After The Wall: German Cults Mimic Native Americans

BERLIN - The Indian war drums are echoing down the River Spree: the Iroquois of Potsdam are on the move, and the Dakota of Meissen are restless.

One of the most curious cultures to emerge from the rubble of the Berlin Wall are the strange German cults, which mimic Native American tribes. They are both an exotic back-to-nature movement and a resistance to Germany's new world order.

An estimated 85,000 Germans are members of Germany's Indian tribes, which include Potsdam's Seneca, Leipzig's Cree, the Dakota of Meissen and the Navajo of Dresden.

Some of the founders of the movement say it has gotten out of hand and become far too serious, as the "hobby Indians" spend their weekends dressing up in buckskin, camping in teepees, smoking peace pipes, and following a way of life and religion they have only read about.

"One crucial point about this is that either both partners in a marriage do this, or none," said Irene Seidel, 56, a former East German school director who was instrumental in establishing the Iroquois of Eiche in the western suburbs of Potsdam. "Many partners do not want to live in a teepee all summer."

Around Eiche, Siegfried Seidel still is known as the local "ober-Indian" from the days he worked as a community coordinator of the Iroquois of Eiche.

But Seidel, 57, says he has given up such activities and is disturbed at the recent developments.

"It's not correct to say there are Indian tribes here," Seidel said. "That's what's dangerous about this. The way some Indians are living here, Americans could be hurt if they saw it."

BEGAN WITH KARL MAY

Germany's romance with American Indians can be traced back to Karl May, a writer who died in 1912, leaving 60 Wild West novels about a German named Old Shatterhand and his faithful Indian companion Winnetou.

May never traveled to the United States, but picked up his colorful accounts of how Native Americans lived from newspaper and magazine articles detailing the lives of Plains Indians.

It's not often mentioned here today, but May was also Adolf Hitler's favorite author, and Indian clubs and the cult of noble savages flourished under the Nazis. Even today, May's books are popular with German kids, and his hometown of Radebuel outside Dresden is a Karl May shrine, complete with a Shatterhand Museum and scalp displays.

East German Communists were naturally attracted to the Native American story for pure propaganda reasons: the sad history of what happened to North America's natives could be held up as another example of U.S. racial oppression.

Establishing tribes in East Germany was one of the old regime's most successful cultural programs, Irene Seidel says.

EXCHANGE MEETINGS

The Iroquois of Eiche had annual exchange meetings with the Cree in Leipzig, Dakota in Meissen, the Apache of southern Germany, along with Mandan, Hopi, Navajo, Blackfeet and Sioux.

Siegfried Seidel says he got his ideas for keeping the children busy from art books, and he's still proud of the Indian pottery and beads they copied from original designs, which he displays on the bookshelf in his home. He says he deliberately picked the Seneca of the Iroquois confederation for his group because it was an Eastern woods tribe and not the Plains Indians of the Karl May novels.

But some locals caught onto the idea with a peculiar Germanic zeal and, in Seidel's view, got carried away by deciding to set up chiefs and mimic the pure back-to-nature lives that Indians lived, along with their religion.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has seen the movement flourish and merge into a back-to-nature movement of hobby Indians in western Germany.

Flush with deutschemarks, the eastern German braves now have access to western mail-order catalogs to buy authentic Native American buckskin, turquoise and beads which they once laboriously fashioned by hand with materials bought on the black market.

This year, some 6,000 Germans with 700 teepees set up their 42nd annual pow-wow at Hessen, where tribal dances were held around campfires and medicine men in feathers summoned the great spirits while passing around feathered peace pipes.

The cult also has evolved into a way of battling today's real estate speculators. In the depressed eastern Berlin suburb of Prenzlauerberg, red, white and black posters of Indians in front of teepees rally eastern Germans to defend their "indigenous culture" against the invasion of Wessies.