Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West
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COLD WAR RIVALRY AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE AMERICAN WEST: WHY BOTH WESTERNERS AND EASTERNERS BECAME COWBOYS AND INDIANS by PAWEL GORAL Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2012 Copyright © by Pawel Goral 2012 All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members: Drs. Thomas Adam (Chair), Joyce Goldberg, Sam W. Haynes, Meredith McClain, and Steven G. Reinhardt. I would also like to thank other professors who also influenced my work along the way: Eric Bolsterli, Kim Breuer, Stephanie Cole, Imre Demhardt, Marvin Dulaney, Robert Fairbanks, John Garrigus, George Green, Donald Kyle, Stephen Maizlish, Christopher C. Morris, Stanley H. Palmer, Dennis Reinhartz, Stephen Stillwell, Jr. Our departmental staff have been priceless in helping me navigate through the program. I thank Robin Deeslie, Ami Keller, Wanda Stafford, and James Cotton. I thank the staff at the Central Library, especially those in charge of interlibrary loan processing. I thank for the invaluable help I received at the archives at Textarchiv des Deutschen Filminstituts / Deutschen Filmmuseums, Frankfurt, Archiv der Berlin- Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ABBAW), and Bundesarchiv, Berlin. My now three year old daughter, Anna, provided helpful entertainment as I progressed through the writing process. My parents, although thousands of miles away, have stood by me all this time. But the person who made it all possible was my wife, Andrea. I hereby postulate that the spouses of doctoral students should be awarded an iii honorary degree for all the sacrifice it requires to endure. In one sense or another, we graduate together. March 27, 2012 iv ABSTRACT COLD WAR RIVALRY AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE AMERICAN WEST: WHY BOTH WESTERNERS AND EASTERNERS BECAME COWBOYS AND INDIANS Pawel Goral, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2012 Supervising Professor: Thomas Adam As the competing ideologies of the Cold War became crucial components of the rivalry, cultural influences gained symbolic power as well. American popular culture had such a tremendous impact upon Europe that the states of the communist bloc denounced it as cultural imperialism. The Western, combined with cultural power and cultural v beliefs, analyzed here as as a major cold war weapon of influence, contributes to an understanding of transatlantic intercultural transfer, best illustrated by the production of German Westerns between 1962 and 1983. This dissertation demonstrates how the adversaries of the Cold War endeavored to create two distinct and unique German identities. This proved to be a complicated process whereby two newly created states chose myths from another country located in another hemisphere to come to terms with their own dark past and articulate a vision for a better future. In their endeavor to claim legitimacy, the German cinematic representation of the American West became an important cultural weapon of mass dissemination during the Cold War. This project examines the following juxtapositions: American vis-à-vis German and East German vis-à-vis West German. The primary questions the study answers are: how do East German Westerns compare with both West German and American Westerns and what do they teach about the nature of intercultural transfer between both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War? How does the portrayal of the United States in German Westerns modify historians’ understanding of the role and image of the United States in the Cold War? Ultimately, this dissertation determines whether both East and West Germany produced Westerns because they were influenced by American cultural images and whether through the use of this very American genre their own productions acquired special meaning. In this case, it is the creation of an American identity, based on the American myth of the frontier, by non-Americans for non-Americans during an ideological conflict that spanned the intersection of various cultural realms. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..…………….……………………………………………....iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………….…...............................v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………...x Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION…….……………..…………………………...…………...1 2. GERMAN IDENTITIES AFTER WORLD WAR II…………………………14 2.1 Territorial Changes and Population Migrations ……………………..22 2.2 The Legacy of the Nazi Past…………………………………………28 2.3 Culture, Media, and Film during the Cold War…………………...…32 2.4 Westerns in the Cold War……………………………………………41 2.5 German Western Films…………….……………………………...…46 3. THE GERMAN WESTERN TRADITION……..…………………………….49 3.1 Indians in Imperial Germany…………………………….……..