Reviewed by: Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals by A. Dana Weber Lisa King Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals. By A. Dana Weber. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 411. Cloth $89.95. ISBN 978-0299323509. Karl May: he is both beloved and maligned across German and European audiences for his novels, his predilection for theatricality, and his scandalous history. His two most recognizable characters, the German adventurer Old Shatterhand and his “blood brother,” the “Apache” Winnetou, have become deeply ingrained in German popular culture in various ways since their late nineteenth-century debut, so much so that Winnetou as a character has become a metonym for “Native American” for most [End Page 646] Germans, even for those who would dismiss May’s work. From the original novels to contemporary films to theatrical productions, May’s vision of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou as a fantasy of idealized cross-cultural and cross-racial brotherhood is alive and well. This volume takes up this fantasy ideal and its manifestations in terms of Karl May festivals (Festspiele), featuring outdoor theatrical productions deriving in some way from the initial Winnetou trilogy (generally not the much-later fourth volume). A. Dana Weber covers six such festivals over several years—in Rathen, Bad Segeberg, Twisteden, Bischofswerda, Elspe, and May’s hometown of Radebeul—with documentation of their stages, rehearsals, and performances; interviews with staff, performers, and enthusiasts; and her own reflections on the experience of watching as an audience member who is also a Karl May fan. Her goal is to demonstrate both the variety of the productions and the various ways in which the communities who support them interpret the Winnetou stories today. Ultimately, Weber argues that the message of cross-cultural understanding is what fuels past and present German fascination with Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, even if the Native American figures are exotified and potentially racist clichés (which she acknowledges), and even if such clichés are derived from colonial appropriations that can and do cause significant cross-cultural dissonance in the present. “Today [these performances] exist solely because of and for the sake of their own fantasy, artificiality, and self-reference that long ago lost their actual historical and cultural signifiers,” she asserts (26). Because they now have been established with their “own history and representational traditions” in Germany, Weber suggests they ought to be treated as existing outside the criticism of appropriation (26). Thus, for each stage production she visits in each chapter, Weber provides an analysis of that history and representational tradition as it manifests for that particular community and place and theorizes the significance of that site’s performance as part of that self-referential tradition. The strength of the volume is in the variety of sites that Weber documents; not all Karl May festivals are the same or engage with the Winnetou stories and their evolving clichés in the same way. For example, the professional multimillion-euro productions of Bad Segeburg generate a different kind of discussion concerning fidelity to May’s work as a nationally known event than the much smaller community-driven festivals of Twisteden and Bischofswerda, where local community relationships are paramount over authenticity in the May-verse. For those readers seeking insight into the wide variety of German Karl May festivals as a related but still distinct ecology of performances, Weber’s analysis provides a way of understanding how the organizers, performers, and enthusiasts see themselves, particularly when they are playing “Indian.” However, there is a significant difference between the good intentions and the actual effects of a performance. While Weber does document German participants’ [End Page 647] satisfaction in what they do and the enthusiasm of the crowds at these performances, she cannot extrapolate that this pleasure in watching the fantasy “blood brothers” actually leads to any “egalitarian cultural exchange” (312) or cross-cultural goodwill. She can only theorize that it might or hope that it does. This hope is pinned on repeatedly framing the Karl May phenomenon in “apolitical” and postcolonial terms, describing colonialism as a practice of the past. Doing so enables Weber to neatly...