Ele era um ladrão, contumaz, mas escrevia bem...
Pelo menos eu adorava as aventuras de seus herois em terras selvagens.
Seus livros estão disponíveis em Português no link seguinte: http://ebooksgratis.com.br/livros-ebooks-gratis/literatura-estrangeira/romance-karl-may-diversos-livros-para-download/
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
GERMANY'S BEST-LOVED COWBOY
Karl May, who died 100 years ago, was an impostor, a liar and a thief -- and one of Germany's most widely read authors. He embellished his own biography with as much fantasy as the scenarios in his adventure novels, and when the deceit was finally exposed, he never recovered. But his legend lives on.
Germany's Best-Loved Cowboy
The Fantastical World of Cult Novelist Karl May
By Jan Fleischhauer
Karl May Jahr 2012
Only once did he actually visit those wild, faraway countries where he had so fearlessly traveled from the safety of his desk. In April 1899, Karl May took a ship from Genoa to Port Said in Egypt, aiming to finally see the Orient. He had 50,000 marks, a tremendous amount of money at the time, to spend on lodgings for himself and his valet. He was 57, one of Germany's most famous authors and a rich man.
The trip was a disaster. May couldn't tolerate the foreign food, and he was distressed by the stench, the noise and ubiquitous filth. Everything went straight to his stomach and his head. And then there were the tourists combing the sights of Cairo with their Baedeker travel books, "tightly clutching the red guide," as the author grumbled.
But he stuck it out, traveling from Egypt to Ceylon and Sumatra, as if to retroactively walk in the steps of someone he had only pretended to be in the past: an adventurer and globetrotter. When May returned to his native Saxony, after 16 months and two nervous breakdowns, he vowed not to embark on another adventure anytime soon. America, the other land of adventure he portrayed in his books, would have to wait.
Inventing a world is the essence of being a writer. Hardly any other author pursued this discipline as consistently, even in writing about his own alleged experiences. This week marks the 100th anniversary of Karl May's death. To this day, in Germany at least, the man from the town of Radebeul in Saxony stands alone in the art of creating a make-believe world.
More than 200 million copies of his books have been printed, a dimension otherwise associated with dictators or the founders of religions -- or J. K. Rowling with her Harry Potter series. Half of the Karl May books printed were sold in German-speaking countries. He is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, and only in Eastern Europe did he achieve a comparable degree of fame. The number of fans who remained loyal to him beyond their adolescent years is large, ranging from Albert Einstein to political activist Karl Liebknecht, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and writer Martin Walser.
Enduring Heros
One could call also May the forefather of today's environmentalist Green Party. With his critical view of civilization and naïve enthusiasm for nature, he was a romantic revivalist preacher determined to give pacifism a voice or, like some of his Christian contemporaries, a dangerous corrupter of young minds. The East German government felt uneasy about him, banning his works until the 1980s, when May, a native of the eastern German state of Saxony, was rehabilitated, together with Martin Luther and Frederick the Great. German writer Klaus Mann felt that May was an early Nazi, even describing him as "Hitler's literary mentor," but he is relatively isolated in this assessment.
There is no question that May created heroes that entered the collective mythology. There was the Native American Chief Winnetou, of course, or "The Red Gentleman," as he was once referred to in a subtitle in his famous series of novels. Then there was Winnetou's German friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand. But the indestructible German traveler of the Orient, Kara Ben Nemsi, whose popularity surpassed that of all of May's other characters while the author was still alive. Only after May's death did Chief Winnetou become his most beloved fictional character, partly as a result of the popular films with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker that were shown in theaters starting in 1962.
But his works remain adventure literature, driven by the author's desire to dream his way out of the narrow confines of his real life, a unique mixture of genius and triviality. May introduced his readers to people and landscapes they had known only by name, capitalizing on a yearning for distant places that was just as prevalent in the late 19th century as it is today.
Still, May didn't stop at dreaming. Through his literature, he transformed his own life. For him, writing was initially a way of finding himself, and later a way of rescuing himself. In this sense, he could be seen as an early advocate of the modern age.
From Con Man Best-Selling Author
His ascent was as spectacular as the material that fueled it. A con man with a criminal record, he wrote his way to success and became a best-selling author. May himself couldn't have come up with a more improbable life story than his climb from the penitentiary to the stars. But that would be a novel for others to write. In reality, May, once he had become respectable, was determined to wipe away all traces of his earlier life. But when it did catch up to him, at the height of his success, it was a scandal that would cost him the tranquility of his twilight years and much of his health.
