@freya Funnily enough I wrote a longer threat about him when I was visiting Denmark in 2023, as one of the first things on Fedi, you can find it here: https://tech.lgbt/@Fiona/110798572209061525

Don’t get me wrong, he isn’t perfect and took approaches to some things that would not be acceptable today, but it’s really hard to overstate how remarkably well many of the things he wrote have aged over the last 130 years.

If nothing else it’s definitely evidence that the moral truth was available to those who looked for it and that it wasn’t just being born in that age that made people bigots.

@2something I don’t think there is a systematic translation of all of his works, but there are a bunch for some of the more popular pieces…

You can for example find them on Bezos’ site, but I can’t comment on which translations are good.

The German originals can be found here because they are public domain by now, with the Winnetou-Trilogy being a good starting point.

That said: They are old, so it’s not like they don’t have issues, both from a purely literary and from a modern progressive perspective. There are also significant issues with accuracy in many places, so a lot of it should be read as a story about morals than an accurate presentation of how things were.

And some of the criticisms leveled against him from a modern perspective are also not true: People say that he depicts American Indians as “Noble Savages”, when that isn’t really what he is doing. Some tribes are borderline states with a different culture and just less technologically advanced than the whites, wielding effectively a military force that is sometimes painted as better organized than the US military, whereas others are essentially just criminal gangs.

Then you have a lot of places where he absolutely perpetuates things like racist stereotypes, but combines them with messages like “they are different, maybe even inferior, but they are people regardless and deserve to be treated with equal respect and dignity because god created all humans as equals”.

Also: The first person narrator who has the same name as the author (the books were advertised as autobiographical…) is one of the biggest Mary Sues you will ever find. Nobody but Winnetou will ever be able to stand up to the perfect human that is Old Shatterhand! 😉

That said, despite all of this, the main points I made stand: He really did condemn the American genocide as a murder of the Indian people, Aunty Droll is very non-binary coded and not a joke-character (of which he does have many), the KKK is an unambiguous villain and slavery seen as clearly evil, he does dress down the antagonist for using the N-word, and he always emphasizes the value of human life to the point where the good guys will negotiate three times that the other side should surrender because their situation is utterly hopeless if they don’t instead of just killing them.