During the Cold War, both the West and East Germany film
industries made popular westerns. Yes, westerns. What was that all about?
JSTOR Daily
By: Matthew Wills
September 23, 2017
During the Cold War, both the West and East Germany film
industries made popular Westerns. Yes, Westerns. Inspired by West Germany’s
international success in the early 1960s with films based on the bestselling
novels of Karl May, the East Germans produced equally successful Indianerfilme.
As their name suggests, these Indianerfilme were orientated towards the
perspective of Native Americans, at least as defined by the state film
industry. The Yugoslavian actor Gojko Mitic became a big star playing Indian heroes
in the German Democratic Republic.
As Gerd Gemünden notes, all movies are ideological
productions of one kind or another, and in the case of the GDR, the
Indianerfilme articulated an “outspoken critique of the capitalism and racism
that fueled the westward expansion of the United States.” But, “not
surprisingly […] the various responses of the Indian tribes to the
ever-advancing Western frontier of the U.S. look like blueprints for a better
socialist Germany.”
The romance of German Indianerfantasien—fascination with
the American West—transcended the Berlin Wall.
Driving the popularity of such films on both sides of the
Iron Curtain was the German fascination with a particular myth of the American
West. To understand this, you have to go back to the novelist Karl May
(1842-1912). His stories about the native Winnetou and the German Old
Shatterhand are some of the most popular in the German language. May—who didn’t
visit North America until late in his career, and even then never travelled
west of Buffalo, NY—inspired a cultural obsession with Plains Indians in
Germany. Gemünden describes it as “a common, widespread and existential
identification with Indians that clearly surpasses that of other nations.” The
motivation for all this, he notes, is “the desire to not only understand
Indians better than others could (especially the United States), but also
better than they themselves [the Native Americans] could.” Indian hobby clubs,
camps, and museums in the now-united Germany are still a thing.
But back in communist party-ruled East Germany, May was
out of favor because the Nazis had been big fans of him. May had been called
Hitler’s “cowboy mentor” while Hitler himself had urged his generals to read
May during the battle of Stalingrad. In the officially de-Nazified GDR,
Indianerfilme trafficked in the world of Karl May without actually being by
Karl May.
Yet the romance of German Indianerfantasien transcended
the Berlin Wall. The Yugoslav Gojko Mitic was courted by capitalist filmmakers
into the 1970s and eventually became a regular at film festivals across the
divide. “Unser Gojko” (our Gojko) “become one of the few sincere symbols of
East and West German unification.”
And for those amused by a Yugoslavian playing an Indian
in East German Westerns, recall that Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey
Hepburn, and Johnny Depp, among many other European-ancestry actors, all
dressed up as movie Indians in Hollywood’s version of the Indianerfantasien.
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