Growing up in Tucson, Natalie Koch used to dress up like a cowgirl, go to rodeos, and take trips to Tombstone. Like a lot of kids, she was fascinated by Old West culture — or at least, the version of it that American movies often portray.
These days, Koch is a professor at Syracuse University, where she specializes in political geography. Among other things, she studies the way that spatial relationships interact with political relationships.
In an article for a publication called “The Anti-Atlas,” Koch wrote about Western movies — but not the American ones.
Germany, it turns out, also has a significant cinematic tradition of stories set in the Old West. Koch joined The Show to discuss how they expand the scope of the genre in fascinating ways.
Full conversation
NATALIE KOCH: My family heritage is German, primarily German, but I hadn't actually spent a lot of time there when I was young. And so I started to go to Germany quite a bit later when I was in graduate school, and that's when I started to watch these German films that were called Westerns, but they were not filmed in the U.S. West, but filmed in Yugoslavia. And a lot of the ideas were similar to what I had encountered when I was growing up, but they were also very different. Like the landscapes were different, the ideas and the way that they spoke, and constructed the Wild West was, was rather jarring for me to encounter.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. What were the stories that were being told in these versions of, of the Wild West?
KOCH: The first sort of Wild West stories came out, not necessarily in film, but in the books of Karl May, who, he's kind of known to be the most selling author in German. And his stories about the Wild West were attached to this one character whose name was Winnetou, and his first book about Winnetou was published in 1875, so this was like going way, way back.
DINGMAN: Wow.
KOCH: Yeah, and the Winnetou stories were not made into films until 1962. And that was when the first German Western film came out. It was called “Treasure of Silver Lake.”
This really, like, shocked the film company when they released it. They did not expect it to be such a success, but it turned into just this huge blockbuster and then sort of catapulted these Wild West films into this whole series that became quite beloved in Germany in the 1960s.
DINGMAN: Wow. So, I mean, this is always a very interesting thing, right? When one country takes the mythology or the lore of another country and presents their take on it, oftentimes, no matter how “accurate” they're trying to be, this very different perspective ends up imbuing the storytelling, right?
KOCH: Karl May had never been to the United States, like he didn't know anything about the West, like he really made up a lot of the stuff and that that's more or less what happened in the films as well. But, one thing that became really interesting as I started to look into this history of these films is that, the films that I'm talking about right now, like the Winnetou stories from the 1960s, this was just the West German version.
So, in at this time in the 1960s, Germany was of course divided between east and west, and it wasn't until 1966 that East Germany released their first Western film, and the storyline in the East German films was a really strong critique of like Western imperialism, following the sort of anti-capitalist account of the Soviet and communist agenda. And so in this, you could see how they talked about the evils of American settler colonialism and capitalism in, in that particular storyline, which of course was quite different in the West German ones.
DINGMAN: That's fascinating to imagine. Can you give us an example of what that looked like in one of the films?
KOCH: Yeah, so, well, it might, it might help just to compare two different films. So, the West German film, like the first one that came out in, “The Treasure of Silver Lake,” or even the second one, “Apache Gold.” In these films, there's two main characters, the white guy who comes and is like settling the U.S. Southwest, and the Native American figure who's supposed to be Apache, they work together and they, like, the white settler sort of helps and becomes friends with Winnetou, they become blood brothers, etc. etc. So, it's kind of the story of companionship and cooperation.
In the East German films, by contrast, there's none of that. It is all about antagonism. The white settlers are evil. They are coming to steal the Native American land, and there's really only this kind of antagonism. And even when there are the white settlers portrayed in these films, they play a rather limited role. So it's, it's much more the sort of communist storyline of lifting up the people who are oppressed in this particular situation, and then the Native Americans become the heroes in the East German films.
DINGMAN: That is fascinating. It's very interesting to me that East German filmmakers at that time would choose stories from the American West to advance these sorts of themes in a story. Was there any sense that they were doing that because a film that tried to tell a similar story with East German characters rather than American characters wouldn't have been allowed, or wouldn't have been as well received?
KOCH: I think it was simply that across the communist world, they had become really enchanted by Western films. And the, the main reason that some people point to for this is that in 1960, “The Magnificent Seven,” that film was allowed into the Soviet Union, and it became this instant sensation. People in the Soviet Union became obsessed with Westerns and this kind of spread into the communist countries and to the East as well.
And Westerns had just shown themselves to be incredibly popular. And so, the Soviet critique was that it was just capitalist propaganda. They wanted to say, “OK, well, if the genre is really popular, then how can we do it with our ideological message?” And that's when the Soviets started to make some of their own westerns, and then the East Germans, they took this up in 1966 with their first Western, “The Sons of Great Bear.”
DINGMAN: As you learned more about this, how did it affect your recollections of, you know, your youthful cowgirl cosplay back in Tucson and also your thoughts about the way that we tell those kinds of Old West stories here in the U.S.
KOCH: I have to say my immediate reaction to watching the first German films was like, “this is ridiculous, this looks totally fake.” But as I reflected on it, I realized that that sort of theater of what I was critiquing in the German films is actually something that I was part of when I was growing up in the U.S. Southwest.
So, there's this kind of fantasy and positive story that gets attached to the Wild West narratives in Arizona today, that is, well, it erases a lot of violence and it erases a lot of the critiques that the East German films were making, about U.S. imperial expansion into the U.S. Southwest. And so, reflecting on the falseness of those German films made me realize that I actually had just been fully imbibing that Western lore that romanticized that past, within my upbringing in the U.S. Southwest.
