Deutschland and the West

Radebeul, Germany

"Ja, wir haben Cowboy und Indianen Klubs. Natürlich."

"But you're Germans. How long have you had these cowboy and Indian clubs?"

"Viele Generations."

"Many generations? But . . ."

First, let's switch to English. Now, belly up to the bar, have a beer, and I'll tell you a tale about the Old West in das Vaterland.

The Germans' love affair with the American West began long ago, before the turn of the century. Germans are not fickle people. Even during two world wars, the Old West was still dear to their hearts.

The Japanese love the West, and they spend a lot of money here, but the Germans were far ahead when it came to starting their first cowboy club. And that's "club" as in memberships and dues, not country-western bar.

The French and Italians found the West only after World War II, when they saw American films with John Wayne and Randolph Scott.

The British are still searching.

But the Germans, ja, have been true and faithful to the lore of the West for more than a century. Yes, believe it or not, even Adolf Hitler.

THE WILD WEST THRIVES BUT GUESS WHERE?

Okay, but let's begin at the beginning. There were two events that sparked this love affair and provided enough fuel to keep it burning all these years. The first one, Americans know about. It, of course, was Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, which toured Europe several times, stopping at many locations in Germany in 1890 and again in 1905-06.

Who would not be thrilled with 400 cowboys and authentic Indians racing on horseback at breakneck speed across the huge field in Munich where Oktoberfest still is held every autumn? And what a stunt to make the populace sit up and pay attention: pretty little Annie Oakley calmly shooting a cigarette out of the mouth of the German crown prince, later Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Oakley commented years later that if she could have foreseen World War I, she would have missed.) Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show toured several European countries and probably still holds box-office records in some locations. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans - not just Germans - cheered the rescue of the Deadwood Stagecoach, the multitude of Indians in full regalia and war paint, and the Western-style horsemanship of both the Indians and the cowboys.

But it was a previous ingredient, more than Buffalo Bill's show, that most endeared the Old West to Germans. That ingredient was a convicted German swindler and counterfeiter who began writing Western novels while serving a prison sentence from 1865 through 1868.

Karl May (pronounced my), who lived from 1842 to 1912, was the German equivalent of Zane Grey, Ned Buntline, and James Fenimore Cooper all rolled into one. This short, mustachioed confidence man eventually wrote 74 highly romanticized novels about the American West, the Middle East, and the Orient. These books have been translated into 30 languages, including English, but May remains primarily a German treasure. More than 80 million of his books have been printed in just the German language. That's in a country of 79.5 million people, who stopped producing consumer products during and for some time after two major wars.

Ever the con man, May wrote his novels

IN GERMANY THAT'S WHERE

without having set foot in the foreign lands he so lavishly described. He gleaned his information from history books and newspapers and illustrated magazines that chronicled battles between the U.S. Cavalry and American Indians. The rest he simply made up. May's most beloved character is Winnetou (pronounced vin-a-too), a brave and noble Apache chief. Every German over the age of six knows about Winnetou. Walk into any German restaurant and ask the Germany-born bartender if he or she knows Karl May. The response will be: "Of course, Winnetou."

Everyone lining the bar looks so American

"Winnetou was an Apache chief who was so good and so pure," Holm Klein, a steel industrialist from Saarbrücken, said with much earnestness during a garden party in a meadow near Mannheim. "He never even had a woman. He was such a great chief that when he called a meeting of all the other Apache chiefs, they came." "There were only three Winnetou books. He died in the third one. It was very sad." Klein and the other Ger-

in their cowboy hats and boots. Then they speak and out comes German!

Looking like real wranglers, some of the 40 members of the Regensburg Cowboy Club relax at a meeting, which might include American history lessons, roping, cracking bullwhips, shooting with bows and arrows, and square dancing. STEFAN GRUBER (BELOW) Members of clubs in eastern Germany set up about 100 tepees for a powwow in a field in the state of Saxony. JOCHEN GIEL mans around the table lowered their beer glasses, sighed, and were silent for a few moments. Then Roswitha Webel, an office manager from Regensburg, added: "But, remember, he was in love with an Indian princess and went into her tent one night. That's all we know about what happened that night. She had to marry a white man as part of a peace treaty, and Winnetou never loved another.

