Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sizzling over campfires Wurst instead of baked beans? And as for the hard stuff being downed in the saloon, wasn't it Steffens Pils and Schnaps instead of redeye? And those redskins turning a little too red in the 90° heat, weren't they powwowing in German? The answer, indeed, was ja. The scene was the long Whitsunday weekend in Bocklemünd near Cologne, where 2,500 members of West Germany's Western Bund gathered in a meadow to dress up as cowboys, Indians and Civil War soldiers and live the life...
...German fad for the Old West dates back to the 1890s, when Buffalo Bill toured Germany with enormous success. His visit coincided with the popularity of potboilers by Karl May, who wrote Zane Grey-style novels about an Old West he had never seen. Since then, with May's books selling in the millions, Germany has never forgotten its home on the range...
This year, for the first time, the cowboys at the council were outnumbered by "Indians," all of whom had meticulously studied the dress and traditions of the tribes they represented. "Spurs, chaps and guns make a cowboy," declared Edgar Aich of Hamburg's Gemeinschaft Norddeutscher Indianerfreunde (North German Society of Indian Friends). "To be an Indian, you must get into the red man's soul." Serge Parquet, 52, came all the way from Paris with his tepee; as "Chief Walking Bear" he is president of France's Le Cercle Peau-Rouge Huntka (Huntka Redskin Circle). "This...
...councils. Said West Berlin's Jūrgen Haase, 26, one of the council's six "sheriffs": "Most Americans don't know enough about their own history to make a contribution. They think Wild Bill Hickok's real name was Bill." (As every authentic German cowboy knows, his forenames were James Butler.) Old Joe, like many of his Western Bund friends, refuses to watch the two U.S.-made westerns currently appearing on West German TV, Gunsmoke and The Virginian. Nobody, he scoffs, ever really said in the Old West, "Sie ritten da 'long " (They went...
...final ceremony: a 36-star Old Westera flag was lowered to the accompaniment of a drumroll and a trumpet call by immaculately turned-out cavalry units in Union uniforms. It had been, proclaimed Old Joe, "the best council ever, the most authentic yet." But what about that German beer and Schnaps! "Well," he said, "none of us is perfect...