The nascent of Red Westerns can be traced to the 1960 Moscow Film Festival premiere of The Magnificent Seven. Soviet leaders had previously been reticent about exposing soviets to American films. But the film was so apparently subversive of postwar Western Imperialism, that officials permitted it to be viewed.

Both The Magnificent Seven and Red Westerns are part of a genre known as “Revisionist Westerns,” which was a postwar global phenomenon that gained increased notoriety and popularity during America’s war in Vietnam. Revisionist Westerns include Spaghetti Westerns from Italy, and Zapata Westerns set in Mexico during the second revolution (1910 – 1917). Revisionist Westerns were often replete with anti-heroes, lawlessness, and tended to critique big business as greedy and corrupt. They also inverted common tropes in traditional American Westerns by providing more sympathetic, or at least complex, portrayals of Native Americans, African Americans, and women.

Red Westerns is a film genre popularized behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s and 1970s. The films were designed in a metropole, but produced part by part throughout the world, in places such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cuba and various parts of the Soviet Union by the Red Circle workers' group. The genre is, like Hollywood Westerns, chocked full of hallmarks such as railroading robber barons, ambushed stagecoaches on the high plains, rock em sock em bar brawls, vengeful Indians assembled into war parties, and spellbinding man to man showdowns. These twelve DEFA studio productions made between 1965 and 1983 invert tropes common to Hollywood Westerns by glorifying Native Americans’ struggle against avaricious white settlers.

Red Westerns self-consciously critique United States expansion in the American West as an expression of colonial greed and racism. The films thus ideologically invert Hollywood Westerns by imposing a socialist notion of community onto the Western genre. They were ultimately designed to demythologize America’s so-called Manifest Destiny as an imperialist venture underwritten by the U.S. federal government in league with heartless capitalists who seem to delight in the displacement and genocide of American Indians. Like Hollywood Westerns, Red Westerns pit good guys versus bad guys in hollow one-dimensional opposition. The Americans are not Indians, and Indians are not Americans is a recurring theme in each Red Western rendition.

The first Red Western, The Sons of Great Bear, premiered in 1966. It depicts displacement of the Lakota who are forced to leave the Black Hills after the discovery of gold in 1874. Chingachgook, based on James Fenimore Cooper's 1841 novel, The Deerslayer, is set in 1740 during the French and Indian War (and the Enlightenment). The Delaware and Huron tribes are depicted as dupes fighting a war on their own ancestral lands, which will ultimately be inherited by either French or British imperialists after the tribes exterminate each other. The warring tribes, however, realize by the end of the film that they must stop fighting each other if they are to survive European Imperialism. In Osceola the hero helps free runaway slaves and successfully negotiates the end of warfare among rival tribes by championing unity against a common enemy – slave owning planters encroaching on Seminole Indians’ tribal lands in nineteenth century Florida.

Native Americans depicted in Red Westerns are, despite the few corrupted by imperialist values and firewater, sanguine members of a homogenous society in which, like worker ants, everyone knows their role in the community and performs the function without complaint. Leadership is determined by tribal laws which are never questioned; decisions are not made impulsively, but by the careful deliberation of tribal leaders. Conflicts arise with white settlers, Union Soldiers, planters, oilmen and robber barons, but seldom within the community. Inter-Indian conflict is always resolved by the conclusion of the story. And since these films were made by the state for popular consumption, they were ultimately designed to, as Noam Chomsky would put it, manufacture the consent of the masses.

One film was generally distributed each summer while kids were on holiday from school. The Sons of Great Bear was viewed 10 million times in Eastern Bloc theatres, making it and Red Westerns an important Cold War vehicle for delineating the continuities of an American imperial narrative. Red Westerns were, in short, hot media during a global Cold and Culture War.

In Dialectics of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer theorize that there were distinct connections between the authoritarian nature of culture in interwar Germany and postwar America, particularly both cultures’ cinema, which symbiotically and powerfully melds multiple mass communication mediums. Despite the ideological rhetoric, Red Westerns are part of a global Culture Industry rooted in fantasy and consumption that was pervasive throughout fascist Germany in the interwar era as well as postwar America.

Adorno and Horkheimer, however, overlooked the triangulation of popular culture in postwar America with East and West Germany, as well as interwar fascism. Red Westerns, like commercials, are designed to manipulate viewers into a certain way of seeing the world and themselves in it.

Ironically, despite the anti-authoritarian ideology espoused in the medium, the process of consumption is as unidirectional as listening to American Westerns on the radio. In short, Red Westerns, like commercials, did not permit viewers to be subjects, but rather passive receptacles of information, mere objects exposed in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations.

DEFA used the movies as propaganda designed to “educate” children about class conflict, an attempt that proved to be largely unsuccessful, since younger audiences tended to ignore the “history” lesson and get lost in the fantasy of reductionist and jejune adventure plotlines.

