Wacky Wednesday - Perry Rhodan!

 

      The main science fiction franchise in Germany is Perry Rhodan, a character who is as much a part of culture in Germany as Doctor Who is in the U.K., or Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are in the U.S. Perry Rhodan is an American astronaut who encounters aliens on the far side of the moon, and subsequently unites the governments of Earth, and makes Sol part of the intergalactic community. Later, the aliens made him immortal. The character and its story line were invented by two German authors: Walter Ernsting (a.k.a. Clark Darlton), and K.H. Scheer.

      Walter Ernsting was an intelligence operative during World War II. He was captured by the Soviets and imprisoned in Siberia until the end of the war. Afterward, he worked for British authorities as a translator. This brought him into contact with British and American science fiction pulp magazines, and he was enthralled with them. He tried writing some science fiction himself, but discovered that Germany was just not culturally ready for indigenous sci-fi. The few Germans who read science fiction were reading British magazines, like he was. As such, he changed tactics, and invented the pen-name of Clark Darlton, who was ostensibly a British writer having his works translated into German. It worked, and Ernsting was one of the first ever post-war writers of sci-fi in Germany.

      By contrast, Karl-Herbert Scheer (1928 – 1991) was just an 18-year-old kid when the war ended, and the training he received from the military as an engineer never got put to use in the German army. He was also fascinated by the science fiction stories coming out of Britain, and determined right away that he would write some. He managed to publish his first story, Stern A Funkt Hilfe (Star: A Distress Call), by at least 1952 (although some accounts say it was serialized as early as 1948). By the mid-1950’s, he had carved out a career for himself as a sci-fi writer, despite doing so in the depressed economy of Germany at that time.

      In the autumn of 1960, Ernsting and Scheer teamed up for a new writing project: a 30 to 50 volume, weekly-published serialization about humanity’s journey into space. Since America was the dominant aerospace power at the time, they cast an American astronaut as the main hero. They hashed out the story-arc, worked out the plot lines, and published the first Heftroman (pulp booklet) on September 8^th, 1961 – two years before the BBC would air the first episode of Doctor Who. It was, to say the least, a hit! Instead of 50 booklets, the serialization kept going, and going, and going! Other authors began to join in. The story arcs took on a life of their own. Nearly 60 years later, the Perry Rhodan serials have never stopped printing stories! It has been, by far, the longest running science fiction franchise, in print, in history!

      With such a successful start, the books eventually spawned a movie. Mission: Stardust (1967) (titled, “4... 3… 2… 1… Morte” in Europe) was produced by Ernst Ritter von Theumer with a screenplay by Karl Heinz Vogelmann. Lang Jeffries played Perry Rhodan. The film was, to say the least, awful. The cinematography was decades out of date, the costumes were gaudy, and the music was pure 60’s psycho-funk. The film was done in German, with an English-dubbed version available for international audiences, and this only detracted from the film even further. It has been utterly lampooned ever since. Mystery Science Theater 3000 didn’t poke fun at it – but it should have. Most fans of the franchise prefer to pretend the movie never existed.

      Despite the awful film (or perhaps even because of it), the franchise garnered the attention of the American science fiction market, and why wouldn’t it, with an American lead character! None other than super-fan Forrest J. Ackerman took charge of translating Perry Rhodan into English and publishing the stories. His wife, Wendayne, spoke German, and soon, other translators joined the project, like Sig Wahrmann, Stuart J. Byrne, and Dwight Decker. The first volume, based on the first two booklets just like the movie was, was published in 1969. It was rendered as Enterprise: Stardust, as opposed to the film title Mission: Stardust. (The original story was Unternehmen: Stardust, and while Unternehmen could mean “enterprise” or “mission,” it more closely corresponds to “undertaking.”) The stories were published through Ace books, which printed a total of 118 volumes, ending with the double-edition of 117/118 in 1977. Three more volumes covering stories which were skipped over for editorial reasons, plus three more which covered the Arkon story spin-off, were published, but that was all. After this, Wendayne Ackerman took it upon herself to continue self-publishing the series in English under the label of Master Publishing. It was a subscription-only based service which allowed 38 more volumes of Perry Rhodan stories to be published in English. By 1979, even Wendayne couldn’t keep it going, and the English-language run ended with volume 137.

      Meanwhile, back in Germany, the series continued on and on, unabetted. William Voltz took over as the primary writer until his death in 1984. After that, Ernst Vlcek and Kurt Maher became the primary writers until about 2011. Other authors included Kurt Brand, Arndt Ellmer, H G Ewers, Robert Feldhoff, H G Francis, Peter Griese, Horst Hoffmann, Hans Kneifel (1936-2012), and Marianne Sydow. Some guest authors have included Andreas Eschbach, Gisbert Haefs, and Markus Heitz.

      Translations appeared in other countries in the 1970’s, and not just in Europe. Japan and Brazil have also seen Perry Rhodan translations. Curiously, the first ever Perry Rhodan translation was later discovered to have been made in Israel. A pirate translator rendered the first four volumes in Hebrew, and published them without permission in 1965. The series itself spans not only dozens of languages, but itself has, in its root language alone, grown to over 3000 volumes! With such a wide range, and variety, Perry Rhodan grew to have the largest readership of any science fiction franchise in the world.

      At the 50th World Con, Reno, Nevada, September 2011, a new series was launched, called Perry Rhodan Neo. This was aimed at winning over new readers with a reboot of the original story, starting in the year 2036 instead of 1971. So far, no English translations of this reboot are available, but the new series did garner new readership, as Germans love to travel abroad, particularly in the American Southwest.

      Perry Rhodan does have its detractors. Many have called the books “pot-boilers.” (They certainly began as juvenile pulp-fiction.) Others have pointed out that the notion of an Aryan space-man uniting all of Terra under one rule using alien technology is decidedly fascist. Quite a few people have pointed out that, by the time Perry Rhodan novels stopped being so juvenile and became more adult and sophisticated, the stories stopped being published in English, and so much of the world ended up missing out on the best parts. As Forrest J Ackerman said in Volume 1 of the English translation, “In Germany, all serious SF buffs claim to hate Perry Rhodan, but somebody (in unprecedented numbers) is certainly reading him.”

            Indeed, they were! Or at least, it can be judged that they did based on cultural impact. Matthias Rust, the 19-year-old aviator who landed his Cessna 172 aircraft on the Red Square in Moscow in 1987, cited Perry Rhodan's adventures as his main inspiration for flying his plane into Soviet airspace. And Dutch ESA astronaut André Kuipers said he was inspired to become an astronaut from an early age by the Perry Rhodan books which his grandmother bought for him. When he went into space, on 18 April 2004, he brought his very first booklet along with him into orbit!