Карл Май: Жизнь, приключения и наследие немецкого писателя

German author (1842–1912)

Karl Friedrich May (/m//aɪ/ MY, ; 25 February 1842 – 30 March 1912) was a German author. He is best known for his novels of travels and adventures, set in the American Old West, the Orient, the Middle East, Latin America, China and Germany. He also wrote poetry, a play, and composed music. He was a proficient player of several musical instruments. Many of his works were adapted for film, theatre, audio dramas and comics. Later in his career, May turned to philosophical and spiritual genres. He is one of the best selling German writers of all time, with about 200,000,000 copies sold worldwide.

May was the fifth child of a poor family of weavers in Ernstthal, Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften (then part of the Kingdom of Saxony). He had 13 siblings, of whom nine died in infancy. His parents were Heinrich August May and Wilhelmine Christiane Weise. During his school years, he received instruction in music and composition. At age twelve, May was making money at a skittle alley, where he was exposed to rough language.

In 1856, May commenced teacher training in Waldenburg, but in 1859 was expelled for stealing six candles. After an appeal, he was allowed to continue in Plauen. Shortly after graduation, when his roommate accused him of stealing a watch, May was jailed in Chemnitz for six weeks and his license to teach was revoked. After this, May worked with little success as a private tutor, an author of tales, a composer and a public speaker. For four years, from 1865 to 1869, May was jailed in the workhouse at Osterstein Castle, Zwickau. With good behaviour, May became an administrator of the prison library, which gave him the chance to read widely. He made a list of the works he planned to write (Repertorium C. May.) On his release, May continued his life of crime, impersonating various characters (policemen, doctors etc.) and spinning fantastic tales as a method of fraud. He was arrested, but when he was transported to a crime scene during a judicial investigation, he escaped and fled to Bohemia, where he was detained for vagrancy. For another four years, from 1870 to 1874, May was jailed in Waldheim, Saxony. There he met a Catholic Catechist, Johannes Kochta, who assisted May.

After his release in May 1874, May returned to his parents' home in Ernstthal and began to write. In November 1874, Die Rose von Ernstthal ("The Rose from Ernstthal") was published. May then became an editor in the publishing house of Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer in Dresden. May managed entertainment papers such as Schacht und Hütte ("Mine and Mill") and continued to publish his own works such as Geographische Predigten ("Collected Travel Stories") (1876). May resigned in 1876

In 1899, May traveled to Egypt then Sumatra with his servant, Sejd Hassan. In 1900, he was joined by Klara and Richard Plöhn. The group returned to Radebeul in July 1900. May demonstrated some emotional instability during his travels. Hermann Cardauns and Rudolf Lebius criticised May for his self promotion with the Old Shatterhand legend. He was also reproached for his writing for the Catholic Deutscher Hausschatz and several Marian calendars. There were also charges of unauthorised book publications and the use of an illegal doctoral degree. In 1902, May did receive a Doctor honoris causa from the Universitas Germana Americana in Chicago for Im Reiche des Silbernen Löwen ("In the Realm of the Silver Lion.") In 1908, Karl and Klara May spent six weeks in North America. They traveled through Albany, New York, Buffalo, New York, the Niagara Falls and visited friends in Lawrence, Massachusetts. May was inspired to write Winnetou IV. On his return, May began work on complex allegorical texts. He considered the "question of mankind", pacifism and the raising of humans from evil to good. Sascha Schneider provided symbolist covers for the Fehsenfeld edition. On 22 March 1912, May was invited by the Academic Society for Literature and Music in Vienna to present a lecture entitled Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen ("Upward to the Realm of Noble Men"). There, he met pacifist and Nobel Laureate Bertha von Suttner.

May died one week later in his own Villa Shatterhand on 30 March 1912. According to the register of deaths, the cause was cardiac arrest, acute bronchitis and asthma, but according to Ralf Harder from the Karl May Stiftung, May's death certificate does not include the cause of death. Scientists examining the remains of May in 2014 found excessive quantities of lead and other heavy metals, and concluded that his death was probably due to a long time exposure to lead in water as well as tobacco. May was buried in Radebeul East. His tomb was inspired by the Temple of Athena Nike. In his later works (after 1900) May left the adventure fiction genre to write symbolic novels with religious and pacifistic content. The change is best shown in Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen, where the first two parts are adventurous and the last two parts belong to the mature work.

