Years ago my father used to read the stories of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand to me. The noble Indian and the noble white man on an adventure together in the Great West. Written by the German Karl May who had never set a foot outside his country and wrote 18 books, based on pure fantasy, about his life with the Indians. He sold a total of 200 million copies. Together with my brother I played his stories on a fallow field nearby. I always played Winnetou and my brother had to be Old Shatterhand. Our bikes were our horses, our branches guns and cars that passed by on the highway over the field were the carriages on their way to the West. They were full of cowboys and other bandits. Just like Karl May, I did not leave my home town and I lived in a fantasy world.
Later on, I made up for this and travelled with my husband and our five children through Albania, Morocco and Romania, where we camped in the wild and built large bonfires. And later I went to Brazil to meet the Indians in real life.
It's 2012 and I have just returned from a trip to ‘our boys and girls’ in Afghanistan. If there is such a thing as beauty in a war zone, it is the friendship and solidarity. When I returned to my normal life in the big city it was a bit disappointing. The people seemingly live at cross purposes. Loneliness is a major and growing problem. Stress too. I saw people immersed in the race of bigger, better and more. And it didn’t make them happier. I was musing about another way of life. I delved into history and read about alternative lifestyles with more commitment and less profit, which however, all too often in the West culminated in deception. Just think of communism. Even the hippies from the sixties cut their wild hair and seem to be busy about their retirement. Yet there is also a backlash going on: young people who want to organize the world differently with more attention to nature and each other. The picture of me and my brother, me with a decaying Indian headdress from the dress box and my brother with a cool band around his head, got me again. Why not visit real Indians? To see how they view the world and whether we in the West may be able to learn something from them instead of the other way around, which westerners dictated for centuries?
