Harvard Magazine
By Eugene Stelzig
March-April 2020
The most popular German author
most Americans have never heard of is Karl May, whose adventure novels have
sold more than 100 million copies in the German-speaking world. Though the son
of poor weavers in Saxony, May (pronounced “my”) nevertheless received
supplementary training in music, English, and French in school; meanwhile, his
avid reading of popular robber tales, and a visit to a puppet theater at the
age of nine, no doubt stimulated his childhood imagination. He trained as a
teacher, but lost his license after being charged with stealing a roommate’s
watch. Banned from his profession, he became a con man, impersonating among
others a doctor and police detective, and spent several years in jail in his
twenties. Perhaps these fictional self-projections were the embryonic
beginnings of his becoming a best-selling novelist.
The books May wrote in his prime that made him a publishing
phenomenon are riveting travel narratives set around the world, but mostly in
the Middle East and the Wild West, where his fictional alter ego performs
daring actions almost nonstop—a type of mid-nineteenth-century German Indiana
Jones. These tall tales playing out in a picaresque fashion in landscapes
vividly imagined in great detail, from the Rocky Mountains and American
prairies to the sands of the Sahara, have been a perennial favorite of young
readers in Germany and beyond. Albert Einstein acknowledged that “my whole
adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today, he has been dear to me in
many a desperate hour.” Arnold Schwarzenegger stated that May’s books “opened
up my world and gave me a window to see America.” But another young
Austrian was also a fan: Adolf Hitler.
May spent his years behind bars as a voracious reader, using
the prison library to prepare himself for a literary career. After his release,
he emerged in his thirties as the editor of several journals as well as the
pseudonymous author of stories in magazines and of pulp fiction novels. He
began writing full-time in 1875, and hit his stride as a hugely popular author
in mid-career. The first of his famous three novels about Winnetou, the
Mescalero Apache chief, and his German friend and sometime sidekick, Old
Shatterhand—May’s most heroic alter ego—appeared in 1893, when he was 51. His
novels have been translated into many languages, and a number of films are
based on them. A Karl May Museum
opened in Germany
in 1928, there are annual Karl May festivals, and a publishing house, Karl May
Verlag, keeps his works in print. (None of this German May fervor, though, has
had any notable impact on the anglophone world, which has its own repository of
Wild West fictions, from James Fenimore Cooper—a major influence on May—to Zane
Grey and classic films and television shows. What’s more, some of May’s
legendary “Westmen,” like Old Shatterhand and Sam Hawkens, were actually
Germans.)
Though May’s tall tales are full of gore and gun smoke, they
are also consistently informed by a Christian message: Old Shatterhand will
kill only as a last resort. He prefers to shoot those trying to kill him in the
hands or knees. May’s most idealized Indian character, Winnetou, dies as a
Christian after a moving conversion experience: “I believe in the Savior.
Winnetou is a Christian. Farewell” are his final words.
From a contemporary perspective, this conversion seems an
uncalled-for abdication of his Native American identity, but part of May’s
idealization of Winnetou is the intense homosocial bond between him and Old
Shatterhand as they become devoted and loving “blood brothers.” This happens
after the “greenhorn” Shatterhand is captured by the Apaches on his first
venture into the Wild West, as a surveyor for a railroad company planning to
lay tracks across tribal territory without permission. Nearly killed by
Winnetou, Shatterhand gains his freedom and the trust of the Apache chief and
his tribe through his heroic deeds and devotion to them. The story of their
friendship up to Winnetou’s untimely death is both highly sentimental and
moving. In May’s overarching Christian and Eurocentric vision, his sympathetic
portrayal of Native Americans in their inevitable decline as they war among
themselves, only to be marginalized and destroyed by the inevitable advance of
the whites into their shrinking territories, is a tragic one.
May’s colorful and dramatic presentation in the Winnetou
saga of “the Wild West around the year 1868,” a landscape imagined only from
his wide reading, is thoroughly inflected, not surprisingly, by the colonial
and racial assumptions of the nineteenth-century imperialist European culture
that shaped his vision of a place he never visited. But despite these
Victorian-era stereotypes haunting his novels, his fictional paean to his
“dear, dear Winnetou” was a powerful protest against what he saw as the
genocidal treatment of Native Americans. Their demise is symbolized by the
tragic fate of Winnetou, that “splendid human being,” who was “eliminated…just
as in short order the entire race will be eliminated, whose noblest son he
was.”
In his later years, having achieved wealth and fame with his
riveting adventure stories, May turned to writing tendentious philosophical
novels with allegorical speculations about humanity’s rise from evil to good.
In the spring of 1912, shortly before his death, he delivered a public lecture
in Vienna, “Up
into the Realm [Reich] of the Noble Humans,” in which he paid tribute to the
peace movement and the pacifist ideal of Nobel Peace Prize winner Bertha von
Suttner, who was a guest of honor. In this lecture, May declared that human
worth was not defined by skin color and championed an evolutionary ideal of a
noble humanity. The young, impoverished Hitler attended the lecture, but seems
to have appropriated May’s pacifist “Reich” ideal for his own infernal
ideological purposes, failing to process May’s powerful Christian and pacifist
message against genocide.
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