Karl Friedrich May (February 25, 1842 – March 30, 1912) is one of the best selling German writers of all time, noted mainly for books set in the American Old West, and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East.
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In addition, he wrote stories set in his native Germany, in China and in South America. May also wrote poetry and several plays, as well as composing music; he was proficient with several musical instruments. May's musical version of "Ave Maria" became very well known.
May was born into a family of poor weavers in Ernstthal, Kingdom of Saxony, the fifth child out of 14. According to his autobiography, he suffered from visual impairment and rickets shortly after birth, due to lack of vitamins A and D. He regained his eyesight after treatment at the age of four or five.
During the years in prison, May began writing. In 1875 his first known story was published. However, not until 1892, when 'Winnetou I' appeared in a book edition, did he achieve success with his writing. May used many different pseudonyms, including Capitan Ramon Diaz de la Escosura, M. Gisela, Hobble-Frank, Karl Hohenthal, D. Jam, Prinz Muhamel Lautréamont, Ernst von Linden, P. van der Löwen, and Emma Pollmer (the actual name of his first wife; according to May, she was never aware of the purpose or content of his writing). Nowadays his works are all published under his own name.
Non-dogmatic Christian feelings and values play an important role in his writings, and May's heroes are often described as being of German ancestry. In addition, following the Romantic ideal of the "noble savage" and inspired by the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, his Native Americans are usually portrayed as innocent victims of white law-breakers, and many are presented as heroic characters. In his later works, there is a strong element of mysticism.
For the novels set in America, May created the characters of Winnetou, the chief of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand, the author's alter ego and Winnetou's white blood brother, who rode together over the empty Western plains from one adventure to the next and straight into the hearts of millions of readers - destined to surpass in popularity all other fictitious characters of German literature.
Another successful series of novels is set in the Ottoman Empire. Here the narrator-protagonist calls himself Kara Ben Nemsi, i.e. Karl, son of the Germans, and travels with his loyal helper and constant companion/travel guide, a Bedouin named Hadschi Halef Omar. The enormous success of the stories is the friendship between Kara Ben Nemsi and Halef that intrigues and inspires the reader.
These stories have been recently characterized as being tales ...
...whose authenticity can hardly be challenged, and which sparkle with unbounded wit and suspense, and show the first-person hero as a contemporary errant knight in his successful crusade against crime and wickedness among proud and haughty sheiks and cruel slave traders and cunning bandits galore. They have all the splendor of the Arabian Nights and their characters are the liveliest to be met in this field of literature.
~Ilmer, Walther: Meet a Marvel . . . (a brochure in English printed in 1995 by the Karl May Society without information on its publication), pp. 2-3
Both series are linked not only by the common narrator, the author himself as either Old Shatterhand or Kara Ben Nemsi, but also by numerous other references and shared minor characters.
May's works were extremely successful, particularly in continental Europe, and have been translated into more than thirty languages including Hebrew, Latin, Volapük, Esperanto and Ido. More than 200 million copies of May's books have been sold worldwide.
Between 1912 and 1968 German cinema produced 23 movies made from May's novels, most only loosely following the books. In thirteen of these American actor Lex Barker [famous as Tarzan in the U.S.] starred either as Old hatterhand, Kara Ben Nemsi, or Doctor Sternau. Three movies saw British actor Stewart Granger in the leading role as Old Surehand, and one film starred American Rod Cameron as Old Firehand. May considered the prefix "old" added to the names of several of his heroes as illustrating their considerable experience. Eleven movies featured French actor Pierre Brice as the Apache chief Winnetou.
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The music for the movie Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake) (1962), composed by German Martin Böttcher, became well known. Music was one reason for the great success of the Karl May movies of the 1960s. Their success made possible the so called "Spaghetti Western" from Italy (with the famous compositions of Ennio Morricone). The star of some of the Spaghetti Westerns, Terence Hill, began his career in the German Karl May movies.
