Probably the best-selling German writer of all time, Karl May (1842 - 1912) was known around the world for his adventure novels, set in the American West and in the Middle East. He was least popular in English-speaking countries, but he remains a much-loved figure as far as Indonesia.
May's lack of renown in the United States, where many of his books were set, is not as paradoxical as it might seem. He described the world of Indians and cowboys without ever having seen any of it; indeed, he did not set foot in the U.S. until 1908, and he traveled only as far west as Niagara Falls at that time. When he visited the Arab world several years before that, he experienced disappointment that it did not much resemble the world he created in his books. May's works reflect popular attitudes in the German culture of his time, but beyond that, their success is testimony to the sheer power of imagination.
Blinded in Childhood
May (pronounced "my") showed imagination from a very early age, but it took many years before he learned to direct it into socially acceptable channels. The son of a weaver, he was born in central Germany, in the small town of Ernstthal near Chemnitz. The family suffered dire poverty during May's youth as the German cloth trade fell victim to competition from English factories. People in May's circle sometimes had nothing to eat but potatoes, and when he was one year old he began to suffer vision problems. He soon went completely blind, possibly a result of vitamin A deficiency. For several years May learned to interpret the world in large part through fairy tales told to him by a grandmother. May attributed his future success to his childhood blindness. "For me there were only souls, nothing but souls," he was quoted as saying on the Australian Friends of Karl May website. "And so it stayed, even after I learned to see, from my youth on until the present day. This is the difference between myself and the others. This is the key to my books."
May's blindness was cured after his mother sought out training to become a midwife and asked the doctor who was instructing her to look at her son's eyes. He attended school for several years and was particularly entranced one day by a puppet show that came through town and performed for the families of the weavers' guild. The flip side of the imagination-centered education, which May received during his years of blindness, came when his father drilled facts and figures into him, backing up his lessons with a whip that May called Johnny the Birch. At his father's behest, May served as a drummer boy in the local militia. May was forced to memorize a 500-page geography book, an exercise that did help him learn to retain large amounts of descriptive landscape detail.
The Western tales of American writer James Fenimore Cooper were popular in German translation, and May tried his hand at writing stories about Indians as early as 1858. The family's plan for him at this time, however, was that he would enroll in a teacher-training school in the town of Waldenburg. He received several warnings there for missing church services and was thrown out at the end of 1859, after stealing six candles to give to his still-poor family to put on their Christmas tree. After the intercession of his parish priest, he was allowed to finish classes at another school. He got a job at one school, but was fired after making a pass at the wife of his landlord. Another teaching job proved unsuccessful when May was accused of stealing a roommate's watch; though he protested his innocence, he was jailed for six weeks. The prison had a large library, and May read widely during his incarceration there.
Between 1862 and 1864 May seems to have wandered from town to town with a theater group, carrying on a relationship with a dancer for part of the time. He was imprisoned twice more, from 1865 through early 1868 and from 1870 through 1874, both times after low-grade swindles in which he impersonated a government official or other authority figure. May seemed less interested in financial gain than in respectability. When he was released from prison, he told officials that he planned to emigrate to America. He followed through with this story, eventually embellishing it with so many details that some think he came to believe it himself. But he did not leave Germany at this time; he got a job in a blacksmith's shop and set to work as a writer. Soon he had produced a historical romance, The Rose of Ernstthal.
Landed Editor Job
In 1875 May renewed his acquaintance with the publisher H.G. Münchmeyer and, having published The Rose of Ernstthal, was offered a job as an editor. The company specialized in books and magazines for Germany's newly literate lower middle classes, and May's writing hit the sweet spot for Münchmeyer. He was incredibly productive, writing stories, serialized novels, and nonfiction. Late in 1875 he introduced the figure of Winnetou, an Apache chief, for the first time in a short story. Münchmeyer, impressed, tried to build a closer professional relationship with May. His wife gave May a piano. The family rented rooms in Dresden near the newly popular author and made it known that he would be looked on favorably if he wanted to marry their daughter Minna. But May was on his way in the literary world and ignored these overtures. He left his editor job after a year and married a girl from Ernstthal, Emma Pollmer, in 1880.
Münchmeyer did not let his disappointment interfere with a chance to share in the profits from May's work, however, and the company published several of May's novels over the next decade. Some of them originally appeared in serial (or episode) form in a magazine called Der Deutsche Hausschatz in Wort und Bild (The German Home Treasury of Words and Images). May's first novel set in the American West was Im fernen Westen (In the Far West) of 1879. In the 1880s he wrote a series of enormous adventure novels (roughly 2,000-pages) that sold well and forever put an end to his need to hold a day job. The most successful of them bore the impressive title of Das Waldröschen oder Die Verfolgung rund um die Erde: Grosser Enthüllungsroman über die Geheimnisse der menschlichen Gesellschaft (The Little Forest Rose, or The Chase Around the World: A Great Revelatory Novel About the Secrets of Human Society).
