Winnetou – 1. Teil

Winnetou – 1. Teil (Winnetou, Part 1) is a 1963 West German western directed by Harald Reinl, the first installment of the Karl May film trilogy about the Apache chief Winnetou and his blood brother Old Shatterhand. A co-production of Rialto Film in Berlin and Jadran Film in Zagreb, made with French and Italian participation, it premiered on 11 December 1963 in Munich and became the top-grossing film of the 1963/64 season in German cinemas.^{1 • 2}

Production

The film followed Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962), which had started the Karl May film wave against the expectations of many observers. Producer Horst Wendlandt, who had already run the successful Edgar Wallace series at Rialto, believed from the start in the series potential of the Winnetou stories and secured the rights to further adaptations early; in 1963 he commissioned the shooting of Winnetou I.⁴

The production was large by West German standards. The total budget came to four million marks, of which 600,000 marks went to sets and horses alone. Shooting lasted three months, two and a half of them in Yugoslavia, after weeks of scouting locations in the region of Dalmatia; the crew moved between locations with 30 trucks and cars. 5,000 extras and 50 stuntmen took part, and the props included a locomotive, 200 meters of track, five covered wagons, and 40 canoes.⁴ The formal shooting period ran from 1 July to 10 September 1963.³

Locations. The American Southwest was played by the Yugoslav karst (barren limestone terrain of sinkholes and caves). A mountain wall on the Zrmanja river in southern Croatia served as the Apache pueblo set, and filming also took place at Tulove Grede in the Velebit mountains.^{5 • 6} Between 1962 and 1968, eleven Winnetou and Karl May westerns were made as co-productions of Rialto-Film Berlin and Jadran-Film Zagreb, most of them at least partly in Croatia, at Paklenica, the Plitvice Lakes and Krka national parks, and the Zrmanja canyon.^{7 • 8} The film was shot in CinemaScope in Eastmancolor.³

Reception and box office

The film was one of the biggest box-office successes of the postwar German cinema. It carried the Prädikat "wertvoll" (valuable), received the Goldene Leinwand in 1964 for more than three million cinema visitors in Germany, and a Bambi in 1965, and it was the top-grossing film of the 1963/64 season in German cinemas.¹ The Karl May Verlag describes it as one of the most successful films in German cinema history and, for many fans, the high point of the series.¹⁰

Contemporary and later criticism has been mixed in detail even where admiring in general. The FILMSTARTS review rates it 3.5 of 5, calling it one of the most suspenseful and tightly constructed works of the series, the adaptation closest to the book, and praising Martin Böttcher's score and the Dalmatian scenery, while noting wooden acting from most of the cast, Ralf Wolter's Sam Hawkens excepted.⁴ On IMDb the film holds a weighted rating of 6.8/10 from about 5,200 users.¹¹

The music

Martin Böttcher's score, including the famous "Old-Shatterhand-Melodie", contributed substantially to the film's legend-building; the Karl May Verlag's account credits the music with carrying viewers "onto the back of a magic horse" and into distant worlds, and reviewers have called the soundtrack the element of the series with consistent world-class quality.^{12 • 4}

Cultural significance

Source and stereotype. The film adapts the novel by Karl May (1842–1912), who had never visited North America when his Winnetou volumes appeared in 1893; his landscapes and figures were created at a desk in Radebeul near Dresden, and Winnetou was not a portrait of the lived reality of indigenous people but the romantic ideal of the "noble savage".¹³ In the film, as in the books, Winnetou functions as a morally elevated "edler Wilder" and Old Shatterhand as a German mediator between cultures; despite, or because of, these simplifications, the films became box-office hits and shaped the West German image of the West.¹⁴ Pierre Brice, a French actor, and Lex Barker embodied an idealized image of friendship and masculinity that found enormous resonance in postwar West Germany.¹⁴

Scholarship has read the film's politics closely. A study in German Life and Letters argues that the West German westerns, Winnetou – 1. Teil in particular, center the portrayal of white innocence: fictive Germans who, confronted with injustice and genocide, choose the right side, with the blood brotherhood ritual serving as a kind of absolution for Old Shatterhand and, by extension, other innocent Germans, granted only after Winnetou is convinced of that innocence.¹⁵

Context of the era. The Karl May films met a West German society of the economic miracle in the early 1960s, where Böttcher's optimistic music and the clear separation of good and evil created a world in which things seemed to be looking up.¹³ In the German Democratic Republic, by contrast, Karl May was frowned upon, and the DEFA developed a deliberate counter-model, the "Indianerfilme", in which indigenous figures stood at the center as victims of colonialism, capitalism, and violence.^{13 • 14}

Decline of the genre. With the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 and the rise of the New German Film, the Karl May western rapidly lost cultural prestige and largely disappeared from contemporary film production.¹⁴ By the mid-1960s the dream world was under pressure from another side as well: television moved into living rooms, cinema attendance fell, and a young generation of filmmakers demanded a German cinema that asked questions about the present of the Federal Republic rather than offering simple answers about distant dream landscapes.¹³

References

1. Winnetou I, Rialto Film GmbH, Berlin
2. Winnetou 1. Teil (1963), Karl May – Mayovky na Internetu
3. Winnetou 1, Auf Winnetous Spuren
4. Winnetou – 1. Teil, FILMSTARTS-Kritik
5. Winnetou – 1. Teil, VPRO Cinema
6. Karl May in Kroatien, Kroatien-Lexikon
7. Winnetou-Drehorte in Kroatien, kroatien.de
8. Crew of Winnetou presents details of filming in Croatia, HAVC
9. Winnetou, 1. Teil, ARD Degeto
10. Karl May Verlag: Winnetou 1. Teil
11. Winnetou I (1963) – Bewertungen, IMDb
12. Michael Petzel: Winnetou 1. Teil, Film-Bildbuch, Karl-May-Verlag
13. «Winnetou III»: Warum Deutsche in einen Apachen vernarrt waren, SRF Kultur
14. Von Helden und Anti-Helden, Goethe-Institut Gegenüber
15. Gallagher (2022): Winnetou, White Innocence, and Settler Time, German Life and Letters
16. Ähnliche Filme zu Winnetou – 1. Teil, FILMSTARTS
17. Winnetou, un héros allemand, Le Monde (2018)
18. Die Welt der Drehorte: Winnetou, filmtourismus.de
19. Test: 4K UHD – Winnetou I, M-Reviews
20. Winnetou 1. Teil – Streaming, JustWatch
21. Stichtag, 11. Dezember 1963 - "Winnetou I" wird uraufgeführt

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Franchise and series entries as standalone works › Action, thriller, and crime series film entries › Entries released 1960s and 1970s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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