A Ginkgo Grows in Weimar

The Goethe Ginkgo
Photo by Robert Matthees

 

I once spent a summer in the East German town of Weimar. Well, it was only one month, but the weeks there were so special, they have grown into a whole summer in my mind. I was fifteen, my mother was attending a German teacher’s course, and my sister and I explored the streets of this historic town, steeped in art, music, and poetry.

Nearly every day we’d walk past one of Weimar’s most famous landmarks, located just a few blocks from our hotel: the Goethe Ginkgo Tree. Planted in 1820 by the German writer whose name it bears, the tree has grown to majestic proportions over the past two hundred years. It towered above the nearby buildings, its thick branches spreading wide to shade the street and the yard outside the Duchess Anna-Amalia Library.

I’d never seen a gingko before, and its oddly shaped leaves, twirling in the breeze on flat stems, always seemed to beckon to me.

During that month in Weimar, I also learned that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was not only one of Germany’s greatest poets and thinkers but also a respected scientist. He wrote a book on his observations of color phenomena and another on the metamorphosis of plants, in which he proposed the theory that the archetypal form of a plant can be seen in the shape of its leaves.

Photo by H. Zell

The ginkgo tree, with its uniquely shaped foliage, captured Goethe’s imagination. Only recently introduced into Europe from the Far East, the ginkgo began to feature prominently in 18^th-century garden design and appeared in many parks throughout Germany. The tree fascinated Goethe so much that he adopted the practice of giving dried ginkgo leaves to his friends.

His most famous association with the tree is in the love poem, “Ginkgo Biloba,” which he wrote for Marianne von Willemer, an Austrian actress and one of Goethe’s many female “muses.” Okay, he was in love with her, although she was more than 30 years his junior and married to another man at the time.

In 1815, Goethe read the finished poem to Marianne and some friends. A week later, when he met Marianne in the garden of Heidelberg Castle, he plucked two leaves from a ginkgo tree and later pasted them onto the page containing the verses. The poem was published in 1819 in Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, a collection inspired by Persian literature.

Although the Heidelberg ginkgo that yielded these famous leaves no longer stands, the poem is on display at the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf.

It is not surprising that Goethe found the ginkgo so inspiring, for these trees are quite remarkable. They are highly tolerant to environmental pollution, for which reason the town where I live decided to plant them as shade trees along our streets, and ginkgos were the first trees to thrive in Hiroshima after a nuclear bomb flattened the Japanese city. Fossils discovered in China show that ginkgos were around 200 million years ago, and the species has changed very little during that time.

With such a long lineage, it makes perfect sense that this ancient tree has medicinal properties that address the afflictions of aging. Ginkgo boosts the circulation, and with better blood flow to the brain, it improves mood, mental alertness, and memory (a kind of herbal fountain of youth). Studies have shown that the leaf extract can improve the symptoms of dementia.

Photo by Uryah

Goethe lived for only twelve years after the planting of Weimar’s most famous ginkgo tree so he never saw it grow to the great height and breadth that it has today. But he would still have been able to watch its transformation through the seasons, from new leaves unfurling in the spring, to deep green in the summer, to golden in the fall. And by immortalizing the ginkgo in his poem to Marianne, Goethe ensured that the tree would become the symbol of his home town for centuries to come.

Off the Beaten Track: Healing Stings

Marianna with her honey frames

Our guest today is Marianna Holzer, a third-generation bookbinder, who also happens to be Heidi’s sister. She owns the Holzer Bindery in Hinesburg, Vermont, and specializes in book restoration and preservation, a topic that she wrote about for us earlier this year (you can find her bookbinding post here). Marianna is also a beekeeper and her post today is all about the medicinal uses of bee venom. Marianna can be found at the Holzer Bindery website.

 

Nearly twenty years ago, I suffered a mysterious health crisis. One day, without warning, I went completely blind in my right eye. Gradually, my vision came back and then it happened again -- six months later I lost the vision in my other eye.

After much testing and a few other episodes, I received the diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This was a condition I knew nothing about, but after learning as much as I could, I became quite depressed and fearful of when it would strike again. Fatigue is common problem in MS, and I had that in spades. I had always been a very healthy person and loved being outdoors, counting gardening, hiking, and bicycling among my favorite activities.

A friend told me about a man in a town not far from us who had helped folks with MS by stinging them with honeybees. This sounded pretty far out, but I was ready to try anything in order to feel better. My husband, Rik Palieri, and I drove down to Middlebury, Vermont, from our home near Burlington to meet this man, Charlie Mraz, and to learn about the bees.

Charlie Mraz

Charlie, a tall, gray-haired man with a twinkle in his eye, was an old-time Vermont beekeeper who had recently turned 88. As a young man, he had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis until older beekeepers told him that bee stings would be a good remedy for this condition. He wrote their advice off as an old wives’ tale until he was accidentally stung on the knee by his own bees. The next day, he realized that he felt much better. He began intentionally stinging himself with the bees and found it helped so much that he began to offer the same treatment to others.

One day a woman came to Charlie saying that he’d treated her for arthritis only to discover a few years later, when her symptoms returned, that she had MS. Since the bee stings had kept her symptom-free for so long the first time, she thought she’d try it again, and sure enough, it helped!

 

Charlie ushered us into his home where he was helping a woman with severe arthritis by holding bees against her hip and her leg until she received several stings. He then turned to us. He asked me a few questions about my symptoms, allergies, and medications. I asked him if it would hurt. He gave me a test sting on my leg and waited a few minutes to see if I would have a severe reaction. While we waited, he told me about acupressure points and meridian lines (healing pathways in the body), pressing on these points to see if I was sore. Every time I said “ouch!” he chuckled and marked the spot with a red wax pencil. He gave me 7 or 8 stings, telling me to start out slowly with only a few stings, and then he taught us how to handle the bees ourselves.

The next step was to go out to his bee yard to collect bees in a jar to take home. We walked up a few steps to go outside, and the woman he had treated when we arrived turned around and went down the stairs, paused, climbed up them again and paused once more, a quizzical look on her face. After going up and down several more times, she turned to us with tears in her eyes and told us that this was the first time she had been able to climb stairs without pain in many years. It gave me hope.

Charlie gave us an old mayonnaise jar into which he had put a little honey, covered with a tissue, and then added a cardboard roll for the bees to cling to. He clamped the jar over a hole drilled into the side of a hive and the bees flowed into it. He slid the jar off the hive and screwed on a perforated lid. Charlie sent us home with this jar full of bees and told us to get tweezers to hold the bees while stinging.  He said we should come back when we needed more bees or to call if we needed advice or support.

The honey bee treatment I learned from Charlie Mraz is called Bee Sting Therapy or Bee Venom Therapy. It is a form of apitherapy, a holistic medicine that relies on natural products of the beehive to improve and maintain health and to alleviate pain and disability, whether from injury or illness. There is even an Apitherapy Society dedicated to promoting this approach to healing. Products of the honey bee include bee venom, honey, pollen, royal jelly, propolis, and beeswax. These amazing insects have been used in alternative, or complimentary, medicinal therapies for thousands of years.

Marianna's bee hives

Honey bees and their healing venom have changed my life. My husband, Rik noticed a lightening of my spirit right away, I have more energy, more hope and feel empowered, as I have now found something I can do for myself.

 

To keep up with my treatment, I became interested in beekeeping and soon had hives of my own. I loved sitting by the hives and watching those busy little creatures coming in for a landing, loaded down with nectar and colorful pollen sacs on their legs. I felt a return of my love of nature, and rejoiced in gathering the honey to share with friends.

Come join me in watching these busy little workers as they gather nectar for the hive in the following video of my bee yard (set to music by Rik Palieri from his CD, Music in Me).

Amita: A Brooklyn Center For Healing

Started by Tatyana Yakovleva, a healer and acupuncturist well-known in the New York Russian community for her alternative treatment methods, Amita Healing Center is more than a holistic clinic but a world of its own.

Unlike typical doctors’ offices, Amita doesn’t run standard tests followed by prescription drugs. No blood is drawn and no shots administered. Contrary to traditional diagnostics methods that take weeks, here patients discover their bodies’ medical status within an hour. Often problems manifest themselves in non-typical ways, masking root causes. Stomach problems can be caused by liver malfunction while shortness of breath may have nothing to do with one’s heart but rather one’s thyroid gland. The traditional practitioners often treat an issue in isolation,” Tatyana explains her healing philosophy. “We get to the root cause.”

Tatyana uses a computer-based diagnostics, Orion Bioscan, a device that analyzes, evaluates and treats a human body at the molecular level. Through a simple array of sensors, Orion reads the organs’ biological conditions by measuring the body’s magnetic fields and the wave characteristics emitted by tissues and cells. Similar to an MRI, it generates a picture displaying the problems, some of which can be corrected with Orion’s electromagnetic therapy. Others require homeopathic treatments, the effectiveness of which can be verified by Orion as well.   

In 1997, Tatyana left behind a well-established holistic practice in Russia and came to America with her husband, a nuclear scientist who signed a three-month contract in Washington DC. When the contract turned permanent, she realized she was here to stay. She was neither fluent in English nor had an American medical degree. Besides taking English classes and legalize a gamut of diplomas, she faced a dilemma of what side of medical science to pursue. The traditional medicine offered an easier path to an established profession. The alternative was an unknown route. But Tatyana felt that an MD diploma limited her in her choices.   

“An MD is obligated to treat a patient a certain way or she may lose her license,” Tatyana says. “If a depression patient complains Prozac isn’t helping, I’d have to put him on another anti-depressant even with potentially dangerous side-effects. The same is true about chronic pain condition. Meanwhile, depression and chronic pains improve drastically with the combination of Orion techniques and homeopathy.”

Tatyana received her degree in acupuncture and alternative medicine from The New York Institute of Chinese Medicine in Mineola, Long Island. She is a Reiki master who completed numerous professional classes, certificate programs, and Orion Bioscan specialty training. After working in several alternative medicine clinics, she opened Amita in 2008, envisioning it expanding into a center of self-healing. “I wanted to spread the knowledge about solutions to pains and problems that harrow people for years,” Tatyana says. “I wanted to educate people on how to help themselves through various bio-energy techniques.” At Amita, patients can learn Reiki, Kundalini Yoga, and join a support group.

Beauty plays an important role in Amita’s mission. A similar bio-approach is used for a painless alternative to surgical face-lifting: a Micro-Current rejuvenation technique that stimulates the skin and muscles, resulting in increased blood circulation and collagen production. Coupled with toxin drainage, it reduces puffiness and dark circles under the eyes.

“While we certainly concentrate on the inner beauty a lot, a good-looking person feels more upbeat and self-confident,” Tatyana says. “When my patients leave relieved, rejuvenated and full of energy, I’m happy.  I love making people feel as good as they look. And vice versa.”

To learn more about alternative healing methods, stop by http://www.amitausa.com/

What’s Old Is New (and Sometimes Fake)

By Supriya Savkoor

It’s 3,000 years ago, and you decide you would like a new nose. Where would you go to get one? If you guessed the holy city of Benares in India, on the banks of the Ganges river, you'd be right. That's where the great sages prayed, and Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains pilgrimaged—and yes, sometimes got nose jobs.

It’s true. Back then, you could could have gotten a nose job or almost any other kind of cosmetic surgery in Benares (now called Varanasi), as well as had your hernia fixed, a caesarian, cataract replacement, prostrate removal, tonsillectomy, or a root canal.

That’s because Sushruta, often credited as the Father of Surgery and also the Father of Plastic Surgery, was from Varanasi, where he taught, practiced, and wrote a seminal series, the Sushruta Samhita, on the art and science of surgery sometime between 800 B.C and 300 B.C. With 184 whopping chapters, Suchruta’s compendium is exhaustive. He described more than 300 surgical procedures and 120 surgical instruments and classifies human surgery into eight categories. He detailed not only surgery but geriatrics, pediatrics, obstetrics, fetal development, psychiatry, and ear, nose, throat, and eye conditions. Overall, he classified some 1,120 illnesses and diseases, as well as 700 medicinal plants and 100 medicines prepared from both plant and animal extracts. And he explained how to examine, diagnose, treat, and give a prognosis on many illnesses and diseases.

In the surgery field alone, Sushruta created tools and techniques to make incisions, conduct probes and extractions, cauterize a wound, perform amputations, pull teeth, and drain fluids. He categorized in great detail the different ways bones dislocate and fracture and even how to measure and fit artificial limbs. He successfully used ant heads to stitch up intestines.The ants would bite into the wounds and act as clips, then Sushruta would twist their bodies off, leaving the heads intact to keep the wounds sealed. Bizarre, maybe, but it worked.

Perhaps most notably, he and his students reconstructed noses, genitalia, earlobes, and other body parts on victims who had these parts amputated as part of criminal or religious punishment. In particular, cutting off the nose was a common punishment for adultery in those days, so nose reconstruction was in high demand. Sushruta created a procedure known as forehead pedicle-flap rhinoplasty in which he used skin from the forehead to repair or replace skin from the nose. Plastic surgeons still use this method today.

