Popular image of Native Americans in German-speaking countries

Native Americans in German popular culture are largely portrayed in a romanticised, idealized, and fantasy-based manner, that relies more on stereotypical depictions of Plains Indians, rather than the historical or contemporary realities facing real Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Since the 18th century, this fascination with imaginary Native Americans has had specific influences on German popular culture, environmentalism, literature, art, historical reenactment, theatrical and film depictions of Indigenous Americans. Hartmut Lutz coined the term "Indianthusiasm" for this phenomenon. It has been connected with German ideas of tribalism, nationalism and Kulturkampf.

H. Glenn Penny states a striking sense, for over two centuries, of affinity among Germans for their ideas of what American Indians are like. According to him, those affinities stem from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of "shared fate." In the 17th and 18th centuries, German intellectuals' image of Native American were based on earlier heroes such as those of the Greeks, the Scythians, or the Polish struggle for independence (as in Polenschwärmerei) as a base for their projections. The then popular recapitulation theory on the evolution of ideas was also involved. Such sentiments underwent ups and downs. Philhellenism, rather strong around 1830, faced a setback when the actual Greeks did not fulfill the classic ideals.

Antisemitism and pro-Indian stances did not necessarily exclude each other in Germany. In the 1920s, Anton Kuh's mockery of a contrast between Asphalt und Scholle (asphalt and clod), urban literature referred to metropolitan Jews and rural-inspired Heimatschutz writings.

Much of German nationalism glorified ideas of "tribalism", using heroes of Germanic mythology and folklore such as Sigurd and Arminius, and positioning itself as an alternative role model to the colonial empires of the time (and the Roman past) by conveying the ideal of a colonizer loved by the colonized. After 1880, Catholic publishers had a specific role in publicizing Karl May's fictional Indian stories. The way May described Native Americans was seen as helpful to better integrate German Catholics, which were "a tribe on their own" and faced Kulturkampf controversies with the Protestant dominated authorities and elite. H. Glenn Penny's Kindred By Choice treats the image and changing role of masculinity connected to Indians in Germany besides a (mutually assumed) longing for freedom and a melancholy sense of shared doom.

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