The Euro-Western

Reframing Gender, Race and the 'Other' in Film

Lee Broughton

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784533892
• eBook ISBN: 9780857729422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Western has always been inextricably linked to the USA, and studies have continually sought to connect its historical development to changes in American society and Hollywood innovations. Focusing new critical attention on films produced in Germany, Italy and Britain, this timely book offers a radical rereading of the evolutionary history of the Western and brings a vital international dimension to its study. Lee Broughton argues not only that European films possess a special significance in terms of the genre's global development, but also that many offered groundbreaking and progressive representations of traditional Wild West 'Others': Native Americans, African Americans and so-called 'strong women'. European Westerns investigates how the histories of Germany, Italy and Britain - and the idiosyncrasies of their respective national film industries - influenced representations of the self and 'Other', shedding light on the broader cultural, historical and political contexts that shaped European engagement with the genre.

PART I

Indians in Europe

Indianthusiasm and the Representation of American Indians in West German Westerns

Paul Simpson asserts that the literary works of the German writer Karl May offer ‘emphatic proof that, as early as the late nineteenth century, the myth of the West was doing strange things to the European imagination’ (2006: 247–248). The sense of strangeness that Simpson alludes to in May’s incredibly popular, Western-themed novels is undoubtedly attached to the books’ promotion of heroic and noble Indians, most notably the young Apache chief Winnetou. Indeed, Richard H. Cracroft asserts that ‘the dreaming power of May’s vivid imagination’, when combined with his exhaustive research on anthropological facts relating to the Indians, served to produce ‘an original and unusual image of the redskin’ (1967: 254). May’s tales of friendship between Indians and whites were surely influenced in part by James Fenimore Cooper’s Western stories but May’s Winnetou novels from the 1890s are distinguished by the presence of German adventurer-pioneer characters like the hardy strongman, Old Shatterhand.

As a consequence, Rudolf Conrad indicates that ‘for the German reader, Karl May’s Indian novels established a deeply effective romantic-emotional tie to the American Indian’ (1989: 458) and, as a result, Hartmut Lutz maintains that ‘to this day, Indianer remain deeply implicated in German popular culture’ (2002: 179). Thus, when West German filmmakers began making Westerns during the early 1960s, they quite naturally chose to draw directly upon May’s enduringly popular works. As a consequence, eleven Western feature films based on May’s writings were produced in West Germany between 1962 and 1968. And each of these adaptations feature empowered and heroic racial ‘Others’ who command as much narrative importance and respect as their white counterparts. This chapter will thus explore the groundbreaking ways in which these West German Westerns represent Native Americans by comparing their content to typical Hollywood Westerns.

Firstly, it should be noted that the East German film studio DEFA also produced a number of hugely popular Indian-themed Westerns during the 1960s. The ideological products of a communist state, the DEFA Westerns sought to use stories set in the Wild West to tell allegorical tales that critiqued imperialism and capitalism. As such, these films featured consistently positive representations of Native Americans too. The May adaptations were banned in East Germany for ideological reasons and Ute Lischke and David T. McNab indicate that DEFA subsequently felt compelled to make their own Westerns because significant numbers of East German citizens were electing to travel to Prague in order to watch the May films (2005: 286). Interestingly, Gerd Gemünden goes as far as to assert that:

both before and after its division into two national states, there exists a common, widespread, and existential identification with Indians that seems to surpass that of other nations … The Indianerfantasien [Indian fantasies] of both East and West Germany are clearly interchangeable because they both stem from the same tradition.

(2002: 254)

The East German people’s desire to see the May adaptations, and the subsequent box office success of DEFA’s own Westerns, seemingly offers evidence that confirms the German people’s deep-seated affection for Native Americans.

