August 02, 2004

Germany's Cult of the Cowboy

On Friday The Times of London published an entertaining article on an off-the-wall subject: the German "cult of the cowboy." So many Germans are fascinated with America's Wild West that entrepreneurs have opened Silver Lake City, a cowboy-inspired theme park just north of Berlin:


There is a main street with a saloon with swinging doors, a general store, a jail at the back of the sheriff’s office and a horse trough. There is a bank that can be robbed to order and a hotel to sleep off one shot of rye too many.

Silver Lake City was inspired by Karl May’s Winnetou and Old Shatterhand books: 1920s German pulp fiction about a cowboy and an Indian chief in a place and a time far from the drab, depressed Fatherland of the day.

Even Adolf Hitler was a fan and before conquering vast tracts of the world he read himself to sleep in the early days of the Nazi movement with a May book every night.

Psychologists say that it is precisely the formality and the order of German society that draws people to escape from it, even if only for weekends and in clothing that most people left behind in the toy-box at the age of ten. The Wild West boom is one of the few growth industries in a country with high unemployment and a collective depression about the future. Silver Lake City is a theme park for the family, but the family had better like its leisure served up in boots, Stetsons and spurs. It cost £12 million to build, as a venture of private and public capital, in a region north of Berlin with double-digit unemployment.


The article was fairly weak in a lot of ways: it never really demonstrated that the country was experiencing a "wild west boom" (beyond the construction of the theme park), and its psychological explanation of the cowboy craze was rather unconvincing. But some of the facts in the article are really fascinating:

After the Second World War, communist East Germany led the way in the creation of Indian fan clubs as they presented a legal opportunity for people to gather in large numbers and because May’s anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist messages conformed to the Eastern bloc doctrine.

Assuming that people actually joined these clubs, then I think this is yet another nice example of just how fascinating (and even weird) life under Communism could be.

Update: The blog Regions of Mind features an interesting entry that touches on European interest in American Westerns (and mentions Karl May.) What's more, as I look back on this post, I'm inclined to think that I was a little too quick to emphasize the humor in this article and a little too slow to think about what might make these Western images resonant, or appealing, or interesting in a German context.

Posted by Ed at August 2, 2004 02:41 PM
Comments

One of the really fascinating things about German culture and the whole Karl May thing is that there are lots and lots of Germans who go on authenticity kicks on Native America to the point that they try to recreate Native dances, rituals, experiences, costumes etc. Sort of like re-enactors of religion. The other is that they love talking about the Native American genocide but rarely talk about the Holocaust, inverse to the US. There is some interesting academic work going on on this front.

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