Of a Fire on the Moon

Blurry Images of America from My East German Youth | Thomas Irmer

I 
It all started for me in July 1969 with the arrival of the Digedags in the United States. The three cartoon characters were time travelers, precocious young adults of gnome-like stature, whose respective hair colors combined to form the colors of the German flag: black, red, and gold. They were the protagonists of MOSAIK, which was by far East Germany’s best-loved comic. If you wanted to be sure of getting a copy, you always needed to keep a close eye on your nearest newspaper kiosk at the beginning of the month. Up to then, these miniature heroes had hung out in Imperial Rome, they had survived space adventures in a future with two irreconcilably opposed systems, and they had accompanied a rather clumsy crusader to the Orient and Venice in the Middle Ages. On the eve of the American Civil War, in March 1860, the three manikins suddenly turned into journalists at the New Orleans Magazine and set out on the longest adventure of their lives. In the United States, they became entangled in a story of epic proportions that took them right across the entire country. Over the course of five years and sixty editions of the magazine, young readers became more than just acquainted with nineteenth-century America. The comics were an enduring educational experience and an emotional depiction of old-time America for all of those who would never read Herman Melville’s and Mark Twain’s works—and even for those who went on to read Melville years later. 
In July 1969 East Germany’s state film production company, DEFA, released a movie in East German movie theaters that finally established the genre of the East German “American Indian” film, and also marked the rise to fame of the East German Indian chief Gojko MiticŽ as the Eastern counterpart to the West’s Pierre Brice. The Frenchman Brice had shot to fame starring as the Indian Winnetou in a popular series of West German Westerns based on the works of German author Karl May. Weiße Wölfe (White Wolves), which was later to perplex and astonish US Western experts, was the fourth DEFA film in the American Indian genre, and the one that bore the closest resemblance to a genuine Western in the entire series. The first, Die Söhne der großen Bärin (The Sons of Great Bear), was produced in 1965 and had a distinctly ethnological and folkloric feel. The series petered out fifteen years later with the false pathos of Blauvogel (Blue Bird). Weiße Wölfe is a straightforwardly gritty tale of revenge about a Native American Indian (Gojko MiticŽ), who attempts to hunt down his wife’s murderers, but finally falls victim to the citizens of a corrupt, utterly capitalist-minded small town and its military representatives. Filmed in the Karst region of the then Yugoslavia against a backdrop reminiscent of the Wild West of America, punctuated by frequent exchanges of gunfire, and displaying manifestations of Indian guile, Weiße Wölfe is an inverted Western where the Indians, and not the cowboys, are the good guys. The movie included a number of fairly brutal scenes of the kind that MOSAIK magazine would never have carried. There are, admittedly, a number of slapstick fights and some shooting in the comic series, but, strangely enough, there were never any fatalities—well, apart from one, but more about that later.  
In July 1969, there was a good chance of a child coming across disturbing photographs in news magazines of the day. Men holding decapitated heads—gripping a bunch of them by their hair in their fists—like trophies; children, their skin burned by napalm, outlined against a backdrop of smoldering village huts; huge US pilots being led through the jungle at gunpoint by child-sized Vietnamese. The images were part of a war that no one really understood. A strange joke was doing the rounds in schoolyards at the time. One child would hold out the back of his or her hand and point at it, as if at a map: This is Amer­ica, this is China and this, here, is Vietnam. The child would then ask: Where is Vietnam? Another would point to the spot, only to get a slap—sometimes harder, sometimes lighter—on the hand and to be told “Hands off Vietnam!” That same month, President Nixon, suspecting that the war could not be won and in the face of the growing wave of protests in the United States, decided to leave his country’s South Vietnamese allies to fight the bloody war on their own and started pulling out US troops. My younger self, eagerly waiting in the north of East Berlin for a copy of MOSAIK’s America series, had now begun to be preoccupied by all the decapitated heads. 
In July 1969—some time in the middle of the night on July 20 to be more exact—this child, who had by this time read, almost unaided, the first episode of the Digedags’ America series Carnival in New Orleans several times over, was woken up to be told that the Americans had landed on the moon. The excited television commentators spoke about the start of a new era, but all you could make out on our black-and-white set were some blurry silhouettes. In contrast, Hannes Hegens’s Digedags’ images of Mardi Gras by the Mississippi were full of color and detail, pulsating with an array of characters from the American South, rich and poor, black and white, audacious and buttoned-up. Looking back, you could say that MOSAIK had an extremely good sense of historical timing. But it was probably no more than an uncanny quirk of history. 

II
The Digedags’ American series starts with a skilful side step into historical terrain. The three protagonists are journalists who are continually being spurred on to write sensationalist reports by their boss, so they call for a steamboat race down the river. They come up with this idea after hearing a rather casual comment made by an impoverished captain of a clapped-out paddleboat steamer about the owner of the plush Louisiana—who enjoys the backing of the plantation owners and the moneyed classes. What ensues is a race from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, complete with maps of the Mississippi illustrating the route, much to the readers’ surprise. Was it really possible to map things out so precisely? The scenery and architecture were also drawn in precise detail, not just the social environment. A real historical imagination was at work here, conjuring up images of overgrown bayous, the pillared houses of the American South, the wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and the bustling market right next door with its Cajun influences. Later they were joined by the Rocky Mountains, the Nevada Desert, and rough-and-ready San Francisco. Karl May’s books had been full of landscapes that were a geographical mishmash, while even Friedrich Gerstäcker’s long-forgotten Flusspiraten am Mississippi (River Pirates of the Mississippi), which rivaled May’s works in his day, is not quite up to par in terms of topography. As its story unfolded, MOSAIK provided an introduction to American geography, a subject that was barely touched upon in East German schools. Back then, students might have been able to pinpoint New York on the map, but they would have found it difficult to locate the setting of Theodor Fontane’s ballad John Maynard (“The Swallow flies over Lake Erie […] and still ten minutes to Buffalo”), even though it  was a poem that we had to learn off by heart in our German class. In school, the US remained, for want of concrete explanations, terra incognita—lying like a steamrollered waffle in the atlases we used for what went by the name of geography class. But the Digedags changed all that. 
During the Mississippi race, the three protagonists, who have already sided with the narrowly victorious underdog, switch from being mere journalists to becoming the agents of history—but not that a child would notice. The brother of their ally Captain Joker is a plantation owner, who has set free his slaves and helped to organize a Slave Express to enable runaway slaves to escape to the north. Seen from the perspective of the young reader toward the end of 1969, this story of a clandestine rescue action set in 1860 had become a historical fact. Next, the Digedags embark on a convoluted story involving a goldmine in the Rocky Mountains. The year: 1849, the time of the Gold Rush. Here, they encounter the canny charlatan preacher Coffins, who resembles a toned-down version of the demonic Harry Powell from Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. But, Coffins, the only person to die in the entire series, does, at least, lead the Digedags to discover Toltec gold in the flooded mine. And, finally, the three Didedags then manage to sell this treasure in New York to help fund the Slave Express.  
The Civil War, in which the Digedags have become involved quasi as active observers, is not yet over. There are even dirty dealings taking place in Wall Street linked to the war. But the Toltec gold of the indigenous people will now benefit the Slave Express and other disenfranchised peoples. That was the unsurprising and rather low-key end to the five-year long America saga of the Didedags, which was by now losing its hold on “reality” with nebulous Carib­bean adventures involving gunrunning ships from England. But the American panorama that Hannes Hegen’s cartoon drawings and the Didedags plot had unfolded had now become so powerful that this comic-reading child later became a real seeker of America. June 1974 marked the end of the Digedags’ adventures in America, as well as their time-traveling escapades in general. Their creator, so today’s official line goes, was no longer able to come to an agreement with his publishers. His real name: Johannes Hegenbarth; his achievement: to have been one of the most important teachers for a whole generation born around 1960. 
There is no doubt that Hegenbarth’s vision of America originated from the historical travelogues of the nineteenth century, with the added comic twist that he sought to combine elements of the film classic Gone with the Wind with the cartoon figures of the Digedags, and to tell the whole tale from the bottom up. From the outset, he incorporated a plotline involving Bob Morris, the son of a plantation owner, and Jenny, the daughter of a slavery abolitionist and also of course an army field nurse. For Bob and Jenny it all ended happily ever after. But MOSAIK showed neither the end of the Civil War nor its complicated consequences. As far as the Digedags were concerned, the whole thing was about securing financial support for the Slave Express and—on another level again—taking part in an adventure that brings them into contact with so many different social strata and geographical landscapes. As a result, their perspective as time-traveling manikins remained quite deliberately restricted; their readers were invited to augment the process themselves. If they so desired.  

III 
In 1974 a new book was published that featured a photo of the French Quarter of New Orleans on its cover. It came as something of a surprise to this former MOSAIK reader who found it a few years later. Inside, the poet Günter Kunert described his encounter with the United States. Kunert, who was still an East German citizen at the time and whose work classed as East German literature, had been invited as a guest professor to Austin, Texas, to talk about contemporary poetry and his own writing. He was probably the first East German to ever make this kind of visit to the States. His book, Der andere Planet: Ansichten von Amerika (The Other Planet: Views of America), kicks off in Kennedy Airport: “Really to have arrived at a place of distant dreams: a miracle.” This sense of astonishment pervades the entire book and is neither naive nor uncritical. Nor are Kunert’s views of the “other planet” strung together in such a way that every single thing has to serve as evidence of a certain political or historical inevitability. And that was the really exciting thing about this book. Sometimes Kunert’s sense of wonder is also just inquisitive, for example, when he asks whether the permissive 1960s have displaced puritanism. He came across the following advertisement: “Do you spend a lot of boring hours in your car? You could make them sexually exciting with AUTO SUCK. Its powerful suction performance will accompany you anywhere. Just connect AUTO SUCK to the cigar lighter. Its soft female rubber opening will stroke and suck you with erotic sucking power. Feel your orgasmic juices being drawn out of your body. Lifelike inner rubber labia surround the penis and can give you hours of pleasure when you’re driving or parked up. 35 dollars.” Kunert comes to the conclusion that “technologized masturbation” adheres to the iron law of time is money, creating double the satisfaction by enabling its user to profit sexually from otherwise dead time, and thus achieving, as he really does write, a “moral balance.” As it happens, I was, at the time I read this book, learning the manual tricks of the car mechanic’s trade in a culture devoid of auto industry innovations. For the one-time MOSAIK reader, this passage furnished the proof that America really must be a different planet. But, it should be emphasized that the Berlin poet Kunert handles the whole matter with a very light touch.  
This is how he describes Times Square, now a sanitized, family-friendly environment: “Times Square is both light and darkness in one, and I mean this almost in the biblical sense; the manifestation of both is more moral than physical. Times Square is the profusion of illumination: in diners devoid of shadows the glare unmasks frightening faces, murderers’ faces, although we know only too well that you normally cannot identify murderers by looking at their faces.” The multiple subtexts of this sentence were, admittedly, not apparent at the time. You could trust Kunert that this illuminated place, in some senses the center of New York, could also appear somehow glaringly negative. A place of dreams often transpires to have a downside when it turns out to be real.  