The iconic cinematic image of May’s Apache chief Winnetou endures within Germany to this day. But film historians have largely overlooked the remarkable representations of Indian characters – and the positive depictions of interracial romance – that are found in the Winnetou films from the 1960s. Kim Newman notes that ‘one would be hard pressed to pick through Westerns made since 1972 and find an unsympathetic, disrespectful portrayal of a Native American’ (1990: 54). This perceptible change of attitude with regard to the representation of Indians in Hollywood films at the turn of the 1970s was made all the more noticeable by the fact that, whenever Indians appeared in Hollywood Westerns during the 1960s, filmmakers consistently chose to employ the savage Indian stereotype. The suggestion that Hollywood productions like Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue (1970), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) and Elliot Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse (1970) approached their Indian subjects with a newfound sense of sympathy, respect and fairness is indisputable. However, I argue that this change of attitude can first be detected in the West German Westerns of the 1960s.

Brian Garfield observes that ‘the history of the [Hollywood] Western is spotted with a fair, although not huge, number of Indian-oriented movies’ before adding that ‘in thousands of movies Hollywood did treat the Indian shabbily. But it was not done with absolute consistency’ (1982: 54). Garfield’s observations are essentially correct. American Westerns produced prior to 1970 that are relatively sympathetic to Native Americans can be found in two distinct periods: between 1908 and 1911 and during the early 1950s. However, overtly negative representations of Indians remained prevalent in American films during both of these periods too. Clearly the West German Westerns of the 1960s were not the first to offer positive representations of Native Americans, but I argue that acknowledging the West German films does problematize the Western genre’s received evolutionary model. These West German productions represent a cycle of films that is at once consistent, unforced and sustained in its efforts to cast the Indians as positive characters and they appeared at a time when Hollywood had reverted to portraying Indians as faceless savage hordes. As such, these positive representations of Native Americans prefigure those seen in Hollywood’s pro-Indian films of the early 1970s.

1

West German Westerns: International Reception and Local Influences

Tim Bergfelder suggests that Rialto Film, the production company that made the May adaptations, sought to ‘de-Germanise’ May’s America in order to appeal to an international audience (2005: 183). However, the company’s efforts evidently did not go far enough as reviews and critiques by international commentators clearly indicate that a perceptible sense of foreignness and difference still pervaded the films. Indeed Simpson, like numerous others, uses the term ‘sauerkraut’ Western in order to set up a cultural distinction between Hollywood Westerns and the West German Westerns, which he describes as being ‘kitsch tongue-in-cheek formula’ films (2006: 248). Tim Lucas suggests that an attendant sense of ‘inauthenticity’ was one of the reasons why the films did not perform well in English-speaking markets (2006: 87). Writing about Alfred Vohrer’s Among Vultures (Unter Geiern, 1964), Robin Bean suggests that the apparent lack of authenticity found in the film’s mise-en-scène, costumes and props ‘might give [genre] enthusiasts a few grey hairs’ before concluding that Martin Böttcher’s soundtrack score represents the film’s ‘only real Western flavour’ (1965a: 54). Bean observes that the content of Among Vultures ‘provides many chuckles’ and he makes specific mention of ‘the general confusions’ found in the film’s action sequences, which give the impression that the ‘extras haven’t the faintest idea what is going on’ (1965a: 54). Since Vohrer’s film is representative of the series as a whole, Bean’s comments can perhaps be taken as an assessment of the May adaptations in general.

Garfield argues that ‘the German Westerns, with one or two exceptions … exemplify “Z” [grade] moviemaking at its worst’ (1982: 367) while Clapham asserts that ‘to the eye of the Western connoisseur they are laughable. … Naive, awkwardly synthetic, they are an oddity’ (1974: 7). George N. Fenin and William K. Everson suggest that the films are nothing more than B movies that represent exercises in ‘the outright imitation [Fenin and Everson’s emphasis] of the [American] Western’ (1962: 327) and John Lenihan agrees, adding that the May adaptations ‘were unimaginative, stiffly acted rehashes of Hollywood themes’ (1985: 168). A common feature found in most of these critiques is the suggestion that the films are somehow inferior or inauthentic imitations of Hollywood Westerns.