The 1960s Karl May films are typical productions of the time and have not aged as well as the Italian westerns from the same time period. Most were shot in Yugoslavia, some in Spain, and none in America.
May's villa in Radebeul, the elegant suburb of It was only in 1899 that May finally traveled to some of the arid lands of his dreams. His route took him to Cairo, up the Nile to Assuan and Schellal, then on to Port Said, Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, Suez, Aden, and finally to Ceylon and Sumatra. In 1900 he made a return trip to
Since many of his books are written as first-person accounts by the narrator-protagonist, there was such a clamor from his delighted readers to see the adventurous author that May hired a photographer in 1896 to come to Villa Shatterhand and take photographs of him in costumes portraying both Kara Ben Nemsi as well as Old Shatterhand.
Quotes from May's texts and from letters he wrote answering questions from his fans establish his identity:
Yes, I have experienced all that and much much more. I wear still today the scars and wounds which I received....
I really visited those lands and I speak the languages of the mentioned peoples....''
I am in reality Old Shatterhand, respectively Kara Ben Nemsi, and have experienced what I tell....
~Heermann, Christian: Der Mann, der Old Shatterhand war: Eine Karl-May Biographie.
Who among his hundreds of thousands of adoring fans could have suspected that their literary hero not only had never been outside Europe to the places he described so thrillingly. He compensated successfully for his lack of direct experiences by a combination of creativity, imagination, and factual sources including maps, travel accounts and guide books, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies.
Karl May and his works are deeply rooted in the belief that all mankind should live together peacefully; all of his main characters try to avoid killing anyone, except when necessary to save other lives.
Karl May had a substantial influence on a number of well-known German-speaking people - and on the German population itself. The popularity of his writing, and indeed, his (practically always German) protagonists, are considered by some as having filled a lack in the German psyche which had few popular heroes until the 19th Century. His readers longed to escape from an industrialised, capitalist society, an escape which May offered them. He was noted as having "helped shape the collective German dream of feats far beyond middle-class bounds" - and criticised as having offered those dreams for later exploitation by the Nazis.
Amongst his fans were counted physicist and Nobel-prize-winner Albert Einstein, who noted that he had spent his entire adolescence under May’s spell, and writer Hermann Hesse, who considered his work "fiction as wish-fulfilment" while being a life-long fan. Albert Schweitzer said that "much in his work was imperishable".
Adolf Hitler was also an admirer, who noted that the novels "overwhelmed" him as a boy, going as far as to ensure "a noticeable decline" in his school grades. Hitler attended a lecture given by May in Vienna in March 1912, in favor of Pacifism and World Peace, and was enthusiastic about the event. He defended May against critics in the men's hostel where he lived in Vienna, as the evidence of May's earlier time in jail had come to light. Although it was true, Hitler confessed, that May had never visited the sites of his American adventure stories, this made him a greater writer in Hitler's view since it showed the author's powers of imagination. May died suddenly only ten days after the lecture, leaving the young Hitler deeply upset.
It is not true that Adolf Hitler read the complete works of Karl May, as it is still repeated in the literature. Hitler was given, when German Chancellor, as a present the whole collection of Karl May's books. In his youth Hitler read the Indian stories and some of the Orient adventures. Hitler most decidedly did not read "Et in Terra Pax". In his superficiality Hitler skimmed the adventure parts but deeper ideas of humanity did not touch him at all. Claus Roxin expressed it in these words: "...where he [i.e., Karl May] finished, in the literary heights, ...his readers could not follow him any more." Hitler was one of them who could not follow Karl May's noble ideas. This did not stop Hitler from quoting May at inappropriate moments.
Hitler later recommended the books to his generals and had special editions distributed to soldiers at the front, praising Winnetou as an example of "tactical finesse and circumspection", though some note that the latter claims of using the books as military guidance are not substantiated. However, as told by Albert Speer, "when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he [Hitler] would still reach for these stories," because "they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people."
