At 11:15 PM 2/10/1999 Tom Smith wrote:
>stuart wrote:
>>
>> When I was in American Studies at Kansas, we had a steady stream of German
>> students and the first thing they wanted to study was cowboys and indians
>
>A lotta that's probably the lingering influence of Karl May
>(1842-1912), whose idealized tales of cowboys'n'indians
>are still popular. May wrote plenty of well-researched
>novels about the West (which, incidentally, he'd never seen
>- his career crashed when he started pretending he'd
>actually done all the stuff he described in the books).
>Generations of schoolkids have been hooked on the stuff,
>including Albert Schweizer and Hitler. Howard Lamar's 1998
>"New Encyclopedia of the American West" calls May's huge
>influence "pervasive and continuing."
>Hey, everybody like a good yarn!
>Tom Smith
Yeah, read a bit about Karl May the last time I was in heaven, er, NW New
Mexico/Northern Arizona. All the major and minor "Four Corners" tourist
sites have a large numnber of German tourists, which baffled me till I read
about May. Apparently May was sort of the Zane Gray of Germany, but in
May's books ("PC" years before their time) the Indians are the heroes,
noble and heroic in resisting the depredations of the ever-present white
settlers and often evil US Cavalry. Seems to me like I remember there being
a place in Germany that's sort of a combination summer camp/fantasy camp
for adults, where you camp out (as an "indian") and actually try to live
some of the culture of May's books. If so, coming to the US Southwest would
be quite the Mecca.
ya tah hey,
b.s.
"The truth ain't always what we need, sometimes we need to hear a beautiful
lie." -Bill Lloyd