So many aspects of his life had been bent into shape, obtained by fraudulent means and invented. He was a relatively slight man, only 1.66 meters (5'3") tall, whose fists were about as dangerous as a flyswatter. But when he sat on his black horse, his Bärentöter (Old Shatterhand's rifle, the "bear killer,") in hand, he could take anyone on, even the worst villains. May was a pioneer in the art of playing with identities, a talent reflected in the life story of every major artist today.
The German author and literary critic Hans Wollschläger titled his well-known study about Karl May "Grundriss eines gebrochenen Lebens," or "Sketch of a Broken Life." And indeed, May's early years could hardly have been less auspicious for someone who would later become a major international author. Everything about the squalor into which he was born in 1842 is evocative of a brief, oppressed existence. Nine of his 13 siblings died in infancy.
Weaving was a traditional livelihood in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) town of Ernstthal, where May was born, but the craft was in decline, so that local residents were forced to turn to smuggling and other secondary occupations to make ends meet. If that wasn't enough, people had to eat soup made with weeds and potato peels, the sort of food on which only a "deprived child," as Arno Schmidt, another May enthusiast, described him, could thrive. When his mother received an unexpected inheritance, she used some of the money to pay for midwife training. But her husband had soon spent the rest of the money on his various schemes. Like his son, Heinrich August May was a dreamer.
A Criminal Record
It was clear early on that Karl was talented, and the family pinned its hopes on him. After school, he was forced to spend hours copying text from the encyclopedias, prayer books and stories about nature that his father had gathered from the neighborhood. If young Karl failed to complete his allotted work in time, he could expect a whipping with a birch switch.
The boy was stuffed with facts in a completely unsystematic way, in keeping with his father's confused ideas about education. Looking back on his childhood, May likened it to being "fed and stuffed beyond compare." Nevertheless, a layer of knowledge developed over time that would later prove useful to him.
Prison was his second significant source of education. May was 20 when he stood before a judge for the first time. He had earned a diploma as a teacher's assistant, which promised a meager but steady income. And he did try to earn a living as a teacher, but there was a part of him that refused to accept the limitations of his circumstances.
He seemed to have inherited a certain swagger. When he was a young student, his file described him as "extremely deceitful." May would later describe the dark aspects of his personality that controlled him: "There were all kinds of characters inside me, and they all wanted to be part of my worries, my work, my creativity, my writing and my composing."
What began harmlessly enough soon became more serious. May posed as an eye doctor, "Dr. Heilig," and even wrote prescriptions. According to a police profile, he wore glasses and had a "friendly, suave and mellifluous demeanor." Then he rented a room in the city of Chemnitz as the "seminary teacher Lohse," ordered two muskrat coats from a furrier and disappeared out the back door with his loot.
He was arrested near Leipzig in March 1865, and the verdict was quickly passed down: four years and one month in the workhouse. It was harsh, but not excessive for the time. May had already attracted the attention of the authorities before: a few stolen candles at boarding school and a watch he had neglected to return. They were trifles, but now they were contributing to a picture of a crook and petty criminal who would be better off behind bars.
Serial Novel Success
May was lucky. He ended up in Oberstein Castle near Zwickau, a reform prison that was committed to the idea of rehabilitation, and he was sent to work in the prison library. It was his second stroke of luck. The library contained 4,000 books, including works of fiction with ethical aspirations, as well as historic, scientific and geographic works -- plenty of material for the next few years. May began to fashion a future for himself as a writer. A so-called "C. May Repertoire," now part of his estate, lists 137 titles and sketches for future books. There was something grandiose about all of May's ambitions, a characteristic he shared with Richard Wagner.
He had hardly been released before resuming his lifestyle of deceit and petty crime. In March 1869, he posed as a "police lieutenant" and confiscated alleged counterfeit money from a grocer. In May, he stole billiard balls from a tavern, and in June he stole a horse. When the police arrested him again, he told them his name was Albin Wadenbach, the son of a plantation owner from Martinique.
Some May scholars speculate that the author may have been mentally ill. In a retroactive psychological appraisal performed in 2003, the neurologist and psychiatrist Edgar Bayer concludes that May suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder. The typical symptoms, Bayer wrote, were a "grandiose sense of one's own importance," an excessive "craving of admiration" and "fantasies of limitless success."
