At the moment, Plauen’s unemployment rate is about 20 percent — twice the rate in Germany as a whole. You see men in their forties, a lost generation, too young to retire but too old to fit into the new scheme, staggering drunk in the middle of the day. The factory workers who bravely defied and brought down the old regime are the group who’ve fared worst, the group with the wrong skills and the least hope. Others have done quite well.
Manfred Voigt, the McDonald’s franchisee in Plauen, is now a successful businessman who, with his wife, Brigitte, vacations in Florida every year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Manfred Voigt attributed his recent success to forces beyond his control. “It was dumb luck,” Voigt explained; “fate.” He and his wife had no money and could not understand why McDonald’s had chosen them to own its first restaurant in East Germany, why the company had trained and financed them. One explanation, never really explored in the Wall Street Journal profile, might be that the Voigts were one of the most powerful couples in Plauen under the old regime. They headed the local branch of Konsum, the state-controlled foodservice monopoly. Today the Voigts are one of Plauen’s wealthiest couples; they own two other McDonald’s in nearby towns. Throughout the former Eastern bloc, members of the old Communist elite have had the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism. They had the right connections and many of the right skills. They now own some of the most lucrative franchises.
The high unemployment rate in Plauen has created social and political instability. What seems lacking is a stable middle ground. Roughly a third of the young people in eastern Germany now express support for various nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Right-wing extremists have declared large parts of the east to be “foreigner-free” zones, where immigrants are not welcome. The roads leading into Plauen are decorated with signs posted by the Deutschland Volks Union, a right-wing party. “Germany for the Germans,” the signs say. “Jobs for Germans, Not Foreigners.” Neo-Nazi skinheads have thus far not caused much trouble in Plauen, though a black person today needs real courage to walk the city’s streets at night. The opposition to American fast food voiced by many environmentalists and left-wing groups does not seem to be shared by German groups on the far right. When I asked an employee at the McDonald’s in Plauen if the restaurant had ever been the target of neo-Nazis, she laughed and said there’d never been any threats of that kind. People in the area did not consider McDonald’s to be “foreign.”
Around the time that Plauen got its McDonald’s in 1990, a new nightclub opened in a red brick building on the edge of town. “The Ranch” has an American flag and a Confederate flag hanging out front. Inside there’s a long bar, and the walls are decorated with old-fashioned farm implements, saddles, bridles, and wagon wheels. Frieder Stephan, the owner of The Ranch, was inspired by photographs of the American West, but gathered all the items on the walls from nearby farms. The place looks like a bar in Cripple Creek, circa 1895. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frieder Stephan was a disc jockey on an East German tourist ferry. He secretly listened to Creedance Clearwater, the Stones, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Now forty-nine years old, he is the leading impresario in Plauen’s thriving country-western scene, booking local bands (like the Midnight Ramblers and C.C. Raider) at his club. The city’s country-western fans call themselves “Vogtland Cowboys,” put on their western boots and ten-gallon hats at night, and hit the town, drinking at The Ranch or joining the Square Dance Club at a bar called the White Magpie. The Square Dance Club is sponsored by Thommy’s Western Store on Friedrich Engels Avenue. Plauen now has a number of small western-wear shops like Thommy’s that sell imported cowboy boots, cowboy posters, fancy belt buckles, work shirts with snaps, and Wrangler jeans. While teenagers in Colorado Springs today could not care less about cowboys, kids in Plauen are sporting bolo ties and cowboy hats.
Every Wednesday night, a few hundred people gather at The Ranch for line dancing. Members of Plauen’s American Car Club pull up in their big Ford and Chevy trucks. Others come from miles away, dressed in their western best, ready to dance. Most of them are working class, and many are unemployed. Their ages range from seven years old to seventy. If somebody doesn’t know how to line-dance, a young woman named Petra gives lessons. People wear their souvenir T-shirts from Utah. They smoke Marlboros and drink beer. They listen to Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash — and they dance, kicking up their boots, twirling their partners, waving their cowboy hats in the air. And for a few hours the spirit of the American West fills this funky bar deep in the heart of Saxony, in a town that has seen too much history, and the old dream lives on, the dream of freedom without limits, self-reliance, and a wide-open frontier.
epilogue: have it your way
WORLDS AWAY from The Ranch, Dale Lasater stands in a corral full of huge bulls, feeding them treats from his hand. Behind him on this warm spring day, the Rockies are still white with snow. Lasater is in his early fifties, with a handlebar mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He wears worn-out jeans and boots, and a well-ironed, button-down shirt, looking part-cowboy, part-Ivy Leaguer. The bulls that crowd around him seem almost sweet, acting more like a bunch of Ferdinands than like fierce symbols of machismo. They were bred to be gentle, never dehorned, and never roped. The Lasater Ranch occupies about 30,000 acres of shortgrass prairie near the town of Matheson, Colorado. It is a profitable, working ranch that for half a century has not used pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers on the land, has not killed local predators such as coyotes, has not administered growth hormones, anabolic steroids, or antibiotics to the cattle. The Lasaters are by no means typical, but have worked hard to change how American beef is produced. Their philosophy of cattle ranching is based upon a simple tenet: “Nature is smart as hell.”
Dale Lasater’s iconoclasm seems bred in the bone. One of his grandfathers headed a Texas cattleman’s association during the early 1900s and led the fight against the Beef Trust, testifying before Congress and calling for strict enforcement of the antitrust laws. In retaliation, the Beef Trust refused for years to buy Lasater cattle. Dale Lasater’s father, Tom, dropped out of Princeton after the Wall Street crash of 1929 to become a full-time rancher. Hard times forced him to seek ways of raising cattle inexpensively. He decided to let nature do most of the work. He bred cattle to be gentle, fertile, and strong, not caring in the least how they looked. He combined Herefords, Shorthorns, and Brahmans to make a whole new breed, only the second new breed of cattle registered in the United States. And he gave the breed an appropriately American name: the Beefmaster. In 1948, Tom Lasater moved his family from Texas to eastern Colorado. Despite the anger and disbelief of his neighbors, he refused to kill predators or to allow hunting on his land, permitting animals that other ranchers exterminated — rattlesnakes, coyotes, badgers, ground squirrels, gophers, and prairie dogs — to flourish. He thought cattle benefited more from the challenges of a natural ecosystem than from any human efforts to control the environment.
Tom Lasater is ninety years old now, and his memory is failing, but he still has the aura of a strong patriarch. As Dale bounces an old cream-colored Suburban Custom Deluxe along one of the ranch’s dirt roads, his father sits in the back seat, wearing a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and thick black glasses, silently staring at the Beefmasters scattered across the prairie. He scrutinizes them, and every so often asks Dale about a particular animal. The cattle roam a landscape that appears vast and unspoiled. The Lasater Ranch is a wildlife sanctuary. The native grasses are thriving, tall cottonwoods grow along the stream banks, and herds of antelope graze alongside the cattle. Dale parks the truck, and I walk a short distance to a rocky outcropping. The Suburban now seems like a small, insignificant speck compared to what surrounds it. Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain rise to the west, and in every other direction the prairie extends to the horizon, the shortgrass moving in waves, blown by a steady wind.