Diving into a world of Wild West nostalgia when visiting the International Country Festival in Berlin in February, recent BCB graduate Mandula van den Berg wrote an article on “Die ostdeutschen Cowboys” (The East German Cowboys) that was published in the German weekly newspaper
Die Zeit. Therein, van den Berg describes the strange admiration for cowboys and "Amerika", which is especially prevalent in East Germany, and discusses the often conflicting and sometimes problematic representations of classical American tropes in Germany. In her article, she locates the historical roots for the nostalgia with the emergence of Karl May adventure novels that were published at the end of the 19th century and that rose to a newfound popularity after the Second World War and fascinated young and old for decades to come. Their narratives and symbolism has been appropriated differently throughout Germany’s divided history, and has provided easily identifiable templates of oppressor and oppressed, and good and bad for a political spectrum that ranges from the far right to the far left.
Comparing the debates around the confederate flag in the US and its usage in Germany that reminds her of a requisite rather than a political symbol, van den Berg asks whether the German Cowboys trivialize US history and racist ideology or whether there is (also) something that we can learn from an approach to history that imagines new, more complex and ambiguous orders and more self-determined forms of communal interaction.
Read the article in the
Zeit >>
Meta: Type(s): Berlin,Student | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |
