May, Karl Friedrich b. February 25, 1842; Hohenstein- Ernstthal, Saxony d. March 30,1912; Radebeul, Saxony
Most famous German author of American Indian novels (Indianer Romane). He soared to fame as the creator of immortal fictional characters such as Winnetou (the “noble Indian”) and Old Shatterhand.
May was born into the family of an impoverished weaver. There were fourteen children in the family, but nine died at an early age. Through his father’s determination to improve his only son’s lot, he was destined to become a schoolteacher. May was enrolled at the teacher’s seminary in Waldenburg in 1856, but was dismissed three years later for stealing six candles, which he took home for Christmas. As this was considered only a minor misdemeanor, he was allowed to finish his education in Plauen, where he graduated in 1861. May’s career was soon ruined, however, when in 1862 he was convicted of the theft of a watch, which, he claimed, had been lent to him by his roommate. He was sentenced to six weeks in prison and lost his teacher’s license. This traumatic experience led to a psychological crisis and strengthened his wish to avenge himself on society. Between 1864 and 1874, May was twice arrested for theft and fraud—he masqueraded as, among others, a medical doctor—and spent seven years in prison, where he worked in the library and immersed himself in reading.May’s first novel, The Rose of Ernstthal, was published in 1874, soon after his release. He continued writing sentimental regional stories, which he issued in various magazines. In 1875 he moved to Dresden, where he spent the next three years working as a journalist and newspaper editor for Heinrich Gotthold Munchmeyer, a publisher. Munchmeyer commissioned May to write stories, which were published serially and anonymously. These five early novelettes were of poor literary quality, but May used them to develop his writing skills. His fascination with other countries and the Indian stories he had read as a boy led to his creating a whole set of adventure stories set in the American West.
Among his best- known works is Winnetou, published in three volumes between 1876 and 1893. The story depicts the friendship of Old Shatterhand, a German traveling the frontier, and Winnetou, the noble Apache chief. May clearly sympathized with the Native Americans and regretted their fate as a “dying people.” He blamed the settlers pushing westward in search of land for most of the bad traits that were considered “typically Indian” by his contemporaries, such as slyness, greed, aggression, and bloodlust. Yet despite his compassion, May was a product of his time: he felt that Western civilization was superior and that Native Americans and other aboriginal people had to adapt to these “modern” values if they wanted to survive. May was a devout Christian and displayed his belief in his novels: he used the characters of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou to advocate friendship, compassion, and brotherly love. Both were always depicted as sparing their enemies and pleading for mutual understanding; although never a professed Christian, Winnetou, on his deathbed, declares himself to have become a Christian.May’s stories were enormously successful. Germans, who had contributed millions of immigrants to the United States and other countries, were very interested in these travel tales. Although May had never been to any of the places he so colorfully described in his novels, his use of the first- person narrative gave readers the impression of actual experience. In trying to forget his impoverished and criminal background, he immersed himself in his own fictional characters so that, by 1880, he was pretending that he himself had lived through all these adventures—that he actually was Old Shatterhand.
With the publication of his short story collections and novels, May gained fame in the 1890s, becoming one of the world’s alltime best-selling fiction writers. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, he was
Karl May, the most famous German author of American Indian novels (Indianer Romane), ca.
1905. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin)arguably the most popular author of adventure stories in Germany. In 1895 May bought a house in Radebeul (near Dresden), which he named “Villa Shatterhand.” It became his home for the rest of his life. May was so desperate to live up to his selfmade Old Shatterhand legend that he commissioned a gunsmith to build the weapons described in the novels. He even posed for a photograph with these guns and other “travel souvenirs.” His readers— most of them young adults—were enthusiastic about his adventures, and several Karl May clubs were founded by his fans.
In 1899 the widow of his former publisher, Munchmeyer, sold the company to Adalbert Fischer, who was mainly interested in May’s early novels. Disregarding May’s copyright, Fischer tried to cash in on May’s reputation and published a new, unauthorized edition of his early works. Years of dispute and legal proceedings followed. May finally won both lawsuits against Pauline Munchmeyer and Adalbert Fischer, respectively, but they came at a huge cost. Lawyers and journalists found out about May’s humble past and published his criminal records. Subsequently, the quality of his novels became an object of widespread discussion in literary circles. May’s health suffered severely while he was trying to save his reputation and fight for his legal rights (he also published an autobiography in 1910). In 1903 he divorced his wife Emma, to whom he had been married since 1880. May then married Klara Ploehn, the widow of his best friend Richard, who had died in 1901. In 1908 he and his new wife finally traveled to the United States.
May’s late work differed vastly from his former adventure and travel stories. Having created a fortune with his pen, May now wrote symbolical novels such as Et in terra pax (1901) and Ardistan and Dschin- nistan (1909), in which he advocated peace and redemption. Nobel Prize winner Bertha von Suttner became one of his close friends.
In the age of imperialistic politics, May supported pacifist views, which he vehemently defended in his writings and public speeches. Most of his readers, however, were not interested in his new books and kept to the adventure stories. In March 1912 May was invited to give a talk on peace in Vienna, which more than 2,000 people attended. Back home in Radebeul a week later he died from pneumonia.After 1945 May’s reputation as an author suffered from the fact that Adolf Hitler had praised his books. Hitler had been impressed by the virtues of the Indian warriors and had 300,000 copies of Win- netou delivered to German soldiers in World War II. According to Albert Speer’s Spandauer Tagebucher (translated into English in 1976 under the title Spandau: The Secret Diaries, (1975), Hitler cited May as proof that “it was not necessary to know the desert in order to direct troops in the African theater of war” (p. 523). Due to Hitler’s admiration, May was viewed as an advocate of imperialism by officials in the German Democratic Republic. His books were not banned, but they were no longer considered to be appropriate reading material for young people. However, the fascination that readers for decades had felt when reading these adventure stories could not be suppressed and the government finally rescinded its disapproval of them.
For generations May has ranked as one of the best loved and most widely read German writers. His books took his readers around the world, introduced them to other cultures and religions, and provided adventure and excitement—this combination has proved to be still attractive more than a century after their first publication, although nowadays May’s books are mainly read by juveniles. May’s sympathy for the oppressed, such as the aboriginal people in North America and the Kurds, has filled many of his readers with timeless idealism. May wrote under many different pen names, including Capitain Ramon Diaz de la Escosura, M. Gisela, Hobble- Frank, Karl Hohenthal, Prinz Muhamel Lautreamont, Ernst von Linden, and P.van der Lowen.
May wrote more than seventy books, and his tales of adventure—many of them set in the American West and the Middle East—have been translated into 33 languages and sold over200 million copies. In spite of his Indian novels and his popularity in Europe, May did not gain much notice in the United States and is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Several of his novels were subsequently made into films in the 1960s, some of them starring well- known international actors such as Lex Barker, Steward Granger, Klaus Kinski, Charles Aznavour, and Terence Hill under his real name Mario Girotti. A 2001 comedy of the Western genre, The Shoe of Manitou, using several of May’s characters with only slightly modified names, proved to be a hugely successful movie in Germany. The stories have also been presented on stage, the most famous of these presentations being the annual Karl May OpenAir Festival in Bad Segeberg (in northern Germany), attended by over 200,000 visitors each summer.
Katja Wuestenbecker
See also Indians in German literature
References and Further Reading
Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London/ Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
May, Karl Friedrich. The Collected Works of Karl May. Ed. Edwin J. Haeberle. New York: Seabury Press, 1977.
Sammons, Jeffrey L. Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May, and other German Novelists of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.