9 - To the Stars! Cosmic Supermen and Bauhaus in Space

Summary

IT WASN'T UNTIL the 1960s that a genuinely “German” SF reemerged; it did so with the East German film Der schweigende Stern (The Silent Star, 1960), directed by Kurt Maetzig. Based on Stanislaw Lem's novel The Astronauts (1951), it depicted an international expedition (led by the Soviet cosmonaut Arsenjew) to the planet Venus. The crew members discover that the inhabitants of that planet had planned to annihilate humanity by means of “nuclear rays” but had been wiped out themselves owing to an accident. In spite of its political message warning of a nuclear war (and its none-too subtle call for international cooperation under Soviet leadership), the film was shown in the United States and the United Kingdom in a shortened and “westernized” version that cut out all references to Hiroshima.

In West Germany, German SF came in the shape of Perry Rhodan, a weekly pulp-style magazine that hit the kiosks in 1961 and was initially written by Walter Ernsting and Karl-Herbert Scheer. Jokingly described as “Unser Mann im All” (our man in space) in a documentary on occasion of its fiftieth anniversary in 2011, the series gave Germans a stake in the emerging space race in the form of an American astronaut of German ancestry who lands on the moon in 1971 and encounters members of an alien humanoid race who have crash-landed their spaceship there. With the help of their superior technology, he establishes a “Dritte Macht” (third power) on Earth, prevents World War III, unites the superpowers (initially in their shared opposition against himself and his small band of loyal comrades), and, once he has established control, he sets out to build a united Earth capable of entering into alliances with, but also defending itself against, threats from other alien species in the galaxy.

In Germany Perry Rhodan has provided the gateway for generations of male and female teenagers, equivalent perhaps to Doctor Who in the United Kingdom and the “pulps” in their golden age, as well as to Marvel and DC comics and films in the United States. It started life as a mirror of its time, reflecting both the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and the global fascination with manned space flight. From the outset, the series has been (rightly) criticized for its militaristic tendencies but also for its thinly veiled revanchism, jingoism, and Germanic superiority complex.