According to an encyclopedia dedicated to May, he is the "most read writer of the German tongue". The total number of copies published is about 200 million, half of them in German. May's first translated work is considered to have been the first half of the Orient Cycle into a French daily in 1881. Recently, it was discovered, and confirmed by Hans Dieter Steinmet (Karl May Museum) that Croatian writer Nikola Tordinac published a translation of May's novel Tree carde monte in the magazine Sriemski Hrvat in 1880. Tordinac's translation became a part of the permanent exhibition of the Karl May Museum in 2017. In 2001, Nemsi Books Publishing Company, Pierpont, South Dakota, was one of the first English publishing houses to produce the unabridged translations of May's oeuvre. Since the closing of Nemsi Books in 2023, some of the English translations by Juergen Nett have been made available on Amazon through KDP.

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 his (generally German) protagonists, are seen as having filled a lack in the German psyche, which had few popular heroes until the 19th century. May "helped shape the collective German dream of feats far beyond middle class bounds." and contributed to the popular image of Native Americans in German speaking countries, which has been described by many as racist and harmful. The name Winnetou has an entry in the German dictionary, Duden. The wider influence on the populace also surprised US occupation troops after World War II, who realised that thanks to May, "Cowboys and Indians" were familiar concepts to local children (though fantastic and removed from reality). Albert Einstein enjoyed May's books and said, "My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today, he has been dear to me in many a desperate hour " The lecture was an appeal for peace, also heard by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner. May died suddenly only ten days after the lecture, leaving the young Hitler deeply upset. Claus Roxin noted that he doubts the anonymous description, because Hitler had said much about May, but not that he had seen him. Hitler 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. 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", Hitler's admiration for May led the German writer Klaus Mann to accuse May of having been a form of "mentor" for Hitler. and led to his books being deemed "chauvinist" by the Communist authorities of East Germany – though this did not affect his popularity or prevent a Karl May renaissance during the 1980s. The phrase Indianertümelei is a reference to the German term Deutschtümelei ("German Enthusiasm") which mockingly describes the phenomenon of celebrating in an excessively nationalistic and romanticized manner Deutschtum ("Germanness"). As part of the phenomenon of Indianertümelei a number of Western and Indian theme parks operate in Germany, the most popular of which are the Pullman City theme park outside of Munich and El Dorado theme park outside of Berlin. May's books also inspired hobbyist clubs, where Germans pretend to be cowboys or Indians, the first of which was the Cowboy Club founded in Munich in 1913.

The German writer Carl Zuckmayer was intrigued by May's Apache chief and named his daughter Maria Winnetou. Heinz Werner Höber, the twofold Glauser prize winner, was a follower of May. He said, "When I was about 12 years old I wrote my first novel on Native Americans which was, of course, from the beginning to the end completely stolen from Karl May." He had pleaded with friends to get him to Radebeul "because Radebeul meant Karl May". There, he was deeply impressed by the museum and said, "My great fellow countryman from Hohenstein Ernstthal and his immortal heroes have never left me ever since."

Asteroid 15728 Karlmay is named in May's honour.

May was copied or parodied during his lifetime. Some wrote similar Wild West stories. Others, such as Franz Treller, published under May's name. Novelizations of May's characters include
Hadschi Halef Omar (2010) Jörg Kastner describes the first contact of the titular character with Kara Ben Nemsi. In Mekka (1923) Franz Kandolf, a sequel to Am Jenseits (Karl May's Gesammelte Werke volume 50). "Die Schatten des Schah in Schah" (2006) Heinz Grill, an alternative to Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen III/IV. Winnetous Testament Jutta Laroche and Reinhard Marheinecke, a series of eight volumes as a sequel to Winnetou IV. Der Schuh des Manitu (2001) Michael Herbig, a parody on the Karl May films of the 1960s.

