Pocahontas I traces the story of the historical Pocahontas: her famous (alleged) saving of the red-blond English captain's life from death on a boulder, her aid to whites in the early winters, her taking of hostages in 1613, her baptism in the name of Rebecca and her marriage to planter John Rolfe in 1614; the breeding of the first North American tobacco that was tolerable to English taste buds. Birth of a son Thomas Rolfe, Pocahontas' trip to England in 1616, and her death on the Thames in 1617. Her story as the "watchmother of all Americans," as American baptism, as American arts design it in the centuries that followed. The second strand of the volume outlines the significance that the Jamestown/Pocahontras story has for Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest. Third, a pictorial history of 'the Indian' from 1600 to the present.
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Klaus Theweleit, born in East Prussia in 1942, studied German and English. Today he lives as a freelance writer with teaching assignments in Germany, the USA, Switzerland and Austria. Between 1998 and 2008, Theweleit was professor of art and theory at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He became known for his monumental work Männerphantasien (1977/78), a new edition of which was published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin in 2019. Rudolf Augstein called it "perhaps the most exciting German-language publication of this year" in Der Spiegel after its initial publication.
