KallMeKris

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.

Like, funny to think about.

And the Stasi monitored these clubs so obsessively that their declassified files on the hobbyists reportedly filled an entire room from floor to ceiling.

So for East Germans, the American West represented everything the GDR was not.

Freedom, vastness, and the romance of just open space.

And growing up behind a wall, you learned what a horizon looked like from photographs and films and novels set in a country you were forbidden to visit.

So after reunification, actually going there wasn't just a vacation, it was the fulfillment of something that had been deferred for an entire generation.

and Egbert had talked about the trip with colleagues at work, and he was excited in the particular way that planners get excited.

He had thought about it very carefully, built out a schedule, and was looking forward to executing it.

So they flew into Los Angeles on July 8th, 1996, and the return flight to Dresden was booked for July 27th, 1996.

19 days to cover a lot of ground.

The itinerary they had put together was ambitious, but not unreasonably so for a family accustomed to European travel, where distances between major landmarks tend to be shorter and the infrastructure between them is a lot denser.

So they plan to spend time in San Clement, a coastal town about an hour south of Los Angeles before heading east to Las Vegas.

And then from Las Vegas, the plan was to loop back west through Death Valley and then north through Yosemite National Park before returning to LA in time for their flight.

So on paper,