Karl May
February 25, 1842 – March 30, 1912
Karl Friedrich May was a German writer. Karl May was one of the most prolific authors of adventure novels. He is one of the most widely read writers in the German language. The worldwide circulation of his works is estimated at 200 million, 100 million of them in Germany.He is best known for his so-called travel stories, which are mainly set in the Middle East, the United States and Mexico in the 19th century. The stories about the Indian Winnetou, summarized in three volumes, became particularly famous. Many of his works have been filmed, adapted for the stage, made into radio plays or adapted as comics.
Karl May came from a poor family of weavers. His parents were Heinrich August May and Wilhelmine Christiane Weise. He was the fifth of fourteen children, nine of whom died in their first months of life. According to May's own statements, he went blind as a toddler and could not be cured until he was five years old by Carl Friedrich Haase. This early childhood blindness, for which there is no evidence apart from May's own indications, was explained by later Karl May research with various causes (including vitamin A deficiency), but was also partly doubted.
From 1848 to 1856 May attended the elementary school in Ernstthal. The ambitious father Heinrich August May wanted to give his only surviving son Karl better chances than he himself had had; it forced the boy to copy entire books and drove him to study scientific works on his own. May was also particularly encouraged by the Ernstthal cantor Samuel Friedrich Strauch and received private music and composition lessons. According to his own account, he earned his first money at the age of twelve as a bowling boy. The sometimes quite coarse conversations of the bowlers were also understandable at the end of the lane due to the "cone push" acting like an earpiece. On this occasion, he also met the first returnees from the New World, who told him about the United States.
From 1856 May studied as an introductory seminarian at the teachers' seminar in Waldenburg. There he was expelled in January 1860 for embezzlement of six candles. On the path of grace, he was enabled to continue his studies at the Plauen Teachers' Seminary. After passing his final examination in September 1861, which he passed with an overall grade, he first worked briefly as an assistant teacher at the school for the poor in Glauchau and then, from the beginning of November 1861, as a teacher at the factory school of the Solbrig and Clauß companies in Altchemnitz. However, his teaching career ended after only a few weeks, when the complaint of a roommate for "unlawful use of other people's things" – May had used his spare pocket watch in class with permission, but had taken him with him on Christmas vacation without consultation – led to a six-week prison sentence and May was subsequently removed from the list of teacher candidates as a criminal record.
In the two years that followed, May tried to earn his living in a legal way: he gave private lessons in his hometown, composed and declaimed.
However, these occupations did not secure his livelihood, so he began various scams in 1864. As a result, he was wanted for theft, fraud and imposture. Among other things, he had obtained a fur coat under a false name at the Leipzig Brühl and had it transferred to a loan office for ten thalers. He was arrested and sentenced to four years in the workhouse in 1865, of which he served three and a half years in the Schloss Osterstein workhouse in Zwickau. Due to good conduct, he became the "special scribe" of the prison inspector Alexander Krell, to whom he worked for specialist essays. For his own planned writing career, he compiled a list of over a hundred titles and subjects during this time (Repertorium C. May), some of which he demonstrably implemented.
After his release, however, all of May's attempts to establish a middle-class existence failed again, and he resumed the frauds and thefts. Often the loot was disproportionate to the effort. After a first arrest in July 1869, he managed to escape during a prisoner transport. In January 1870, he was finally arrested in Niederalgersdorf in Bohemia for vagrancy. At the police station, he called himself Albin Wadenbach, claimed that he came from the island of Martinique, was the son of a rich plantation owner and had lost his identity papers on his trip to Europe. Only after several weeks of identity verification was he recognized as the wanted petty criminal Karl May and transferred to Saxony.
From 1870 to 1874 he was imprisoned in Waldheim prison. For his inner transformation, of which May reports about this time, he held the asylum catechist Johannes Kochta particularly responsible. A literary activity – as May later claimed – was not possible in Waldheim. After May was released from prison in 1874, he returned to his parents in Ernstthal and began to write. In 1874 or 1875 a story by May was published for the first time (Die Rose von Ernstthal). He benefited from the fact that the newspaper landscape in Germany had been in upheaval since the founding of the Reich. Industrialization, growing literacy and freedom of trade led to numerous new foundations in the publishing industry, especially in the field of entertainment papers. According to his own statements, May had already contacted the Dresden publisher Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer in the time between his two longer prison sentences. Now he hired him as an editor in his publishing house, where he published, among other things, the magazines Der Beobachter an der Elbe and Schacht und Hütte. This was May's livelihood secured for the first time.
