ABSTRACT
In 1992, Berlin’s Treptow Park was memorable because of the Soviet-era statues, but more captivating was the make-believe village in the nearby woods. There was a nineteenth-century American West village complete with boardwalk, saloon, and farrier; and in the woods were tepees and a Native American village. Even for someone who had read Karl May and knew of Old Shatterhand and the overall German love for Western Americana, the village was too much.1 The simulacrum of the village was not what made it excessive; rather, the joy of the villagers was most amazing. It was a cultural Disney for grown-ups, some sort of ethnic festival that seemed much more American than German. At the beginning of the new, post-cold war Germany, it was a symbol of transition and stasis, of the various performances of cultures, memories, and history that are now assuming shape for the twenty-fi rst century. As discussions of ethnic literature have moved from the stately theories of Werner Sollors and his former students at Yale to the challenging biopolitics of Rey Chow, new ethnic texts have constantly appeared, demonstrating that the genre is comfortable and enduring.2 Certainly the United States is more than ready to read itself as inherently ethnic, and even the presentation of Mormonism in John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven is a tale of immigration, though the Mormons ‘immigrated’ from Palmyra, New York, to Missouri and then Salt Lake City, Utah.3 In other words, ethnic difference has become central to telling an ‘American’ story. Two recent ethnic texts fi t into this pattern: both Michael Schorr’s 2003 fi lm Schultze Gets the Blues and Louise Erdrich’s 2003 novel The Master Butchers Singing Club tell of Germans and German descendents in America.4 Yet both tell the story with subtle variations that either confound the genre or confuse the critics.
