A New, "Western" Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s

Abstract

n 1952 one of West Germany's foremost experts on youth and film, Fritz Stiickrath, wrote a damning critique of film westerns, in which he connected the consumption of movie westerns directly to male juvenile delinquency. Stiickrath titled his piece The Attack of the Ogallala on the Youth, thus suggesting that both western films and American Indians were dangerous. In 1956 he wrote another, much more positive article on the same topic, now arguing that westerns could in fact help boys to distinguish between good and evil. A year later, the West German staterun television station broadcast a show with the title Nothing against Wild-West-Films, during which an education professor maintained that westerns provided an outlet for the excessive energies of young men and thus fulfilled an important societal function.' These three examples stand for changing West German attitudes toward westerns, which transformed from a general rejection of the genre in both dime novels and movies to increasing acceptance as a tool for shaping proper West German men. In this article, I examine briefly what was at stake in this change of heart. While my aim is not a general critique of westerns, I suggest that some shifts within the genre may have contributed to transforming German views of westerns in the postwar period. More important, I argue that the changing West German attitudes toward westerns have to be understood in the context of the legacy of National Socialism and the cold war division of Germany. Although my focus is on West Germany, I draw some comparisons to East German reactions. In doing so, I investigate debates over westerns as a site for the reconstruction of East and West German masculinities. Finally, I explore briefly how changing