I Like America

A comprehensively illustrated companion volume to an exhibition that explores the German fascination with the Wild West.

Beginning in the 1820s when waves of German immigrants crossed America's high plains, German-speaking Europeans were obsessed with the lives, histories, and myths surrounding the American West. This volume examines and documents that enthusiasm and its origins. Paintings, drawings, engravings, exhibition posters, and photographs by American and German artists such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Bierstadt, George Grosz, August Macke, Emil Nolde, and Carl Wimar are accompanied by illuminating essays that follow the rise of American and European imagery pertaining to Indians and frontier life. Throughout this wide-ranging volume, Germany's enthusiasm for the Wild West is explored through the filter of American visual culture, resulting in a distinctly German take on a distinctly American myth.