May was 32 when he was released from the Waldheim Prison, where the authorities described him as "somewhat exhausted but otherwise fit for work." He was a dropout who had already spent half of his life under supervision, a dependent and "very old child," as May biographer Rüdiger Schaper writes. May insisted that he wanted to emigrate to America, but instead he published the first episode of "Aus der Mappe eines Vielgereisten" ("From the Portfolio of a Well-Traveled Man") in a magazine published by Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer, the Deutsches Familienblatt, or German Family Magazine.
But he stuck it out, traveling from Egypt to Ceylon and Sumatra, as if to retroactively walk in the steps of someone he had only pretended to be in the past: an adventurer and globetrotter. When May returned to his native Saxony, after 16 months and two nervous breakdowns, he vowed not to embark on another adventure anytime soon. America, the other land of adventure he portrayed in his books, would have to wait.
Inventing a world is the essence of being a writer. Hardly any other author pursued this discipline as consistently, even in writing about his own alleged experiences. This week marks the 100th anniversary of Karl May's death. To this day, in Germany at least, the man from the town of Radebeul in Saxony stands alone in the art of creating a make-believe world.
More than 200 million copies of his books have been printed, a dimension otherwise associated with dictators or the founders of religions -- or J. K. Rowling with her Harry Potter series. Half of the Karl May books printed were sold in German-speaking countries. He is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, and only in Eastern Europe did he achieve a comparable degree of fame. The number of fans who remained loyal to him beyond their adolescent years is large, ranging from Albert Einstein to political activist Karl Liebknecht, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and writer Martin Walser.
Enduring Heros
One could call also May the forefather of today's environmentalist Green Party. With his critical view of civilization and naïve enthusiasm for nature, he was a romantic revivalist preacher determined to give pacifism a voice or, like some of his Christian contemporaries, a dangerous corrupter of young minds. The East German government felt uneasy about him, banning his works until the 1980s, when May, a native of the eastern German state of Saxony, was rehabilitated, together with Martin Luther and Frederick the Great. German writer Klaus Mann felt that May was an early Nazi, even describing him as "Hitler's literary mentor," but he is relatively isolated in this assessment.
There is no question that May created heroes that entered the collective mythology. There was the Native American Chief Winnetou, of course, or "The Red Gentleman," as he was once referred to in a subtitle in his famous series of novels. Then there was Winnetou's German friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand. But the indestructible German traveler of the Orient, Kara Ben Nemsi, whose popularity surpassed that of all of May's other characters while the author was still alive. Only after May's death did Chief Winnetou become his most beloved fictional character, partly as a result of the popular films with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker that were shown in theaters starting in 1962.
But his works remain adventure literature, driven by the author's desire to dream his way out of the narrow confines of his real life, a unique mixture of genius and triviality. May introduced his readers to people and landscapes they had known only by name, capitalizing on a yearning for distant places that was just as prevalent in the late 19th century as it is today.
Still, May didn't stop at dreaming. Through his literature, he transformed his own life. For him, writing was initially a way of finding himself, and later a way of rescuing himself. In this sense, he could be seen as an early advocate of the modern age.
From Con Man Best-Selling Author
His ascent was as spectacular as the material that fueled it. A con man with a criminal record, he wrote his way to success and became a best-selling author. May himself couldn't have come up with a more improbable life story than his climb from the penitentiary to the stars. But that would be a novel for others to write. In reality, May, once he had become respectable, was determined to wipe away all traces of his earlier life. But when it did catch up to him, at the height of his success, it was a scandal that would cost him the tranquility of his twilight years and much of his health.
So many aspects of his life had been bent into shape, obtained by fraudulent means and invented. He was a relatively slight man, only 1.66 meters (5'3") tall, whose fists were about as dangerous as a flyswatter. But when he sat on his black horse, his Bärentöter (Old Shatterhand's rifle, the "bear killer,") in hand, he could take anyone on, even the worst villains. May was a pioneer in the art of playing with identities, a talent reflected in the life story of every major artist today.