Indian doctors and healers relied on Sushruta’s compendium for generations, but the earliest surviving manuscript, known as the Bower Manuscript, comes from the 4^th century A.D. In the 8^th century, the original Sanskrit text was translated to Arabic and traveled to Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt, and by the 15^th century, to Europe. Along the way, in Turkey, surgeons even used Sushruta's techniques to perform breast reductions. (Makes you wonder, who was getting breast reductions in the Middle Ages? The Real Housewives of Istanbul?)

A rendering of an apparently painless cataract removal from
an 8th century Arabic translation of the Sushruta Samhita. 

In the late 1700s, when the British annexed parts of India, physicians began studying Indian surgical methods, plastic surgery in particular. One of these doctors, Joseph Constantine Carpue, spent 20 years studying Indian rhinoplasty—nose jobs—and is credited with performing the first major rhinoplasty in the western world (in the UK) in 1815. The forehead pedicle-flap technique Sushruta invented is now known as the Carpue operation. (Insert your own sarcastic comment here.)

Doesn’t it give you a little chuckle that this holiest of places, from one of the world's oldest civilizations, is also the birthplace of plastic surgery? It does me.

The Power Of Many

When I started travelling, my eyes opened to all the wonderful possibilities for healing there are in the world. I witnessed eastern and western medicines working alone and together and saw people rely entirely on faith with remarkable results. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when my three-week-old daughter lay in an ICU in a Canadian hospital, that I experienced the meeting of two worlds – the medical and the spiritual – and how those two combined, can make a difference.

My daughter contracted a type of meningitis that is very rare. The medical profession couldn’t work out how she got it, and they didn’t hold out a lot of hope for her to survive, let alone function like a “normal” child. If she made it through the first 72 hours, they expected her to have numerous disabilities. Not one to give up easily, I asked friends and family around the world to help us out. I didn’t care what people believed in, whether they prayed, read tarot, or spoke to aliens, I needed their spiritual support in any way they saw fit. 

A friend of a friend, Alys, happened to be in New Zealand at the time, attending a gathering held by a Brazilian man I’d heard about over the years. João de Deus (John of God) is known for helping the infirm heal and people travel from every corner of the globe to see him. He rarely travels outside of Brazil, so it was pure luck (or was it?) that Aly was with him at the time of my daughter’s illness.

Here’s Alys’s experience in her own words:

When I was in Brazil in 2005, I felt drawn to spending some time at a particular meditation centre in the middle of Brazilian plateau. This place had an outward focus of spiritual healing through connecting with the divine entities of the Casa De Dom Inacio. It's a fairly typical representation of spirituality in Brazil, albeit on the miraculous side of the scale. The energy is powerful and subtle, it is the embodiment of love and chaos as old patterns are torn off. It's a washing machine for karma.

I stayed in touch with the energy of the Casa after I left after staying there for six weeks. I later participated in the John of God event in Wellington when João de Deus came to New Zealand in 2006. I'd been carrying a crystal round with me from the casa in 2005 and when a special friend of mine that I'd met in Abadiania (the Casa in Brazil) told me about a friend of his that had a sick baby in hospital, I dedicated the crystal to this baby and took it with me to the three days of meditation. 

The whole event was geared towards healing our spiritual karma and finding the peace within our process. With the dedication in place, I wrote a poem after the event for baby Rebecca and sent the crystal off to her parents in Canada so they could place it by her side while in the hospital. I had never met the parents, but it felt an honour to pass the crystal on to such a loved child.

John of God, born as João Teixeira de Faria, discovered his healing abilities at the age of 16. For more than three decades, he’s worked out of the Casa de Dom Inacio, a healing centre near Abadiania, south of Brasilia, in Brazil. People with all manner of illness travel great distances to visit him – people with cancer, auto immune disorders, arthritis, injuries from sports and accidents, emotional disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and addictions... the list goes on. He also works with people who have problems with their family and loved ones, and many look to him for guidance in repairing their fractured relationships.

Each year, tens of thousands of people visit this Casa de Dom Inacio, with 500-600 people lining up every day to share even a moment with him. He doesn’t profess to be tied to any one religion, in fact, he says he incorporates all religions, even though Brazil is a predominantly Catholic country. John of God says anyone who believes in any higher power is welcome. Through the casa there are symbols and pictures from many religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. 

John of God doesn’t have any formal medical training, yet he is known for helping many desperately ill people heal. In numerous interviews I’ve read, John of God tells people he’s a simple farmer who wants to help people. He says he can’t look at blood and won’t even get a flu shot, he hates needles that much. But when he’s in healing mode, the sight of blood doesn’t seem to register. 

