Traven, B. b. (?) 1890; (?) d. (?) 1969; Mexico City, Mexico
B. Traven is the pseudonym of the man called “the greatest literary mystery of this [the twentieth] century” by Paul Theroux. Conflicting stories about his life persist into the twenty-first century, despite the publication of several biographies that claim to tell the real story of his life.
The author himself remained secretive and added new and contradictory versions of his life. Many critics agree that he was born of low origin in Germany in 1890. While he himself always claimed to be of U.S. origins, biographers have assumed a range of possibilities. Some claim that he was the son of workers from Schwiebus, Brandenburg; others assert that he was an illegitimate son of German emperor Wilhelm II. Yet others claim that he was born Hermann Albert Otto Maximilian Feige, and that he led a life as an actor and writer before he came to Mexico in 1924. According to that version, he left Germany as a political refugee after his participation in the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919 in which he edited an anarchist journal under the pseudonym Ret Marut. Sentenced to death, he escaped and later went via London to Tampico, Mexico. In Tampico, a port city and stronghold of anarchist trade unions, Feige seemed to have found the realization of the shattered dreams of the Munich Soviet Republic. He began using the pen name B. Traven in 1925 when he published the novel Die Baumwollpflucker (The Cottonpickers). This novel was published by the Buchergilde Gutenberg in Germany, which henceforth remained his publisher. While Traven refused to give any details of his life, he asserted the autobiographical nature of Die B>aum.wollpflu.cker, a book that details the attempt of an American worker to find work in Mexico. In this manner, Traven continued to invent numerous contradictory life stories, at one point even representing himself as his own literary agent under the name Hal Croves. Despite the mystery surrounding Traven, he has a firm place in German expatriate literature. He wrote in German in such an idiomatically masterful way that one cannot deny that German was his primary language.In his second year in Mexico, Traven experienced the life of the Chamula Indians in Chiapas when he went on an expedition into that area as a photographer. As a result of this journey, he published Land des Fruhlings (Land of Spring) in 1928. This travel account is the only one of his works that was never translated. It shows Traven’s infatuation with the Mexican Revolution and misguided admiration of the postrevolutionary government of Plutarco Elias Calles, whom he then considered a true Socialist president. However, all his illusions were to be destroyed on two subsequent trips to Chiapas, when he observed firsthand the abuse and misery of debt peonage that continued unbroken despite the revolutionary promises. His subsequent five novels, collectively dubbed Dschungel Zyklos (The Jungle Cycle), strongly attacked such abuses, as well as local figures of authority and the corrupt Mexican government. He pointed to continuities from the Porfirian dictatorship to Calles’s government, and he criticized the continuing lack of social justice in Mexico.
In the early 1940s, having retreated to a cashew farm near Acapulco after the publication of the Jungle Cycle, Traven worked on shrouding his life from view. His secrecy was partly due to the fact that some of the local figures of authority thinly veiled as characters in his novels were threatening him. Moreover, he believed that the Mexican government was preparing to extradite him to Nazi Germany, where his books were being burned. However, those fears were unfounded and he lived the rest of his life in Mexico City. Traven became a Mexican citizen in 1951 and married Rosa Elena Lujan of Mexico City shortly thereafter. The latter part of his life did not produce the same kind of evocative works he had written earlier. With the end of World War II and the beginning of the cold war, his ideological convictions seem to have lost their world of reference and became irrelevant. Traven died in 1969 in Mexico City.
Anabel Alia,ga-B>u.chena,u.
See also Mexico
References and Further Reading
Goldwasser, James. “Ret Marut: The Early B.
Traven.” Germanic Review 68, no. 3 (1993): 133-142.
Guthke, Karl S. Traven: Biographie eines Ratsels. Frankfurt am Main: Buchergilde Gutenberg, 1988.
Schurer, Ernst, and Philip Jenkins. B. Traven: Life and Work. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1987.
Wyatt, Will. The Man Who Was B. Traven. London: Cape, 1980.
Zogbaum, Heidi. B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992.