How teenagers lived through the *real* Wild West experience on German television

By Anne-Katrin Lacher

The American West is often depicted as the land where the cowboys and Indians live, where coyotes and crickets wish each other goodnight, and where once was the Great American Desert. While I was combing through the German television network to find an artifact of this American West in German popular culture, I found another group of temporary inhabitants whose stay had been documented by the German broadcasting station RTL:

The TV-show called “Teenager außer Kontrolle – Letzter Ausweg Wilder Westen” [translation: Teenagers out of control – last resort wild West; UK original: “Brat Camp”] is a reality show format that accompanies a group of chosen adolescents on its way through a wilderness therapy, lasting eight weeks, in the desert of Utah in the United States of America. Four seasons were broadcasted in German television from 2007 through 2010. The teenagers were looked after by therapist Annegret Noble and her team of helpers while they were challenged by weather and nature, camping outdoors all length of their stay.

The boys and girls often originated from financially weak family backgrounds and shared their missing social skills and bad behavior. Most of them had mounted a plane for the first time in their lives and arrived in the United States of America in the smoldering heat of a Utah airport, received by their therapist and her team. In addition to their arriving in an unknown country with a totally unfamiliar landscape, they were also forbidden to drink and smoke, which most of them did regularly at home. They were picked up by SUV’s or minivans and taken directly into the great outdoors, seeing for the first time the completely unacquainted terrain of their new surroundings. Therapist Noble explains on her website that the adolescents could leave all their daily troubles and bad customs behind in this foreign environment. In the TV-show the vastness and beauty of the landscape of the American West was many times used to make the group of youngsters forget about their problems back at home in Germany. In this new space, where mainstream civilization was allegedly absent, they were left on their own a lot in the early days of the therapy to learn more about themselves and to approach their own inner self again.

While there would have probably been some ranches or small country towns available, where the therapy could have been lodged at, the therapists chose to locate it in the middle of nowhere. That way they let the teenagers experience the hardships of this inconsequential nature and environment, sometimes being surprised by a sudden and heavy shower at night, washing away their campsite.

For reasons unknown, many members of the therapist’s team often also wore cowboy hats during the shootings. If that was to represent the good old cowboy country or only to protect themselves from the burning sunlight, will never be known but the stereotype of cowboys “watching their herd (of juveniles)” in the American West was nonetheless brought back to the audience’s minds.

The adolescents were subsequently engaged into group challenges and adventures to show them how vulnerable they were in this rough landscape all on their own. These kinds of lessons could be compared with the hardships of the early settlers’ families that made their ways out into the uninhabited regions of the West such as the Shimerdas in Willa Cather’s novel My Àntonia. Though if that is a real American experience, could probably be questioned since troubles like that are not lived to see happen on a daily basis in the West anymore.

The means of therapeutic handiwork might be as effective as they are but a true American experience cannot be generated by cowboy hats and hot weather. The originality of this undertaking, created by the astonishing landscape, was counterbalanced by bluntly celebrated stereotypes. The so called “last resort wild West” is nothing but an empty image of past heroic days, sending villains to the American West, and could have also been enacted in the Sahara Desert, if it would not be for the difficult climatic circumstances in that particular region.

Source: http://www.annegret-noble.com/teenager.php