Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Friedberg, Lilian

Titel

Mule minus Forty Million Acres: Topographies of Geographic Disorientation and Redface Minstrelsy in George Tabori's Weisman und Rotgesicht

Ist Teil von

• New German critique, 2001 (84), p.55-86

Ort / Verlag

New York: Telos Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Drawing perhaps on the conventions of the "Western" genre and the master narrative of the vast, unpopulated wilderness that acts as the "screen" on which these dramas are played out, [Martin Kagel] determines the setting to be in what is now the state of Arizona and concludes that the play takes place in what is "in reality [...] nevertheless a no man's land." 52 The territories of what is now the state of Arizona were originally home to southwestern Pueblo, Navaho and Hopi tribes. To these peoples, the West was not, by any means, a "no man's land." But, the "Indian" portrayed by the character of Rotgesicht describes himself as the descendant of a "Cherokee Chief" ([WuR] 23). 53 While the 1830 Indian Removal Act did legally permit the US government to forcibly dislocate approximately 17,000 Cherokee about 1,500 miles west of their southeastern territories in a death march that has since become known as the Trail of Tears, this pogrom displaced them only as far west as what is today the state of Oklahoma. One German reviewer displaces the geographic location several hundred miles further west to the "California desert." 54 Were this the case, the "Cherokee" Indian portrayed here would have found himself several thousand miles from home. Becker identifies the geographic location as "on route sixty-six ... uber irgendeinem Death Valley am sudlichen Arsch der neuen Welt, im alten Indianerland." 55 This comment, as much as any other, reveals the precipitous gap between the "American Indian" and European/Euroamerican understanding of the location of culture in the West: the notions of irgendein or "just any old" Death Valley and "altes Indianerland" are completely alien and even hostile to an indigenous view of the land in the territories at issue here. The term "Indian land" designates a geographic territory which encompasses not only the entire bounds of what is now the "United States," but also of what is today called "Canada." More properly, this territory is identified as "Turtle Island," and, from a Native American perspective, it is here that the world begins, not where it ends. Paul Kruntorad and [Jack Zipes] come closest, geographically, in identifying the site as New Mexico - an interpretation supported by the prominence in the text of the cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. They both lie within the current bounds of New Mexico's borders. But [George Tabori] does not specify the location of the actual confrontation between the characters - neither in the short story version, "[Weissman] und Rotgesicht," nor in the English language original "Weisman and Copperface," nor in the stage directions to the German Weisman und Rotgesicht: Ein judischer Western. The reader/viewer is left to his own devices and the limits of his own imagination in determining precisely where in the world this duel in the "desert" takes place. The tension created by the conjunction of Biblical and "frontier" metaphors at this "desert" site might be seen as an intentionally gross exaggeration of the trope of geographic disorientation designed to elicit critical reflection on the myth of the "vast, unpopulated wilderness" or "no man's land."