At the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Celebration in Aspen, Colorado, two tribes of American Indians staged a mock battle for the foreign visitors. In the audience were Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, both then in their seventies. At the end of the battle, when one of the Indians raced across the field on his horse, Einstein poked his elbow into his friend's side and pointed excitedly. "Do you see that Apache on the black mustang? Couldn't he, in reality, be a grandson of the Great Chief?"
Schweitzer knew precisely what Einstein meant. The Great Chief remains to this day the most famous American Indian in German history: He is Winnetou, "the Red Gentleman," son of Intshu-tshuna, and chief of the Mescalero clan of the Apaches. But, more important, the Great Chief is blood brother to "Old Shatterhand," the eighteen-year-old German university graduate who -- in a series of more than thirty novels by Karl May -- came to the wild west of America in 1860.
Karl May published the three volumes of Winnetou: Der rote Gentleman, his most famous novel, in 1893. Einstein was fourteen at the time, and Schweitzer eighteen, but for them both, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou became more real than any living westerners could ever be. In an interview after the mock battle, Einstein continued: "I am not alone in my affection for Old Shatterhand. Did you know that my whole adolescence was lived under his spell? Yes, actually, he is still very important to me, and I am not the least bit ashamed of it." Schweitzer was even more effusive, crediting Karl May with the inspiration for his life's work: "He taught all of us wild and coarse roughnecks to see in our fellow man a brother in Christ."
Einstein and Schweitzer were hardly alone. May's novels have sold more than a hundred million copies in German (and an estimated eighty million more in translation). Hermann Hesse called May's works "indispensable and eternal." Carl Zuckmayer, the great German playwright, named his daughter Winnetou. The fifth winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner, sitting at May's desk after his death in 1912, broke down and declared: "If I had written but one of his books, I would have been able to accomplish more."
The son of a weaver, Karl May was born into a desperately poor family in 1842. Only four of his fourteen brothers and sisters survived infancy. May himself suffered from such extreme malnutrition as a child that he was blind for the first four years of his life. But this became something of a blessing, for his grandmother, into whose care he was placed by a frequently absent mother, read pulp adventure stories to him. His father was a brutal alcoholic, but he saw some promise in this one son and, despite the hardship, saw to his education.
Bad luck, however, dogged the weaver's son, poisoning his schooling and destroying his teaching career. While a student, he was accused of stealing candle wax from the chapel in school and nearly expelled. After graduation, he lost his first teaching job when his landlord accused him of standing too close to his wife. He lost his second job when his roommate lent him his watch and then had him arrested for stealing it. Sentenced to six weeks in jail in 1862, May, as a convict, was forever barred from teaching. Falsely accused, improperly convicted, the young man felt he had no choice to become what society labeled him -- entering a life of crime, as a result of which he spent eight of the next twelve years in prison.
It was there in prison that he began to dream of writing. Upon his release in 1874, he found work as an editor and began churning out magazine stories, taking breaks only to consult scores of travel accounts and reference books for the geography, customs, and languages of the locales in his stories. From short stories he turned to the serialized novels that filled the pages of popular magazines and brought him fame. By the time of his death in 1912, he had sold more than 1.6 million copies -- a phenomenal number for the time.
All of May's adventure stories were written in the first person, and the hero's name was always some variant of Karl -- which led the public to assume that they were true accounts of his experiences. Soon May began to believe it too. In his youth he had written, "I myself must become a fairy tale -- I personally, my own ego." He toured Germany dressed in the costumes of the characters in his books, recounting "his" adventures to adoring audiences. A whole generation of youth came to sit at his feet and believed him to be a genuine hero.
In 1900 the deception was discovered, and May became the object of one of the most vigorous hate campaigns in the history of German publishing. The initial -- and accurate -- accusations of fraud by the press quickly led to other -- and false -- accusations that he was a "sexual pervert" and "corrupter of youth." (These charges arose from lurid passages added to his stories by his first publisher; writing at lightning speed, the author had never bothered to read his own published work.) May spent the last dozen years of his life bringing libel suits. In the end, he won, but the ordeal drained him, and he died of a fever in his home in 1912.
The attacks on May as a fraud did nothing to slow his sales. Though often described as the epitome of nineteenth-century, Wilhelmine values, his books survived the First World War and continued as bestsellers through the Weimar Republic. He was popular with Catholics, Protestants, and Jews; Communists, monarchists, and republicans. Sales of his books rose to 4.4 million by 1926. The popularity of May with everyone from Thomas Mann to the socialist leader Karl Liebknecht did cause some Nazis to attempt to have his works banned. Copies of May's novels were thrown onto the bonfires in Goebbels's book burnings of 1933 -- until it was learned that the Fuhrer was also a fan of Old Shatterhand, whereupon Winnetou went to the head of the National Socialist teachers' list of recommended books.