The German author and literary critic Hans Wollschläger titled his well-known study about Karl May "Grundriss eines gebrochenen Lebens," or "Sketch of a Broken Life." And indeed, May's early years could hardly have been less auspicious for someone who would later become a major international author. Everything about the squalor into which he was born in 1842 is evocative of a brief, oppressed existence. Nine of his 13 siblings died in infancy.
Weaving was a traditional livelihood in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) town of Ernstthal, where May was born, but the craft was in decline, so that local residents were forced to turn to smuggling and other secondary occupations to make ends meet. If that wasn't enough, people had to eat soup made with weeds and potato peels, the sort of food on which only a "deprived child," as Arno Schmidt, another May enthusiast, described him, could thrive. When his mother received an unexpected inheritance, she used some of the money to pay for midwife training. But her husband had soon spent the rest of the money on his various schemes. Like his son, Heinrich August May was a dreamer.
A Criminal Record
It was clear early on that Karl was talented, and the family pinned its hopes on him. After school, he was forced to spend hours copying text from the encyclopedias, prayer books and stories about nature that his father had gathered from the neighborhood. If young Karl failed to complete his allotted work in time, he could expect a whipping with a birch switch.
The boy was stuffed with facts in a completely unsystematic way, in keeping with his father's confused ideas about education. Looking back on his childhood, May likened it to being "fed and stuffed beyond compare." Nevertheless, a layer of knowledge developed over time that would later prove useful to him.
Prison was his second significant source of education. May was 20 when he stood before a judge for the first time. He had earned a diploma as a teacher's assistant, which promised a meager but steady income. And he did try to earn a living as a teacher, but there was a part of him that refused to accept the limitations of his circumstances.
He seemed to have inherited a certain swagger. When he was a young student, his file described him as "extremely deceitful." May would later describe the dark aspects of his personality that controlled him: "There were all kinds of characters inside me, and they all wanted to be part of my worries, my work, my creativity, my writing and my composing."
What began harmlessly enough soon became more serious. May posed as an eye doctor, "Dr. Heilig," and even wrote prescriptions. According to a police profile, he wore glasses and had a "friendly, suave and mellifluous demeanor." Then he rented a room in the city of Chemnitz as the "seminary teacher Lohse," ordered two muskrat coats from a furrier and disappeared out the back door with his loot.
He was arrested near Leipzig in March 1865, and the verdict was quickly passed down: four years and one month in the workhouse. It was harsh, but not excessive for the time. May had already attracted the attention of the authorities before: a few stolen candles at boarding school and a watch he had neglected to return. They were trifles, but now they were contributing to a picture of a crook and petty criminal who would be better off behind bars.
Serial Novel Success
May was lucky. He ended up in Oberstein Castle near Zwickau, a reform prison that was committed to the idea of rehabilitation, and he was sent to work in the prison library. It was his second stroke of luck. The library contained 4,000 books, including works of fiction with ethical aspirations, as well as historic, scientific and geographic works -- plenty of material for the next few years. May began to fashion a future for himself as a writer. A so-called "C. May Repertoire," now part of his estate, lists 137 titles and sketches for future books. There was something grandiose about all of May's ambitions, a characteristic he shared with Richard Wagner.
Some May scholars speculate that the author may have been mentally ill. In a retroactive psychological appraisal performed in 2003, the neurologist and psychiatrist Edgar Bayer concludes that May suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder. The typical symptoms, Bayer wrote, were a "grandiose sense of one's own importance," an excessive "craving of admiration" and "fantasies of limitless success."
May was 32 when he was released from the Waldheim Prison, where the authorities described him as "somewhat exhausted but otherwise fit for work." He was a dropout who had already spent half of his life under supervision, a dependent and "very old child," as May biographer Rüdiger Schaper writes. May insisted that he wanted to emigrate to America, but instead he published the first episode of "Aus der Mappe eines Vielgereisten" ("From the Portfolio of a Well-Traveled Man") in a magazine published by Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer, the Deutsches Familienblatt, or German Family Magazine.
Münchmeyer was one of the major players in the business of serial novels, which flourished when printing machines became widespread. Each booklet, which was part of a subscription, consisted of about 20 pages. May proved to be a talented supplier, and he was soon hired as full-time writer. He was tremendously prolific as an author of light fiction, churning out more than 20,000 printed pages in the first five years. Someone who writes trash fiction can't afford to have writer's block. Sometimes May lost track of where he was and characters would simply disappear, or the plot lines became so entangled that he had to abandon some of them.