He was in charge of various entertainment papers and wrote or edited numerous articles with or without naming. In 1876, May resigned because an attempt was made to bind him permanently to the company by marrying Münchmeyer's sister-in-law and the publishing house had a bad reputation. After another job as an editor at Bruno Radelli's Dresdner Verlag, May became a freelance writer from 1878 and moved to Dresden with his girlfriend Emma Pollmer. However, his publications did not yet generate a regular income; rent arrears and other debts of May are also documented from this time. Five years after his release from prison, May was sentenced to three weeks' arrest in Stollberg in 1879 for alleged usurpation of office: a year before his marriage to Emma Pollmer, he had wanted to investigate the circumstances of her drunken uncle's death and therefore pretended to be a civil servant. Only later could it be proven that the conviction had been a miscarriage of justice because he had not performed any official act. In 1880, Karl May and Emma Pollmer married in a civil and ecclesiastical ceremony. In 1879 he received an offer from the Deutscher Hausschatz, a Catholic weekly newspaper from Regensburg, to offer his stories there first: in 1880 May began the Orient cycle, which he continued, with interruptions, until 1888. At the same time, he wrote for other magazines, using various pseudonyms and titles in order to have his texts paid several times. By the time of his death, more than a hundred stories had been published in sequels in various magazines, including the German Household Treasure (F. Pustet, Regensburg), which was important for May's career, as well as the boys' magazine Der Gute Kamerad (W. Spemann, Stuttgart and Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft), in which May's stories for his youth appeared. In 1882 he came into contact with H. G. Münchmeyer again and May began work on the first of the five great colportage novels for his former employer. The Waldröschen was reprinted hundreds of thousands of times by 1907. The fact that May only concluded a verbal contract with his old friend Münchmeyer later caused ongoing legal disputes.
In October 1888 May moved to Kötzschenbroda, and in 1891 to Oberlößnitz to the Villa Agnes. May's decisive breakthrough came with contact with Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld, who was looking for a successor to his previous in-house author Curt Abel. The young publisher contacted May in 1891 and offered to publish the Hausschatz stories in book form. With the success of the series Carl May's Gesammelte Reiseromane (from 1896 Karl May's Gesammelte Reiseerzählungen), which began in 1892, May gained financial security and fame for the first time.
However, he soon no longer knew how to distinguish between reality and fiction and became more and more involved in the "Old Shatterhand legend". Not only did he claim to be Old Shatterhand himself and to have actually experienced the contents of the stories, but he even had the legendary rifles made by a gunsmith from Kötzschenbroda, which can be seen today in the Karl May Museum in Radebeul: first the "Bear Killer" and the "Silver Rifle", later also the "Henrystutzen". His publishers and editors supported the legend by, among other things, answering letters to the editor accordingly. May's readers, who willingly followed the equation of author and protagonist, subsequently addressed countless letters directly to him, most of which he answered personally. Several readers' trips and lectures followed. From 1896 onwards, he was listed in the Allgemeines deutschen Litteratur-Kalender by Joseph Kürschner as a translator from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish and various Indian dialects, and later also from Chinese. In July 1897, he provided his later opponents with further points of attack by declaring in front of numerous listeners that he mastered 1200 languages and dialects and was the commander of 35,000 Apaches as Winnetou's successor. May avoided people who could have refuted his claims.
From about 1875 Karl May held a doctorate without ever having earned a doctorate or even attended a university. This degree was also included in authors' registers and from 1888 even in the Kötzschenbroda population register. In 1898, the doctoral degree was suddenly missing from the "Address Book for Dresden and its Suburbs"; May asked for correction and was confronted with the question of proof. He explained that the University of Rouen had awarded him the degree. In addition, he has at least an equivalent Chinese dignity. Nevertheless, he was prohibited from using the degree. May let the matter of the address book rest, but continued to use the title privately. In the fall of 1902, his future wife Klara Plöhn presumably took care of the matter again and May received an elaborately designed certificate – dated December 9, 1902 – of an honorary doctorate from the German-American University in Chicago for the work Im Reich des silbernen Löwen. On March 14, 1903, May applied for the (accelerated) examination because he wanted to remarry and praised the issuing university for attracting "teachers of the highest rank from Germany". Just four days later, after examination, the use of a doctoral degree was rejected on the basis of this certificate, because – as May himself researched a little later – the alleged university was only a title mill. Thus, the title was worthless. May defended his doctorate in 1904 in the open letters to the "Dresdner Anzeiger", but then gave up running.
At the end of the 1890s, he undertook lecture tours through Germany and Austria, had autograph cards printed and photographed with disguised visitors. In December 1895, the company moved to the Villa Shatterhand in Alt-Radebeul, which was acquired by the Ziller brothers and now houses the Karl May Museum.
