1991 Vintage Geobra Playmobil Western Fort Bravo Set 3773 99. 9 Complete
Item History & Price
| Reference Number: Avaluer:48516096 | Country/Region of Manufacture: Germany |
| MPN: 3773 | Featured Refinements: Playmobil Western |
| Character Family: Fort | Year: 1991 |
| Brand: PLAYMOBIL | UPC: 4008789037732 |
There's a fascination among many Germans about the American West. Not the American West that I grew up and live in, which is full of the greatest natural beauty in the world. (Well, you didn't expect someone who grew up amid fabled places like Yosemite, Lassen, Joshua Tree, Point Reyes, and Death Valley to believe anything else, did you?)
And which is also the American West of conflagration, a world in which each summer we have our hearts broken again and again and irretrievab...ly as we breathe in the smoke of each of those places as climate change savages our world.
This American West -- not the one outside my window -- is the American West created by Hollywood (and Lewis and Clark and James Fennimore Cooper and Mark Twain and Alexis de Toqueville). A factory-of-dreams West in which the good guys wear the white hats. And are white. And male. And everything else must be tamed. And this taming is seen as good and necessary and inevitable.
Of course it is not just Germans who are fascinated in that American West. People around the world are, and a great many of them are Americans. A myth does not have such power, it seems to me, if it has no support from inside. The story of the American West is is mostly a narrative of the victors. (Well, why should the American story be different from the stories of every part of the world?)
I'm only focussing on Germans here because Playmobil is a German company and this is a listing for a Playmobil set. About the West.
A lot of earlier Playmobil sets involved Western scenes and Western themes. The scenes and themes of that American West that is myth and fable and run through with truth the way the granite in the Sierra Nevada is veined with gold.
So, yes, it's an entertaining toy, as are all of the older Playmobil sets.
But it's also a decoder that can allow you to travel (in your imagination) from the stories that Westerners tell about themselves and the stories that outsiders tell about the West. It's an unfathomably complicated code, because it's multigenerational. It includes the stories that Westerners tell about themselves that have chapters in them about how Westerners understand, mock, and embrace the stories about them, which include subchapters about how non-Westerners understand the stories that Westerners tell about outsiders in ways that only outsiders who love (or hate or do not care about) the West an understand and sub-subchapters that Westerners tell each other about outsiders who love the West and love stories about how Westerners think about how outsiders tell stories about the West. And so on.
And so on.
Until there are no more stories left to tell about the West. Because all of its peoples and lands are gone, reduced by fire into ashes, then transformed into smoke, and reduced again to darkness. And the quiet that lies behind stars.
And which is also the American West of conflagration, a world in which each summer we have our hearts broken again and again and irretrievab...ly as we breathe in the smoke of each of those places as climate change savages our world.
This American West -- not the one outside my window -- is the American West created by Hollywood (and Lewis and Clark and James Fennimore Cooper and Mark Twain and Alexis de Toqueville). A factory-of-dreams West in which the good guys wear the white hats. And are white. And male. And everything else must be tamed. And this taming is seen as good and necessary and inevitable.
Of course it is not just Germans who are fascinated in that American West. People around the world are, and a great many of them are Americans. A myth does not have such power, it seems to me, if it has no support from inside. The story of the American West is is mostly a narrative of the victors. (Well, why should the American story be different from the stories of every part of the world?)
I'm only focussing on Germans here because Playmobil is a German company and this is a listing for a Playmobil set. About the West.
A lot of earlier Playmobil sets involved Western scenes and Western themes. The scenes and themes of that American West that is myth and fable and run through with truth the way the granite in the Sierra Nevada is veined with gold.
So, yes, it's an entertaining toy, as are all of the older Playmobil sets.
But it's also a decoder that can allow you to travel (in your imagination) from the stories that Westerners tell about themselves and the stories that outsiders tell about the West. It's an unfathomably complicated code, because it's multigenerational. It includes the stories that Westerners tell about themselves that have chapters in them about how Westerners understand, mock, and embrace the stories about them, which include subchapters about how non-Westerners understand the stories that Westerners tell about outsiders in ways that only outsiders who love (or hate or do not care about) the West an understand and sub-subchapters that Westerners tell each other about outsiders who love the West and love stories about how Westerners think about how outsiders tell stories about the West. And so on.
And so on.
Until there are no more stories left to tell about the West. Because all of its peoples and lands are gone, reduced by fire into ashes, then transformed into smoke, and reduced again to darkness. And the quiet that lies behind stars.
