| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, editors. Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 351. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.95.

The topic "Germans and Indians" has a twofold general significance. Franz Boas, one of the founders of American anthropology, was raised and educated in Germany but moved to the United States near the beginning of his career and did field work among American Indians. His achievements are inseparable from their German intellectual genealogy. Apart from this, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular writer Karl May wrote hugely successful novels about Germans and Indians, and for much of the twentieth century German schoolchildren read them voraciously. Influenced by May and like-minded writers, Germans have imagined that there was, or even still is, a special relationship between Germans and Indians. Since, as Christian Feest argues in his erudite contribution on "Germany's Indians in a European Perspective," no such special relationship has ever existed, scholars may well ask why the belief in it has been widespread and persistent. 1

The essays in this volume directly or indirectly address this question by examining either histories of German-Indian contact or German representations of Indians. (The tragically deceased coeditor Susanne Zantop notes in her introduction that one might have included an essay on Boas; the volume's most extensive treatment is two pages in coeditor Colin Calloway's survey of "Historical Encounters Across Five Centuries.") The book's subtitle points in the direction of emphasizing the colonial imagination, but, Zantop writes, the editors were aiming at "a dialogue between those interested in representations and the imaginary, on the one hand, and those who are after historical 'facts' and 'experience,' on the other" (p. 6). The volume's contributions (not all of which can be mentioned in the space of a brief review, and which include a few selections from fiction in addition to scholarly essays) offer expert as well as nonexpert readers rewarding insights and information. . . .

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