In 1910, the Benedictine priest and literary scholar Ansgar Pöllmann published one of his anti-May articles entitled Ein literarischer Dieb (A Literary Thief) in the second February issue of the semi-monthly magazine for fine literature Über den Wassern, in which he identified some of May's (geographical) sources. May took legal action against him and the publisher Expeditus Schmidt. The indications were taken up and May was confronted with the accusation of appropriation of other people's intellectual property. It has been proven to him that his story Die Rache des Ehri, which first appeared in 1878 under the pseudonym Emma Pollmer, the name of his first wife, in the magazine Frohe Stunden (Frohe Stunden), is largely identical with the story Das Mädchen von Eimeo by Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1872), published in 1868.
On May 9, 1910, Egon Erwin Kisch also addressed May directly about the plagiarism accusation with regard to Gerstäcker in an interview and received the answer: In addition, there are numerous other similarities with Gerstäcker's work, as well as with works by Gustave Aimard, Gabriel Ferry, Charles Sealsfield and others. However, Karl May mainly incorporated scientific sources into his work, e.g. entire paragraphs from encyclopaedias and travel reports. Adaptations from literary works are rare.
May's practical music-making activity was relatively extensive until his imprisonment in Waldheim. As a child he was a Kurrendaner and church soloist, in Ernstthal as a trained teacher choirmaster and composer with solo performances; he was a wind player, organist and arranger in Osterstein and Waldheim. He could play the following instruments: piano, organ, violin, guitar and alto horn. At the time of his full employment as a writer from 1874 onwards, regular practice was certainly over. May played music with Münchmeyer in Blasewitz in the evenings, he composed the Ernste Klänge and played the organ for the last time in Jerusalem in May 1900. In the last decade of his life, he limited himself to listening to music. In 1899 and 1900, Karl May actually travelled to the Orient for the first time. In the first part of the journey, he was alone for almost nine months (accompanied only by his servant Sejd Hassan) and reached Sumatra. In December 1899 he met his wife and friends Richard and Klara Plöhn. The four of them continued the journey and returned to Radebeul in July 1900. During this year and a half, Karl May kept a travel diary, which has only survived in fragments and partial copies. May's second wife Klara reported that he had suffered a nervous breakdown twice on the way ("feared that he would have to be taken to an insane asylum"). The condition is said to have lasted about a week both times and was – as Hans Wollschläger and Ekkehard Bartsch suspect – to be attributed to "the intrusion of a glaring reality into his [May's] dream world". May overcame the crises without the help of a doctor.
Parallel to his trip to the Orient, fierce attacks on May began in the press from 1899 onwards, especially by Hermann Cardauns and Rudolf Lebius. For different reasons, they criticized May's self-promotion and the associated Old Shatterhand legend. At the same time, he was accused of religious hypocrisy (he wrote stories of the Marian calendar as a Protestant) and immorality, and later also of his criminal record. These accusations and various court proceedings for unauthorized book publications accompanied him until his death.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1903 at May's request. Emma May, who was a friend of H. G. Münchmeyer's widow Pauline, had, according to May's statements, burned documents that could have proven May's publishing contract with Münchmeyer verbally, so that this legal dispute could not be decided in May's favor during his lifetime. In the year of his divorce, on March 30, 1903, May married Klara Plöhn, who was widowed in the meantime.
In 1908, Karl May undertook a six-week trip to America with his wife. They visited Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, among other places, and friends in Lawrence. May was also confronted with reality on this trip, and during his stay in the city of New York he did not want to be photographed under any circumstances. This journey served as inspiration for May's book Winnetou IV.
After his trip to the Orient, May began to write more literarily. He subsequently called his previous work a mere "preparation". Now he began to write complex allegorical texts. He was convinced that the "questions of humanity" (Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?) consciously turned to pacifism and devoted several books to the effort to elevate man from "evil" to "good".
The artist's friendship with Sascha Schneider led to new Symbolist cover paintings for the Fehsenfeld edition.
May experienced jubilant recognition (after threats of boycott in the run-up to the event) on 22 March 1912 when, at the invitation of the Academic Association for Literature and Music in Vienna, he gave the pacifist lecture Empor ins Reich der Edelmenschen. There was also a meeting with the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner, who after May's death on April 5 published the obituary Some Words about Karl May in Die Zeit. On March 30, 1912, only one week after his speech in Vienna, Karl May died. According to the funeral book, the cause of death was "cardiac paralysis, acute bronchitis, asthma". Recent examinations of the skeleton indicate chronic lead poisoning; previously, (undetected) lung cancer was not ruled out. May was buried in the Radebeul-Ost cemetery in the so-called May tomb.