I grew up in Sacramento, California and went to Sutterville Elementary School. “Sutterville” is a reference to John Augustus Sutter, pictured at the left, born Johan Suter in February 1803 in the Kingdom of Saxony,whose father came from Neuchatel, Switzerland. Young Suter moved to and went to school in Switzerland. He joined the Swiss Army and became a captain in the artillery, but he incurred gambling debts and left Europe for the United States. He arrived in the United States in 1834 and by a circuitous route that took him to Vancouver in the Oregon Territory to Honolulu to the Russian colony in Sitka, Alaska he landed at Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, a then poor mission station, on July 1, 1839.

At that time there were fewer than 1000 Europeans in California. Suter, who was now calling himself John Augustus Sutter, obtained permission from Juan Bautista Alvarado to settle in the Sacramento Valley and to qualify for a land grant Sutter became a Mexican citizen. The Mexican government granted him 48,827 acres in June 1841, the El Sobrante or “leftover” grant. He named his new settlement, which was centered at present day Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, New Helvetia or New Switzerland since Helvitia was the Latin name for Switzerland.

In 1848 John Marshall and Sutter began the construction of a sawmill in Colma along the American River, and Marshall discovered gold flakes in the ground. Sutter and Marshall could not keep the find a secret and the Forty-Niners, coming from around the world to prospect for gold, overran Sutter’s holdings. Sutter deeded what remained of his land to his son John A. Sutter, Jr., who started planning for a new city which he named Sacramento after the river on which it was located, rather than Sutterville after his father.

The Squatters Association challenged the legitimacy of the Sobrante grant, and in 1858 the Supreme Court denied the validity of the grant. Sutter sued to recover his Gold Rush losses but received nothing but a pension of $ 250 from the United States government. He and his wife, Nanette, moved to New Lititz, Pennsylvania where he spent  fifteen years petitioning the U.S. Congress unsuccessfully for redress. He died virtually penniless in a Washington D.C. hotel and was buried in New Lititz.

This saga of early California is the basis of a fascinating article by Joe McNeill in the June 2010 issue of True Westentitled “Heil Hitler Away” describing a German western, yes a German western, based loosely on Sutter’s life, Die Kaiser von Kalifornen( The Emperor of California). To reach the story author Joe McNeill makes a necessary digression through the history of the German western as embodied and created by Karl May.

Karl May was born into a family of weavers in Saxony in 1842 and became a teacher but lost his license because of a conviction for theft. He spent time in a pair of gaols, and while serving a sentence in Bohemia he became the gaol librarian and read a great deal including travel literature. He became a writer of popular novels and one of his most successful series was set in the American West, a place he never saw or visited, and featured the adventures of  Winnetou, the Apache Chief, and his white blood brother, Old Shatterhand. The picture in the center show May dressed as Old Shatterhand.

These novels had a great appeal to Germans who were seeking an imaginative escape from the industrialized capitalist society in which they found themselves. Numbered among May’s readers were Albert Einsetein, Herman Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer, and over 200 million copies of his works, including translations, have been sold world wide.

One of May’s admirers was not to have such a beneficial influence on world history as Einstein, Hesse, and Schweitzer. As Joe McNeill notes in the article, one of May’s most fervent admirers was Adolph Hitler. Hitler attended a lecture that May gave only ten days before May’s death and was devestated to hear of May’s death. Hitler praised Winnetou to his troops as a master tactician and distributed copies of the Shatterhand/Winnetou novels to them.  Albert Spier said that in times of trouble Hitler looked to the stories to renew his courage. .

Author McNeill notes that the Nazis appropriated the German film industry as an instrument of their propaganda and that May’s Teutonic view of the West had a big influence on Director Louis Trenker’s 1936 dramatization of Sutter’s life in the film, Der Kaiser von Kalifornen. The director and the cast actually  came to the United States to film some outdoor scenes for the film.

Trenker,who also played the title role of Suter, filmed some initial scenes near Mt. Whitney in a landscape that would be featured in Republic Pictures 1938 Lone Ranger serial. He rented a distinctive white stallion named Shiek who was later ridden by the likes of John Wayne, Tim McCoy, and William Boyd in low budget westerns. But he filmed the most improbable scenes in Arizona.

He and the cast took rooms at the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. In an earlier post I noted the German mountain climbing or bergfilmes. German audiences had an expectation of mountain climbing scenes in adventure films. Der Kaiserhas scenes of Trenker climbing the walls of the Grand Canyon as part of his depiction of  Sutter’s search for California. In the climactic scene Trenker/Sutter reaches the top of the canyon wall to find himself with a panoramic view of California and exclaims,”California Hello!”

The California that Trenker/Sutter is actually looking at is, by a feat of creative editing, Sedona, Arizona. McNeill notes that great effect is made of Sedona in the cinematography. The cinematographer, Albert Benitz, showed crisp skies and billowing clouds shadowing the Sedona peaks and rock formations. He observes that the film looks more like Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece, The Triumph of the Will, than the 1931 film Riders of the Purple Sagealso shot in Sedona. The effect is all the more eerie because the soundtrack for the ascent is a mixture of “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi Party anthem and the “Star Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. The cast finished the exterior shots in Yuma, Arizona and made a side trip to Washington D.C. to film the penniless Trenker/Sutter slumped on the steps of the United States Capitol in the ending scene of the film. The Nazis designated Der Kaiser a “Great National Film,” and showed it to the Volkssturm ( the people’s storm) militia of old men and boys that he formed as a last attempt to hold off the advancing Russian Army in 1944

Hitler and most of the hierarchy of the Nazi Party attended the world premiere of the film in Berlin on July 21, 1936, and at the Venice National Film Festival in 1936 the Der Kaiserwon the award for best foreign film beating out among others Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town starring Gary Cooper.

Trenker denied that he himself was a Nazi and in 1983 the Goethe-Institute sent him to the U.S. with prints of two of his films including Der Kaiseras part of a series honoring the German immigrant experience in America. The tour concluded at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado with a tribute in his honor. He died in 1990 at the age of 97 as a much honored German figure. When East and West Germany reunified a researcher at the Berlin Document Center discovered a Nazi membership card in Trenker’s  file which established that he had joined the party in 1940.

Trenker had cited the theme of Der Kaiser as being one of Lebensraum, Hitler’s idea that the German people needed space to carry out their destiny. The story of one of the first and most prominent European settlers of California was used to forward on film the ideas of the modern world’s most evil figure.