Abstract (eng)
Between 1961 and 2008, the Austrian author Käthe Recheis published a number of books about North American indigenous people, which comprise a variety of genres and which are addressed to readers of different ages. Many of these works refuse a stereotypical perspective onto the 'Indian' as the Other, diverging from both from the German tradition of the 'Indian novel' for children and the genre of the young adult adventure novel. Instead, several of Recheis' texts exhibit narrative strategies of anti-essentialism and ethnography as well as a sensitivity for cultural difference.
This master thesis investigates a selection of Käthe Recheis's monomodal and multimodal publications, drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s theory of the 'simulated Indian'. Reconceptualizing poststructural and postmodern theories (especially Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation) from an indigenous viewpoint, the Anishinaabe writer and scholar has described the Indian as a colonial invention lacking any extralinguistic referent. This thesis analyzes to what extent the selected texts reproduce or challenge these dominant forms of representation and how they counteract or reaffirm the disanalogy between the extralinguistic realities of Native Americans and First Nations and the literary representations of the 'Indian', as it has been delineated by Gerald Vizenor.
Before presenting this critical re-reading of Recheis's publications against the backdrop of indigenous postcolonial and postmodern theories, the thesis also examines the historical and transnational genesis of the myth(s) of the 'Indian' as well as their development in German-speaking countries. On the one hand, it discusses how the hyperreal constructions of the Savage, the Noble, the Vanishing, and the Ecological Indian have shaped Western imaginations. On the other hand, it explores the mythological, semiotic, and semantic structures of these images based on Roland Barthes's theory of the creation of myths.