May also began to work on two large series of novels, sometimes introducing already completed short stories where appropriate. The Fehsenfeld publishing house issued these works and bound them handsomely with illustrated covers giving a taste of the adventures contained within. For a family that might not own a large library of books, these novels were attractive household possessions. May began these two series, in 1892, under the collective title of Gesammelte Reiseromane (Collected Travel Novels) and added to them through the 1890s and beyond; by the time of his death the Gesammelte Reiseromane comprised 32 volumes, and they continued to sell well through the 20th century.
One of the two series that made up the Gesammelte Reiseromane consisted of novels of the American West, often featuring a German-born hero called Old Shatterhand. (The significance of the name was that the character could destroy an opponent in a fight with a single punch.) May's most successful Western novel, and the best seller among all his books, was Winnetou, der rote Gentleman (Winnetou, the Red Gentleman), which appeared in 1893 but was not translated into English until 1977. The novel featured a friendship between Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, a cultured Indian chief who resists the exploitation of white invaders. Unlike in American Westerns, the villains in May's books were usually white Americans; Winnetou represented a "noble savage" figure that could undergo self-improvement by contact with European culture. In Winnetou, the Indian cheif refuses to disclose the location of a large gold deposit, and in a later book in the series he converts to Christianity. As for Old Shatterhand, May, at times, implied in lectures that the adventures the character experienced were actually his own. With the profits from the Winnetou books, May built a large rural estate that he called Villa Shatterhand. He stocked it with a large collection of Western artifacts that he showed off to visitors.
Traveled Through Islamic World
May's other major series of novels took place in the Middle East and North Africa. Like the Winnetou tales they featured a figure, Kara Ben Nemsi (or Karl the German) who was a potential stand-in for May himself; the novels were highly readable adventure yarns of intrigue, capture, escape, and deception. Kara Ben Nemsi had a comic sidekick, Hadschi Halef Omar. May based many of the details in these novels on what he learned from his large library of books about the Islamic world, but when the author finally traveled to some of the lands he wrote about he found the landscape had little resemblance to his imaginative constructions. May journeyed through the Middle East and went as far as Indonesia in 1900; when he returned, his outlook was altered.
Back home, May encountered problems as well. While he was traveling, his detractors launched a campaign against him in German newspapers, seizing on the some of the fantasies he promoted and pointing out that he had taken the title of Doctor without the benefit of any medical or scholarly degree. May also struggled, for much of the rest of his life, against pirated editions of his books. May's ultimately successful libel suit against the journalist Rudolf Lebius spanned several years, and his marriage broke up. His wife sided with his opponents in lawsuits and public controversies.
In 1903 May married again; his wife Klara was the widow of one of his friends. His writings in the last decade of his life represented a major shift in direction from his Western-style and Middle Eastern novels. Ardistan und Dschinnistan (1909) still featured Kara Ben Nemsi as hero, but depicted a fictional pair of Eastern realms, one beautiful and enlightened, the other in the grip of materialism and violence. His new books were filled with symbolism and allegory, and in lectures he began to claim that his earlier books, too, had had symbolic meanings; taken as a whole, he said, they represented the rise of humanity from primitive superstition to enlightenment. His popularity declined, but it had been so great to begin with that he found a large reservoir of readers who were willing to follow his new path.
In 1908, May visited the United States for the first and only time. He lectured to German-American groups but, perhaps mindful of his disappointments in the Middle East, he went only as far west as Buffalo and Niagara Falls. His touring lecture was entitled "Three Questions for Mankind: Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?" Around this time May began to suffer from various health problems, and doctors advised him to cancel a lec-ture in Vienna, Austria, entitled "Rise to the Realm of the Man of Nobility." He went anyway, and was well received by an audience that included the young Adolf Hitler (an admirer of May despite May's ardent pacifism).
May died soon after returning home to Villa Shatterhand, in Radebeul, Germany, on March 30, 1912. His novels were continually issued in new editions by an official Karl-May-Verlag (Karl May Publishing Company), and after their copyright finally expired in 1962, a host of paperback publishers reprinted the works. A century later, May's novels remained an inspiration to German children who used their imaginations and dressed up as cowboys and Indians.
Books
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 129: Nineteenth-Century German Writers, 1841 - 1900, Gale, 1993.
Periodicals
Economist (US), May 26, 2001.
New Republic, July 14, 1986.
Online
"Karl May (1842 - 1912)," Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/karlmay.htm (January 24, 2006).
"Karl May - Life and Works,: Australian Friends of Karl May, http://karlmay.ziby.net (January 24, 2006).
May, Karl, My Life and My Efforts, Volume II (translation of Mein Leben und Streben, Band I), http://www.karlmay.leo.org/kmg/sprachen/englisch/primlit/bio/lebvel/kmlae 10h.htm (January 24, 2006).
"A Short Biography of Karl May," http://www.karlmay.leo.org/kmg/sprachen/englisch/primlit/bio/lebvel/kmlae 10h.htm (January 24, 2006).
