Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West

This book demonstrates how the two adversaries of the Cold War, West Germany and East Germany, endeavored to create two distinct and unique German identities. This proved to be a complicated process whereby two newly created German states chose myths from another country located in another hemisphere to come to terms with their own recent past and articulate a vision for a better future. Amidst the Cold War rivalry and in facing the troubling Nazi past, Karl May Westerns became the quintessence of the German Western tradition and provided essential understanding of German-Indian relations. Furthermore, the production of Karl May films instantaneously triggered the production of Westerns in East Germany which proved tremendously popular. In their endeavor to claim legitimacy, the German cinematic representation of the American West became an important cultural weapon of mass dissemination during the Cold War. While attempting to portray what it meant to be German, the competition between the two German states resulted in the creation of transnational productions, with transnational heroes, in a transnational setting, eagerly embraced on both sides of the Iron Curtain as their own.

Pawel Goral is a Lecturer in the history department at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA.