Cowboys und Indians.(Germans celebrate American West)

A village of 390 tepees stretches along the valley floor, close by a gurgling stream. Squaws cook breakfast over open fires. Young girls play lacrosse. A pair of warriors skin a buffalo. Others have painted themselves with black ash and white chalk and donned their tribal finery. Today will be the Great Dance, with prayers for the grass to grow so that the buffalo may multiply.

Morning on the American Great Plains, 1850? No, Langenwetzendorf in eastern Germany, a sleepy town in the forests south of Berlin. The buffalo comes from a breeder in Nuremberg (yes, it's been tested for BSE), and 15 port-a-pots stand ready in a meadow. As for the thousand residents of the tepee village, not one claims a drop of American blood. Instead, these half-naked "natives" are lawyers from Leipzig, doctors from Hamburg and office workers from Oberhausen. Called Indian Week, the secretive, sealed-off camp with the strictest of dress codes is organized by one of the more than 200 clubs in Germany devoted to celebrating the long-gone culture of the American West. Across the country, some 40,000 Germans are aficionados of das Westernhobby. Once a year, and often more, they step out of their everyday lives--and into the role of Comanche or Hidatsa, trapper or trader, cowboy or sodbuster. They don feathers or chaps, practice archery or shout "yee- hah!" From the Lakota Friends of Dusseldorf to the Pony Express Riders of Berlin, they stage everything from country hoedowns and barbecues to painstaking re-enactments of life on the prairie, Langenwetzendorf style. And always they do it with true Teutonic flair.

Europe's strangest culture cult harks back to the famous Karl May, an oddball 19th-century schoolteacher whose fantastical novels about an Apache named Winnetou remain best sellers to this day. (May himself never visited America, let alone the West, and penned at least some of his romances while in prison for fraud.) Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1896 drew tremendous crowds when it toured Germany, fanning the love affair May had inspired. Nor let us forget Prince Maximilian of Wied, the German explorer and ethnographer who was among the first to record tribal life in the Dakotas and Montana in the 1830s. It was largely thanks to his influence that Berlin more than a century ago became one of the first centers for Native American studies--and his collection of artifacts remains one of the world's finest.

Westernalia still permeates Germany. Saloons and Western-themed restaurants dot the countryside, vying with beer gardens and bratwurst stands. There's Stetson City amusement park near Dresden, and Pullman City in Bavaria. Women seeking enlightenment chant naked in Indian- style sweat lodges, pounding drums, and a craze for country dancing has recently swept up young and old alike. This summer, like every summer, travel agents offer a bonanza of holidays at dude ranches across the West. And Lufthansa's flights from Frankfurt to Phoenix are packed.

When it comes to cowboys and Indians in Germany, it's always been the Native Americans who inspire the greatest devotion. At Indian Week, the only "white" men allowed were a couple of traders--in period costumes, of course, manning an outpost selling pelts and other paraphernalia near the parking lot. (We will not mention the NEWSWEEK correspondent hiding his Levi's ...