Not even Hitler's praise could destroy May's postwar popularity, though it did result in the banning of the novels in East Germany and several other countries behind the Iron Curtain. (When Communist Bulgaria lifted its ban on Karl May in 1977, the first printing of 300,000 copies sold out in a single day.)
"May has advanced," wrote Der Spiegel in 1962, "to a kind of Praeceptor Germaniae whose influence is greater than that of any other German between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann." In 1969, the Karl May Gesellschaft formed and quickly became -- with more than two thousand dues-paying members -- perhaps the largest single-author literary society in the world (setting aside the loose-knit collection of "Baker Street Irregulars" and other Sherlock Holmes societies that dot the globe).
More than two hundred Cowboy and Indian clubs, boasting more than fifty thousand members, flourish in Germany, actively celebrating Karl May's version of the American West. You can see the May touch everywhere. At the height of the Cold War, an American soldier went AWOL from a base in Germany, stole a car, and kidnapped a West German couple. The incident aroused considerable public outrage, and the court martial was opened to a host of German journalists. The victims testified to their ordeal, and the case was proceeding toward a heavy sentence -- when the defense attorney casually mentioned that the defendant was an American Indian. The public explosion amazed the military authorities. Suddenly the press was filled with stories about the "Red Man's Plight." Across Germany, articles and editorials mourned how difficult it must have been for a "son of the wild prairies" to be confined to barracks life. Petitions for acquittal poured in to the judges. Even the kidnap victims reversed their stance to plead for their abductor. The United States ambassador made Karl May required reading for embassy personnel.
Karl May's Collected Works fill eighty-two volumes. More than thirty are novels set in the American southwest both before and after the Civil War, including such titles as Winnetou's Heirs, Old Surehand, and Old Firehand -- all of which feature first-person accounts of Old Shatterhand's adventures. A second group of May's novels involve the adventures of the author as Kara ben Nemsi ("Karl the German") who travels with his trusty sidekick Hadji Halef Omar in the decaying Turkish Empire of the late nineteenth century. In his last years, May also wrote a series of mystical adventures set in imaginary lands, which critics call his best works. But it is his first-person stories of Old Shatterhand and his blood brother, the noble Apache chief Winnetou, that have earned him the undying loyalty of his German readers.
Rousseau, with his vision of the noble savage, may have been responsible for Chateaubriand's novels Atala and Les Natchez, and other early European attempts to imagine the pristine American west. But it was James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales in the 1820s that broke the dam. By the 1850s, William Cullen Bryant reported, everyone in Europe was reading translations of Cooper. Works by native Europeans quickly followed. Charles Seals-field, Friedrich Gerstacker, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, and Balduin Mollhausen published almost four hundred volumes of popular stories, novels, travelogues, and reports of exciting adventures in the arcadia of America. In almost all these stories, the Indians were portrayed as the last noble race, possessing an Edenic closeness to nature and being driven to extinction by the greedy and merciless "civilization" of the white men.
But it was left to Karl May to give the drama its archetypal formulation:
Yes, the Indian race is dying. From the Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America to far beyond the North American Great Lakes, the bleeding giant lies stretched out, thrown to the ground, crushed, trampled on by a fate that knows no pity. He resisted it with all his might but in vain. His strength is ebbing. Life lingers on, but the convulsions which occasionally shake his body announce his approaching death.
Into this world comes Karl May's narrator -- named, of course, "Karl" -- a young German writer seeking adventure. Arriving in St. Louis to work as a tutor for a German family, he meets the famous gunsmith Mr. Henry, who notices him because he reminds him of his son who was killed in an Indian raid. Mr. Henry tests the young German and finds that he excels at marksmanship and horse riding. He judges that Karl -- Americanized to "Charley" -- is born to become a "Man of the West" and finds him a position on a surveying team for the new railroad that will take him deep into the prairies. Mr. Henry then gives him the guns that will become his trademarks: the Barentoter and the Henrystutzen (a bear rifle and a twenty-five-round repeating carbine).
As he heads off into the West, Charley is taken under the wing of an experienced but comical character, Sam Hawkens, whose role is to teach him the secrets of the savanna. Soon the pupil far outdistances his teacher. He begins by knocking out a much bigger man with a single blow that earns him the nickname of "Old Shatterhand." He saves Sam from an onrushing buffalo, captures a wild mustang, and takes on a grizzly bear single-handed.
