Abstract
Karl May Westerns and Indianerfilme created national heroes with whom audiences in both West and East Germany quickly identified. In both cases, these heroes were uniquely German creations, even though the films used the American West as the setting and the myth of the American West as their narrative. Moreover, in both cases the heroes were not played by German actors nor were most of the other characters German nationals. The two most important Karl May heroes, the German frontiersman Old Shatterhand and the Indian chief Winnetou, together with DEFA Indian chiefs such as Tokei-ihto, Osceola, Chingachgook, and Ulzana, came to define what it meant to be German in the Cold War, still tainted by the omnipresent memories of the Nazi past.
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