http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2765598,00.html

Julie Gregson | www.dw-world.de | © Deutsche Welle.

The Wonderful World of Karl May, Germany's Best-Loved Author

Nineteenth-century writer Karl May is Germany's best-selling author of all
time as well as one of its most prolific ones. A new exhibition in Berlin
throws light on this colorful and complex character.

With sales of over 200 million books, Karl May remains a household name in
today's Germany. As well as his literary legacy of some 33 novels, many
films have been based on his work.

Every year thousands of ardent fans attend open air theater festivals where
his fiction is acted out. Young or old, popular or high-brow, he seems to
have something for everyone.

The writer has become most famous for his Wild West series featuring the
adventures of the increasingly ennobled Native American chief Winnetou and
his blood brother, the white trapper Old Shatterhand.

Shaped the image of the Wild West

For generations, as Professor Alex Kuo of Washington's State University has
written, "May has been a significant author in shaping the average German
youth's view of the American West and the American Indian as well."

Yet ironically, although translated into 37 languages, the author is barely
known in the United States or the rest of the English-speaking world. Nor,
despite his claims to the contrary, did the author actually set foot in
America until 1908. And Buffalo was the furthest West he ever got.

The German Historical Museum (DHM) exhibition, which showcases for the
first time items from his personal estate, highlights both the biographical
and the cultural dimensions of May's work.

"This was not intended to be any kind of homage to a Great Master," said
Sabine Beneke, co-curator of the exhibition. "We wanted to put his life and
his age into a cultural historical context. To make him and his work, and
his success, comprehensible in terms of the era in which they were
written."

Growing interest in far-away lands and their peoples

As the array of paintings, photos and objects on display make clear, the
writer was living in an age where there was a thirst for knowledge about
the "exotic." People flocked to see "native" peoples touring Europe in
ethnological peepshows organized by the likes of Buffalo Bill.

It was a time of scientific expedition, colonial expansion, tourism and
immigration. Four million Germans had also left Germany for the States
during Karl May's lifetime and those left at home were filled with
curiosity about the New World.

For a while May actively pretended that he had experienced his first-person
narratives set in America, the Orient and Africa at first-hand. Photographs
in the exhibition in the German Historical Museum show May posing for
photographs in his study near the eastern city of Dresden, surrounded by
bear skins, a stuffed lion and other game that he claimed to have killed
himself.

He certainly wasn't afraid to lay it on thick. "I really am Old
Shatterhand," wrote May, citing as proof a number of rifles that you can
see on display in the show in Berlin. The writer actually had gotten the
guns manufactured by a Dresden rifle maker, who had been sworn to secrecy.

"We wanted to dissect this interplay between fiction and reality," said
museum head Hans Ottomeyer.

Fans taking things in good spirit

A weighty album containing photos sent in by his fans shows the breadth of
his appeal and the appetite for masquerade at the time. Many of his readers
are themselves dressed up as Western heroes or Native Americans.

But did they really take May's protestations seriously? Just like Karl May,
aka. Old Shatterhand, some appear to have a twinkle in their eyes.

Another image shows three women dressed up in hijabs and signed "your
harem" also reveals another playful blend of fact and fiction. At least two
of the women were involved with him at the time -- one his wife, the other
his wife-to-be.

But May's appetite for role play, as the exhibition charts, had already got
him into trouble in his earlier life. Various fraudulent activities,
including impersonating a police officer and a doctor for financial gain,
led to the impoverished weaver's son spending eight years in prison and the
workhouse. Writing was one of the few options open left to May, who was
barred from teaching and from emigrating because of his criminal record.

His penchant for make-believe was to land him in deep water once more
towards the end of his life when a press campaign was launched against him,
designed to unveil him as a charlatan.

Public pressure and changing mores led him to distance himself from his
earlier fictional characters and set out his stall as a more serious writer
concerned with religion, social utopias and philosophy. But his later books
were never to enjoy the same popularity as his earlier ones.

The exhibition runs until Jan. 6.