Women's and Gender Studies

This essay discusses the German fans of author Karl May's Westerns against the backdrop of a broader community of German hobbyists devoted to the American West, as this community developed after 1912 – examining the impact of political repression, war, and the division of Germany after 1945 on these fan communities and their interpretations of the American West. German fans of the 'Old West' (both 'Indian' re-enactment hobbyists and fans of Karl May's more fictionalized story world) created their own bodies of knowledge and celebratory performances over the last century, reinterpreting and exploring the world of May's novels. The historical American West is part of the 'Primary World,' as defined by Mark Wolf, but this essay argues that the diverse versions of the West created by German fans can be understood as partly or entirely secondary, since neither May, nor many of the first generations of German fans, ever visited the American West. Both May's stories and fans' interpretations of the West were partly based on fiction, even as many tried to recreate an 'authentic' world that they had never seen. The story world created by May, and the broader fictionalized world of the American West created by German fans, was also transmedial before media convergence, tentatively before 1945 and increasingly so after 1960. But the German versions of Karl May's stories and the American West that extended across varied media during the twentieth century were often inconsistent, created by a variety of producers as a result of political regime turnover in twentieth century Germany, the expiration of copyright over May's novels, and the growing consumer culture of West Germany after 1945. The lack of any centralized editorial control over transmedia versions of both Karl May's story world and the fictionalized American West helped German fans to make the American West their own, creating their own versions of the 'Western' stories, characters, and cultures suited to the politics and culture of each decade, and circulating these interpretations among other fans.

This chapter examines the fandom that grew up around Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series, and the memorial sites ("homesites") and heritage tourism associated with the fandom.  From the time of the fandom's origins in the 1950s, fans perceived the stories and homesites as important lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) both for the imagined world of Wilder, and for the history of American white colonial settlers.  Originally, the storyworld and homesites were seen as important relics of the settlement of the West and the creation of American national identity.  But the resurgence of Indigenous political activism and a new understanding of the history of the American West challenged this traditional white view of American history and identity. Changing public history narratives about white settlers and Indigenous cultures fragmented white Americans’ understanding of their history. As a result, some Little House fan organizations and fan scholars –like the public history sector that they overlap with – are working through the process of including Indigenous Americans in their depictions of the historical
world where the stories are set. At the same time, conservative fans amplified their support for older, Turnerian understandings of Western history. The books and homesites have been repurposed in ways that reflect current U.S. political polarization. This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

This book is a series of intriguing essays organized around the relationship between nationalism and housekeeping in Germany. Nancy R. Reagin draws our attention to a cultural layer of nationalist thinking by and for women, among an "imagined community of German housewives" (p. 69). She draws on prescriptive literature by housekeeping experts, housewives' associations, and government agencies, mostly penned by self-conscious nationalists of the urban middle classes. Reagin shows how these speakers considered housekeeping to be an integral part of German national identity and their own nationalist aspirations. She argues that a bourgeois quest to "invent Germans" after unification in 1870 drove this process (p. 3).