righteous man. He never did anything wrong. When one of his friends was killed, he never said, 'Let's go kill someone back.'" Roswitha, who owns all 74 May books, bound in green leather, said she saw her first movie in 1963 when she was a girl. Of course it was Winnetou. "I still remember how I cried at the end when he died." The title role was played by French actor Pierre Brice. He became so typecast by that one film that he was never offered another part. No matter. Younger generations see the movie often on German television, and Brice earns a good living making guest appearances as Winnetou. In fact, if you asked our German bartender who Winnetou is, he might say: "An Apache chief," or he might say: "Pierre Brice." Karl May and Winnetou have become such a part of the German culture that, like the ubiquitous sauerkraut and sausage, they seem to go wherever Germans go. Marlies Haschke, a Regensburg artist, remembers her father reading Karl May books long before World War II, when her German family lived in the former Czechoslovakia. "Now I am a grandmother," she said. "Sometimes, if I am lucky, my sixand seven-year-old grandchildren let me play Winnetou's grandmother." Ingrid Morro Botero, who grew up near Heidelberg and now is a businesswoman in Phoenix, also has a complete set of the green leather-bound May books. "It's incredible. When Karl May described the rock spires and red cliffs, you would swear he wrote it while standing in Canyon de Chelly," Ingrid said. "It's hard to believe he wrote it without seeing it because he had the mountains, the desert, the Grand Canyon just exactly right."

"May's Winnetou was such a brave and Ingrid played cowboys and Indians as a child, too, but lost her taste for the game when her older brother tied her to a tree in the woods while reenacting an episode from a Winnetou book. Unfortunately for her, and later himself, the brother forgot about his little sister until hours later when she didn't show up for dinner. Children aren't the only Germans who play cowboys and Indians."

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cowboy-andIndian clubs sprinkled across Germany. No one knows just how many there are because they are not affiliated.

The oldest known cowboy club is the Plains Riders, established in Munich in 1930 by a man who yearned to emigrate to America but was stymied by hard times and responsibilities. Instead he made his own little piece of the Old West.

A newer piece of the Old West is the Regensburg Cowboy Club, founded in 1960 on a shady hill about a mile from the Danube River.

The city gave the club a long-term lease on the land at the edge of the city, and members turned it into a miniature Western town. There are two saloons. The sheriff's office is the club president's office. The Wells Fargo office is a tiny museum of Western clothes, pictures, furniture, and trinkets. The jail has two bunks for sleeping off too much beer. A deep tunnel cut into the stone under the hill is used as a beer cooler. Originally the tunnel was a World War II bomb shelter carved out by Polish prisoners of war.

The Regensburg Cowboy Club has 40 members. The oldest is 81, the youngest 19. Each member has a Western name. For example, Jürgen Schmid goes by Jack Drango. Peter Schuster, a rather large man, is Hoss. The president, Helmut Ring, is Jim, and his Frau is Daisy.

The Regensburg Cowboy Club, unlike some, is integrated. That is, one member of the group likes to dress up as an Indian. The club also has a Confederate cavalry soldier, a Union quartermaster sergeant, and a gambler, besides the usual array of wranglers and trappers.

THE WILD WEST THRIVES IN GERMANY

Meetings are on Friday and Saturday nights. An agenda might include lessons on American history, especially the Civil War and Indian wars. Sometimes members and their wives practice square dancing. They also share research and pictures that will make their costumes more authentic. Meetings are usually held in the big saloon, and beer is always available. The official club drink, a must for first-time visitors, is a "prairie fire": tequila and Tabasco.

American visitors might need a stiff drink. Everyone lining the bar looks so American in their cowboy hats and boots. Then they speak and out comes German!

On Sunday afternoons, members gather to do chores around the club and practice their cowboy-and-Indian skills: throwing knives and tomahawks, roping, cracking bullwhips, and shooting with bows and arrows. Every few weeks, they can show off these skills when the clubs in a region meet for a competition. Regensburg's Anton Wittner, aka Tracy Black, usually strolls away the big winner in local meets.

"Cowboy clubs give us a special kind of freedom to throw knives and tomahawks and have an open campfire," Tracy said in German, as he shoved back his black Stetson, leaned his tall frame against the bar, and hooked a boot heel on the brass rail. "We all live in the city, all very close together. You can't do these kind of things in your backyard."

There is a limit to a German cowboy's freedom. Guns are prohibited at the club, and horses are prohibitively expensive to keep in Germany.

While cowboy and Indian clubs easily flourished in the former West Germany, clubs in the East miraculously survived and multiplied despite the communist government's anti-American stance. Today there are an estimated 50 clubs, all Indian, in eastern Germany. Each summer, about 600 German "Indians" gather there for a powwow in a grassy field in the southern part of the state of Saxony. One hundred leatherclad tepees transform the scene into a vision of the Great Plains.

Jochen Giel, whose Indian name is Swift Horse, founded the Leipzig Indian Club behind the Iron Curtain in 1958. It has 20 members.