Red Westerns, which are postwar East German cultural products made in reaction to Karl May novels turned TV miniseries in 1950s West Germany, as well as Postwar American Westerns, are hardly more accurate depictions of Native American history than Hollywood studio productions. In May’s novels and DEFA productions, the “history” of Native Americans is product of European anxieties and fantasies and used as propaganda to serve European ends and agendas. Though Red Westerns were billed by producers as more ethnographically, anthropologically and historically accurate than their American counterpart, they were part of the same Culture Industry that pervaded fascist Germany and postwar America. And so, despite the seeming ideological inversion of American Westerns, Red Westerns, despite the ideology conspicuously presented in them, helped construct what Max Weber would refer to as conspicuous consumers.

In the fin de siècle era, at the same moment when Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show toured Europe to raucous audiences, Karl May was the most read writer of the German language. But during the Cold War he was officially debased in the German Democratic Republic as a bourgeois chauvinist, and “The Cowboy Mentor of the Führer,” whose exotic tales paved the way for the fascist ideology of “blood and soil” that reached its zenith in the 1930s and 1940s.

But Red Westerns, though they were made in reaction to May’s novel series, Winnetou, which Hitler supposedly ordered his generals to read after the debacle of Stalingrad to boost their morale–were all part of the same semantic field that depicted Native Americans as the Noble Savage caricature popularized throughout the Enlightenment.

Red Westerns help illuminate Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory that “myth is already Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Native Americans, Christian F. Feest argues in Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, constitute “a wholly fictional population inhabiting the Old World mind rather than the New World lands.” To Europeans, Indians had always served as a “message” of one kind or another. The message could simultaneously remind Europeans of the glory of their achievements, their fall from grace, and their alienation from nature.

Rayna Green’s “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” like Vine Deloria’s Playing Indian, asserts that in some instances, Indians have been synonymous with nature, progress and American identity – sometimes simultaneously. “The theory of ‘progress’ in the arts is bound up with the idea of the imitation of nature,” Walter Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “and must be discussed in the context of this idea.” That is exactly what sociologist Robert Berkhofer, Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian from Columbus to Present does. Berkhofer examines how imagery of Native Americans in literature, art, and philosophy from first contact to the 1970s served to, as Edward Said would surmise, “Orientalize” Indians in North America, much in the same manner the British Empire “Orientalized” actual Indians in Asia during the Nineteenth Century.

Red Westerns are evidence that Soviets are playing Indian in the Cold War as a means of stylizing themselves as antipodal to American Westerns that were so popular in Postwar America, which many believed were a metaphor for the commodified rugged individualist capitalism being sold to the world by American corporations, an ethos seemingly embodied in Theodore Roosevelt/John Wayne. But the very act of consuming Red Westerns helped cultural elites craft consumers as marketized/political subjects in much the same manner as had happened in fascist Germany and postwar America – via the production and distribution of mass media designed to manufacture consent to the Weimar ruling class and then the Third Reich.

Red Westerns were incredibly popular in Eastern Bloc countries by the early 1970s. On both sides of the Iron Curtain–from hippies in San Francisco to factory workers in Frankfurt–American Indians were fetishized as wise, ritualistic, and at times supernatural Noble Savages victimized rather than participants in Enlightenment Era imperialism.

By then, Rayna Green argues, Native American culture was increasingly fetishized throughout the world as a model of an “alternative” lifestyle that was manifested in communal living and fashion. Following broad trends toward environmentalism and anti-technology, North American Indians were often symbolized as inherently possessing pre-capitalist social and economic values and were thus the supposed antithesis of Western Imperialism.

Though Red Westerns were supposedly made in reaction to Karl May’s books, and despite the brick and barbed wire wall separating East Berlin from West, German culture shared generations of history that could not be so easily decoupled.

Most Postwar Westerns, Red Westerns included, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they were produced, were deeply informed by Enlightenment area discourse and popular culture. The irony of Red Westerns is that the Soviets were far more akin to the populist American Cowboy archetype than they were the Osceola or any other native American group; residents of countries whose names conclude with “stan” would thus ‘stand in’ for the mythic American Indian far more aptly than the imperialist Soviets could. But this seemed conspicuously lost on DEFA’s producers.

And so, for all the high-minded billing as antithesis to Hollywood Studio Productions, Red Westerns were ultimately designed to project a pervasively conservative hegemonic discourse that was, like its American counterpart, rooted in Enlightenment Era economics, politics, and philosophy. Like Hollywood Westerns, Red Westerns celebrated the same racism and heteronormativity–the same power dynamics–pervasive throughout Enlightenment Era Western Empires.

