RADEBEUL, Germany, Sept. 7 — The other day I found Jürgen Michaelis, a short, 50-year-old, beefy-handed man with a broad smile, standing by himself inside a teepee not much bigger than a phone booth behind a house in this suburb of Dresden. A former locksmith and demolition worker from Chemnitz (which used to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt), Mr. Michaelis settled here a couple of years ago.

Gazing through inch-thick lenses and overjoyed to have a visitor, he showed off his homemade deerskin suit. Perched halfway on his head, about to tumble, was a matted black wig with a blue feather. At his feet burned a tiny charcoal fire, large enough to warm a single metal mug of water on a cold morning. A few forlorn trinkets rested on wood blocks, ostensibly for sale.

“My Indian name,” Mr. Michaelis told me, “is Lonely Man.”

A few months ago the director of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Tex., told me in passing how his museum was frequently overrun by visiting Germans, so the curious German obsession with the Wild West — which newly arrived Americans repeatedly discover to predictable eye-rolling from Germans, for whom it’s hardly news — was not exactly unknown to me. Still, the extent of it is a little astonishing.

At powwows — there are dozens every year — thousands of Germans with an American Indian fetish drink firewater, wear turquoise jewelry and run around Baden-Württemberg or Schleswig-Holstein dressed as Comanches and Apaches. There are clubs, magazines, trading cards, school curriculums, stupendously popular German-made Wild West films and outdoor theaters, including one high in the sandstone cliffs above the tiny medieval fortress town of Rathen, in Saxony, where cowboys fight Indians on horseback. A fake Wild West village, Eldorado, recently shot up on the outskirts of Templin, the city where Angela Merkel, the chancellor, grew up.