Fantastic Fiction: Perry Rhodan – (West) Germany’s Space Hero

Science fiction has many long-running science fiction series. However, there is no series longer running than Perry Rhodan, which as of this writing has racked up a staggering 3,312 volumes since 1961.

Rachel Cordasco already offered an overview of Perry Rhodan and his international publication history on this very blog. However, I want to go a bit deeper into the Perry Rhodan phenomenon and what makes it so unique.

You can’t write about Perry Rhodan without also discussing the German Romanheft. Romanhefte (literally “novel magazines,” the plural form of Romanheft) are A5-sized fiction magazines printed on woodpulp paper with a glossy cover. Every 64-page issue contains a single short novel, a novella. Sometimes they’re serialized; sometimes they’re standalone stories.

Romanhefte got their start in the nineteenth century, like their American and British cousins, the dime novels and penny dreadfuls respectively. But while the format died in the U.S. and U.K., Romanhefte continue to be published in Germany and are sold at newsstands, railway stations, and grocery stores. There also is a thriving aftermarket at flea markets, comic shops, and Romanheft exchanges, where readers can swap Romanhefte they’ve already read for ones they haven’t. My local Romanheft exchange is tied to a hardware store run by two lesbian grannies.

Romanhefte come in a variety of genres. Romance with its various subgenres and western are the most popular ones, but you can also find crime and mystery, adventure, war, horror, and of course, science fiction. Romanhefte are cheap, ubiquitous, lurid, and very much literature for the masses, so educators, politicians, and other busybodies naturally hate them. All of the various regimes that have governed Germany over the past 150 years really hated Romanhefte, and there were many moral panics and even bans. But the Romanheft form has always prevailed.

Romanhefte quickly came back after being banned during WWII (supposedly due to paper shortages). By the 1950s, dozens of different series could be found at West German newsstands every week, including two science fiction series, Utopia Zukunftsroman (Utopia Future Novel), published since 1953, and Terra Utopische Romane (Terra Utopian Novels), published since 1957. Both series have published translations of American science fiction, and occasionally British or French SF.

Enter Walter Ernsting: Drafted into WWII directly out of school, Ernsting couldn’t find a job when he returned from a POW camp in 1950. What he did have was a knowledge of English and a love for science fiction, so he started working as a translator and, later, an editor for Utopia Zukunftsroman. But Ernsting wanted more: He wanted to tell his own stories. Since his publisher believed that science fiction by German authors wouldn’t sell, Ernsting created a fictional American author named Clark Dalton and passed himself off as the translator of Dalton’s work. His first story went into print in 1955.

By the early 1960s, Ernsting a.k.a. Dalton was an established science fiction writer, and so he was tapped, together with Karl-Herbert Scheer, another veteran Romanheft author, to create an ongoing science fiction series for the publisher Moewig. And thus Perry Rhodan was born. The covers were provided by Johnny Bruck, who would continue to illustrate every single issue of Perry Rhodan—more than 1,700—until his death in 1995.

The first issue, “Mission Stardust,” hit West German newsstands on September 8, 1961. Set in the not too far-off future of 1971, it featured a world on the brink of nuclear war, divided among two superpowers, a western and an eastern bloc. It was a world readers in 1961 recognised only too well. The Berlin Wall had been built barely a month earlier, the specter of nuclear war was ever-present, and West Germans knew they would likely be on the frontlines.

Like the real world, the fictional world of the Perry Rhodan series was also engaged in a space race. And, as in the real world, the first aim was the moon. The series opens with the launch of the spacecraft Stardust under the command of Major Perry Rhodan of the U.S. Space Force, embarking on the first manned mission to the moon. But things quickly go wrong. The Stardust loses contact with Earth and is forced to make an emergency landing on the dark side of the Moon.

Here, Perry Rhodan and his crewmates find a crashed alien spacecraft and its occupants, the humanoid Arkonides. Crest, commander of the alien ship, is dying, and his people have no cure for his disease. However, the humans do, and so Perry Rhodan makes a deal with Crest and his sister, Thora. Rhodan will take them to Earth, where Crest can receive treatment, and humanity will get access to Arkonide technology in return. However, Perry also realizes that Arkonide technology is far too advanced to benefit only one of Earth’s superpowers, and he renounces his allegiance to the U.S., declares himself a citizen of Earth, and establishes a neutral Third Power in the Gobi Desert.

The eastern and western blocs may be at each other’s throats otherwise, but they are united in their decision that Perry Rhodan must be stopped at once. Soon the nukes are flying, but a forcefield protects the Stardust and the city that slowly springs up around it as Perry recruits others to his cause. Finally, the governments of Earth recognize and eventually join the Third Power to form a united world state.

Note that all this happens in the first ten issues. So what does Perry Rhodan do in the remaining 3,300 issues? Well, he establishes a base on Venus, leads an expedition to Vega, puts down a robot revolt, gains immortality, gets married (more than once), has children, and continues to fight for peace in the galaxy. Almost every German science fiction author has written for Perry Rhodan at some point, and the original series spawned several spin-offs and even a reboot entitled Perry Rhodan Neo in 2011, for those intimidated by decades of lore.

Have you read Perry Rhodan? Who is your favourite character? Let’s continue the conversation in Seattle, revisiting the past, discussing the present, and speculating about the future of this iconic series and its titular hero.