Unlike other mediums, John of God doesn’t claim to cure everyone. He never asks people to stop taking their medication or to stop treatments like chemotherapy. He also doesn’t ask people who are gravely ill to make the trip to Brazil, he does, however, offer to heal by proxy. Thousands of people from all walks of life swear healing by proxy has worked for them as a result of John of God and his work.

At the casa, John of God has hundreds of volunteers help organise the visitors and nurse the sick, as well as pray for eight hours or more every day in special healing rooms. With that many people devoting themselves to others and sending nothing but love and prayers to the heavens, it’s a little hard not to be affected in some small way.

What I’ve learnt over the years is religion can take many forms – some official, some not. Sometimes it’s a god, sometimes many gods, sometimes it’s a feeling a person has, or a way of life they lead. Western and eastern medicines can both heal, and sometimes the combination of both disciplines and people’s positive energy coming together can make great things happen. 

When my daughter was desperately ill and needed all the help she could get in the medical and spiritual sense, she received it in many ways. The wonderful doctors and nurses worked hard to bring her back to health, and she had the love and prayers and positive energy of hundreds of people, many complete strangers, who believed that faith and love can bring about healing. Personally, I think the world needs both western and eastern medicine, and the positive energy of many to help heal.

My daughter is now a bright, healthy five-year-old without one single disability the doctors thought she might develop as a result of her illness. When I look at the beautiful white crystal capturing the early morning sunlight on my daughter’s window sill and see the twinkle in her brown eyes, I know that it doesn’t matter what people believe, as long as they believe in something, it can change people’s lives.  

Persia's Renaissance Man

Once a millennium or so, certain civilizations produce a genius who is so far ahead of his era I have to wonder whether time travel is possible after all. Fifteenth-century Italy produced Leonardo da Vinci, whose agile mind still impresses us five hundred years after his death. Eleventh-century Persia had its own Renaissance man in the form of Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina, a mouthful of a name that is thankfully often shortened to Ibn Sina or Abu Ali Sina. In the West, he is known by the Latinized version of his name: Avicenna.

Born in 980 A.D. in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan (but part of the Persian Empire at the time), Avicenna had a thirst for knowledge that quickly outstripped the capabilities of his many tutors. He memorized the Koran by the age of 10, an accomplishment that earned him the title of Hafez (just like the great Persian poet of the same name).

Avicenna began studying medicine at the age of 16 and became a practicing physician at 18. His medical skill drew the attention of Nooh ibn Mansoor, the emir of the Persian Samanid Dynasty (whose capital was Bukhara). The emir suffered from a mysterious illness that baffled the royal physicians but proved to be no match for Avicenna’s skills. As payment for his successful services, the young doctor would accept no reward except access to the emir’s vast royal library. For a man with Avicenna’s insatiable curiosity, a library was worth far more than all the emir’s gold.

Trouble came in 999 when Turkish invaders booted the Samanids out of Bukhara, and Avicenna had to flee. He embarked on a series of wanderings through the Persian Empire that lasted the rest of his life. After short stays in various towns such as Nishapur (Eastern Iran), Merv (Turkmenistan), Gorgan (near the Caspian Sea), and Rey (just south of Tehran), he ended up for a longer period in Hamadan, where he became the court physician to the local ruler.

When political turmoil forced Avicenna to pack his bags once again, he fled to Isfahan and took another job as court physician. This nomadic life in no way interfered with Avicenna’s scholarship, for he wrote over 450 books, only half of which have survived. They cover a wide range of subjects, including geology, astronomy, mathematics, psychology, physics, and music. (Avicenna believed that music was conducive to healing.) As well as a scientist, he was an accomplished poet, writing in both Arabic and his native Persian.

The two works that form Avicenna’s greatest legacy are the Book of Healing, a scientific encyclopedia that covers logic as well as a range of medical and natural sciences, and the Canon of Medicine, a compendium of all medical knowledge available during Avicenna’s time, augmented by his own observations. The Canon, a huge, million-word volume, was used as a medical textbook at European universities for 700 years.

The Canon of Medicine in Persian

Due to these two impressive books, begun in Hamadan and completed in Isfahan, Avicenna is often called the “father of modern medicine.” In fact much of his approach to medicine, as documented in the Canon, would be familiar to us today. He recognized the contagious nature of certain illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and introduced the concept of quarantine to halt the spread of infectious disease. He discovered that alcohol kills germs and devised experimentation rules that still form the basis for clinical drug trials today (including the need to test new drugs on humans and not just animals). Avicenna also believed in the mind-body connection, hence his interest in the healing power of music.