But, as far as this former MOSAIK reader was concerned, The Other Planet was probably not as important as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which was published in German translation by the Leipzig-based Reclam publishing house in 1978. In it, Times Square was not just a place to stare at “frightening faces,” but one of the settings of a story that had actually taken place some thirty years before, and it lent wings to an East German fantasy about America that can at best be compared only with Karl May’s inventions. Digedags’ readers now imagined that they were romantic freedom seekers, somewhere between the Beat Generation and Woodstock, in an endless space replete with non-stop music and limitless supplies of drugs, all promising creative self-determination. It was not possible to check whether these dream worlds contained any semblance of reality, and it made no difference that Woodstock was already ten years past or that Jack Kerouac, who died in 1969, was now a topic for academic research. This image of longing was, unlike Kunert’s more sober America, somewhat schizophrenic, as it set a fantastic image of America against the America that first had to be distilled from East and West German propaganda. Romantic East German hippies were barely aware of the fact that the West German image of America was often both highly ambivalent and highly political throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The whole range of US rock music—from Bob Dylan and Neil Young through to Bruce Springsteen—had, in all likelihood, contributed much to the notion that you could love America at that same time as adopting a rebellious pose and being extremely critical. You could never have had that kind of love/hate relationship with Germany, whether East or West. Being able to dream of America with critical awe was fantastic. These fissured lines come from German poet Durs Grünbein’s first book of poetry, Grauzone morgens (Morning in the GrayZone), 1988: “Most of us//wanted to get away (to New York/or someplace): we were students// with funny cracked voices/ enthusiastically turning/ failed projects in our heads, and some of us// in our melancholy anarchy/ fell thrall to new totems, idols/ of gone revolutions …” 
The Dane Jacob Holdt had already embarked on this trip in 1970. He had actually set off originally for Latin America, but then, like the Digedags, spent five years criss-crossing the United States from the far north to the deep south. He met the Rockefellers, as well as encountering bitter poverty along the way. His balance sheet: “381 families in 48 states in 161,265 kilometers.” He sold his blood plasma for money, hitchhiked his way around, and recorded what he saw on camera. Mostly, his photos feature Afro-Americans who belonged to the underclasses, sometimes in scenes of shocking poverty. Jacob Holdt, who, as a Dane, was very much sheltered from the Cold War, approached the country from a very different standpoint than Günter Kunert, whose awareness of racial issues was restricted to just a few remarks. Holdt’s vision was quite distinct from Kunert’s own and also from that of the hippy generation (in both East and West Germany). He traveled through the most powerful country in the world as if it were a developing country and he triggered almost a shock reaction. His pictures were not taken during the Great Depression of the 1930s, nor do they document the race riots of the 1950s. They are travel photos that record the poverty in the United States in the otherwise permissive and prosperous 1970s. Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures was published in Copen­hagen in 1977, a year later in West Germany, and in East Germany in 1982. There were even a few East German presentations of his American Picture Show, as his traveling slide show was officially called. Every print run of the book sold out straightaway. 
At the same time, Holdt’s work coalesced with former MOSAIK readers’ images of the US, as well as their biographies. On the one hand, all of them would have loved to hitchhike their way through the United States—not caring whether they would have confronted Third World conditions or been called upon to free slaves. The main thing would have been just to get around. On the other hand, Holdt drew attention to very serious issues of race and class that his East German audience was sure to measure up against official propaganda. Holdt’s show reveals a fascinatingly different America, a counter image to the diffuse image of hippy America with all its great music and vast landscapes. He photographed most of his protagonists in their impoverished dwellings, showing cramped domestic surroundings instead of open countryside. 

