KallMeKris

And West German firms dominated the new market.

Not to mention, he had just come through a pretty difficult divorce, the kind that leaves a mark even when it has the right outcome, and was in the middle of a custody dispute over his son, Georg, who was 11 at the time.

Now, Georg lived primarily with his mother, Heike Weber, and the formal arrangements around his care were still being resolved.

So work was steady, but it was still demanding, and life had a lot of moving parts, and most of them were in motion at once, so there was a lot going on.

And his girlfriend, Cornelia Meyer, was 27 years old at this time, seven years younger than Egbert.

And she had a four-year-old son named Max from a previous relationship.

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.