This is a travel guide about the life and works of Karl May, the West German movies based on his work, the DEFA-Indianerfilme of East Germany made in reaction to those movies and modern adaptations or parodies of those works.

While a lot less common than the term "Spaghetti Western", the term "Kraut Western" is less of a (sub-)genre signifier and more of a catch-all term describing all Western movies made mostly or exclusive by and for Germans. That said, even in the 1960s moviemaking was quite an international business and Germany's favorite Native American was actually portrayed by Frenchman Pierre Briece whereas "DDR Chef-Indianer" (East Germany's "Indian in Chief") Gojko Mitić was born in Yugoslavia and is of Serbian heritage. The first movies were made in West Germany and put the works of Karl May from Saxony - who wrote most of his works about the Orient, the Wild West and other places before ever setting foot there - to film. They were an instant smash hit and are so successful that even German kids born forty years later will at least know the basics of the movies. East Germany, ever threatened by the Klassenfeind ("class enemy") to the West and the widespread availability of West German TV tried to counter and produced the "DEFA-Indianerfilme" ("DEFA Indian Movies"; DEFA being the state owned movie production company) which - in part for political reasons - almost always featured heroic Indians and often had them fight evil Yankees. Interestingly 1950s Westerns from the US sometimes had the Indians stand in for the "red threat" of communism, so the metaphor seemed to resonate in different ways on both sides of the iron curtain. In addition to all those movies and of course the sites of Karl May's own life, it soon became popular to have "Karl May Shows" or "Wild West Shows", some of which are going strong to this day. The peculiar German fascination with (a very distorted view of) Native Americans has been the subject of quite a bit of academic literature and there is even a Wikipedia article on the phenomenon.

But even when the original movies had come to be seen as cheesy and some of the undertones that weren't seen by younger audiences (or were ignored at the time), could no longer be ignored, the phenomenon did not die, as German comedian Michael "Bully" Herbig started making skits lovingly parodying May's heroes. Those skits would ultimately be turned into a feature length movie, featuring Bully (in a double role as "straight man" Abahachi and his effeminately and stereotypically gay twin brother Winnetouch) his colleagues Christian Tramitz (as "Southerner" Ranger with a Bavarian accent standing in for the Southern drawl), Rick Kavanian (as the Greek "Dimitri") and Sky DuMont as the villain Santa Maria, who might as well have sprung from an Italo-Western. The movie, called "Der Schuh des Manitu" ("Manitoe's shoe") was fittingly shot in neither the Llano Estancado where May had set the original books nor in Ex-Yugoslavia where the 1960s movies were shot, but in the region around Almería, Spain, which - according to Bully - "just fit" his vision.