by Larry Tritten

Approaching the Allegro Bar in the Hotel Taschenbergpalais in Dresden, Germany, the first thing one notices is the blue neon script above the doorway spelling out the bar's name; then, inside, one's gaze is drawn by a big green neon cactus on the far wall. That cactus stopped me in my tracks. I wasn't prepared in so august a place as the Taschenbergpalais, built in 1709 and once the residence of kings before it metamorphosed into a 20th-century hotel, to encounter so striking an example of the American West, and specifically of Arizona. A heraldic design or insignia, such as a lion rampant, would have seemed more appropriate. I was, after all, in one of Europe's classical cities. In any case, I made a note of the sight and put it out of my mind to concentrate on all of the other impressions of my first day in Europe.

Then, the next morning, going to breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant Intermezzo, I came upon a 3 foot cactus keeping a solitary potted vigil in one of the hallways. It was almost a dead ringer for a saguaro and I was reminded again of Arizona.

That night I attended the city’s Semper Opera for a performance of Rienzi, the 19th century opera composed by Richard Wagner. I might add that my knowledge of opera is on a par with my understanding of tree surgery, that I'm much more comfortable with country-Western music, but that's another story. Returning from the opera with Wagner's music still dominating my thoughts, I turned on the television in my hotel room. Randolph Scott appeared on the screen, speaking German. The movie was, of course, a Western. I've got a pretty good memory for the movies of Randolph Scott, who was one of my favorite stars when I was a kid. From 1932 to the 1950s, he made something like two or three dozen Westerns. They had him all over the landscape of the frontier as many of the titles indicate, e.g., The Texans, The Nevadan, Belle of the Yukon, The Doolins of Oklahoma, Carson City, Fort Worth, Santa Fe, even Canadian Pacific. But in this particular movie, Frontier Marshall, he played Wyatt Earp, which put him in Arizona. Here I was in Dresden, and at every turn I was being transported vicariously back to Arizona.

A thesis was now in gestation, so to speak, but I still didn't think that much about the matter, being much too excited about being in Europe for the first time with a busy itinerary to absorb me.

A couple of days later, at the Bayreuther Volksfest, at the end of a day spent touring opera houses and Wagner's homes and even meeting personally with composer Wolfgang Wagner, Richard’s grandson, I found myself in a packed beer hall behind a colossal seidel of pilsner and eyeing two Stetson wearing celebrants at the next table. They might have been from Texas, I thought, or even Arizona, but I was almost sure they were speaking German from what I could make out of their conversation in the general cacophony. A band was playing loudly, German songs, but, at some point it launched into an American country-Western favorite (the title of the song escapes me: the seidels were a foot tall and I was well into my second one).

In Germany, between the time I saw Rienzi in Dresden and attended a performance of Tristan und Isolde at the National Theatre in Munich, I was reminded of the American West so often that it eventually set me to wondering about the juxtaposition of the West with classical music. I remembered the unlikely score for High Noon by Russian-born composer Dimitri Tiomkin and his somewhat operatic music from the Italian Western, Once Upon a Time in the West.

Everybody knows about Italian Westerns, Spaghetti Westerns as they came to be known, filmed on Italy’s “frontier” and directed by Sergio Leone But on reflection, it occurred to me that it was a director newly arrived from a career in German cinema, Fritz Lang, who had made one of my favorite Westerns as a kid — The Return of Frank James.

Long before Leone teamed up with Clint Eastwood, silent-film cowboy star William S. Hart rode herd on the Hollywood concept of the West during the late 1910s and early ‘20s. Germany produced Western movies and Arizona had a high profile in many of them. Among these were Die Apachen (directed by E.A. Dupont, 1919), Der Apachenlord (directed by Fred Sauer, 1920), Bull Arizona: Der Wüstenadler (directed by Piel Jutzi, 1920). Die Rache der Mexikaners (directed by Joe Stoeckel, 1920). It is also worth noting that 16 years before Randolph Scott starred in The Last of the Mohicans (perhaps aptly pegged as an “Eastern Western”) in 1936, Bela Lugosi starred in the German version (Der letzte Mohikaner) in 1920.

Enough German Westerns have been made over the years to provide grist for the mill of a long academic treatise. In my limited space here, I can merely tip my hat to the fact that Germany's fascination with the American West is part of a tradition established just four decades after Wagner passed away. As Dennis Hopper says in the role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders' The American Friend, "What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?"

• Along the Way Archives