Red Westerns

The American West is about as far from East Germany as one can get, politically, geographically, and philosophically, but Germans have a long—some might say bizarre—love affair with America’s past, and, in particular, the lives of the Indians who roamed the plains.¹ Some Germans spend their summers living in teepees, wearing feathered headdresses and facepaint, and dancing around campfires. This phenomenon could be observed in both East and West Germany. If anything beyond being German united both halves of Germany, it was their love of Native Americans.

During the sixties, when westerns made by the three Sergios (Leone, Corbucci, and Martino) became all the rage, West Germany started to get in on the fun, most notable in Italian co-production of the dozens of pseudo-sequels to Corbucci’s Django. It was only a matter of time before East Germany decided to try their hand at making a few of these as well, but the GDR had a card up their sleeve that neither the United States nor Italy could play. As a socialist country, rejected capitalism and came to the genre with a socialist interpretation. While the US films championed the bravery and pioneering spirit of the white people who settled in the West, and the Italians focused on the corruption inherent in the early western towns, the East Germans turned away from the antics of the cowboys and settlers and looked to the people that others were using as villains and sidekicks: the American Indians.²

Thus the “Red Western” was born, although a more correct term for these films would be Indianerfilme (Indian Films). DEFA made at least seventeen of these films. Sadly, only a few of these have been provided with subtitles. Fortunately, some of these are the most important and the best of DEFA’s Indianerfilme.

The Sons of the Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin)

The first East German western was based on a book by East German author Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. Like the popular German author Karl May—whose work was frowned on in East Germany because of Adolf Hitler’s love for the books—Welskopf-Henrich was fascinated with the American West.³ Unlike May, she did far more research to ensure she got the details of Indian life accurate than May did (May’s actual knowledge of Native Americans was woefully inadequate). The film starred a Yugoslavian actor named Gojko Mitić, who would go on to star in nearly all of DEFA’s westerns.

Chingachgook, The Great Snake (Chingachgook, die grosse Schlange)

The next western from DEFA was based on The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper, like May, wrote more from imagination than experience. He wasn’t much of a writer (see Mark Twain’s ​​Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences for more on that) yet his books are still popular today. Perhaps because they told inarguably exciting stories. This film is considered one of the better film adaptations of Cooper’s work.

Apaches (Apachen)

Here’s one that is based on an actual event that occurred in Santa Rita, New Mexico in 1837. Hollywood never bothered making a movie out of this story.⁴ The movie does play loose with a lot of the facts, but so did every American western made at that time. The fact that it took an East German film company to put the story on film is just sad.

Blood Brothers (Blutsbrüder)

Have you seen Dances With Wolves? Most people have. The film went on to win five Academy Awards in 1991, including Best Picture and people all over heralded the film for its new approach to a western story. The only problem with this is that East Germany had already told a nearly identical story back in 1975. Blood Brothers might also be the first film to use an early prototype of the Steadicam, but I’ve never seen anyone talk about this.

All of the films listed above are available either for rental or to stream on Kanopy. There are a two other films available from The DEFA Film Library, that have English subtitles, but are not available streaming:

Osceola

One could argue that this is only a “western” in relation to East Germany for it takes place in Florida. It tells the story of the betrayal by the United States of the Seminole Indians in Florida when President Jackson decided they wanted the land they gave to the Seminoles back (shouldn’t the term “Indian Giver” be reversed?). It’s an ugly chapter in American history, which made it a perfect story for East Germany to tell.

Sing, Cowboy, Sing

The only musical western DEFA ever made. It stars East Germany’s favorite American pop star, Dean Reed. It’s a silly film, but it comes the closest of any East Germany movie to looking like a Hollywood western. Perhaps because it was written and directed by Reed himself.

There are plenty more Indianerfilme that you can rent from the DEFA Film Library or buy as region 2 PAL discs if your up for it, here are a three without subtitles that I recommend:

The Falcon’s Trail (Spur des Falken)

This was the first of the DEFA Indianerfilme that was a western in the usual sense of the word. Unlike The Sons of the Great Bear and Chingachgook, The Great Snake, which were made before it, The Falcon’s Trail focuses as much on the white townspeople as it does on the Indians. The difference here is that the story is told from a Native American perspective. When the Indians attack a train, we are rooting for them, not the people on the train.

White Wolves (Weiße Wölfe)

A sequel to The Falcon’s Trail, White Wolves continues the story after the events in the first film. It’s largely the same story that John Ford told in Cheyenne Autumn, but without Ford’s inherent bias against the Indians (even when he was attempting to tell their side of the story).

Fatal Error (Tödlicher Irrtum)

Of the three German-only films listed here, this one is the most likely candidate for subtitling for one simple reason: Martin Scorsese. Long before Scorsese made Killers of the Flower Moon, DEFA made Fatal Error—the first film since the silent era to deal with the deadly events following the discovery of oil on Indian land.⁵ To its detriment, the film is primarily a fictional account with few of the actual details of the story. Nonetheless, it’s another example of how good DEFA was when it came to chronicling the more brutal aspect of the American West at a time when Hollywood and the rest of America chose to look the other way.

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1. And it does seem to be specific to the plains Indians (with occasional Apaches, thanks to Karl May). I’ve never seen Germans roleplay the Tohono Oʼodham.

2. I realize that some people might find the use of the term “American Indian” for Native Americans offensive, but life’s too short to worry about things like that. I’ll be using both terms interchangeably.

3. Karl May (pronounced my). Karl May is almost unknown in America, but he was and still is the most popular writer of western fiction in Germany. Most of these involved an Apache Indian chief named Winnetou and his adventures with his white blood brother Old Shatterhand. May never visited the American West, getting any further west in America than Buffalo, New York.

4. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain has a script on file for a movie titled Massacre at Santa Rita by Kenneth Sylvia, but the film was never made.

5. There was a 1927 silent film about the events titled Tragedies of the Osage Hills, but the film saw limited release in Oklahoma only. After a fight between the director and producer, the few prints of the film that were made disappeared. It’s now considered a lost film. For more on this, see the article in The Hollywood Reporter.

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