How the World Moves by Peter Nabokov

Author:Peter Nabokov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

39

Joining the Circus (1927)

Suffice to say here that German Indianthusiasm is basically a nineteenth-century construct, an expression of colonial desires and fantasies, that it has escapist and self-aggrandizing tendencies, that it is narcissistic in that it constructs Indianer as people who love Germans, and that it is a by-product of the nineteenth-century invention of an essential German nation.

—Hartmut Lutz, 2003

AFTER TURNING INTO the Elbe River at Cuxhaven on February 14, 1927, the steamship Deutschland, bearing Southern Cheyenne Indians from Clinton, Oklahoma, for the Krone Circus in Munich, and the Miller Brothers entourage of Sioux, Seneca, Creek, Arapaho, and Pueblo Indians bound for the Sarrasani Circus in Dresden, crawled the next sixty miles to the port of Hamburg. From there the Hunts and the rest disembarked and registered at Emigrant Hall, across the river. Two days later their contingent boarded a train that cut nearly three hundred miles across northwestern Germany. During their six-hour ride the Indians watched the cultivated hills, estates, vineyards, and churches of old Saxony rattle by until they stopped near Dresden. Then cowboys, Cossacks, Indians, horses, stagecoach, and gear were transferred into circus cars for a final lap to “Florence on the Elbe.”

Dresden was long famed for its baroque architecture, its churches, theaters, and famous museums for painting, jewelry, and porcelain concentrated in the Altstadt district on the river’s south side. To allow more public venues and revitalize the neglected Neustadt quarter on the river’s north bank, around 1910 Dresden’s city fathers permitted a circus clown named Hans Stosch-Sarrasani to add to Germany’s roster of the “theaters of the world,” where visiting American Indians frequently performed.

From Max Littmann, a highly regarded architect, Stosch-Sarrasani commissioned a dome-roofed performance space to be located in the Königin-Carola-Platz, a crossroads for this emerging neighborhood. It cost a million marks, and its electrically lit interior accommodated five thousand spectators around a circular arena. Except for expensive boxes in the front row, all seats cost the same—first come, first served. Stosch-Sarrasani felt that the Ringling Brothers’ “three-ring” idea distracted from central events. Wilbert Hunt recalled how its arena spotlighted the boss himself, gleaming in his white outfit, turban glittering with diamonds, whip and hook in hand, a dozen elephants at his bidding.

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