At first, producing fiction on demand was a "gift from heaven" for May, but he would later perceive it as a curse. He moved on to more reputable publishers. In 1892, the Fehsenfeld publishing company in Freiburg published the first volume of "Carl May's Collected Travel Novels," with the characteristic green spine that still reminds many readers today of nights spent blissfully devouring May's books.
May intuitively understood the public's need for authenticity. At first, he merely hinted that his writing wasn't just made up, but that he was describing his own experiences. When one reader inquired as to the author's whereabouts, he received the following response: "He is currently traveling in Russia and intends to make another side trip to Zululand." A few months later, readers learned that May was "laid low because of an old wound that has opened up again."
But the boundaries between the author and his fictional heroes became more blurred with each new story. At some point, Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi were no longer merely written extensions of the author's existence.
May outfitted his house as an exotic treasure chamber, buying the furniture from a dealer in Dresden. At a time when the Orient was in vogue, he had no trouble finding what he wanted. Carpets were hung up on the walls and a stuffed lion stood next to his desk.
Living in a Fantasy World
May had a studio photographer in Linz make portrait photos of him, dressed in an Old Shatterhand costume against exotic backdrops. A rifle maker in Dresden made the Silberbüchse (Silver Gun), the Bärentöter(Bear Killer) and the Henrystutzen (Henry Rifle), the most famous weapons from his books, according to his specifications. They were proudly displayed in his house, the "Villa Shatterhand," which the author bought in 1896 with his now handsome royalties. But the guns could not be used because they probably would have exploded.
The fictitious persona came naturally for an impostor like May. Because he believed that he was the person he pretended to be, he became convincing to others. This distinguished him from a liar, who is always aware of his tricks. As with the charades that led to his imprisonment, May became more audacious over time. Once he had internalized his role as an adventurer, there were no longer any limits to his fantasies.
During a reading in Munich, May told the audience that he had "only two major goals left in life, a mission to the Apaches, where I am a chief," and a trip to "my Halef, the supreme sheikh of the Haddadin Arabs." Then, he said, he would present his Henrystutzen to his majesty, the Kaiser, in the hope that it would become the standard weapon in the German army. When May was invited to an audience at the court in Vienna, he had his assistant inquire whether he was to appear as a "cow-boy" or an author. The archduchess chose the latter.
There were irritations here and there, which May deftly managed to explain away. One reader was surprised to see the Silberbüchse on display, because the author, in the third volume of the Winnetou series, had described how he had buried his dead friend "with all of his weapons." It was all perfectly explainable, May replied, saying that he had spotted robbers nearby while visiting the grave and had decided to take the costly memento with him. Someone once knocked on his door and asked for a strand of Winnetou's hair. The visitor was overjoyed when the author sent him on his way with a handful of black horsehair.
Lies Exposed
May was also ahead of his time in knowing what he owed his fans. In his letters, he complained about the endless stream of visitors, and yet he rarely told his servants to say that he wasn't home. He answered his fan mail promptly, and he even wrote a description of himself, for his most tenacious admirers, that would forestall today's celebrity profiles in tabloid newspapers: "I wear a moustache and a mouche, both of which, like the hair on my head, were once very dark blonde. Now my hair is beginning to turn a very dignified but unwanted gray, as I am 54 years old, despite looking 10 years younger. My eyes are grayish-blue. I dance every dance, but only when I must. My favorite dish is roast chicken with rice, and my favorite beverage is skim milk."
May's blustering nature also marked him as a man of his time. In his biography, Rüdiger Schaper places him within the genealogy of Wilhelminism, the overheated final phase in the history of the German Empire characterized by hubris and the craving for status. Kaiser Wilhelm II posed in uniforms that changed daily, the dreams of German global dominance continued to expand and the German navy doubled as a vehicle for fantasy. The extravagant and the illusory led to the trenches of World War I, but in May's case they ultimately led in the opposite direction, toward a mystical pacifism with Winnetou, the Apache chief, serving as a sort of red-skinned Christ figure.
At the age of 56, May had arrived at the height of his fame. By now he allegedly spoke 40 languages, including Malay, Kurdish and Swahili, and understood a great deal more -- "more than 1,200 languages and dialects," as he explained to a delighted audience in Munich. The adoration took on such a dramatic scale that the fire department had to be brought in to disperse his admirers.
