DEFA’s Depiction of Native Americans in its Indianerfilme [Part 3 of 3]

By Jennifer Michaels

In several films, DEFA addresses imperialism, showing that the colonial powers, using a divide and conquer strategy, manipulated Native Americans to fight on their side and thus against each other. In Chingachgook, whose plot derives from James Fenimore Cooper, for example, which takes place in the 1740s during the colonial wars between the British and the French, the Hurons fight for the French and the Delawares support the British. In Tecumseh the Shawnee chief, betrayed by the United States government, joins the British in Canada to fight against American oppression, where he is also betrayed. The films do not differentiate between the colonial powers, which all break treaties and promises and grab Native American lands. The French and the British appear less repressive than the Americans only because their subsequent defeats took away their opportunities to plunder and kill Native Americans. In Apachen DEFA depicts imperialism in action as the United States, represented by capitalists and the cavalry, encroach increasingly on New Spain, belonging to Mexico. Ironically, the film treats the Mexicans, who are also imperialists, but are not a target of Cold War rhetoric, quite positively since they try to help the Apaches. In Tecumseh DEFA alludes briefly to Christianity’s complicity in colonialism. Tecumseh’s attempts to unite various tribes to resist fail when some choose the Americans and Jesus. DEFA’s reflections on imperialism are silent about Germany’s own previous imperialist endeavors.

The DEFA films stress the genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans by the United States and show genocide as integral to capitalism and colonialism. Their attempt to link racism and class largely fails since the films suggest that racism exists in all levels of white society. The films show a close connection between economics and racism with the profit motive used to justify murdering those who stand in the way of “civilization”. Many of the films depict massacres in Native American villages, where, to drive home their message, the camera focuses slowly on the representations of brutal murders of women and children. The booklet accompanying Blood Brothers uses the word  “Ausrottungspolitik” (extermination policies), a word fraught with meaning for a German audience after the Holocaust, to characterize American policies toward Native Americans. Most of the American whites are racist, as the frequently repeated “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” suggests, an attitude shared by the colonial powers as when a British officer remarks: “We will fight to the last Indian”.

Surprisingly, given the GDR’s supposed anti-racist attitudes and its promotion of women’s rights, the films, following the conventions of the western genre, demonstrate a definite gender bias and a reluctance to accept interracial relationships. For the most part white and especially Native American women are shown as “passive and obedient, reflecting what German women should be and not what Aboriginal women really were (and are) like”. Most are depicted as childlike victims, helplessly dependent upon their men. Like American westerns DEFA also avoids addressing interracial marriage. In Blood Brothers, for example, soldiers kill Harmonika’s pregnant Native American wife, conveniently avoiding the issue of miscegenation and eliminating the “problem” of giving birth to a mixed race child.

As several critics have observed, the Indianerfilme “tell us more about the politics and culture of former East Germany and Germans in the late twentieth century than they do about Native people in North America”. By using Native Americans to criticize the United States the films contributed to Cold War rhetoric, but they also offered, as Gemünden points out, “blueprints for a better socialist Germany”. At the end of The Sons of the Great Mother Bear chief Tokei-ihto exclaims “Ackerbau, Büffelzucht, Eisen schmieden – das ist unser neuer Weg” (farming, raising buffalo, smelting iron – that is our new way), a utopian vision of a peaceful and productive workers’ society. The films also emphasize the necessity for citizens of the GDR and other Eastern European countries to work together in solidarity to build new societies just as in Ulzana the Apache chief attempts to build a self-reliant nation out of different and often warring tribes. By emphasizing Native American resistance, the Indianerfilme remind their viewers of their state’s commitment to antifascism, one of the foundational myths of the GDR. Other aspects of the films resonated with East German audiences. Dika argues that the conflict in The Sons of the Great Mother Bear is “best described as the struggle for nation against the forces of partition”. In her view, East German audiences could identify with “the Indians” because they had experienced “the pain of partition, and the loss of nationhood”. Through identifying with a persecuted minority audiences could also ignore “the recent racist German past that had been characterized by extinguishing alleged enemies”. Similarly, the films’ portrayal of the long, brutal marches to infertile reservations would arouse multiple associations in East German audiences: the deportation of the Jews, the forced death marches of concentration camp inmates at the end of the war, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the East. By implication, the films’ solidarity with the resistance of historical Native Americans against an imperialist power suggests the GDR’s solidarity with freedom movements around the world, such as the Vietnamese people in their struggle against United States militarism. “Indians” in some films, for example Apachen and Blood Brothers, “employ guerrilla and terrorist tactics against their scheming American enemies”. The films thus suggest a model for resistance groups around the world, but since, as they demonstrate, the “Indians” were ultimately doomed, this model is hardly compelling.

The subtitle of White Wolves, “wilder Westen und historische Wahrheit” (wild West and historical truth), points to DEFA’s conflicted goals in these films. It wanted to present authentic and ideologically correct portraits of Native Americans, but it was also concerned with box office success, which led it to emphasize the adventure/entertainment aspects of the western genre. Lischke and McNab argue, in fact, that commercial concerns were primary, that “any attempt to lend accuracy or authenticity to them was quite secondary”. DEFA took over uncritically widespread romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans as noble savages and tropes of a dying race, perpetuated in the West by May. Unintentionally, the films offered many East Germans, whose travel was restricted, not only entertainment, but also a temporary escape into a more exotic world. As Briel notes “shots of roaming tribes and of the big blue sky of the American West had a particular appeal”. Inadvertently, by depicting Native Americans’ resistance to the American government the films also gave their audiences a space to question their own government’s policies.

In DEFA’s Indianerfilme, its most successful film series, Native Americans, despite the studio’s repeated claims of authenticity and its attempts to avoid a false romanticizing of “Indians”, are appropriated for Cold War rhetoric against the capitalist and militarist West, specifically the United States. They undergo a “re-mythification” to become brave examples of oppressed groups fighting throughout the world for their freedoms. Despite the many inaccuracies and the appropriation of Native Americans for ideological purposes, however, the films’ focus on Native American perspectives, their attempts at historical authenticity, and their positive depictions of Native Americans as individual people were at that time quite unique.