Germany's Fantasy of the Old West

Focus on the Koepnick article Unsettling America: German Westerns and Modernity (on OAK). What is Koepnick's argument? Is it convincing? What do you agree or disagree with?

The piece by Koepnick that we read was very interesting in its examination of the way the German film industry used the Western film genre. Koepnick begins by pointing out, "Transculturated through the cinema, the imagery of the American frontier provided, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, symbolic resources for assessing Germany's abrupt step into the age of machines, urban traffic, democratic will formation, and mechanical reproduction." In other words, as Koepnick shows in this piece how the Western genre was used primarily as a way of navigating the harsh terrain of Germany's confrontation with modernism, which many believed was embodied in Americanization. As he states, although making Westerns was a way of constructing their own national cinema, Germany used "Western imagery...as a catalyst to negotiate the meaning of Americanization and urbanization, and thus to contest the value of technological progress, mass culture, and democratization." Going on, he remarks that "the American past, imagined or real, could return forever through technological mediation, a spectacle for mass audiences, a simulacrum open for an ample set of different political agendas and conflicting ideological inscriptions." In essence, as Koepnick demonstrates, the Western genre, in its ability to help navigate modernism, presented an opportunity, using a modern tool (the cinema) to present mass audiences with a particular political or ideological point of view.

If I am reading Koepnick correctly, he is showing that this genre presented a much different and simpler view of the world that was opposed to modernism. In doing so, audiences would be viewing a fantasy. Koepnick alludes to this when he writes that "Portraits of bucolic homeland settings and idealized images of the American West became focal catalysts of fantasy production, offering imaginary redemption from cultural discontent: they sketched places 'of epic action, heroic individualism and liberated wildnerness,' helping to release the disenfranchised urbanite from the iron cage of modern routinization." This being the case, by opening oneself up to this and partaking in the fantasy, the audience member would also be opening themselves up to any type of political or ideological agenda that was inherent in that fantasy. This is why Koepnick points out later in the piece that films like Trenker's and others in the Western genre could be used, particularly during the Nazi period, to promote "the vision of a new man in service of the new political order."