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Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around "Indianthusiasm." Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis' racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

Frank Usbeck is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Technische Universität Dresden. He earned his Ph.D. at Leipzig University, and his thesis was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies in 2011. He co-edited the collection Participating Audiences, Imagined Public Spheres (2012) and has published a number of essays on Indian imagery in Germany and on ceremonial storytelling in American soldier weblogs. Usbeck is a member of the Dresden-Leipzig research initiative "Selbst-bewusste Erzählungen."