Mollyycolllinss Authors Jess Nevins
7 days
30 days
All time
Recent
Popular
Good morning/afternoon/evening! We could all use some diversion today, I think, so let’s talk about a complicated real-life redemption story.
To wit: Billy Jenkins, the Jewish Nazi cowboy.
1/30
“Billy Jenkins” was the man’s stagename. The name he was born with in 1885 was “Erich Rudolf Otto Rosenthal;” his father, a German Jew, was a café owner & variety-show artist. (We don’t know much about his mother). I’ll be calling him “Jenkins,” as that was his chosen name.
2/
Jenkins grew up in Berlin and imbibed deeply of the German fixation with Buffalo Bill and all things Western. After college, in 1910 he left home (he hated his father) and traveled to the American West, where he spent several years learning tricks from every cowboy he met.
3/
In 1919 or 1920 (sources are unclear)—after WW1 ended, anyhow-- he returned to Berlin and went to work as a rider and animal trainer for various German circuses, including the very famous https://t.co/SwKfMahfmI Circus Sarrasani, where he became a star.
4/30
Jenkins was very talented, of course, but a large part of his appeal to German audiences was that he was one of them, a German, who’d gone to the American West, hung out with actual cowboys, and learned how to do everything that they did. And Jenkins loved their adulation.
5/
To wit: Billy Jenkins, the Jewish Nazi cowboy.
1/30
“Billy Jenkins” was the man’s stagename. The name he was born with in 1885 was “Erich Rudolf Otto Rosenthal;” his father, a German Jew, was a café owner & variety-show artist. (We don’t know much about his mother). I’ll be calling him “Jenkins,” as that was his chosen name.
2/
Jenkins grew up in Berlin and imbibed deeply of the German fixation with Buffalo Bill and all things Western. After college, in 1910 he left home (he hated his father) and traveled to the American West, where he spent several years learning tricks from every cowboy he met.
3/
In 1919 or 1920 (sources are unclear)—after WW1 ended, anyhow-- he returned to Berlin and went to work as a rider and animal trainer for various German circuses, including the very famous https://t.co/SwKfMahfmI Circus Sarrasani, where he became a star.
4/30
Jenkins was very talented, of course, but a large part of his appeal to German audiences was that he was one of them, a German, who’d gone to the American West, hung out with actual cowboys, and learned how to do everything that they did. And Jenkins loved their adulation.
5/