Kevin Grant (2011) approaches the May Westerns in an objective manner but the key points of his appraisal of the films largely mirror the opinions of earlier commentators. Grant detects ‘the mechanical melodramatics of B-westerns at their most banal’ in the May adaptations and he describes the films as being ‘almost childishly naive’ before making reference to their ‘dime-novel morality, saddle-sore plot conventions, stilted dialogue and trite characterisations’ (2011: 55). Phil Hardy’s capsule reviews of a handful of the May Westerns are generally fair in tone too, but his brief assessments do tend to be littered with negative adjectives and phrases: ‘inconsequential’ (1991: 283), ‘piece of fluff’, ‘thin and banal’ (1991: 288), ‘routine’ (1991: 290) and ‘indifferent’ (1991: 300). Although none of the critiques make a negative issue out of the films’ patently un-generic representations of Indians, I would suggest that this does actually play a part in generating the perceived lack of authenticity that the critics repeatedly refer to.

Early affiliations and Nazi propaganda

The local elements found in the May Westerns are many and varied but most of them are linked to the enduring idea that the German people are somehow culturally inclined to identify and empathize with Native Americans. Indeed, the May films appeared after more than a century’s worth of German cultural activity that revolved around imagined and real encounters with Indians. Lutz has referred to the German people’s longstanding and ongoing ‘romantic infatuation’ and ‘obsession’ with Native Americans as a cultural phenomenon that he dubs ‘German Indianthusiasm’ (2002: 167). Since Edward Buscombe indicates that, beyond Karl May’s own work, ‘more than a thousand fictional Indian stories were published in Germany between 1875 and 1900’ (2006: 188–189) it would seem that German Indianthusiasm was bolstered and coloured by the positive depictions of Indians that May and his fellow writers provided. However, the sense of cultural connection and identification that served to link Germans to Native Americans might actually predate May’s work.

Historically minded Germans seemingly find the roots of Indian‑ thusiasm planted deep in the country’s turbulent past. Michael Kimmelman notes that Johannes Zeilinger, the curator of a May exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, detects a link to Native Americans in the Roman historian Tacitus’ description of the ancient German tribes: ‘uncorrupted, primitive, fierce and at one with nature, a people on the edge of a corrupt and voracious empire’ (quoted in Kimmelman, 2007). And Susan Zantop suggests that towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘when the German states were trying to redefine themselves against imperial(ist) France’, a ‘collective sense of inferiority, resulting from military and political defeat’ led to the German people forming ‘a collective identification with “the Indian” as the underdog’ (2002: 5). Clearly it is possible for this kind of identification to be linked to any period in German history that saw the country defeated and/or occupied by a foreign power. As will be discussed later in this chapter, America’s occupation of Germany after World War II is of particular significance since it provides a common occupier that directly links the Germans to Native Americans.

Colin G. Calloway has detailed the popularity of numerous performing Indian shows in Germany throughout the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries (2002: 71). These shows – the most famous example being ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s touring Wild West Show – featured genuine Native American performers. Although such shows played throughout Europe, George Moses reports that Cody’s 1890 tour of Germany ‘caused a sensation’, adding that ‘the enthusiasm in Germany seems to have been greater than anywhere else in Europe’ (quoted in Calloway, 2002: 71). Certainly, these touring shows provided much needed employment for their Native American participants but the power relations that the shows were built around (white Europeans paying to gaze upon exoticized and essentialized ethnic performers) bring to mind those of the colonial World Fairs and Expositions that were popular in Europe and America during the same time period. Indeed, it is clear that the Native Americans who performed in travelling Wild West shows provided white audiences with a stereotypical representation of Indian history and behaviour.

