SIEGFRIED RIDES AGAIN: WESTERNS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE THIRD REICH

Abstract

The paper investigates the popularity of the Western genre in Germany during the 1930s as an integral part of the machinery of fantasy production that was both Nazi cinema and Nazi politics. While it deploys a critical concept of cinematic genres that relates generic conventions to the dynamics of spectatorial expectations, desires and investments, as well as specific imperatives of the entertainment industry, it traces the status of the cowboy within a (fascist) society that relied heavily on a constant mobilization of cultural resources for the sake of political legitimation. Nazi Westerns, the paper argues, indicate a comprehensive redefinition of the location of culture under the condition of fascism, while they at the same time remind us of the fact that Nazi culture was far less homogeneous and autochthon than its proponents in the past and most historiographers still today would like to suggest. In an analysis of Herbert Selpin's Water for Canitoga, the paper further shows how Nazi Westerns deploy the phallic rhetoric of the traditional Western, its idiom of masculinity and physical immediacy, in order to suggest surprising continuities between the nineteenth-century world of cowboys and the twentieth-century cosmos of engineers: German Westerns of the 1930s invite their spectators to imaginary voyages to the Far West that help revamp ideological formations of the nineteenth century – Wagner's romantic anti-capitalism – for the twentieth century only to avow and disavow simultaneously the technological faces of modernity. As they celebrate technological progress as a triumph of cultural forces, these Nazi Westerns render modern technological means as catalysts to explore the power of elemental forces, the rhythmic timelessness of pre-modern life; Nazi Westerns stage a complex protest against modernity by means of modernity's own tools of technological mediation and representation.