The American West of Karl May
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2732880 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard H Cracroft (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1967 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 249 |
| Publication date | 1967-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2710789 |
| OpenAlex | W2321420917 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
have made the Wild West of North America as exciting to German Biirger and their children as to their American counterparts. Indeed, in West Germany, sellout movies, television and the popular Karl Festival at Bad Segeburg propagate the image of May's American West to a German nation which, in spite of space-age interests, never seems to weary of the marvelous adventures of May's two famous equivalents of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook-Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, the noble chief of the Apaches. These two indefatigable adventurers have fulfilled a need of the romantic German Geist, and German readers have made Karl a perpetual favorite, the likes of which have never really been seen by Americans. May's distinctive image of the American West is perpetuated through nearly forty volumes of thrilling adventures; and his eight-foot shelf of published works has been translated into more than twenty cultural languages, including Volaplik and Braille-but not English. 1 May's work has been so influential on several generations of German youth that Der Spiegel claimed recently that May has advanced to be a kind of Praeceptor Germaniae, whose influence, without doubt, is greater than that of any other German author between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann.2 The obvious task, then, is to trace the image of the American West which Karl has thrust upon the German man in the street-the image of the frontiersmen, Indians and customs of a distant land which had really never seen. This picture, for the American reader at least, is fascinating, for Karl May's mythic American West varies startlingly from the West-mythic or real-familiar to Americans
American west · Ethnology · Political science · Sociology · History
| Citations per year | 0.21 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1997 - 2020 (24) |
| Highly cited | No |