Avicenna died of an intestinal disease in 1037 on a return trip to Hamadan, where he is buried. Iranians today view him as something of a national icon and one of the greatest Persians in history, a status I was able to observe first hand on a visit to Avicenna’s tomb several years ago. We arrived on a religious Shi’ite holiday (the birthday of the 12^th Imam), and the place was packed with Iranian tourists—entire families with children in tow. As the kiddies raced around the oddly shaped tower that sits atop the tomb, their parents unpacked picnic lunches and prepared to make a day of it.

Inside the mausoleum, the tone was reverent as people spoke in hushed tones and quietly read the inscriptions bordering the great man’s tombstone.

In addition to the tower (built in 1954 but modeled on a similar structure from Avicenna’s time), the complex includes a museum, a library, and an exhibit of medicinal herbs documented in the Canon of Medicine.

So the next time you pat antiseptic on a scrape or put on calming music to smooth away the day’s stress, think of all we owe to the inquiring mind of Persia’s Renaissance man.

And if you’d like to hear Avicenna speak about his life and work, check out this video where he reaches out to us over the space of a thousand years (as interpreted by the actor, Roger Worrod):

Off The Beaten Track: Winnetou – A German Classic

We’re so honored to have another of our favorite authors, Rebecca Cantrell, as our guest this week AND she's even offering a copy of her latest book. (Read to the end for details.) Rebecca writes the critically acclaimed iMonster series under her pen name, Bekka Black. The iMonsters are young adult novels written entirely in text messages, web browsers, photos, and voice mails–“only what you could read on a cell phone.”  You can even download the first book, iDrakula, as an app. But as she explains below, long before launching iDrakula, Rebecca took on another old classic in her award-winning Hannah Vogel series. If you haven’t already, check out these terrific novels—starting with A Trace of Smoke, A Night of Long Knives, and A Game of Lies—set in 1930s' Berlin. Currently, Rebecca lives in Hawaii with her husband, her son, and too many geckoes to count and online at www.rebeccacantrell.com and www.bekkablack.com.

In A Trace of Smoke, Anton flees into the world of Karl May’s Wild West books. Anton, like many German children since the 1890s, identifies with the strong and noble Apache brave Winnetou. Other Winnetou fans include Albert Einstein, Erich Kästner, and Adolf Hitler (yes, that’s quite a range).

Karl May is often referred to as the most read German writer, with more than 200 million copies of his books in print. He’s popular outside of Germany too, and he’s also the most translated German writer, with works translated into more than thirty languages (including Esperanto and Latin). Here’s picture of Karl May dressed up as his German hero, Old Shatterhand:

Despite all that, Karl May is practically unknown in the United States, and his works weren’t published here until 2001. When I arrived in Germany in the late 1980s, I had never heard of him until I saw my host sister’s large leather-bound collection of his books. She gleefully received a Karl May book every year at Christmas and on her birthday. The books were forest green, like the trees that Winnetou rode through, the spines had the titles in gilt, and the covers had pictures of Winnetou and his friend Old Shatterhand posing with horses, guns, and wilderness. These were books built to last.

I read a few of her books and watched the Winnetou films in rerun on TV, but they slipped right through my head. Winnetou was played by French actor Pierce Brice, and he was always clean shaven, with immaculate buckskins, and perfect hair. He cantered through the mountains of Italy on a perfectly groomed horse.

These tales were nothing like the Native American culture I’d seen when I went to school in New Mexico and Colorado. I’d read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and learned about the Trail of Tears. It didn’t look like that there.

I’d come to Germany to learn about German culture, not idealized versions of the American West, so I didn’t give them much thought at first. But over time, I realized how important the ideal of wide open spaces and simple nobility was to people living in mostly urban areas and trying to live down their own complicated history.

Winnetou stands for courage to do the right thing, strength to get through difficult times, and a strong moral compass that never wavers. He might live in a brutal world, but his heart never faltered.

So, when Anton needed a place to escape the rigors of a difficult life in Weimar-era Germany, I knew just where to send him.

Rebecca Cantrell has graciously offered to donate a copy of her just-released novel, A Game of Lies, to one lucky reader this week. All you have to do is comment on this blog post by Thursday, September 15, and we'll have a random drawing to select the winner on Friday. It's that easy! Good luck!