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c ow b oy s a n d m o d e r n i z at i o n An anecdote of World War II history relates that Hitler, in 1943, ordered his general staff to read Karl May’s western novels about the Apache Winnetou and his friend Old Shatterhand. Vis-à-vis the dwindling fortunes of the German war machinery, Hitler wanted May’s imaginary West to become a source of moral inspiration.5 Seen through the lenses of May’s American frontier, technological warfare for Hitler emerged as a western adventure, a shoot-out between greedy Jewish Yankees on the one side and noble savages and superhuman German cowboys on the other. Spellbound by May’s romantic western fantasies, Hitler in the very last days of the war did not even hesitate to apotheosize himself as a double of the last of the Mohicans, a representative of a race of heroically dying, yet morally infallible, warriors.6

Writing in American exile, Klaus Mann exposed the role of popular western imagery in Nazi ideology as early as 1940. As Mann argued, May’s hero, Old Shatterhand, incarnated a “fascinating blend of young Siegfried and Tom Mix.”7 Shatterhand personified an amalgam of romantic longing and existential resolution that was destined to culminate in Nazi Germany: One of the most ardent Karl May fans was a certain good-for-nothing from Brunau [ sic], Austria, who was to rise to impressive heights. Young Adolf was seriously smitten by Karl May, whose works were his favorite, if not his only reading, even in later years. His own imagination, his whole notion of life was impregnated by these Western thrillers.

The cheap and counterfeit conception of “heroism” presented by Karl May fascinated the future Führer; he loved this primitive but effective shrewdness: the use of “secret weapons” and terrible tricks, such as carrying prisoners as shields, the brutal cunning of wild animals in the jungle; he was delighted by the glorification of savages. . . . He could see no reason why Old Shatterhand’s convictions and tactics should not work if applied to national and international politics. One might conquer civilization by going back to the principles of the jungle.8

It is not difficult to see that Mann’s rage against May and his disciple Hitler, although highly perceptive, relied on rather fragile assumptions. According to Mann, May’s and Hitler’s westernism resulted largely from a falsified picture of American frontier life. Only because Germans, in Mann’s view, had misconstrued the western frontier in the first place could they transform the Far West into a source of political legitimation. What Mann overlooked was of course the mythic status of the frontier itself, the fact that ever since Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 speech in Chicago American frontier fantasies had helped define American identity one-sidedly, in terms of agrar-

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ian democracy and heroic individualism rather than of ethnic difference, European immigration, and urban conflict in East Coast metropoles. Instead of falsifying history, as Mann believed, Hitler, when taking recourse to western themes, simply elevated myth to a higher level.

More important, however, what makes Mann’s argument insufficient is the fact that he completely elided the diversity of German western fantasies prior to the Nazi takeover. By suggesting direct continuities from May to Hitler, Mann obscured the host of western images that had swept over Germany during the 1920s, mass reproduced through a variety of different media and institutions, in particular the urban movie theaters.9 Weimar images of the Far West were thoroughly marked by contemporary debates about the costs and blessings of technological, cultural, and political modernization. The Nazi cowboy must therefore be viewed as a discontinuous reinscription of nineteenth-century fantasies rather than as their direct continuation. Only after containing the discursive heterogeneity of German western images could Hitler impose himself as a descendant of Old Shatterhand and his blood brother Winnetou. As we will see in this chapter, Nazi western films played an essential role in this process. They unified competing interpretations of the American West to arouse desire for ideology.

It is useful when trying to examine the curious existence of the Nazi cowboy first to retrace briefly the trail of German western fantasies from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The popularity of western themes in Germany originally evolved from the same historical context that gave birth to the notion of “Heimat” (homeland).10 The idea of both

“Heimat” and the “Far West” expressed anxieties about the unsettling effects of industrial technology, rapid urbanization, monetary exchange, and functional abstraction. Portraits of bucolic homeland settings and idealized images of the American West became catalysts of fantasy production.

Western fantasies offered imaginary places of action, heroism, individualism, and liberated wilderness.11 They symbolically reduced complex political or economic issues to questions of morality. In a truly Wagnerian move, the early literary western genre portrayed economic instabilities as products of egotistical materialism and corrupt ethical dispositions, not of restraints placed on the individual by inadequate social structures. Often counterposing American greed with true German spirituality, German western stories reconstructed the homeland somewhere else and in doing so became a screen on which to project what nineteenth-century German discourse considered the essential elements of home: individual authenticity, temporal continuity, spatial closure, and harmonic interaction between a homogeneous social body and its natural environment.