There are very few aspects of May's books which would seem to make them appealing to Nazi authorities, particularly his heroes' humaneness towards their enemies and his explicitly expressed opposition to racism should have made his books highly suspect to the National Socialists. Also, particularly in the works published late in his life, May was a pacifist through and through.
What appears to have made Karl May appealing to the National Socialist in the first place was his continued popularity among the young. The authorities were seeking to exploit this popularity to their own ends. Also, then as now, the image people had of things was important - and a lot more people had an idea of Karl May than had read his books, or they had read one of the adventure novels. In May's case the image may have been a diffuse collection of adventure, suspense, cunning and power, which may have been an attractive mix for the Nazis, but not a correct representation of Karl May. They were hoping to impress upon the young
· a romantic sense of adventure which might make them more willing to play 'Cowboys and Indians' in the Hitler Youth organization and - ultimately - the war, and
· a feeling of admiration for and a striving for emulation of the omniscient, omnipotent German narrator-hero.
At the same time they probably hoped that readers would not realize the very obvious parts of the books that contradict Nazi ideology. However, they did not completely trust their citizens to succeed in turning a blind eye to May's humanity: they had changes made in the books and the majority of his novels were not published during the Third Reich. While a few Nazi officials and 'concerned citizens' saw the contradictions, particularly in the area of racial policy, and sought May's books to be banned, the national authorities continuously backed May and deemed him, of course not him alone, to be a good educator for Nazi youths. This, and the fact that Hitler was a fervent May reader, made May very suspicious to exiled German writers during the war. Quite a few used him in their anti-Nazi writings, in some cases apparently without (or despite?) a knowledge of May's books.
Klaus Mann, published in 1940 an article entitled "Cowboy Mentor of the Führer," speaking of his "lurid glorification of cruelty" and, in obvious hyperbole, wrote, "The Third Reich is Karl May's ultimate triumph."
Mann's emotionally colored view still appears in the literature in 1993 [F.C. McKenzie: Inside Adolf. Beaver Publishing House, Victoria (Australia) 1993, p.18] in the following sentence: "Old Shatterhand continually quoted the Bible claiming that he was invested with a divine right to exterminate inferior races, and we know that Hitler frequently expressed this view in later years."
Hitler apparently was attracted to May
· because reading May was a way for him to relax
· by similarities he saw in both their biographies, succeeding despite difficult starts in life
· by May's ability to convincingly portray events in lands he had never seen (Albert Speer suggests that Hitler for example used this to prove that it is not necessary to know the desert to direct troops on African terrain)
· because he saw a lot of positive values, decent attitude and humor in these books - apparently he admired the heroic in the novels and thought them valuable in youth education
· because he appreciated May's creativity and tactical finesse which he applied to military matters
It is difficult to see how Hitler was able to overlook the contradictions between his his own and May's world view. May certainly is a child of his times in displaying a certain colonial attitude (people in the first person narrator's country are so much more advanced than any others) and there also are quite a few clichés used when it comes to the characterization of peoples (particularly Armenians, and in some instances but not always, yes, Jews are not treated very well in this respect). But there are heroes from any race or creed in May's books, the narrator frequently stresses that people are good and bad everywhere, there is criticism of white and Christian colonial behavior and arrogance, the heroes almost never kill even their worst enemies and especially in his later years he was a firm pacifist, also in his books. These traits Hitler and his "willing executioners" (?) must have very seriously overlooked when they assumed they were planning and executing war, persecution and genocide even remotely in the spirit of Karl May.
The wide influence on the populace surprised post-WWII occupation troops from the US, who realized that thanks to Karl May, "Cowboys and Indians" were familiar concepts to local children (though fantastic and removed from reality). The new Eastern Germany was less favoring of his work, and officially considered him a "chauvinist" - though this could not break his popularity, and eventually, even the communist state allowed free publication of his books and created its own Karl May museum.
