Unsettling America: German Westerns and Modernity

“What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” asks Dennis Hopper in the role of Tom Ripley in the 1977 film Der amerikani-sche Freund (The American Friend). ¹ His question bespeaks not only Wim Wenders’s well-known commitment to the Western genre, but also a long-standing German preoccupation with the iconography of the Far West. From Friedrich Gerstäcker’s nineteenth-century novels to the Marlboro Man, from Karl May’s imaginary West to Harald Reinl’s Winnetou-sequels of the 1960s, from Kafka’s Oklahoma theater to the rock group BAP’s 1993 “Blonde Mohikaner,” German artists, ideologues, and imagemakers have repeatedly deployed the mythological heartpiece of American popular culture, the Western, in order to entertain their audiences, evaluate the course of modernity, and raise questions concerning their own national identity. Transculturated through the cinema, the imagery of the American frontier provided, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, symbolic resources for assessing Germany’s abrupt step into the age of machines, urban traffic, democratic will formation, and mechanical reproduction. Even though homegrown adaptations frequently appealed to strong anti-American sentiments, the genre of the Western—the American film par excellence, according to André Bazin—thus constituted a discursive site at which Germans negotiated and contested the meaning of modern culture and society. ²

In what follows, I seek to reconstruct some aspects of this multifarious iconography of the Western during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, an analysis that will lead to a reading of one of the most eminent German Western productions of the 1930s, Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California, 1936). ³ As I will argue, the film engages with the Western genre in order to explore issues of charismatic leadership, masculine identity, organic communality, and technological modernization, thereby synthesizing thematic strands that meander through many German Western films of the period, from the silent feature film Der letzte Mohikaner (The Last of the Mohicans, 1920) starring Bela Lugosi, to August Kern’s Der goldene Gletscher (The Golden Glacier, 1932), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938) and Wasser für Canitoga (Water for Canitoga, 1939), and Paul Verhoeven’s Gold in Frisco (1939). ⁴ The following pages scout the trails of Western motifs through Weimar and Nazi culture, however, not in order to provide the reader with a history of the genre in Germany, nor to indulge in a normative aesthetic debate as to whether non-American Western productions can really live up to the generic excellence of classical Hollywood works. Rather, what is at stake here is the mapping of the popularity of the Western in Germany by means of a critical concept of cinematic genres, a concept that gives equal attention to: the economy of certain conventions within individual texts; spectatorial expectations, desires, and investments; and specific imperatives of the entertainment industry. Like other cinematic genres, the Western does not simply describe recurring sets of archetypes, historical themes, or iconographic references. We can define its specificity neither solely along semantic lines, as consistent organizations of thematic or iconic inventories, nor along syntactic lines, as vehicles for the reproduction of certain narrative patterns and “constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders.” ⁵ Instead, genres mediate both syntactic and semantic matrices, yet also involve a coherent set of spectatorial expectations that organize desire and memory across a series of textual instances, and a complex cluster of production interests and commercial imperatives. ⁶ It therefore seems hardly sufficient to define and analyze a genre simply by isolating a number of peculiar themes, visual motifs, dramatic constellations, or authorial inscriptions. Rather, in assessing the generic economy of certain cinematic texts, one also needs to consider what different film industries and audiences—steeped in specific cultural, historical, and national conditions—accept as generic examples at a certain moment in time. If genres such as the Western cross borders, and national film industries other than Hollywood’s even decide to produce their own, the decisive question is not: is this really a Western? What is of greater interest is why and how certain audiences construct a certain text as a...