BAD SEGEBERG, Germany – It’s not often you’ll find 4,000 people at a play about a fictional native character written by a 19th-century German writer who reportedly never visited North America.
But here they and I are, nestled in a humongous amphitheatre that was once a quarry, at a performance of Karl May’s Im Tal Des Todes (In The Valley of The Dead).
Welcome to Bad Segeberg, home of the annual Karl May Festival, which dramatizes a series of highly romanticized and somewhat clichéd novels about the adventures of an Apache warrior named Winnetou and his faithful German companion Shatterhand. The novels, adapted in the 60s and 70s into movies and a television series, are responsible for the fascination of many Germans with North American aboriginal culture – and indirectly, no doubt, for my 15 lecture tours of the country. May is believed to have been a favourite author of both Hitler and Einstein.
Though I’m a frequent visitor to the country, this fabled festival has long eluded me. I’ve never before been in the right region at the right time of year. Picture it: one lone Ojibway playwright in a sea of indianthusiasts, as German “hobby Indians” are sometimes called. That “movement” claims some 80,000 members nationwide.
Scattered through the enthralled crowd in the amphitheatre are a multitude of cheap headdresses with a single chicken feather sticking up from the back, mostly worn by children, but by adults, too. Others are wearing imitation buckskin and fringe. I weep silently.
A cast of approximately 50 people are riding horses in and out of the amphitheatre amidst explosions and massive fight sequences. A bald eagle flies to Winnetou’s arm – twice – and our hero comes flying over the audience’s heads on a zip line spanning the length of the theatre. Who knew zip lines were part of Apache culture?
From my aboriginal perspective, the characterization is pretty black-and-white. Winnetou, the good Indian, wears white buckskin, while the native villains wear black. Though I don’t speak German, the plot is easy to follow. There’s a mercury mine, an evil Mexican woman who plays both sides, and a bad white guy who’s manipulating the bad Apaches by giving them “firewater.” The play’s quite amusing, though perhaps not for the reasons the producers anticipated.
There are several moderately successful “traditional” dance sequences, including one healing dance. Additionally, the hero, Winnetou, always speaks in the third person. The native people of the American southwest, like Tonto, have personal pronoun problems.
After half a dozen mob fights, the hero manages to convince the bad chief of the Apaches, a man named Iron Arrow – who is constantly swigging from a bottle of something – to give up alcohol and join Winnetou to defeat the bad white people.
The audience eats it up, cheers uproariously and at the end rushes the stage to shake hands with the cast and, hopefully, touch the faux leathered arm of the man playing Winnetou himself.
Add to this the impressive yet ominous marketing of toy bows and arrows, plastic rifles, actual bullwhips (which I saw young boys practising with during the intermission), and something called a Burger Manitou on offer at one of the several booths dedicated to native-inspired merchandise at the festival.
Inside the Trading Post, people are eyeing something called a Squaw Starter Kit. Others are having their picture taken next to two large cigar-store Indians near a row of what appear to be tenement teepees across the walkway from some poorly carved totem poles.
I’m wearing a T-shirt with the word “Anishnawbe” on it (it’s what we Ojibway call ourselves), and it’s also spelled out in Oji-Cree syllabics. I think it’s the only truly indigenous object in the entire place.
I should mention that the man identified as the 100,000th audience member is brought on stage and presented with a prize. He announces to the crowd that his dream is to attend the two other Karl May Winnetou festivals in other parts of Germany.
I started my indigenous theatre career in the wrong country.
Drew Hayden Taylor is an award-winning playwright, author and humorist. He is originally from the Curve Lake First Nation in central Ontario.
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