WINNETOU, WHITE INNOCENCE, AND SETTLER TIME

Proclaiming ‘every generation has its Winnetou’, German network RTL ushered in the return of Winnetou to German television in 2016 with a big-budget film trilogy, Winnetou – Der Mythos Lebt. This article analyses the Winnetou film trilogy in dialogue with Karl May's original 1893 novels and the 1960s West German westerns using the concepts of settler time and white innocence. It brings a critical focus on race that is lacking in much existing scholarship on May, showing how whiteness functions in the Winnetou franchise as a structuring principle. In the new Winnetou, the blood brotherhood between the white German Old Shatterhand and the Mescalero Apache Winnetou becomes a way of forging connections not only across cultures but across temporal lines, allowing for the imposition of settler time onto Indigenous persons and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and survival in order to centre a narrative of German innocence and reinscribe fantasies of white conquest in the American West.