But that is only the small stuff for the Teutonic uber-cowboy. He accepts a challenge to fight to the death with the most experienced knife-fighter of the Kiowa tribe -- a giant named Lightning-Knife -- even though he has never fought with a knife before. Sam thinks it's certain death, but Old Shatterhand defeats Lightning-Knife by logically inferring from a careless remark what the Indian's first move will be, deftly countering it, and killing him in two quick strokes.
After Karl and Sam are captured and sentenced to death by Winnetou's tribe of Apaches, Old Shatterhand, by a clever ruse, escapes, saves Sam, earns the respect of Winnetou's father, and becomes Winnetou's blood brother. Winnetou now replaces Sam as Old Shatterhand's teacher, and he takes the young foreigner through another period of learning how to see, think, and reason like those close to nature. As a result, the German and the Indian together outguess and outwit all their enemies, and can even read each other's mind. They become more than blood brothers, with an almost homoerotic love and a mental bond that makes them inseparable.
Then begins a series of adventures following the trail of the evil Santer who has killed both Winnetou's father and sister. At the end, Winnetou dies in the arms of Old Shatterhand, felled by another Indian's bullet. But he leaves a message for Old Shatterhand that, when ingeniously deciphered, allows him to defeat Santer's plans and avenge the deaths he had caused.
Great literature this isn't, but -- like Riders of the Purple Sage or The Hound of the Baskervilles -- it is popular fiction of a high order. So why has it never found much of an audience in the new world in which it is set? There are two translations of Winnetou currently in print in English: a recent republication of Michael Shaw's translation, and David Koblick's translation of volume I. Both are substantial abridgments. Koblick concentrates on the action, omitting most of the explanations of Old Shatterhand's reasoning and flattening out the mystical passages. Shaw attempts to convey both the style and flavor of the original, and has by far the more faithful rendering.
Six of May's other novels have been translated into English: his later mystical work Ardistan und Djinnistan (the book most praised by critics) and five of his adventures as Kara ben Nemsi in the Middle East. (All were published in the 1970s by Seabury Press as part of an ambitious project to print May's Collected Works; the project was abandoned when expected sales failed to materialize.)
But despite these American editions, May remains virtually unknown in the United States. Though his works have been translated into thirty-nine languages, English might as well not have been one of them. Part of the problem is tone. Take, for example, the opening paragraphs of Winnetou -- and, as you read it, keep in mind that this is probably the most widely read passage ever written in German:
Dear Reader! Do you know what the term "greenhorn" means? . . . A greenhorn takes a raccoon for a 'possum and the prints of a turkey for the tracks of a buffalo. . . . When he is pushed by a Paddy, a greenhorn will run to complain to the Justice of the Peace, instead of shooting the man dead on the spot in true Yankee fashion.
A greenhorn will hesitate before putting his dirty boots on the knees of his fellow traveler, and he refuses to slurp his soup with the wheeze of a dying buffalo as his companions do. Because he believes in cleanliness, a greenhorn will carry a bath sponge, a scrub brush and ten pounds of soap for a day trip out on the prairie. He sticks his bowie knife in his belt so that when he bends over, it sticks him in the thigh. . . . He makes a campfire that flares up to the treetops and then, when the Indians kill him, wonders how they could have found him.
A greenhorn is -- well, a greenhorn. And that's what I was back then. . . . Young as I was, I hadn't yet realized that school learning just doesn't teach one much about life. I had a lot to learn.
If this attempt by May to make the reader his adoring sidekick doesn't sound stilted, then German must be your native tongue. This is not the normal idiom of an American western (though it may sound right to a German contemplating immigration). Still, even for an American reader, the stories themselves are exciting. The Winnetou novels are a fun and fast-moving set of adventure tales quite the equal of the bestselling westerns of Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour.
May's sense of drama is not individual and personal, but symbolic and cosmic. Within his cosmic drama of a brave, noble, and innocent people being driven from a pure and beautiful land, the role of the hero is to establish in the American West a new Round Table of all the "chivalrous knights of the endless prairies." Old Shatterhand is a Christian knight on the savanna.
One result of this reinvented Arthurian romance is that many of the events in May's novels seem not only highly implausible but almost mystical. This is especially conspicuous in May's later fantasy novels, of course, but in all his works there abound events and coincidences that are unbelievable, unless one believes in God's divine providence for his holy knights -- or for May's Siegfried in buckskins. It's one thing to find that providence in Geoffrey of Monmouth or Chretien de Troyes, Parsifal or Tristan. But Americans are not used to finding it in Dodge City.
A recent Ph.D. in German history, Ben Novak practices law in State College, Pennsylvania.