As with most Hollywood Westerns, Red Westerns also largely conflated tribal differences into a generic mascot-like ahistorical caricature and thus ignored centuries of regional and cultural difference. An autonomous Native American past prior to 1740 does not actually exist in Red Westerns, thus making them hardly more historical than Hollywood Westerns. DEFA depictions of Native Americans thus, like their American counterparts, provide viewers with the same hokey and tired clichés and misconceptions of tribal life exhibited in Hollywood Westerns, all readymade for consumption in dark theaters with other consumer products such as soda and popcorn.

Red Westerns also perpetuate the same gender norms popularized in mass media throughout Western Empires during the Enlightenment and recycled in Hollywood Westerns. Indian women, if depicted at all, are often sacrificial lambs to plotlines that perpetuate fantasies of coital bliss and revenge. Red Westerns thus invert tropes and themes common to American Westerns but cannot escape the deep seeded racism and sexism part and parcel of the Western genre popular in the so-called First World during the Postwar Period.

Red Westerns are also deeply implicated in the postwar Culture Industry due to the way they, like Hollywood movies, created and perpetuated consumer/star culture, which is inherently class-based. The fantasies commodified through Gojko Mitić's heroic persona accentuate responsibility for the community, fairness, and willingness to reach peaceful agreements with an enemy one knows to be economically and militaristically superior.

Mitić was widely hailed in Pravda, the Soviet Union’s state mouthpiece, as the Soviet John Wayne. Since his characters were physically fit and rejected firewater, Mitić could be unabashedly celebrated as a “role model for children, the dream of teenage girls, and ideal son-in-law and model citizen,” an East German film critic gushed.

Mitić’s star persona and the postmodern way he could be portrayed as both the antithesis of John Wayne concomitant to being portrayed just like John Wayne could at once stand in for the Yugoslav partisan, the model German, the displaced Jew, as well as American Indian.

And yet, the fantasies perpetuated in Red Westerns are similarly utopian to Manifest Destiny ideology of individualism and capitalist expansion espoused in Hollywood Westerns. In short, Mitić was a kind of Che Guevara t-shirt. Despite his commodified form as anti-capitalist, his very commodification is an example of how consumer culture co-opts symbols of rebellion to serve anti-revolutionary agendas, means, and ends.

The cult of stardom (read class hierarchy), inherent to and embedded in the film industry in the U.S., East and West Germany, and in Pop Culture writ large throughout the Postwar Period served the very same ideological and advertising interests Benjamin wrote about in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space and Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction illuminate the correlation between industrialized consciousness and consumer consciousness. Cinema, like steam and rail travel in the nineteenth century, made previously disconnected regions of the world–including Latin America, Asia, and Europe–more easily and expediently absorbed into metropoles in Europe and North America, thus expanding the realm and range of Enlightenment Era ideas as well as consumer capitalism.

Adorno, Horkheimer, Schivelbusch, and Benjamin’s works were all informed by Karl Marx’s notion that production not only provides an object for the subject but also provides a subject for the object. Their correlation helps to elaborate the point that viewers of Red Westerns, regardless of the ideological rhetoric presented in the medium, were pervasively developing an “industrialized consciousness” and thus being disciplined as capitalist subjects through the very act of consuming an incredibly powerful communication technology and consumer good – cinema. The ideology espoused was beside the point to the transcendent act of consuming the media, popcorn and soda in a darkened theater as a faceless member of a huddled mass.

American Westerns and Red Westerns are both products of empires that sought to define themselves in contrast to the other as the true preservers, arbiters, and purveyors of Enlightenment Era values in the twentieth century.

Red Westerns were thus not the antithesis of Hollywood Westerns that seemed to glorify a white supremacist Manifest Destiny synecdoche of capitalism. Both genres ultimately propagated the same European ideas that led to the Enlightenment, which led to the Age of Empires, industrialization, capitalism and, after World War II, the globalization of consumer culture.

Although Red Westerns on the surface might seem to be antithetical to Hollywood Westerns, they are, from a marketing and consumerist standpoint, hardly more different than Coke is to Pepsi.

The political ideology rhetorically espoused, whether state-run communism or corporatism, is beside the point. The act of consumption–the fantasy of class transcendence–became the basis of reality on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the half-century after the Americans dropped the bomb (twice) on Japan.

Perhaps the most glaring irony of Red Westerns is that although they celebrate an ideology of communalism embodied in Native Americans as a commodified form, the act of consuming the genre was intensely personally gratifying for viewers and thus crafted the desire to more actively participate in the Culture Industry.

The star cult Mitić was embedded in behind the Iron Curtain is like the demagoguery in fascist Germany and postwar America and serves as evidence that consumer culture was increasingly seductive and desirable behind the Iron Curtain decades prior to the disintegration of the Berlin Wall.

East Germans, in short, like Western Germans, were conspicuously shaped as consumers before, during, and after the war. The very act of consuming Red Westerns is evidence that viewers were not merely being shaped as nationalist and political subjects; they were also being conditioned, above all, as consumer subjects.