ABSTRACT
A central strategy in both late-Victorian and ColdWar German efforts to secure mainstream masculine stability involved the articulation of a criminal culture that demanded quick, vital protection. Reception theory is used to establish a baseline for reader and viewer response levels for Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary works as well as film adaptations based on his works in West Germany between 1945 and 1967. This chapter investigates German translations, television and film broadcasts, and reviews of Doyle’s adaptations and explicates the importance of reason and logic to West-German ColdWar masculinity and how Paul May’s film reinforces and prioritizes reason and logic through mise en scene and the characterization of Sherlock Holmes. Focusing on Paul May’s 1967–1968 Sherlock Holmes series, this chapter argues that the methodological precision of the Holmes’s narrative lent to mid-century German male identity a scientifically invested clarity of gender performance and self-understanding. Finally, it explains how May’s writers diverted from the 1964 BBC screenplay template of how an English-identified male hero functions under external threats in order to re-create a viable space for how a German-identified male hero functions under similar external threats.
