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Chingachgook, The Great Snake
When DEFA started making westerns (Indianerfilme), they first looked to literature for stories. The only writer who was definitely off limits was Karl May, the most popular writer of western fiction in...
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Apaches
Hollywood has always had an ugly relationship with Apaches. Even at their most sympathetic (most notably in Broken Arrow and The Battle at Apache Pass) they are portrayed as ruthlessly violent. Most of...
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Blood Brothers
In 1990, actor/director Kevin Costner made a film called Dances With Wolves. The film told the story of a U.S. Army soldier stationed out west who learns the ways of the local Indian tribe and...
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The Falcon’s Trail
When it came to telling the truth about the American West, the East Germans had it all over Hollywood. While Hollywood was still portraying Indians as brutal savages, DEFA’s Indianerfilme gave a much...
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White Wolves
As discussed in previous articles here, the Western genre, so popular in America, afforded an excellent opportunity for the folks at DEFA to explore the dangers of capitalism without having to...
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Fatal Error
With the protests at Standing Rock, and recent plans to privatize Indian lands for their oil deposits, this is an excellent time to take a look at Fatal Error (Tödlicher Irrtum), a 1970 western from...
View ArticleOsceola
The shocking history of actions by the United States against Native Americans and blacks was a source of great delight to East Germany’s leaders. Here was a country that boasted about its freedom and...
View ArticleRed 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,...
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