The Karl May Museum is a museum in Radebeul, Germany named after the German author Karl May, containing artifacts from May's life as well as a worldwide ethnographic and art collections with emphasis on the life on the American frontier and Native American life of that era. It is located in Villa Shatterhand, May's Italian Renaissance home, and Villa Bärenfett, a log cabin built in the garden that was the founding core of the museum. The main house was opened to the public after Klara May's death.
German author Karl May (1842–1912) wrote many books about the American frontier and Native Americans featuring the fictional characters Winnetou (a Mescalero-Apache Chief) and Old Shatterhand (a white European settler). Mays' books were popular in Germany and created a mystique about the "Wild West" in German popular culture. [1]
The museum opened in 1928 in Radebeul, in the house where May had lived, called Villa Shatterhand. [2] It was founded during a peak of interest in the US frontier and Native Americans, fostered in part by the Sarrasani circus, which was headquartered in nearby Dresden, and which was very popular in the 1920s. [3] : 84 Sarassani and Native American members of the circus came to the opening, and the Native Americans performed death songs for May. [3] : 84
The museum was founded by May's widow and an eccentric Austrian named Ernst Tobis, who was a fan of May's work and had travelled to the American frontier, and liked to tell tall tales about his time there. [1] Tobis donated a large collection of artifacts to help found the museum's collection, which included 17 scalps, some of them from Native Americans. [1] [4]
When the Nazis took over Germany, they appropriated the museum and the image of May, and were especially focused on swastikas that appeared in some of the Native American artwork. Hitler Youth were encouraged to visit the museum and to hear stories from Tobis. [5]
After World War II, the original museum was in East Germany and a replica was built in Bamberg in West Germany. [3] : 73 A person who called himself Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance became associated with the museum shortly after the war ended. [3] : 84
From 1956 to 1984, the museum in Radebeul was called the "Indianer Museum", because May's books were suppressed by the East German government, in part because of the association with the Nazis, but also because the books were viewed as leading people to want to travel, which the government did not allow. [2] During the Cold War placards in the museum in Radebeul and its displays were refactored to describe oppression of Native Americans by the US, as part of Soviet propaganda efforts to rally indigenous people against the West. [6] Some East Germans also did work with the American Indian Movement. [2]
The museum in Radebeul was given its original name again in 1986, as the East German government moved to reclaim May. The renaming led to an exhibition focused on May in February, which had 4,000 visitors a day, and people waited for three hours outside to get in. [2] After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, attendance at the Radebeul museum dropped from around 300,000 people per year to around 60,000, as people could travel to the US instead of visiting the museum, which had been one of the only sources of information about Native Americans in East Germany. [2]
In 2010, according to the South China Morning Post, US activists began seeking repatriation of the scalps. [7] Berlin-based journalist Mark Worth brought the scalps to the attention of Karen Little Coyote of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, who wrote a letter asking for the scalps to be returned in the fall of 2013. [8] In 2013, the German Museums Association issued a guideline on the care of human remains, listing scalps from peoples who "fashioned trophies from the heads of their killed enemies" as an exception to "human remains acquired in a context of injustice". [1] In March 2014, Cecil E. Pavlat, who works on return of artifacts for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, wrote a letter asking for return of the scalps. [1] [9] The scalp was returned in 2021. [10]
The director of the museum in Radebeul from 1985 to 2014 was René Wagner; Christian Wacker was appointed director in 2018. [2] [11]
The museum is still collecting modern and contemporary art and archival material relating to the existing collections and received a donation of new artifacts in 2018. [12]
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Pub. L. 101-601, 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 104 Stat. 3048, is a United States federal law enacted on November 16, 1990.
Karl Friedrich May was a German author. He is best known for his 19th century novels of fictitious travels and adventures, set in the American Old West with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand as main protagonists and in the Orient and Middle East with fictional characters Kara Ben Nemsi and Hadschi Halef Omar.
Johann Carl Bodmer was a Swiss-French printmaker, etcher, lithographer, zinc engraver, draughtsman, painter, illustrator and hunter. Known as Karl Bodmer in literature and paintings, as a Swiss and French citizen, his name was recorded as Johann Karl Bodmer and Jean-Charles Bodmer, respectively. After 1843, likely as a result of the birth of his son Charles-Henry Barbizon, he began to sign his works K Bodmer.
George Catlin was an American adventurer, lawyer, painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the American Frontier.