In his will, May made his second wife, Klara, his sole heiress. He instructed that after her death all of his property and any future earnings from his work should go to a foundation. This foundation should support the education of the gifted poor including writers, journalists, and editors. One year after May's death, on 5 March 1913, Klara May established the "Karl May Foundation" ("Karl May Stiftung"). Contributions have been made since 1917. Klara and Karl May's estate went to the foundation. The foundation established the Karl May Museum to maintain the Villa Shatterhand, the estates, the collections and May's tomb. In 1960, the Karl May Foundation received the Karl May Press. Third hand revisions of these texts were added to the series Karl May's Gesammelte Reiseerzählungen, which was renamed to Karl May's Gesammelte Werke (und Briefe). The existing 33 volumes of the original series were also revised, some extensively. By 1945 there were 65 volumes. The press is exclusive to May's work and subsidiary literature. Besides the Gesammelte Werke (the classical "green volumes"), which have 91 volumes today, the press has a huge reprint programme. The Karl May Press aims to rehabilitate May from literary criticism and to support the Karl May Foundation. In 1921, Fehsenfeld left and in 1960, the foundation fell to Klara May's estate, and thus the Press is owned by the Schmid family. In 1959, due to censorship in the Soviet occupation zone and East Germany, the Press moved to Bamberg (Germany). In 1963, when copyright ended, the Press began commercialising May's works. After German reunification, in 1996, the Press took a second office in Radebeul. The name "Karl May" is a registered trade mark of the "Karl May Verwaltungs und Vertriebs GmbH", which belongs to the Karl May Press. It was founded in 1928 by May's widow and an eccentric Austrian named Ernst Tobis. When the Nazis took over Germany, they appropriated the museum and the image of May, and were especially focused on swastikas that appeared in some of the Native American artwork. Hitler Youth were encouraged to visit the museum and hear stories from Tobis. After World War II, the original museum remained in East Germany and a replica was built in Bamberg in West Germany. From 1956 to 1984, the museum in Radebeul was called the "Indianer Museum", because May's books were suppressed by the East German government; its original name was restored in 1986.

In the 1890s, there were Karl May clubs. Today, various entities focus on research about the author. These organisations exist in German speaking regions, the Netherlands, Australia and Indonesia. While such societies are responsible for the release of most May related periodicals, for example, Der Beobachter an der Elbe, Karl May Haus Information, Wiener Karl May Brief, and Karl May in Leipzig, the magazine Karl May & Co. is published independently. The "Karl May Society" (KMG), founded on 22 March 1969, is the largest organisation, with approximately 1800 members. The KMG publishes Jahrbuch, Mitteilungen, Sonderhefte der Karl May Gesellschaft, and KMG Nachrichten and reprints. Since 2008 and in cooperation with the Karl May Foundation and the Karl May Press, the KMG has published the critiqued edition of "Karl Mays Werke". This project was initiated by Hans Wollschläger and Hermann Wiedenroth in 1987.

Wiedenroth H. and Wollschlager H. Karl Mays Werke: historisch kritische Ausgabe (Karl May's Works, an historical critique.) various publishers. May K. Mein Leben und Streben (My Life and Aspirations.) (1910) Karl May, 2014. My life and my efforts. Karl May company English version website. Michalak M. My Life and My Mission Nemsi Books 2007. and Plaul H. Illustrierte Karl May Bibliographie. Unter Mitwirkung von Gerhard Klußmeier. Saur, Munich, London, New York, Paris 1989, (in German). Sudhoff D. and Steinmetz H. Karl May Chronik (5 volumes and companion book). Karl May Verlag, Bamberg and Radebeul 2005–2006, (in German). Ueding G. (Ed.) Karl May Handbuch. Second enlarged and revised edition. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, (in German). Wohlgschaft H. Karl May, Leben und Werk Bücherhaus, Bargfeld 2005, (in German). Wollschläger H. Karl May. Grundriß eines gebrochenen Lebens (1965) Wallstein, Göttingen 2004 (in German). Schiedt H. Karl May oder Die Macht der Phantasie. Beck Verlag, München 2011 (in German)