Two villains from the Wild West are riding eastwards on the central reservation of the socialist boulevard. With their guns drawn, they are on a shopping spree to stake their claims on the city's last open spaces. To passers-by, these guys look familiar - and indeed: they are toy cowboys from East German production scaled up to larger than life size - imperialist class enemies made of rubber, while citizens of the GDR showed solidarity with the indigenous peoples of North America and literally slipped into feather headdresses and tepees as ‘Indianisten’. The cowboy and native figures turned the struggle for survival between buffalo herds into a class struggle and brought it into children's bedrooms and toy boxes in the 1960s.
✕ Jagd auf die grosse Bärin
The west wind blows dust over the freshly laid pavement. It smells like freedom, biting your eyes. A few vehicles whizz past, then the crickets chirp again. Between the deserted lanes, a strip of picture-book prairie landscape stretches into the shimmering late summer horizon. Barely recognisable against the light - two gloomy silhouettes. On horses that have their heads in the dry grass, two figures are sitting and peering anxiously into the distance. Vehicles roar by again. The cars drive past on either side of the riders and their drivers are surprised at the strange familiarity of the two gunmen - or are they gunwomen? Black button eyes, thickly painted red mouths, brightly coloured trousers, fitted waistcoats, a red cowboy hat and a blue one, almost like clowns in folklore costumes. Their limbs and clothes seem to be moulded from the same rubber and the colts look as if they had had them painted on their outstretched index fingers. Where they are staring, smoke is still rising, from a hastily extinguished campfire. Not a hundred steps away, has someone just been sitting around in a circle?
