Romy Franks, Brigham Young University
Humanities
Following the Second World War, the adventurous westerns of 19th-century author Karl May resurfaced in Germany as wildly popular pulp fiction and dime novels. In subsequent decades, May’s literature inspired several successful film adaptations in the West, followed by alternative “Indian films” in the East. Karl May and the contemporary phenomenon of the global Western film genre tapped into many themes central to Germany’s long, tortured quest for a national identity. Post-war Germans looked to Westerns as a means for “projecting” a new image of Germany to the world-one that could help overcome the stigma of Nazism.
In 1962, a few months after the Berlin Wall was built, an essay in the leading West German news magazine Der Spiegel declared: “May has advanced to be a kind of Praeceptor Germaniae, whose influence, without doubt, is greater than that of any other German author between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann.” For generations, May’s vision of the American West exerted a strong influence on Germans from both sides of the Wall. In 2012, Jan Fleischhauer wrote in Der Spiegel: “More than 200 million copies of [May’s] books have been printed…Half of [which]…were sold in German-speaking countries. [Thus, May] is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world…” Despite his German prominence, Karl May’s writings and the films they inspired have barely been acknowledged in the English-language scholarly discussion of German national identity.
My research contrasts the ways in which East and West Germany used unique images of the American West to generate their own national identities. Through the analysis of archival production documents, contemporary newspaper articles, subsequent literature and commentary, and the first-ever Western films in the East and the West, my research presents the deeper significance of “Sauerkraut Westerns” as part of the Cold-war era German identity crisis.