Alexander Crichlow Barker Jr., known as Lex Barker, was an American actor. He was known for playing Tarzan for RKO Pictures between 1949 and 1953, and portraying leading characters from Karl May's novels, notably as Old Shatterhand in a film series by the West German studio Constantin Film. At the height of his fame, he was one of the most popular actors in German-speaking cinema, and received Bambi Award and Bravo Otto nominations for the honor.
The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational and scientific programs, and its extensive scientific specimen and artifact collections. The permanent exhibitions, which attract up to 2 million visitors annually, include fossils, current cultures from around the world, and interactive programming demonstrating today's urgent conservation needs. The museum is named in honor of its first major benefactor, Marshall Field, the department-store magnate. The museum and its collections originated from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the artifacts displayed at the fair.
Winnetou is a fictional Native American hero of several novels written in German by Karl May (1842–1912), one of the best-selling German writers of all time with about 200 million copies worldwide, including the Winnetou trilogy. The character made his debut in the novel Old Firehand (1875).
Scalping is the act of cutting or tearing a part of the human scalp, with hair attached, from the head, and generally occurred in warfare with the scalp being a trophy. Scalp-taking is considered part of the broader cultural practice of the taking and display of human body parts as trophies, and may have developed as an alternative to the taking of human heads, for scalps were easier to take, transport, and preserve for subsequent display. Scalping independently developed in various cultures in both the Old and New Worlds.
Old Shatterhand is a fictional character in Western novels by German writer Karl May (1842–1912). He is the German friend and blood brother of Winnetou, the fictional chief of the Mescalero tribe of the Apache. He is the main character in the Eurowestern by the same name from 1964, starring Lex Barker, as he does in six more films of the Winnetou film series.
The Glenbow Museum is an art and history regional museum in the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The museum focuses on Western Canadian history and culture, including Indigenous perspectives. The Glenbow was established as a private non-profit foundation in 1955 by lawyer, businessman and philanthropist Eric Lafferty Harvie with materials from his personal collection.
The film Old Shatterhand is a successful Eurowestern based on the character Old Shatterhand, written by German novelist Karl May and part of the Winnetou series. It is a West German CCC Film production co-produced with French, Italian, and Yugoslav companies and filmed in 70mm. Financed with roughly DM 5,000,000, the film was the most expensive Karl May western. Composer Riz Ortolani used a chorus for his film score.
Repatriation is the return of the cultural property, often referring to ancient or looted art, to their country of origin or former owners.
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with particular focus on the ethnography and archaeology of the Americas. The museum is caretaker to over 1.2 million objects, some 900 feet (270 m) of documents, 2,000 maps and site plans, and approximately 500,000 photographs. The museum is located at Divinity Avenue on the Harvard University campus. The museum is one of the four Harvard Museums of Science and Culture open to the public.
John Mix Stanley was an artist-explorer, an American painter of landscapes, and Native American portraits and tribal life. Born in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he started painting signs and portraits as a young man. In 1842 he traveled to the American West to paint Native American life. In 1846 he exhibited a gallery of 85 of his paintings in Cincinnati and Louisville. During the Mexican–American War, he joined Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's expedition to California and painted accounts of the campaign, as well as aspects of the Oregon Territory.
Wild West shows were traveling vaudeville performances in the United States and Europe that existed around 1870–1920. The shows began as theatrical stage productions and evolved into open-air shows that depicted romanticized stereotypes of cowboys, Plains Indians, army scouts, outlaws, and wild animals that existed in the American West. While some of the storylines and characters were based on historical events, others were fictional or sensationalized.
Shatterhand is a 1991 game for the Nintendo Entertainment System
The Desperado Trail is a 1965 West German film directed by Harald Reinl.
Heinz Werner Höber was a very prolific pulp fiction author who produced many novels about the fictitious FBI-agent Jerry Cotton and eventually sued his publisher because he felt he had been entitled to receive royalties.
Native Americans in German popular culture have, since the 18th century, been a topic of fascination, with imaginary Native Americans influencing German ideas and attitudes towards environmentalism, literature, art, historical reenactment, and German theatrical and film depictions of Indigenous Americans. Hartmut Lutz coined the term, Indianthusiasm, for this phenomenon.
During the American Indian Wars of the mid to late 19th century, Native American warriors of the Great Plains, sometimes referred to as braves in contemporary colonial sources, resisted westward expansion onto their ancestral land by settlers from the United States. Though a diverse range of peoples inhabited the Great Plains, there were a number of commonalities among their warfare practices.
For four years, United States activists have been calling for the return of the scalps. The display of scalps has been banned in the US since 1990.