But then his lies finally caught up with him, when a strange alliance of the gutter press and Christian zealots that converged against May starting in 1899. In addition to the charges that he had deceived the public about his past, his books came under sharp criticism. The self-appointed investigators identified a "deeply amoral" aspect to his works, especially his early trash novels, and one critic even claimed to have discovered "pornographic works of the worst kind."
Legal Battles
In a panic, the author tried to destroy the evidence of his deception, but his attempts were in vain. He had the plates of the photographs taken by his Austrian studio photographer thrown into the Danube, even though thousands of copies of the compromising negatives were already in circulation. Starting with Volume 14, the "Travel Novels" published by Fehsenfeld included a portrait of the author with the caption "Old Shatterhand (Dr. Karl May) with Winnetou's Silberbüchse."
Everything was exposed and examined, including his fake doctorate (from the University of Rouen) and the criminal record he had kept hidden. A huge media spectacle ensued. But May's books still sold, even after he was exposed and brought down as a charlatan.
The legal battles lasted almost 10 years. There were constantly new accusations and defamatory claims, which May fought in court. Could someone describe him as a "born criminal" with impunity, or did this exceed the rights of the critic? The author sank into depression, his writing dried up and he began to experience a sharp pain in his chest that almost took his breath away. May's legal nightmare ended with the redeeming pronouncement that a literary man was entitled to a different, freer perception of the truth. "I consider Karl May to be a poet," Theodor Ehrecke, the chief justice on the Berlin District Court concluded in 1911. But this final judgment could not restore the author's lost health.
A few years before his death on March 30, 1912, May finally made the trip to America. With his Baedeker in hand, the book he had scoffed at in Cairo, May visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls. The man who had called the Wild West his home dutifully completed the standard tourist circuit, bought souvenirs for himself and his wife, and wrote postcards to Germany.
A sad highlight of his journey was a visit to the reservation where 400 descendants of the once-powerful Tuscarora people, one of the nations of the Iroquois tribes, lived in teepees. A photo depicts the author standing next to the chief, who is wearing suspenders. May knew perfectly well why he preferred the life of the armchair traveler. He knew that reality could rarely compete with fantasy.
Translated from the German by Christopher SultanAt first, producing fiction on demand was a "gift from heaven" for May, but he would later perceive it as a curse. He moved on to more reputable publishers. In 1892, the Fehsenfeld publishing company in Freiburg published the first volume of "Carl May's Collected Travel Novels," with the characteristic green spine that still reminds many readers today of nights spent blissfully devouring May's books.
May intuitively understood the public's need for authenticity. At first, he merely hinted that his writing wasn't just made up, but that he was describing his own experiences. When one reader inquired as to the author's whereabouts, he received the following response: "He is currently traveling in Russia and intends to make another side trip to Zululand." A few months later, readers learned that May was "laid low because of an old wound that has opened up again."
But the boundaries between the author and his fictional heroes became more blurred with each new story. At some point, Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi were no longer merely written extensions of the author's existence.
May outfitted his house as an exotic treasure chamber, buying the furniture from a dealer in Dresden. At a time when the Orient was in vogue, he had no trouble finding what he wanted. Carpets were hung up on the walls and a stuffed lion stood next to his desk.
Living in a Fantasy World
May had a studio photographer in Linz make portrait photos of him, dressed in an Old Shatterhand costume against exotic backdrops. A rifle maker in Dresden made the Silberbüchse (Silver Gun), the Bärentöter(Bear Killer) and the Henrystutzen (Henry Rifle), the most famous weapons from his books, according to his specifications. They were proudly displayed in his house, the "Villa Shatterhand," which the author bought in 1896 with his now handsome royalties. But the guns could not be used because they probably would have exploded.
The fictitious persona came naturally for an impostor like May. Because he believed that he was the person he pretended to be, he became convincing to others. This distinguished him from a liar, who is always aware of his tricks. As with the charades that led to his imprisonment, May became more audacious over time. Once he had internalized his role as an adventurer, there were no longer any limits to his fantasies.
During a reading in Munich, May told the audience that he had "only two major goals left in life, a mission to the Apaches, where I am a chief," and a trip to "my Halef, the supreme sheikh of the Haddadin Arabs." Then, he said, he would present his Henrystutzen to his majesty, the Kaiser, in the hope that it would become the standard weapon in the German army. When May was invited to an audience at the court in Vienna, he had his assistant inquire whether he was to appear as a "cow-boy" or an author. The archduchess chose the latter.
