—
ratatazong — ratatazong —
ratatazong ...
 Dear co-travellers, on this
occasion we have decided to let the
TAZARA-express roll on rails in Germany;
in these minutes it will enter one of the
first terminus stations that existed in
Europe. Have a look through the windows,
what can you see?
—
ratatazong — ratata ...
Hopefully not cattle-wagons again, I say!
Where are we stranded now? A
railway-station in a town with the image
of a lion as its heraldic symbol!
... zong!
 We railway-fans
are in the know: oldest
station-building in Germany, erected in
1845 in a classicistic style by the same
architect who, only seven years earlier,
had built on the same ground the first
German station at all, in neo-gothic
style … Had to be demolished to make
place for a bigger one, no one had
calculated that such a great number of
travellers would have to be accommodated.
What is written on that billboard?
BRAUNSCHWEIG
Welcome in the city along the
Oker-River in Lower Saxony!
Braunschweig’s
Lion is the oldest remaining grand
sculpture of the middle age north of the
Alps; you can find it as an image on the
„Ebstorf World Map“ of around
1300.
As one would expect, the animal made of
bronze is of course a symbol for Highness
and Jurisdiction. Heinrich the Lion, Duke
of Bavaria and Saxony, got it erected in
1166, perhaps after he had seen the
Markus-Lion in Venice at the time when he
participated in Barbarossa’s Italy
War.
But the lion is not the reason why we are
here … we want to meet an old
acquaintance!
We rolled back on our time-line and have
reached the 16th of July anno 1890.
This new terminus station erected by the
Braunschweig Hofbaurat (architect) Carl
Theodor Ottmer is again not sufficient to
cope with traffic. There are three
platforms in the hall but this particular
summer day sees a huge crowd, which came
to watch the thirty wagons of a special
train that arrived with the most unusual
cargo the Lion of Braunschweig had ever
to compete with.
We hand over to the expert for such
mobile genre, to our Herr André Dunkler
…
„What would be the international
circus without railways? … I,
myself, inquired already how much it
would cost to transport my CIRCUS AFRICA
across Europe.“
Please, Herr Dunkler, Wednesday,
16th July 1890, Braunschweig-station?
…
„Well, I see a line of empty wagons
over there. Billboards painted on them
show a circle made of stars and of
colourful Indian faces and in the centre
of the circle the bigger profile of a
Westerner with trapper-hat and a
turned-up moustache … below I can
read:“
BUFFALO BILL’S
WILD WEST
The bulk of
the whole expedition has already
moved to the Leonard-Square —
hundreds of Indians, cowboys, horses,
buffalos …
The ‘Braunschweiger Stadtanzeiger’
reports: 13.634 tickets have been sold
for today, for tomorrow 15.937 —
18.316 for 18th of July — 18.536 for
19th of July — 17.743 for 20th of
July and 12.000 for 21st of July. We are
talking here about almost one hundred
thousand paying visitor in six days!
Masses are moving. Every train brings
hundreds of people to the residence.
Public transport within the town cannot
cope to get the visitors back and forth
the Leonard-Square.
Yet, the star’s constellation under
which the show is travelling has brought
mishap, as this paper reported already
yesterday:
A member of the Buffalo Bill-Kompagnie
lost in an accident both legs and one
arm; he had fallen out of the train. It
is said that the unfortunate one was a
Sioux-Indian.
Today, we read in the paper:
The Indian who yesterday fell from the
special train has died.
Let never fall an African from
your train, Herr Dunkler, once you start
to move your artists through Europe
…
Turn-up-moustache William Frederick Cody
aka Buffalo Bill made sure that his
Sioux-Indian was buried on Braunschweig’s
central cemetery accompanied by great
sympathy of the population.
We remember: your animation-colleague was
seen last time in 1867 whilst hunting for
bison. How did he enter the show
business?
The
U.S.-army used him from 1868
to 1872 as a scout. Then fate hit in the
form of New York based journalist Ned
Buntline. He was in search of a
marketable story out of real life, an
early inventor of the docu-soap-genre so
to speak. After he had met Cody, he began
to glorify ‚Buffalo-Bill‘ in
theatre-plays and as pulp-fiction,
exaggerated of course, creating a
cliché. Cody who, from 1872 onwards,
played himself in theatre-plays written
by Ned Buntline recognized soon the
business-angle of it and formed in 1883
his own Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
still following the unrealistic style of
Buntline’s publications.
A chronologist of contemporary
events in Braunschweig wrote:
The whole troupe of riders raged like
a thunderstorm right at the beginning
through the whole arena, stopped in front
of the platform so that the audience had
ample time to see the whole picture in
general and in detail. Multicoloured
figures in blue and green coat, tattoos
on different body parts, hair in
complicated knots, eagle feathers high on
the heads, some mounted on horses others
without saddle — all this offered a
colourful and wild romantic picture.
And finally, he rides in, the famous
buffalo-hunter himself: Buffalo Bill is
not anymore a youngster, but under his
grey silken hair there is fire in his
eyes … he rests on his horse like
made from brass, no vehement move of the
animal can irritate him, it looks like
rider and horse would be one piece.
The shooting-act in which he is hitting
three balls thrown into the air at the
same time with three rapid shots from his
galloping horse will no one imitate.
The most magic impression for the
children comes, of course, from the
Indians. Certain shyness prevents them to
be too close to these alien people; once
they turn abruptly the kids jump away.
On 22nd July, the local paper notes: The
tent-colony has disappeared as fast as it
had been erected, and it adds: The troupe
is very much satisfied with their stay in
the town; it was mentioned that one had
found nowhere else such an excellent
place for the event like the
Leonard-Square. And the newspaper
acknowledges that: Buffalo Bill has been
not only a magnet for the marketing of
Braunschweig but that his show also let
pour money into the town’s business
community.
The calculation is that town and
business-community sold to the show
licences and services in the region of
30.000 Mark and that visitors from out of
town spent some 150.000 Mark.
The local paper analyzed the fascination
as follows:
We Germans are somehow familiar with
America’s Wild West because, we may
ask, whose imagination has not been
caught by Coopers’ novels or those
written by Gerstäcker? That is why the
audience has been so keen to watch the
show.“ …
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