For over three hundred years, the Indian peoples of North America have attracted the interest of diverse segments of German society missionaries, writers, playwrights, anthropologists, filmmakers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, and even royalty. Today, German scholars continue to be drawn to Indians, as is the German public: tour groups from Germany frequent Plains reservations in the summer, and so-called Indianerclubs, where participants dress up in "authentic" Indian costume, are common. In this fascinating volume, scholars and writers illuminate the longstanding connection between Germans and...

Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies--a kind of colonialism without colonies--in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of "Germans" with "natives" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial...

Bitter Healing is the first anthology of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German women's writing in English translation. It goes far toward filling a major gap in literary history by recovering for a wide audience the works of women who were as famous during their lifetime as Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. Like those men, they wrote in the early modern period spanning the transition from early Enlightenment to Romanticism. Edited by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, this collection assembles little-known writings by fifteen authors from various social classes, religious...