Karl May


Karl Friedrich May was a German author known for writing often in first-person narrative about travels and adventures, mostly set in the American Old West or the Orient and Middle East, but also in Latin America, China and within Germany. For a time he insisted that he actually had travelled to the West and was called Old Shatterhand there, while in the Ottoman Empire he was called Kara Ben Nemsi, and posed in costumes.
May is one of the best-selling German writers of all time, with about 200 million copies sold worldwide. A series of Karl May film adaptations was successful in the 1960s.

Early life

May was the fifth child of a poor family of weavers in Ernstthal, Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften. 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.

Delinquency

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when his roommate accused him of stealing a watch, May was jailed in Chemnitz for six weeks and his license to teach was revoked.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
On his release, May continued his life of crime, impersonating various characters 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.

Career

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 was published. May then became an editor in the publishing house of Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer in Dresden, where he managed entertainment papers such as Schacht und Hütte and continued to publish his own works such as Geographische Predigten . May resigned in 1876 and was employed by Bruno Radelli of Dresden.
In 1878, May became a freelance writer. Once again, May was insolvent. In 1882, May returned to the employ of Münchmeyer and began the first of five large colportage novels. One of these was Das Waldröschen. From 1879, May was also published in Deutscher Hausschatz, a Catholic weekly journal from the press of Friedrich Pustet in Regensburg. In 1880, May began the Orient Cycle, which ran, with interruption, until 1888. May was also published in the teenage boys' journal Der Gute Kamerad of Wilhelm Spemann, Stuttgart. In 1887, it published Der Sohn des Bärenjägers. In 1891 Der Schatz im Silbersee was published. May published in other journals using pseudonyms. In all, he published over one hundred articles. In October 1888, May moved to Kötzschenbroda and in 1891 to Villa Agnes in Oberlößnitz. In 1891, Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld offered to print the Deutscher Hausschatz "Son of the Bear Hunter" stories as books. In 1892, the publication of Carl May's Gesammelte Reiseromane brought financial security and recognition. May became deeply absorbed in the stories he wrote and the lives of his characters. Readers wrote to May, addressing him as the protagonists of his books. May conducted talking tours in Germany and Austria and allowed autographed cards to be printed and photos in costume to be taken. In December 1895, May moved to the Villa Shatterhand in Alt-Radebeul, which he purchased from the Ziller brothers.

Later career

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 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. There, he met pacifist and Nobel Laureate Bertha von Suttner.

Death

May died 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.

Personal life

In 1880, May married Emma Pollmer. They divorced in 1903 and had no children. May subsequently married Klara Plöhn, who was widowed.

Works

May used many pseudonyms, including "Capitan Ramon Diaz de la Escosura", "D. Jam", "Emma Pollmer", "Ernst von Linden", "Hobble-Frank", "Karl Hohenthal", "M. Gisela", "P. van der Löwen", "Prinz Muhamel Lautréamont" and "Richard Plöhn". Most pseudonymously or anonymously published works have been identified.
For the novels set in America, May created the characters of Winnetou, the wise chief of the Apaches, and Old Shatterhand, Winnetou's white blood brother. Another series of novels were set in the Ottoman Empire. In these, the narrator-protagonist, Kara Ben Nemsi, travels with his local guide and servant Hadschi Halef Omar through the Sahara desert to the Near East, experiencing many exciting adventures.
May's writing developed from the anonymous first-person observer-narrator to a narrator with heroic skills and equipment, to a fully formed first-person narrator-hero.
With few exceptions, May had not visited the places he described, but he compensated successfully for his lack of direct experience through a combination of creativity, imagination, and documentary sources including maps, travel accounts and guidebooks, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies. The work of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Gabriel Ferry, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen and Mayne Reid served as his models.
Non-dogmatic Christian values play an important role in May's works. Some of the characters are described as being of German, particularly Saxon, origins.
In a letter to a young Jew who intended to become a Christian after reading May's books, May advised him first to understand his own religion, which he described as holy and exalted, until he was experienced enough to choose.
In his later works 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.

Early work

In his early work, May wrote in a variety of genres until he showed his proficiency in travel stories. During his time as an editor, he published many of these works within the periodicals for which he was responsible.
  • Das Buch der Liebe
  • Geographische Predigten
  • Der beiden Quitzows letzte Fahrten
  • Auf hoher See gefangen
  • Scepter und Hammer
  • Im fernen Westen
  • Der Waldläufer
  • Die Juweleninsel
The shorter stories of the early work can be grouped as follows, although in some works genres overlap. Some of the shorter stories were later published in anthologies, for example, Der Karawanenwürger und andere Erzählungen, Humoresken und Erzählungen and Erzgebirgische Dorfgeschichten.
May wrote five large colportage novels, which he published either anonymously or under pseudonyms between 1882 and 1888.
  • Das Waldröschen
  • Die Liebe des Ulanen
  • Der verlorne Sohn oder Der Fürst des Elends
  • Deutsche Herzen
  • Der Weg zum Glück
From 1900 to 1906, Münchmeyer's successor Adalbert Fischer published the first book editions. These were revised by third hand and published under May's real name instead of pseudonyms. This edition was not authorized by May and he tried to stop its publication.