Even though the individual films were not too important, the entire series of westerns based on May’s novels were central to the emergence of the genre of European Western, in particular its Italian version – Spaghetti Westerns. If nothing else, the German Westerns based on the works of Karl May are the predecessors of great Westerns by Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Solima, Duccio Tessari and Tonino Velerii



Recently I made a list of films I would take with me to a deserted island. Among the ten films there were four westerns: The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West. My twenty years younger friend, the editor of a popular weekly magazine, agreed only with Rio Bravo on my list and added that in his list he would have included gangster films instead of westerns - Goodfellas, One Upon a Time in America, Godfather I and II and Scarface – and concluded that the reason for it was the generation gap between us: I grew up watching westerns and he gangster movies. And he was right.

In my case, my love for westerns and the Wild West began with Karl May and Winnetou. All the kids from my generations read Karl May, loved Indians and preferred to be them rather than cowboys on playgrounds. Karl May was our first encounter with the rottenness of white men and the nobleness of other races – Indians, Arabians, South American natives and others.

Later I found out that our boyish devotedness to Karl May was nothing special. He was equally adored by Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler, which proves that completely different people – children as well as grownups – find completely different stories and that May was universal enough for all spiritual horizons, including those devoted to evil.

The German philosopher Ernst Bloch called him the “Shakespeare of the youth” and the “best German storyteller”, and faithful readers of May’s novels – during all their lives, from childhood to old age – included, as previously mentioned Albert Einstein, Herman Hesse, Karl Liebknecht and Albert Schweitzer. If the united Europe should have to chose one single European writer who throughout his life fought against all forms of intolerance –racism, religious intolerance, hatred towards minorities and all forms of diversity, including the once widely despised gay community – it would have to be Karl May (who was not gay). His best friend was the German illustrator and painter Sascha Schneider, who was a homosexual and had to escape from Imperial Germany to Italy. The last and 98th volume of May’s collected works is his abundant correspondence with Sascha Schneider.

In the early 1960’s, when I saw the first German film based on Karl May’s novels, Treasure of Silver Lake (I watched it on opening day in the packed screening of the Tuškanac movie theater, which was then called Sloboda), I was already hooked on American Westerns and started to question the humanist-adventurous fantasies of Karl May as something completely different from “the real thing” starring heroes such as James Stewart, John Wayne, Richard Widmark and Gregory Peck.

To be honest, Treasure of Silver Lake, at that point turned out quite a disappointment for me. Not because I compared it to American Westerns, which seemed much more convincing, but because the film was not faithful to May’s novel, but was rather “modernized”, embellished and shot in settings that I easily recognized as our “plain” Dalmatian inlands, since every year I passed through them on the way to the coast, and not the border between Texas and Mexico. Later when I saw Winnetou III and noticed the typical Dalmatian dry stone wall (that I climbed every summer to reach figs and grapes) at the entrance to some “Texan” town, Old Shatterhand and the bad guys speeding on horses through the narrow streets of some Dalmatian renaissance small town – that in the films plays the Spanish-Mexican conquistador architecture – it all struck me as very funny. I had no idea that what was funny to me – including the typical physiognomy of extras from Lika and Dalmatia who played Indians – was to German and international audiences not at all funny, but in fact rather grand and spectacular. For German viewers our rocky country, rivers, forests, lakes and waterfalls were a more beautiful Wild West than those of American Westerns, and Martin Böttcher’s music far more attractive than the ingenious scores by Dmitri Tiomkin and Elmer Berstein!

Treasure of Silver Lake, the Winnetou trilogy, Old Surehand, Frontier Hellcat, Rampage at Apache Wells and other films inspired by May’s novels were not true Westerns, nor were they entirely faithful to Karl May’s originals. In only seven years, from 1962 to 1968, eleven films were made starring the American actor Lex Barker as the white hero Old Shatterhand and the French actor Pierre Brice the Apache chief Winnetou. These were beautiful escapist fairy tales – a true German national local and export global product, sort of a German Hollywood, which did not last very long, from the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, when the first films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorf, Wim Wenders and other stars of the German film renaissance appeared.

The most famous director of films about Winnetou was Dr. Harald Reinl, who specialized in the genre of crime dramas based on novels by Edgar Wallace, as well as horror films. Westerns were not his strong point and his Winnetous are not as good as his crime films, but he did manage to evoke the Wild West as a fairy tale place of fantasy for German and European audiences. Even though the individual films were not too important, the entire series of Westerns based on May’s novels were central to the emergence of the genre of European Western, in particular its Italian incarnation – Spaghetti Westerns. If nothing else, German Westerns based on the works of Karl May were the predecessors of great Westerns by Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Solima, Duccio Tessari and Tonino Velerii.

It is evident how universal and popular the European westerns Were as a politically infused Cold-War phenomenon. The films about Winnetou were produced by West Germany. For some mysterious reason these films, as well as novels by Karl May, were banned in East Germany. However, the popularity of the films transcended the Cold-War borders and a decision was reached that the socialist Germany had to strike a blow to the capitalist West.

If you watch the Winnetou trilogy carefully you will notice a handsome tanned warrior near Pierre Brice who perfectly resembles an ideal Indian. This is the extra Gojko Mitić from Leskovac, an athletic ornament to doctor Harald Reinl’s Westerns. He was found and employed in East Germany to act as a noble and brave Indian who fights the capitalist white men, just like Pierre Brice in Winnetou. From 1965, starting with the film Sons of Great Bear, until the late 1970’s Gojko Mitić starred in twelve Indian Westerns (Tecumseh, Osceola, Ulzana, Chingachgook, The Scout, Trail of the Falcon, Apachen and others) which were huge hits throughout the entire former Eastern bloc. Gojko Mitić was so popular that there were documentaries made about his fans whose entire childhoods and youths were deeply influenced by him and his characters. One Bulgarian punk and ska band even made a song about him entitled Bate Goiko.

Of course, had there been no bans of Karl May and West German films about Winnetou, there would have been no Gojko Mitić, nor the alternative ideological films featuring anti-capitalist Indian heroes. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Western and Eastern Germany, Gojko Mitić got his first opportunity to play the original hero from Karl May’s novels in the TV series Winnetou, and thus symbolically united the divided country in its love for the same hero, same writer and the same fairy-tale like world of Westerns.

What remains to us of these films in Croatia? There remains the fact that we were part of one great European film project, that for the first time our landscapes and wild nature shone on international film screens, and that our cinematography was so advanced that our set designer, Vladimir Tadej, worked among the creative team of people who created Winnetou. His inspired work is remembered in the minds and fantasies of tens of millions viewers even today. (Živorad Tomić)