……57 3.2 Karl May’s Long Shadows………..…………………………………59 3.3 Karl May……………..……………..………………………………..69 3.4 Karl May is Old Shatterhand…………....…………..……………….77 3.5 Karl May Westerns………………………...………………………...81 3.6 The First West German Western…………..……………………..…..88 4. THE SONS OF THE GREAT MOTHER BEAR: vii THE FIRST EAST GERMAN WESTERN…….…..……….……...…………93 4.1 Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich…………..……………….……………..98 4.2 Welskopf and the American Indian Movement’s Cause………...…105 4.3 Welskopf-Henrich and the Native American Cause..………………116 4.4 Welskopf-Henrich’s Indictment of Karl May……………………....120 4.5 Welskopf-Henrich and the Making of the First East German Western.………………………….............................................127 4.6 The Film…………………………………………………………….136 5. GERMAN WESTERNS: PERCEPTION, IMPACT, INTERCULTURAL TRANSFER, AND TRANSNATIONALISM………......139 5.1 German Westerns: Reception……………………………...……….140 5.2 Karl May Westerns and Westerns in Europe………………..……...158 5.3 Intercultural Transfer of a Movie Genre………………….………...161 5.4 Landscape: A Transnational American West………………...…….167 6. GERMAN INDIAN HEROES……………………………………………....175 6.1 Winnetou, Old Shatterhand, and Intercultural Transfer…...…………………………….………..……….177 6.2 Karl May Westerns v. Indianerfilme…………………………………...184 6.3 Heroism on the Frontier………………………………….…………191 6.4 Heroines, Miscegenation, and Race……………..………………….198 6.5 Winnetou and DEFA…….………………………………………….202 7. KARL MAY WESTERNS AND INDIANERFILME: ABSOLUTION AND ANTI-FASCISM………………………………..…….210 7.1 Postwar Society and the Holocaust………………..………………..213 viii 7.2 German Postwar Film and the Holocaust………………...………...220 7.3 Karl May and the Holocaust…………...…………...………………226 7.4 Karl May Westerns and the Holocaust, Indianerfilme and Anti-fascism…………………………………….……………….…232 8. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………...…248 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………257 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION…………………………………………………..267 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 2.1 The Holy Roman Empire in 1789………...………………………………………….23 2.2 The German Reich 1871-1918………………………………………………..……...24 2.3 Soviet Zones of Occupation……………...…………………………………………..26 3.1 Karl May…………………..…………………………………………………………71 3.2 Karl May’s house in Radebeul, Germany……………………………………………73 3.3 Villa Shatterhand…………………………………………………………………….76 3.4 Inside Villa Bear Fat…………………………………………………………………77 3.5 A sample of Karl May’s original works....……………………………..……………80 3.6 Karl May’s desk……………………………………………………………………...88 3.7 A statue of a sitting Indian in the small park at the site of the Karl May Musem…...83 7.1 A cremation oven at the former Majdanek Concentration Camp……………...…...213 x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In his most recent book, A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell has written that following World War II, “Soviet soldiers brought the virus home from the western front. It soon infected large portions of the Soviet population, then spread to other Eastern Bloc countries.”1 American culture, also labeled “American primitivism,” “capitalist cultural imperialism,” and “bourgeois cosmopolitanism,” which the Communist authorities considered an existential threat and which ultimately helped bring down Communism, is the virus Russell discusses.2 While culture most certainly became an effective tool of Cold War propaganda on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the cultural exchange was not marked by absolute dominance of the Western (American) products. On the contrary, the case of the American Western demonstrates the two-sided flow of cultural exchange across both camps during the Cold War. Indeed, intercultural transfer seems a more adequate term than cultural imperialism or Americanization to describe the cultural contest of the Cold War era. The appropriation of the American Western in both East and West Germany further suggests that this most American of all cultural products underwent significant transformation in order to fit into postwar West and East German 1 Thaddeus Russell. A Renegade History of the United States. New York: Free Press, 2010, 285-294. 2 Ibid. 1 cultures. Moreover, the appropriation of the American Western also became an essential element in the construction of national identity in both Germanies. Postwar German-American cultural history serves as a good example of intercultural transfer. Peter Bergmann has observed that “Late-nineteenth-century nationalism reinforced a cultural hierarchy (high brow/low brow) by ranking nations as cultures and fostered a view of culture as a war against chaos that also irresistibly became a conflict against other cultures.” He also has observed that the specter of Americanization permeated German culture for almost two centuries.3 German elites and intellectuals believed that culture became the only remaining medium the