Glenn Penny's Kindred by Choice is a wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and engaging book about why Germans have often displayed enthusiastic affinities for American Indians. That such affinities exist is well known, but they are typically seen as a form of displacement of guilt, of projection of subjugated status, or of romantic longing. Penny radically departs from this interpretive tradition. He argues, instead, that German affinities for American Indians have roots reaching deep into the nineteenth century and that represent, if not quite a continuity, “a case of striking consistencies” (232) over a long history in which those affinities have undergone significant changes in meanings. In following these shifting meanings, Penny describes a German fascination with peoples organized into tribes, who mirrored a German sense of themselves as historically valiant if quixotic fighters against well-organized, aggressive empires. He also emphasizes the German interest in Indians' resistance to bureaucratic, global modernity. Underlying it all, according to Penny, is a German perception of the American Indian as a distant mirror reflecting a melancholic, tragic sense of loss of freedom and community.
This is one side of Penny's argument, but the book is also a work of transnational history, and the best parts of Kindred by Choice depict the interactions between Indians and Germans as these occurred both in Germany and in North America. In a departure from previous work on the subject, Penny takes seriously both sides of the elective affinities and draws on impressive knowledge of the Indian contexts. This multifocal dimension makes Kindred by Choice a methodologically groundbreaking book, one that suggests interesting ways both of writing Atlantic histories of the interactions among groups, and of conceiving of German history in a transnational frame.
The book is divided into two parts: the first a series of empirically driven sketches organized chronologically, the second a series of thematic chapters showing how, in the twentieth century, discourses and modes of interaction between Germans and American Indians drew on patterns established in the earlier period. Of the sketches, the least surprising is Penny's examination of the discursive construction of the early German interest in American Indians, which he traces to Tacitus's depiction of the Germanen, as well as to Johann Gottfried Herder and Alexander von Humboldt. But, as Penny's material suggests, this interest did not achieve critical density until the publication in the 1820s of the series of books that made up James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Penny also offers brief treatments of the Düsseldorf school painters, whose canvasses shaped the visual imagination of westward expansion in both Germany and North America.
Kindred by Choice goes on to give us a multilayered account of the interaction between Indians and white settlers, Germans prominent among them, on the violent Great Plains. Focusing on a microhistory of the Sioux massacres of white settlers near New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1862, the author shows, in fascinating detail, how the German press sympathized with the Sioux and downplayed the fact that many victims of the massacre were German emigrants. We see a transnational circulation of reports and reflections and glimpse essential tropes of identification of German with Indian, which, Penny insists, date back to the early nineteenth century and became even more tenacious deep into the twentieth. Penny then turns back to intellectual biography, following the career and writing of Rudolf Cronau, whose immensely popular works did much to solidify German identification with North American Indians. In Cronau's writings, a kind of melancholy about the fate of Indians gives way to anger at the ruthlessness of white settlers' destruction of Indian lands, nature, and traditional Indian ways of life. Cronau also popularized the parallel between American Indians and the Germanen described by Tacitus. Penny shows, moreover, that Cronau's writing was part of an immensely thick and intricate turn-of-the-century trans-Atlantic print and lecture culture.
Penny is surely correct to point out that the prevalent focus on the nation-state has tended to prevent historians from integrating the wider transatlantic frame into textbook narratives about modern German history. The point is well taken, even if it remains necessary to recall that, even at the high-water mark of transatlantic migrations, no more than 3 percent of the population (of Germans) died in a different country from that of their birth, and that the far larger population shifts were internal. It is nevertheless true that for certain kinds of histories, the transoceanic frame is decisive, and one of the great virtues of Penny's book is to show how much is to be gained by opening the aperture.
The second part of Kindred by Choice covers a broad range of material and includes thoughtful analyses of the German hobbyist reenactors fascinated by Indians, of Indian reflections on the relation between the destruction of their own peoples and the Holocaust, of the experience of Indians in postwar Germany, of the androcentric aspects of the German fascination with Indians, and of the Indian reception of this fascination. Here, Penny is especially adept at anchoring his interpretations of postwar phenomena in the longer history of German interest in American Indians. He also reveals an almost equally long history of American Indians knowing about, and, in their own way, being fascinated with and appreciative of the attention Germans have historically given them—hence, the book's title, Kindred by Choice.
This is an important book, and it can be read on two levels. One is as a methodologically innovative recounting of the relationship between Germans and Indians, in which Penny follows these relationships where they appear, integrating the world of transoceanic migrants, German travelers and tourists, and American Indians. This level of Penny's book has a great deal to teach us, and its experimental dimensions are worked out in exemplary fashion. The second level involves various claims about the import of this story for contemporary narrations of German history. These claims are often speculative, loosely tied—if at all—to the empirical material, and dependent to a high degree on specific secondary approaches to major problems. Scholars may well wonder whether it is sustainable to argue, as Penny does, that, for instance, German regional differentiation and unfinished nationhood might be one of the things Germans “most shared with American Indians” (15); or that “expansion through official colonies was a weak second thought compared to the expansion of German cultures that had already taken place in the United States” (295); or that, “in short, their [the Germans'] eliminationist racism stemmed more from their history of identifying with colonized subaltern groups such as American Indians than with any legacy of anti-Semitism in German culture” (240). It would be a mistake, however, to dwell on the book's more speculative dimensions, for beneath them lies an innovative, lasting contribution that remaps the relationship between Germans and North American Indians.