There were irritations here and there, which May deftly managed to explain away. One reader was surprised to see the Silberbüchse on display, because the author, in the third volume of the Winnetou series, had described how he had buried his dead friend "with all of his weapons." It was all perfectly explainable, May replied, saying that he had spotted robbers nearby while visiting the grave and had decided to take the costly memento with him. Someone once knocked on his door and asked for a strand of Winnetou's hair. The visitor was overjoyed when the author sent him on his way with a handful of black horsehair.
Lies Exposed
May was also ahead of his time in knowing what he owed his fans. In his letters, he complained about the endless stream of visitors, and yet he rarely told his servants to say that he wasn't home. He answered his fan mail promptly, and he even wrote a description of himself, for his most tenacious admirers, that would forestall today's celebrity profiles in tabloid newspapers: "I wear a moustache and a mouche, both of which, like the hair on my head, were once very dark blonde. Now my hair is beginning to turn a very dignified but unwanted gray, as I am 54 years old, despite looking 10 years younger. My eyes are grayish-blue. I dance every dance, but only when I must. My favorite dish is roast chicken with rice, and my favorite beverage is skim milk."
May's blustering nature also marked him as a man of his time. In his biography, Rüdiger Schaper places him within the genealogy of Wilhelminism, the overheated final phase in the history of the German Empire characterized by hubris and the craving for status. Kaiser Wilhelm II posed in uniforms that changed daily, the dreams of German global dominance continued to expand and the German navy doubled as a vehicle for fantasy. The extravagant and the illusory led to the trenches of World War I, but in May's case they ultimately led in the opposite direction, toward a mystical pacifism with Winnetou, the Apache chief, serving as a sort of red-skinned Christ figure.
At the age of 56, May had arrived at the height of his fame. By now he allegedly spoke 40 languages, including Malay, Kurdish and Swahili, and understood a great deal more -- "more than 1,200 languages and dialects," as he explained to a delighted audience in Munich. The adoration took on such a dramatic scale that the fire department had to be brought in to disperse his admirers.
But then his lies finally caught up with him, when a strange alliance of the gutter press and Christian zealots that converged against May starting in 1899. In addition to the charges that he had deceived the public about his past, his books came under sharp criticism. The self-appointed investigators identified a "deeply amoral" aspect to his works, especially his early trash novels, and one critic even claimed to have discovered "pornographic works of the worst kind."
Legal Battles
In a panic, the author tried to destroy the evidence of his deception, but his attempts were in vain. He had the plates of the photographs taken by his Austrian studio photographer thrown into the Danube, even though thousands of copies of the compromising negatives were already in circulation. Starting with Volume 14, the "Travel Novels" published by Fehsenfeld included a portrait of the author with the caption "Old Shatterhand (Dr. Karl May) with Winnetou's Silberbüchse."
Everything was exposed and examined, including his fake doctorate (from the University of Rouen) and the criminal record he had kept hidden. A huge media spectacle ensued. But May's books still sold, even after he was exposed and brought down as a charlatan.
The legal battles lasted almost 10 years. There were constantly new accusations and defamatory claims, which May fought in court. Could someone describe him as a "born criminal" with impunity, or did this exceed the rights of the critic? The author sank into depression, his writing dried up and he began to experience a sharp pain in his chest that almost took his breath away. May's legal nightmare ended with the redeeming pronouncement that a literary man was entitled to a different, freer perception of the truth. "I consider Karl May to be a poet," Theodor Ehrecke, the chief justice on the Berlin District Court concluded in 1911. But this final judgment could not restore the author's lost health.
A few years before his death on March 30, 1912, May finally made the trip to America. With his Baedeker in hand, the book he had scoffed at in Cairo, May visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls. The man who had called the Wild West his home dutifully completed the standard tourist circuit, bought souvenirs for himself and his wife, and wrote postcards to Germany.
A sad highlight of his journey was a visit to the reservation where 400 descendants of the once-powerful Tuscarora people, one of the nations of the Iroquois tribes, lived in teepees. A photo depicts the author standing next to the chief, who is wearing suspenders. May knew perfectly well why he preferred the life of the armchair traveler. He knew that reality could rarely compete with fantasy.
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