KallMeKris

And she and Egbert had been building a life together that involved weaving two separate families into something functional and new.

So by the summer of 1996, the four of them were operating as one unit, even if the legal and logistical edges of that unit were still being worked out.

So this American road trip, in a sense, was a pressure valve.

Three weeks away from the custody arrangements and the professional obligations and the particular weight of a city still finding its footing in a place that none of them had ever been and just full of landscapes that looked nothing like Germany.

So it was exciting.

But for an East German in 1996, America, and specifically the American West, meant something that is difficult to fully translate.

Because the fascination ran pretty deep, and it had very specific roots in Dresden itself.

Carl May was the best-selling German author of the time, with something approaching 200 million copies of his work sold worldwide.

And he wrote adventure novels set in the American West, stories about the Apache chief, Wenetu, and his German blood brother, Old Shatterhand, navigating the frontier with honor and skill.

And May wrote every one of them without ever setting foot in North America.

And his museum was housed in his villa, Shatterhand, in Redibull, which is a suburb of Dresden.

directly adjacent to the city Egbert and Cornelia had grown up in.

And the GDR government had suppressed May's books because the Nazis had embraced them, but pre-war copies circulated as treasured family possessions and never stopped being read.

And the State Film Company, DEFA, produced at least 17 Indian-era film A or Red Westerns between 1965 and 1983.

casting Native Americans as heroes resisting capitalist oppression.

And the most popular, the Son de Groban Baron, I butchered that, I'm sorry, sold over 9 million tickets in a nation of 17 million people.

That's pretty popular.

So this subculture of Indian hobbyist clubs flourished across the GDR, with an estimated 40,000 members in hundreds of clubs.

And the first Dresden Indian and cowboy club, Manitou, one of the oldest, was based in Egbert and Cornelia's own city, with its members building a mock frontier settlement called Stetson City in the woods outside Dresden.

These people were, they were LARPing American Western culture.