IV  
One US movie, which made a big impression at the time, but has now been largely forgotten, played a formative role in shaping how we imagined the expansive landscape of the United States. Vanishing Point was released in about 1971 or 1972 in East Germany under the title Grenzpunkt Null (Frontier Point Zero) and was repeated irregularly in the years to come. A former racing driver called Kowalski is chased by cops the length and breadth of the American West, and this road movie is a variation on Godard’s pared-down formula “a film is a girl and a gun.” It features simply a car and a man. Kowalski is lent support by a blind, black radio DJ, who sits alone in his studio the whole time and broadcasts messages of solidarity to the lone rebel. The entire film is an allegory of rebellion in a breathtakingly filmed setting. Kowalski dies in the end after crashing into a police barrier. East Germany’s state film distribution company wisely decided not to purchase Easy Rider, with its anarchic take on drugs and surreal denunciation of the southern states of America—despite it winning the Golden Palm in Cannes. Grenzpunkt Null still has fans to this day who saw it during the communist era, but the film is hard to locate in reference works. The original appeared in the States in 1970 and the dubbed West German version was given the title Fluchtpunkt San Francisco (Fleeing to San Francisco). Although this was neither an elegant or accurate title, it was probably its allusion to “escape” that led the East German film distribution company, Progress Film­verleih, to opt for Grenzpunkt Null instead.   
Star Trek, or Raumschiff Enterprise as we knew it, was broadcast on West German TV (and thus also accessible to East Berlin viewers) on Saturday evenings, unfortunately, as it happens, at the same time as West Germany’s top league football matches. It communicated an image of a hi-tech and multicultural America of the future that appeared to be light years away from the Soviet space mission, which, once the glory days of Soviet space heroes were gone, consisted for many years of taciturn four-liners noting the launch of unmanned Cosmos satellites. Captain Kirk and, above all, Doctor Spock were, by contrast, a talking point in the schoolyard. In particular, our interest was focused on the Vulcan’s supposedly green blood, the color of which we could never check on our black and white televisions. Raumschiff Enterprise was, like MOSAIK, a never-ending series, broken down into individual adventures. However, unlike the comic series it did not have its own “red” line, or “meaningful” bracket. This may have prompted East German viewers to suspect that the history of the future, which was evoked with the logbook entry at the beginning of every episode of Star Trek, might one day no longer conform to a teleological master narrative. That is if you wanted to see it like that—or were already able to.            
Both MOSAIK readers and their parents were fascinated by two miniseries about actual historical events. Roots, a family saga based on the novel by Alex Haley, traced the history, right up to the present, of a black family whose ancestors were trafficked from Africa and brought to the United States as slaves. The program brought a central element of US history into our living rooms, and our parents debated whether the miniseries merely trivialized history for the purposes of entertainment or whether it represented a way of seriously addressing the past. This question became more pressing and thereby, as it were, unanswerable when Holocaust was screened on television the following January. The term Holocaust—rather than its history—was made more widely known by this lachrymose miniseries about the persecution and the deportation of the Jews. We were curious to see whether it would be mentioned in school. In the mid to late 1970s Western television programs were occasionally brought up for discussion in class, but only by the most courageous and outspoken of teachers. But even they remained silent in this case. America had gained another meaning; it had now also become a mirror for German history.  

V 
All of these images came back to me when I started to read American literature. Faulkner’s American South brought back MOSAIK, while Mark Twain and Bret Harte evoked Gold Rush West. Even as I was reading Melville’s grim story Bartleby, the Digedags’ visit to Wall Street was present in my storehouse of visual images. They helped me to understand a country that I thought that I would, in all historical probability, never set eyes on, at least not in the concrete terms of Günter Kunert’s observations or Kerouac’s delirious road movie in novel form.  
In the year 1969 Led Zeppelin’s second album included the song Moby Dick. This was a link that I was able to make years later when reading Melville’s novel. By that time, music from and about America had replaced MOSAIK in my affections. I met Greil Marcus, the author of Mystery Train (Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music) and other writings, once during the 1990s. He was the first to analyze, magnificently describe, and trace Elvis’s and Bob Dylan’s mythical America back to the great tradition of nineteenth-century literature. I told him about the comic magazine and he proved to be surprisingly enthusiastic about MOSAIK.


Thomas Irmer studied German and American literature and lectures in American Drama and Theater at the Free University in Berlin. His publications include Moving Pictures, Moving Histories (1995), a book about the US postmodern historical novel.