The gentleman shown in the last post is Hanns Heinz Evans, the German who wrote the introduction to Zane Greys first German edition of The Man of the Forest in 1926. Evans was anti-American, but he loved Zane Greys writing. Consequently, he uses Zane Grey as a tool in anti-American propaganda. You can learn more about Evans at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Heinz_Ewers. As many of you may know, Grey was not a fan of Germans with his feelings perhaps most vividly shown in The Desert of Wheat. Much of his feelings appear to have been brought on by their brutality to women and children when they invaded Belgium. In his April 5, 1917 journal he states ...I hate the Germans, although I recognize their greatness. But I hate war more than I hate anything else. The agony to women and children I cannot forgive... ZGWS member Henry Nardi shared the translation of Ewers forward to The Man of the Forest which will shed a light on the feelings of at least one German about America during the total economic collapse of Germany following World War I and leading to the rise of the Nazi Party. Introduction to the first German edition of Zane Greys The Man of the Forest by Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1926 To Americanize - that means to sweep every corner and every spot free fromromanticism, that means to sweep off old knickknack, dust and cobwebs, turningthe whole earth into a big stable where egalitarianism reigns - one that is cleanand tidy. The way things are in the USA, so they are to be everywhere in theworld. In every city, one lives in the same hotel, one sleeps in the same bed, one rides in a similar cab through identical streets. One eats the same food, talks about the same subjects, listens again and again to the same music on the radio and the gramophone, watches everywhere the same pictures in the movie theaters. One reads the same inanities in the daily papers and keeps looking at the same pictures in the magazines. One is ruled by governments that rant in the same way in every state of the Union. Thats right. And we in Germany are well on the way to doing the same. Except - that it will not entirely work this way. However much slander one might bring forth against the highly undemocratic romanticism, as if it were a bad weed; however much one weeds out and extirpates, using airplanes, telephones, radio, the movies, cars, prohibition or whatever other forms of modern gimmicks, the Blue Flower2 will never cease to bloom and blossom. For one simply cannot strike dead the notion of romanticism - just in the same way as one cannot strike dead the ideal of liberty in any country of this world and not even in America. For sure, the USA has become one of the most enslaved countries on earth and most other countries are on their way to follow this noble example. Nowhere is freedom spurned as much; nowhere either does one find as many heavy-handed attempts of crushing the last remnants of romanticism. For Freedom and Romanticism are twin sisters; they grow from a root called yearning. They have to be eliminated from the souls. And yet - not even in America is it possible to do this. Herman George Scheffauer3 and H. L. Mencke4 are right: what they describe is the real America. Of course, both of them exaggerate to some extent. Scheffauer does so with a broken heart, with much love for the country that mistreated him so badly but from which his soul cannot disengage. Mencken does so with a condescending gesture, always laughing and jeering, without regret, knowing that nothing around him is worth a single tear. There you have America, there you have the piteous, dismal, unspeakably dumb and boring result of your democracy!, say Mencken and Scheffauer, and with them quite a few other people. They all exaggerate - of course. Nevertheless: the way they portray it, such is the true face of America. However: even in this America, the Blue Flower cannot be eradicated. It prospers today as much as it did when Cooper, Irving, Melville, and Poe were alive - even if today one has to digress by some distance from the main road if one wants to find it. And from among the 120 million inhabitants of the US, there are only a few who know where it blooms. One of those who does know is Zane Grey. In his blood, the old yearning is alive. When William Penn crossed the ocean to found the state that after him is called Pennsylvania, he was joined not only by Anglo-Saxons and Scotsmen, but also by quite a few Germans. Among his following was also a Dane from Jutland. His name was Zane. Later, he went to Virginia where he married. He had a daughter and four sons; all five gave fame to their name during the years of the Revolution. The five crossed the Alleghenies and settled in the fertile Ohio valley, together with a few Germans, the brothers Wetzel. Their settlement was of course fortified - - they called it Fort Henry. The Zanes and the Wetzels and their following held the fort for many years against the Indians. The last one of these fights was at the same time the last battle of the War of the American Revolution, namely the siege in 1782 of Fort Henry by the English and the Indians. At this time, Elizabeth Zane made a name for herself that is well known to this day to American school children: Betty Zanes Powder Ride. When the supply of ammunition of the fort was nearly exhausted and capitulation seemed ineluctable, at night time the courageous girl crept through the ranks of the enemies. A few nights later, she returned with a fresh powder keg, having again crossed successfully the enemy lines. A young girl that saved a fort with a few handfuls of powder? In those days, war was at a small scale, but that did not diminish the bravery of Bettys deed. Her bravery must have carried some weight, otherwise the victorious George Washington would not have visited Fort Henry personally and would not have entrusted the Zanes and the Wetzels with the protection of the land against the Indians. In the medieval period, one would have said: the King elevated captain Ebenezer to margrave. And the margrave watched faithfully over his borderland. To this very day, the road that he traced through the country is called Zanes Trace and the town that he founded Zanesville. The Zanes are therefore what in Europe would be called: established nobility. Landed aristocracy, as it were, from the early days of the USA. Except that the USA were a democracy from the beginning where owning large or small estates did not mean much. In the USA, the farmer could never become a peasant. However, he was always, and still is, the countrys stepchild, always betrayed, always shamelessly exploited by stock exchange jobbers and political hagglers. And this is how Zane Grey, who wrote this book, did not inherit a cent from his ancestors. What he inherited was nothing but a half-forgotten name and - the good old romantic yearning. His road was not an easy one. One editor after another sneered at him, and threw him out sarcastically when he presented his manuscripts. For seven years this went on, with one book after another. What grasp did New York publishers have of the free life afield? Finally, in a misguided moment, a publisher let himself be talked into accepting one of his books - the man sold over a million copies of it. Today, he tells everyone who will listen how keen a flair he had when he discovered Zane Grey for his publishing house. Zane Grey knows an America that all the others do not know, an America that the average American, the Babbits, from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles all the way to Boston, would never have suspected. He knows Utah, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, knows Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the lands beyond the Southern border. He knows what lies far away from the roads, from the railroads and the big cities, he knows high mountains and huge deserts, large lakes and untouched virgin forest. He knows how to handle shotgun, knife, and lasso, he knows the bear and the puma, the wolf, the buffalo and the wild horse. He knows equally well the Molzi and the Navajo Indians, the Texan border riders and the Mormon horse thieves. This is where a free America is alive, not a wild one - it is the free America that he loves, and he describes it with an innocent love of everything adventurous. The longing of the masses, however, to disengage themselves from the humdrum of their treadmills - if only in their dreams and only for a few hours at a time - this infinite longing makes the smashing success of his books. The Blue Flower of romanticism - even in America! August 1926 Translation by Reinhart Helmke, January 2004
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:36:50 +0000
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