Share Your Nostalgia – Round 2

Back in November, I did a feature I called “Share Your Nostalgia.” I asked some of my blogger friends to write up a piece that focused on their favorite toy from childhood. The response was positive and it was suggested to do another round. So this time around, I asked for them to tell us about their Favorite Childhood Book.

Their book could be something that was read to them by their parents or grandparents. It could also be a book that was read to them in school at story time. I also suggested that their book might be one that they read to their own children. I wanted each of them to have as much freedom as necessary.

We’ll kick things off with my pal, Christian from Christian’s Music Musings. Christian features music from every era on his site. My favorite feature is his “Sunday Six,” where he features six random songs. It’s always a good mix.

Christian was raised in Germany. Perhaps he’ll get us started with a German author? Let’s find out!

My Childhood Admiration of Karl May’s Winnetou and Old Shatterhand 

A few weeks ago, Keith (Nostalgic Italian) put out another call to fellow bloggers to contribute to his new recurring feature Share Your Nostalgia. This time, he asked participants to write about their favorite book from childhood. 

The topic reminded me that sadly I haven’t read a book in ages. My lame excuse is I do a lot of reading as part of my job, so I don’t want to spend my spare time doing the same thing. I hate to admit it, I think my real problem is short attention span. I no longer have the patience to read an entire book. That said, ironically, my blogging involves quite a bit of background reading, though I’m relying on Wikipedia and other Internet sources, not books. 

A short attention span or lack of patience, however, never prevented me from reading books when I was a child. Perhaps, there were fewer distractions back then while I was growing up in Germany. Usually, I read in the evening in bed prior to sleeping. Among my favorite books were the Western novels by Karl May, featuring the characters of Winnetou, the Apache, and his friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand. 

At age 8 or 9, I didn’t question May’s distorted portrayal of the American West and representation of Native Americans. It wasn’t until 1908 the German author took his only trip to America, visiting New York, Albany, Buffalo, Lawrence and Boston. At that time, he had already published many of his famous novels featuring Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Despite all of this, May is one of the best-selling German writers of all time, with about 200,000,000 copies sold worldwide, according to Wikipedia. 

While I still recall titles of some May novels I read as a child, such as Winnetou I, Winnetou II, Winnetou III and Der Schatz im Silbersee (“The Treasure of the Silver Lake”), the details are gone. In a nutshell, Old Shatterhand was a young German who had come to America and initially was working as a surveyor for a railroad company expanding across the American West. He first meets Winnetou under hostile circumstances, but the two men not only become friends but also blood brothers. Together, they fight for justice and against villains who often seek to exploit tensions between settlers of the American West and Native Americans. Eventually and tragically, Winnetou is killed.  

At the time I was reading Karl May novels, his stories and characters were pretty popular in Germany. I loved watching movie adaptations that featured Winnetou, Old Shatterhand and other recurring characters in the novels. There were also Karl May theatrical open air festivals in various German towns like Bad Segeberg and Elspe, which continue to this day. I’ve never been to any of the performances. In 1985, German scholar Hartmut Lutz came up with a term to describe the fascination in German popular culture with the Indigenous peoples of North America: Deutsche Indianertümelei (“German Indian Enthusiasm”). 

In the aforementioned movies, Winnetou was portrayed by French actor Pierre Brice, while Old Shatterhand was played by American actor Lex Barker. Not surprisingly, they were among my favorite actors as a child. These movies were produced during the 1960s in Germany and largely filmed in the former Yugoslavia, which not only offered cost-effective locations but spectacular landscapes that had some resemblance of the American West.  

The characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were also part of daily playing with my best friend. I was Winnetou and he was Old Shatterhand. Every day, we came up with our own stories and amazingly never got bored. At some point, we even had toy versions of their rifles, Winnetou’s Silberbüchse (“The Silver Gun”) and Old Shatterhand’s Bärentöter (“Bear Killer”) and Henrystutzen (“Henry carbine”), and ran around in costumes.  

I’m leaving you with a short clip of the intro to the film Der Schatz im Silbersee. Unfortunately, it’s in German, but I guess you can still get an idea why an 8-year-old would be excited about it!😊 The clip also features the main musical theme written by German composer Martin Böttcher, which I loved at the time. Admittedly, writing the above, as well as watching and listening the clip gives me nostalgic feelings about my childhood. I guess this means mission accomplished!