Karl May

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Karl May.

This article is about German writer. For the Russian educator Karl May, see Museum of the history of the K. May school.

Karl Friedrich May (Ernstthal, Kingdom of Saxony, February 25, 1842 - Radebeul, Germany, March 30, 1912) was the best selling German writer of all time, noted chiefly for wild west books set in the American West and similar books set in the Middle East; in addition, he also wrote some lesser-known stories set in his native Germany, Russia, China and South America, some poetry, an autobiography, and a play. May also dabbled as a musical composer, writing two very famous romantic German songs, "Forget Me Not" and a version of "Ave Maria".

1 Life and career
2 Filmed works
3 Karl May festivals
4 See also
5 Literature
6 External links and references

[edit] Life and career

May was born into a poor family and - according to his autobiography - suffered from blindness shortly after birth, probably due to malnutrition. He regained his eyesight only after an operation and treatment at age four. He was trained to become a teacher in Waldenburg and Plauen (Saxony). His short career as a teacher ended abruptly with a first conviction in 1863; in the following years he repeatedly got into trouble with the law for small thefts and conman frauds, and was jailed several times. This might have been a case of pseudologia (compulsive lying).

During the years in prison May began writing, but he remained commercially unsuccessful for a long time. In 1875 he published his first story. Not before 1892, with Winnetou I, did he achieve commercial success with his writing, eventually becoming something of a pop icon. Many of his books are written as first-person accounts by the narrator-protagonist, and he sometimes claimed that he actually experienced the events he described.

He used many different pen names, including Capitain Ramon Diaz de la Escosura, M. Gisela, Hobble-Frank, Karl Hohenthal, D. Jam, Prinz Muhamel Lautréamont, Ernst von Linden, P. van der Löwen, Emma Pollmer (the actual name of his first wife; according to May, she was never aware of the purpose or content of his writing), Franz Langer. Today his works are all published under his own name.

He visited North America only in 1908, well after writing the books set there, never getting west of Buffalo, New York. This lack of direct experience of the Western milieu he successfully compensated for by an ingenious combination of creativity, imagination, and factual sources including maps, travel accounts and guide books, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies.

Non-dogmatic Christian feelings and values play an important role, and his "good guys" are often described as being of German descent. In addition, following the Romantic ideal of the "noble savage", and inspired by the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, his Red Indians are generally portrayed as innocent victims of white aggression, and many of them are presented as heroic characters of almost superhuman abilities. Especially in his later works, there is a strong air of mysticism, often personified as the mysterious old woman Marah Durimeh.

In the books set in America, May invented the characters of Winnetou, the wise chief of the Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand, the author's alter ego and Winnetou's white blood brother. A very successful Oriental series of books is set in the Ottoman Empire. Here the narrator-protagonist calls himself Kara Ben Nemsi, i.e., Karl, son of Germany, and travels with his local guide and servant Hadschi Halef Omar through the Sahara desert and the Near East, all the while experiencing many exciting adventures. Both sets of books 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 immensely successful, particularly in continental Europe, and have been translated into more than thirty different languages including Hebrew, Latin, Volapük, and Esperanto. More than 200 million copies of May's books have been sold worldwide. Nonetheless, he is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, though this is slowly beginning to change. Several of his novels were made into films, usually with the mountains of the former Yugoslavia doubling for the wild west. These films predated the mid-1960s Italian Spaghetti Westerns by some years.

May had famous admirers, including Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Mann, Karl Liebknecht and Bertha von Suttner. German author Carl Zuckmayer even named his daughter after the character "Winnetou" (although Winnetou is male). For a long time, literary criticism typically regarded May's books as trivial. The Karl May Society (Karl-May-Gesellschaft) was founded in 1969 to study his life and works.

May's house in Radebeul near Dresden in Germany has been turned into a museum devoted to Karl May and his anthropological collection of artifacts of native American Indian origin.

[edit] Filmed works

Main article: Karl May movies

Between 1912 and 1968 German cinema produced 23 movies made after novels by Karl May, most of them only loosely connected to the stories of the respective novels. In thirteen of these movies American actor Lex Barker starred either as Old Shatterhand or as Kara Ben Nemsi or as Doctor Sternau. Three movies have seen British actor Stewart Granger in the leading role as Old Surehand and one movie starred American actor Rod Cameron as Old Firehand. At the time of writing, Karl May considered the prefix "Old" to the names of several of his heroes as being typically American and illustrating the great experience of the heroes. Eleven movies featured French actor Pierre Brice as the fictional Apache-chief "Winnetou".

The music for the movie "Der Schatz im Silbersee" (The Treasure of Silver Lake) (1962), composed by German Martin Böttcher, was a landmark in German film music. It was one ingredient of the great success of the Karl May movies of the 1960s. And the success of these movies only made possible the later 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 popular productions of the time, and have not aged as well as Italian westerns of the same period. Most of them were shot in former Yugoslavia, some in Spain, none in America. May himself is the subject of a 1974 film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (1920), silent movie
Die Todeskarawane (1920), silent movie
Die Teufelsanbeter (1921), silent movie
Durch die Wüste (1936), first May talkie
Die Sklavenkarawane (1958), first May color film
Der Löwe von Babylon (1959)
Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962)
Winnetou 1. Teil (1963)
Old Shatterhand (1964)
Der Schut (1964)
Winnetou 2. Teil (1964)
Unter Geiern (1964)
Der Schatz der Azteken (1965)
Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes (1965)
Der Ölprinz (1965)
Durchs wilde Kurdistan (1965)
Winnetou 3. Teil (1965)
Old Surehand 1. Teil (1965)
Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen (1965)
Das Vermächtnis des Inka (1965)
Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi (1966)
Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand (1966)
Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der Toten (1968)

[edit] Karl May festivals

The most famous are the open-air-festivals every summer in Bad Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein (Northern Germany) and in Lennestadt-Elspe(Western Germany), where movie-actor Pierre Brice for ten years was playing his Winnetou-character in a live version. Another open-air-stage is in Rathen (Eastern Germany) near the village of Radebeul, where Karl May lived.