In common with most European countries, Germany has been producing Westerns since the days of silent cinema and early titles – The Deerslayer and Chingachgook (Lederstrumpf, 1 Teil: Der Wildtoter und Chingachgook, Arthur Wellin, 1920), Last of the Mohicans (Lederstrumpf, 2 Teil: Der letzte der Mohikaner, Arthur Wellin, 1920) and Red Bull, The Last Apache (Red Bull, der letzte Apache, Phil Jutzi, 1920) – indicate an obvious interest in producing Indian-themed Westerns. Similarly, the German public’s continued enthusiasm for Karl May’s work soon saw his writings being presented via a more physical and dynamic medium. Katrin Sieg indicates that May’s Indian novels were adapted into stage plays in 1919 (2002: 82) while reporting that Indian clubs came into existence in Germany at around the same time (2002: 121). The members of such clubs were enthusiastic hobbyists who would meet up, dress as Indians and interact in ways that celebrated their understanding of Native American culture and it should be noted that these early Indian clubs came into being soon after the American-led Allies defeated Germany in World War I. This suggests that, in part, German identification with the Indians can indeed be linked to a need to identify with a historical ‘underdog’.

Later in the century, the Nazi Party’s propaganda was able to capitalize on the German people’s seemingly inherent willingness to relate to Native Americans. Lutz reports that a raft of literary formats, including children’s literature, were used by the Nazis to stress ‘the affinity between Germans and Indians’ by ‘reading Native American resistance to European encroachment as a reenactment’ of German myths such as ‘Arminius’s fight against the Romans’ (2002: 177–178). Ultimately, the ideology that exoticized and lauded a pointedly stereotypical image of one racial ‘Other’ (the Indian) was part of a racist discourse that duly fed into a wider spread of propaganda that sought to negatively stereotype and demonize another racial ‘Other’ (the Jew). In revealing that Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Karl May’s Western novels, Klaus Mann goes as far as to suggest that May was Hitler’s literary mentor (1940: 393). However, it is clear that Germans of all political persuasions read May’s work, and Frayling has uncovered quotations to this effect from the likes of Albert Einstein (1981: 108) and the pro-communist Dadaist George Grosz (1981: 105). Evidently the contents of May’s Winnetou novels are polysemic enough to be agreeable to both right- and left-wing political mindsets. In terms of film production at this time, Luis Trenker directed a Western in 1936 titled The Emperor of California (Der Kaiser von Kalifornien). Frayling notes that the film plays like a variant of the German ‘mountain film’ (1981: 19) while observing that its German hero ‘has much more in common with the Indians than with vicious, money-grubbing Americans’ (1981: 105). These key elements of The Emperor of California can be linked to the content of the later Winnetou films.

The post war years and ethnic drag

Defeat by the American-led Allies, the subsequent occupation of Germany and the question of culpability for the Holocaust led to further Indian-related debate and activity inside Germany. Jennifer Fay describes how the American authorities that occupied Germany after World War II provided public screenings of Hollywood films in order to culturally re-educate the German populace (2008: 80). It was thought that films ‘concerned with American Westward expansion and the history of immigration’ would ‘teach Germans about democracy’ (Fay, 2008: 80). Ironically, Fay suggests that watching two of these films – John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and Stagecoach (1939) – together presented a ‘version of history’ in which ‘genocide is not just the founding violence of American statehood, it is constitutive of its sustainability’ (2008: 78). Indeed, in describing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify the settlement of the West, Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin conclude:

Genocide, which means the deliberate destruction of an entire cultural group of people, is a very strong word, but one that in recent years has been applied to official (and not-so-official) US policies towards Native Americans during the nineteenth century.

(2009: 98)

Clearly some parallels can be drawn between the philosophy of Manifest Destiny and its subsequent effects and the Nazi philosophy of blood and soil that led to Germany’s aggressive, genocide-driven expansion throughout Europe during the 1930s.

As such, Fay indicates that in the immediate post war years Germans ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction
• PART I: Indians in Europe: Indianthusiasm and the Representation of American Indians in West German Westerns
• Part II: Emancipation all’Italiana: The Representation of African Americans in Italian Westerns
• Part III: Funny Men and Strong Women: The Representation of Frontier Femmes in British Westerns
• Final Thoughts
• Select Filmography
• Bibliography