"The clubs have different reasons for being," he said over a glass of wine at a street cafe. "We have a tradition of having a Western folk fest in Taucha, the nearby village where I live, which began 100 years ago when the Buffalo Bill show came to Leipzig.

"Already in 1930, my father had a beautiful Indian costume. As a child from 1910 and into the 1920s, he went to Indian shows around here. I guess starting the club was just a continuation of a family tradition."

Members meet once or twice a month to share what they have studied about various Indian tribes and work on their costumes. Swift Horse's costume is Mandan, a North Dakota tribe that was wiped out by smallpox at the end of the 19th century. It took Swift Horse, an engraver by trade, four years to fashion his near-authentic costume. He has eagle feathers in his warbonnet, bear claws on his necklace, elk hide for his

tunic. He used quill needles to stitch the beadwork. His one concession was using glass beads from Czechoslovakia.

"I think that's okay, though, because the Indians used quills until they got glass beads in trade from the white man," Swift Horse said, seeking approval. "Even then, the beads probably came from Czechoslovakia."

He knows these bits of Indian trivia because of the extensive research he has done at both the Folk Museum in Leipzig and the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, a suburb of Dresden.

May, who lived in a three-story house in Radebeul, finally traveled to America in 1908, long after he had become rich from his Western novels. He returned from America with a trove of Indian clothing and artifacts. His widow and a family friend added to the collection with later trips, and the museum was opened December 1, 1928.

The big house, named Villa Shatterhand after Winnetou's sidekick, Old Shatterhand, holds the collection concerning May's life and works. Hidden behind the house and dense trees is a huge two-story log house called Villa Bärenfett (Bear Fat), the name of Old Shatterhand's home.

Inside Villa Bärenfett is a collection of Indian artifacts whose quality equals that in any museum in the United States. The items were purchased from the original owners before authentic Indian clothing, jewelry, and baskets were considered historic. The 15 glass-encased mannequins were sculpted to resemble the facial and body styles of the tribes whose clothing they model. Other glass cases hold baskets, blankets, tools, weapons, papoose boards, and even human scalps. The displays and buildings are remarkably clean and wellmaintained.

Through all these years, the private museum has survived without government assistance because of the quarter of a million paying customers who visited it annually, even during the coldest days of the Cold War. Visitors were allowed to see only the Indian collection in Villa Bärenfett, as a study in anthropology and as propaganda to show the oppression of Indians at the hands of the capitalist American government. The May collection was closed.

"Karl May was Adolf Hitler's favorite author," said Helmuth Grimmer, curator of the museum. "This was of great concern to the East German government. The government also had problems with the church. In several of Karl May's books, he brings up different religions, such as Islam, and

The most popular attraction at No Name City is an honest-to-goodness live American Indian.

says they are correct. The government also felt that as a swindler and ex-convict, Karl May was a bad example for children, so they didn't want to make a national hero of him."

May's books were banned in East German bookstores and libraries, but for 40 years the novels were passed secretly from hand to hand. The museum was renamed the American Indian Museum.

In 1983 May was reinstated as a favorite son because of his humanistic portrayal of Indians, blacks, the elderly, and other groups.

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, museum ticket sales have declined. That's because, Grimmer said, former East Germans are free to travel to Western countries.

Still one of the most popular tourist destinations for all Germans east and west is No Name City, a Western-theme town in the Munich suburb of Poing. No Name City, named after the mining camp in the movie Paint Your Wagon, has everything from Boot Hill to a Mexican cantina on its five acres.

But the most popular attraction at No Name City is an honest-to-goodness live American Indian.

Nicky, the Buffalo Child, is a tall 71year-old Cherokee-Choctaw who came to Germany with the U.S. Army in 1946, married a local girl, and stayed on. As Nicky silently beads a moccasin or armband while sitting in the biggest Indian sod house in Europe, children in Indian costumes shyly approach the dark, forbiddinglooking character. He speaks to them quietly in German. Soon he has his long arm gently around their shoulders, and they are posing while Daddy takes a picture. Incidently, Pierre Brice, the Winnetou movie actor, is Nicky's close friend.

More than 200,000 visitors, almost all Germans, walk the dusty streets of No Name City each year.

"I think Karl May did ignite the fascination of the Old West for most Germans, but I think it is more than that," said Heinz Bründl, No Name City's creator and general manager. "The Apache, the Sioux, the Cheyenne. There were so few of them in such a big space. We Germans are fascinated because they had such personal freedom in such a wide-open area. They were able to come and go as they pleased. America is such a beautiful country, so open and free."