Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES COLD WAR RIVALRY AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE AMERICAN WEST PAWEL GORAL Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series Series Editors: Akira Iriye, Professor of History at Harvard University, and Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford This distinguished series seeks to: develop scholarship on the transnational con- nections of societies and peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; provide a forum in which work on transnational history from different periods, subjects, and regions of the world can be brought together in fruitful connection; and explore the theoretical and methodological links between transnational and other related approaches such as comparative history and world history. Editorial Board: Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities, Pro- fessor of History, and Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University; Jane Carruthers, Professor of History, University of South Africa; Mariano Plotkin, Professor, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, and member of the National Council of Scientific and Technolog- ical Research, Argentina; Pierre-Yves Saunier, Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France, and Visiting Professor at the University of Montreal; Ian Tyrrell, Professor of History, University of New South Wales Titles include: Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez THE CHINESE IN BRITAIN, 1800–PRESENT Economy, Transnationalism and Identity Manu Bhagavan INDIA AND THE QUEST FOR ONE WORLD The Peacemakers Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (editors) COSMOPOLITAN THOUGHT ZONES South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (editors) COMPETING VISIONS OF WORLD ORDER Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel (editors) EUROPEANIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Historical Approaches Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin (editors) THE TRANSNATIONAL UNCONSCIOUS Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (editors) TRANSNATIONAL LIVES Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–present Jonathan Gantt IRISH TERRORISM IN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY, 1865–1922 Pawel Goral COLD WAR RIVALRY AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE AMERICAN WEST Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (editors) RELIGIOUS INTERNATIONALS IN THE MODERN WORLD Per Högselius RED GAS Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence Eric Hotta PAN-ASIANISM AND JAPAN’S WAR, 1931–45 Martin Klimbe and Joachim Scharloth (editors) 1968 IN EUROPE A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–77 Erika Kuhlman RECONSTRUCTING PATRIARCHY AFTER THE GREAT WAR Women, Gender and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury TELEGRAPHIC IMPERIALISM Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830–1920 Bruce Mazlish THE IDEA OF HUMANITY IN THE GLOBAL ERA Nicola Pizzolato CHALLENGING GLOBAL CAPITALISM Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin Glenda Sluga THE NATION, PSYCHOLOGY, AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, 1870–1919 Giles Scott-Smith WESTERN ANTI-COMMUNISM AND THE INTERDOC NETWORK Cold War Internationale Mark Tilse TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE PRUSSIAN EAST From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871–1914 Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–50746–3 Hardback 978–0–230–50747–0 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West Pawel Goral Department of History, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Palgrave macmillan © Pawel Goral 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-36429-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-47324-3 ISBN 978-1-137-36430-2 ()eBook DOI 10.1057/9781137364302 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. To my parents, Barbara and Bogdan Goral This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations viii Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Karl May Westerns and the Conquest of the American West 10 2 Indianerfilme and the Conquest of the American West 34 3 German Westerns: Popularity, Reception, Heroines, Miscegenation, Race, and Landscape 59 4 German Indian Heroes and Intercultural Transfer 86 5 The Quest for National Identity 106 Conclusion 138 Notes 142 Bibliography 164 Index 178 vii Illustrations 1.1 Pierre Brice as Winnetou (left) and Lex Barker as Old Shatterhand. Photo courtesy of United Archives GmbH/Alamy 29 2.1 Gojko Mitic: Bild 183-H0627-0018-001, Bundesarchiv. Photographer: Vera Katschorowski-Stark 45 2.2 Dean Reed: Bild 183-J1223-0202-006, Bundesarchiv 49 3.1 Winnetou and Old Shatterhand inspired millions of readers and movie enthusiasts on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including the author, whose family always took the “Winnetou” tent wherever they traveled 65 viii Series Editors’ Preface A fascinating subject of study in the broad field of transnational history is the question of what may be termed “transnational memory,” that is, how various nations seek to understand the past, not just their own but also that of other people. It may be as much transnational imagination as transnational memory in that imagination and memory are frequently interlocked, one influencing the other. Works of art, from lit- erature and paintings to music and dramas, contribute to and reinforce historical memory and imagination. In a book published in the Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History series, Europeanization in the Twentieth Century (edited by Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel), the editors speak of the European Union as “a community of shared memory.” Europeans have endeavored to understand their collective history as a shared experience. To the extent that they have succeeded, they have been able to imagine a past in which they and their forebears have all taken part. One may wonder if other regions of the world have developed, or will be able to develop, similar communities of shared memory. A trans-Atlantic search for transnational memory is presented in this book. It describes a fascinating story of how Germans after the Second World War sought to relate the history of the American West to their own recent past. Having experienced the devastating war and now become divided into West Germany and East Germany, respectively tied to the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, postwar Germans incorporated what they understood of the American experi- ences in “the wild west” to their own recent history. And they did so through movies, “German Westerns.” The stories of the “wild west,” in particular the relationship between American Indians and white fron- tiers and cowboys held a fascination for Germans at many levels: the frontier experience, the heroism – or the brutality – of the frontiersmen, their relationship with native Americans, race prejudice as well as efforts to overcome it, interracial cohabitation and miscegenation, and many others. How the two Germanys incorporated their understanding of American history into their own self-definition makes fascinating history. As the author shows, selective themes from the story of the ix x Series Editors’ Preface American west – from frontier heroism to the extermination of an alien race – had obvious relevance to Germany’s own recent past, so that such phenomena as Nazism and the Holocaust could be seen not as uniquely German but rather as transnational. As the author notes, German Westerns were “transnational products that created transnational heroes in which both West Germans and East Germans found superheroes with whom they could identify.” Of course, not only superheroes but super villains abounded both in the American west and in Nazi Germany,

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