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In the nineteenth-century texts of Otto Rupius, Balduin Möllhausen, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, and Friedrich Gerstäcker countless and often barely literate readers found vehicles for imaginary travel to the New World. Yet these early western fictions offered much more than simply fantastic escape. They participated in the construction of an alternative public sphere, one inimical to bourgeois reading practices and the increasing dissemination and commodification of printed news. Western novels, however unrealistic, served as maps and manuals. They prepared for what, around 1850, seemed like a mass exodus over the Atlantic—pulp fiction instructed the disempowered on how to succeed in their quest for a new homeland abroad. As Ray Allen Billington writes, western novels might not have been “the most accurate purveyors of information, but they were better than nothing.”12

Karl May’s success around the turn of the century, that is, after the actual heyday of German emigration, indicated a fundamental transformation of the German western genre from a swatch of migration aspirations to a catalyst of exotic fantasies and transfigurations.13 May rendered the West as a tabula rasa that awaited the inscriptions of imaginary new social orders, symbolic structures, and the kinds of “customs” that abound in his novels.14

Although overflowing with nostalgia for the romantic, May’s novels exported contemporary architectures of authority and submission from Germany to the Far West. As he projected onto Indians the seasoned picture of the noble savage,15 as he embraced the western setting to rail against American materialism and greed, May recast the American West as a realm of spiritual salvation. In the heroic figures of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, Wagner’s heroes Siegfried and Parsifal continued their respective voyages to the final frontier of mercy and redemption. In his writing May fed directly into the imperialist projects of Wilhelminian Germany around the turn of the century. As his texts traversed fictional geographies, envisioned new social orders from scratch, and relocated traditional meanings, especially the rhetoric of Christianity, to exotic settings, May played a pivotal role in the proliferation of the cultural vocabulary necessary for imperial rule: the hierarchizing of different cultures, the aligning of narrative and spatial practices, and the jargon of unquestioned authority and domination.16

May’s late-nineteenth-century search for paradise, as Eric Santner has pointed out, took place “at precisely that historical moment when psychoanalysis was becoming a science, when a mass popular culture was beginning to emerge in a form that could become a new market and industry proper, and finally, when film was being introduced as a new medium for the

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exploration of fantasy.”17 Small wonder, then, that for twentieth-century audiences western themes kept much of their appeal and actuality even though the western genre’s proper subject domain had more or less been reduced to anachronism by the historical process. During the first decades of the new century, images of the Far West invited newly emerging mass audiences to embark on passages through space and time—voyages not simply to an imaginary past of unhampered individualism and archaic nature but also to one’s own childhood fantasies, shaped by the reading of adventure literature and the experience of ethnographic exhibits so popular around 1900. The many second-rate American western films that were dumped on the German market after 192118 were thus all grist to the mills of Germany’s desire for the West. In the field of Weimar visual art, representations of the West as a result often engaged directly with the way modern technology itself shaped fantasy and produced memory. In many instances these representations revealed that the popular historiography of the West had become concomitant with the history of cinematic representation, that the western film, as a genre, was a product of the very conditions that made its heroes disappear.

Consider, for example, Karl Hubbuch’s drawing Lederstrumpf (Leather-stocking, c. 1921), which depicts an urban sidewalk tableau with electrical appliances and a truncated film advertisement (fig. 14). At first one is tempted to read the movie poster within this sketch as an incentive to imaginary escape, but Hubbuch draws his ad for a western film in a conspicuously dismembered fashion, severing the very dramatic event, the struggle that—we are led to believe— occupies the center of the poster. Further, he invades the romantic representation within the representation with markers of economical instrumentality, the sticker “Kartenverkauf hier” (Tickets sold here) glued right over the face of one of the internal onlookers.

Surprisingly, what is excluded from our vision of the movie poster, action and heroic combat, reemerges synecdochically in the form of the arrow inscribed in the hardware of modernity. As a result of a curious symbolic exchange between the Wild West and the modern city, the arrow on the electric box signifies the very drama that escapes our view in the movie ad.

Electric modernity and American frontier thus constitute an intricate play of presence and absence, one that calls attention to the modern moment that triggers the invocation of the West and transforms it into a commodity. Hubbuch’s drawing reveals the technological apparatus that prompts Weimar fantasies of western heroism. It betrays the fact that cinematic modernity shapes the very content of such fantasies.

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Figure 14. Lederstrumpf, by Karl Hubbuch (c. 1921). Courtesy of Miriam Hubbuch, Freiburg (Germany).

Compare Hubbuch’s drawing with Paul Gangolf’s 1922 lithograph Kino (Cinema), which radically blurs the borders between the representation of western themes, the cinematic apparatus, and the forms of modern urban life (fig. 15). Gangolf’s Kino depicts a chaotic crowd of people in a noctur-nal German city. Over the heads of the mob looms a film poster announc-ing the western movie Land without Sun. Here urban life appears as a dark amalgam of hardly discernible, anonymous individuals, and the street becomes an extension of the cinematic auditorium. The picture show, in a