The first two chapters of this volume attempt to trace German perceptions of Native Americans from the early nineteenth century to 1933 and to delineate the role of “German Indianthusiasm” in the German construction of nationalism and national identity. (Usbeck borrows this awkward term from Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” in Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantrop [2002], 167–84.) In the third chapter of his study, Usbeck makes the argument that the Nazis’ ideological promotion of racial hierarchy did not automatically result in the denigration of supposedly “inferior,” non-white, non-Aryan races—such as Native Americans—by Nazi writers and officials. Based on a wide array of printed sources, Usbeck's work shows that the maltreatment of Native Americans—at the hands of American settlers and the American government during the nineteenth century, for example—could be useful for Nazi Germany's overall anti-American propaganda effort.

This interesting contribution to the field of history and German studies is nevertheless largely lost in the long and problematic historical survey of what Usbeck calls “Indianthusiasm”: the supposedly unusual German fascination with all things Indian. Usbeck, like the small group of scholars he repeatedly cites—including Lutz, H. Glenn Penny (“Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History [2006]: 798–819), and Deborah Allen (“The Reception and Perception of North America's Indigenous Peoples in Germany, 1871–1945” [PhD diss., University of Konstanz, 2004])—thus posits that German perceptions of Native Americans were somehow distinct from those of other Europeans or Westerners. To make this point, Usbeck relies heavily on Lutz's and Penny's ideas without either adding to or engaging critically with them. The main problem with Fellow Tribesmen is that the book focuses solely on Germany; as a result, it fails, for lack of comparison, to offer any proof of Germany's supposed peculiarities. In fact, existing studies on images of Native Americans in France and Great Britain suggest that presumptions of a peculiarly German way of perceiving Native Americans are problematic on a variety of fronts (e.g., Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian [2008]).

Fellow Tribesmen’s analysis of German perceptions of Native Americans is also replete with uncritical adoptions of long-outmoded notions about the peculiarities of nineteenth-century German history and culture. For example, according to Usbeck, cultural pessimism was rampant in late nineteenth-century Germany, and German romanticism simply rejected reason and the Enlightenment; the first section of this volume is reminiscent of classic elaborations of the alleged German Sonderweg. Yet these notions have been either considerably nuanced or rejected outright since the early 1980s. Usbeck's book ignores a whole series of studies, beginning with David Blackbourn's and Geoff Eley's The Peculiarities of German History (1984) and continuing with more recent analyses of Imperial Germany's transnational connections by Sebastian Conrad (Globalisation and the Nation [2010]), Andrew Zimmerman (Alabama in Africa [2010]), and many others. It may be that Usbeck chose not to utilize this transnationally minded scholarship because of his narrower focus on German perceptions of Native Americans; yet he also fails to engage with scholars whose work specifically contradicts his Sonderweg-inspired storyline about nationally specific German perceptions of American Indians. For example, Harry Liebersohn's study of similar Native American imagery in early nineteenth-century Germany and France, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (1998), is conspicuously absent from Usbeck's discussion. Likewise, Usbeck does not engage with Jeffrey L. Sammons's analysis of Karl May (Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America [1998]). The success of May's American Indian and Western fiction in Germany has often been used as supposed proof for the peculiar fascination of Germans with Native Americans, and Usbeck follows suit; yet Sammons argues that “no conclusion about the ‘German mind’” can be drawn from May's popularity (Ideology, 229). Given Usbeck's postulate that Germans were fascinated with Native Americans both more and in a different way from other Europeans and white North Americans, his failure to engage with works that question notions of general as well as more narrowly defined German peculiarities narrows the range of insights his study can offer.

This criticism should not distract from Usbeck's achievements. Fellow Tribesmen succeeds in demonstrating that the Nazi regime was willing to harness sentiments such as German romantic fantasies about Native Americans—as long as these views did not contradict their immediate plans and interests. Especially when it came to scholarly discussions about race in the mid-1930s, it was thus possible for scholars to promote a range of different views regarding Native Americans, among them positions that were outliers even within the framework of a Nazified scientific debate—for example, Hermann Wirth's idea that American Indians were descendants of a “Aryan-Atlantian-Nordic” race (89). Usbeck shows that the regime was astonishingly flexible when using existing German perceptions of Native Americans both during the six years of peace between 1933 and 1939 and during World War II, especially if they could be utilized to criticize or embarrass the United States. Ultimately, Fellow Tribesmen therefore reveals how uneven and varied debates about race could be, at least at times, even under a radically racist regime.