationship. This account is related to a second approach, in which the focus of the study, the elective ainities of Germans and North American Indians, is interrogated to see what it can reveal more broadly about the peculiarities of German history and the Germans’ perception of themselves and the world in which they live. On this second level, the author promises no less than ‘to help us rethink, even respatialize, the understanding of “Germany” and German history’ (p. 6). In linking the German nation state with Germans in North America to form an account of ‘transnational German cultures and histories’ (p. 22), Penny seeks to bring new light to the continuities and fault lines of German history, and, at the same time, to ‘rethink the ways’ (p. xv) in which cultural history should be conceived and written. * Translated by Rona Johnston Gordon at University Tuebingen on May 16, 2015 http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from