Karl May lends some Wild West to Peter Behrens’ latest epic
The Wild West myths of German pulp-fiction writer Karl May power Peter Behrens’ latest, a war-epic love story
Few cultural phenomena are more curious than the vast popularity of Karl May, a 19th-century German pulp- fiction writer who created his own Wild West. This frontier was populated by a noble Apache chief, Winnetou, and his blood brother, Old Shatterhand, an equally noble white man of German derivation. Their domain was the rugged High Plains of the American Southwest — home to the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, and known as El Llano Estacado.
It is not merely the wisdom, bravery and endurance displayed by May’s heroes that inspired Germans from Albert Einstein to Adolf Hitler but the setting itself, “the bleak grandeur of its emptiness,” according to Billy Lange, first person narrator of Peter Behrens’ novel Carry Me. The setting is, Billy Lange comments, “an enormous mesa, a raised tableland flanked by red bluffs and sprawling over millions of acres from the Texas Panhandle into New Mexico ... the mystical hunting ground of the Mescalero Apache.” It is, in short, a dreamlike landscape offering the concept of mental freedom to the young Billy Lange, born in the Isle of Wight in 1909. Billy is the son of Buck Lange, the GermanIrish captain of a racing yacht belonging to a German-Jewish industrialist, the Baron Hermann von Wienbrenner. ( These hyphens will become very important as the novel proceeds.) Carry Me is the story of Billy’s lifelong love affair with the baron’s daughter Karin.
We know a doom lies over the girl — our first view of her is that of a four- or- five- year- old trying to enter the “wild world” of the sea and “leave behind the calm and safety of shore” by swimming to America. Naturally she nearly drowns, but it is fitting that this daredevil is t he one who i ntroduces Billy to Winnetou and Old Shatterhand.
Later Billy will found a Winnetou cult among his classmates. In the summers, in the Walden woods near the baron’s estate, Billy recalls, he and his mates “would become Apache, Comanche, Taos comancheros, frontiersmen. We’d blaze trails, track renegades, plan ambushes. Make camp, light fires, send smoke signals.” The would-be Winnetous, Billy adds, “were passionate for rituals. For codes of honour. We all wanted to carry ourselves as warriors. In the Walden woods we would press bloody thumbs together and swear brotherhood.”
This is all by way of explanation why the cult of Winnetou faded but never disappeared. “I’m certain some of my classmates,” Billy muses, “Indian braves and plainsmen to the last, were carrying copies of Winnetou in their haversacks on the frozen steppe 20 years later when they attacked and were attacked, when they killed and when they perished.”
Meanwhile the vision of El Llano Estacado became Billy’s lifelong “refuge” — a handy refuge, as it turns out. “I never expected the world outside our household, our little family, to be safe,” Billy recalls. “I always assumed there would be lions out there, and sure enough there were.” The First World War commences, and Billy’s fath- er, whose peacetime occupation was partly scouting opposing racing yachts for the baron, is arrested as a German naval spy and interned for the duration of the war. Young Billy, cut off from his father, is forced to attend a school where he is mercilessly bullied for being “German.” The need for a refuge does not diminish after the war. As time goes on, postwar life in Germany becomes more and more hostile to people like Karin, the hybrid German. Billy himself engages in a balancing act — working by day as an ambitious young executive at the prestigious industrial cartel I. G. Farben and cruising bars and cafés at night in search of the “Kansas City sound.” One night their search is particularly successful. “We hit the right spots at the right time,” Billy reminisces, “each club smaller than the one before, at each one the riffing and jitterbugging fiercer, more sexual.” The Kansas City sound, it seemed to Billy, was “packed with disrespect” and “embodied loathing for every aspect of the (Nazi) regime.”
It’s a complex tapestry, then, that author Behrens weaves, but one unified by certain repeating motifs. Billy’s father, for example, draws on his nautical experience and urges his son to study the sky and the weather — an attentiveness that can easily become a metaphor for other modes of awareness. And not just for sailors. An “aristocrat,” according to Billy’s aristocratic Irish grandmother, should also attend to the commotions of the sky. The narrative, meanwhile, is constantly enriched by references to the quality of the air. The sky is “cold blue” with a “weak winter sun.” The city “was almost cheerful under a bit of rare, pallid November sun.” At one point, Billy recognizes a “Rembrandt sky” where the Irish light is “grey and soft,” but he concentrates on the “sodden and fiercely green” fields, under a sky that “felt more generous than wartime England’s.”
Underlining this attentiveness is the dream of El Llano Estacado., a country, Billy comments, described by May with surrealist passion. “The light of the High Plains became our dream light in German darkness,” Billy observes. Opposed to this dream light is what he describes as “barbed wire disease” characterized by a taste of “nothingness,” and “curdling, decomposing fear.”
Meanwhile a larger drama is unfolding in Germany. The reader’s heart sinks as characters — notably the baron — are gradually stripped of their illusions that men of influence and power will come to their aid against Nazi thugs, and that society will soon return to normal. It is a very costly illusion.
The depth of the social and natural environment in Carry Me makes for a compelling narrative. The lovers who drive that narrative are not so entirely engrossing, however. Karin is a female character we have come to know from frequent exposure — a highly wilful heroine with a foreknowledge of tragedy and an inability fully to reciprocate affection.
In a sense Carry Me depends on that ever- reliable fount of evil, the Nazi Party, to drive the story rather than the emotions of the protagonists. And this reliance does serve its purpose. As family sagas go, Carry Me is consistently credible and highly readable throughout. What may be missing is more of that dreamlike element embodied by Winnetou, the sage Apache chief beloved by Germans.