The Imaginary Travels of Karl May

IT WAS 1870 and the 28-year-old German ex–teaching assistant Karl May had just finished reading The Deerslayer, by the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. It was the story of Natty Bumppo, a white boy brought up by Delaware Indians in the American wilderness. Europeans, many of whom lived in squalor in crowded cities with open sewers and few trees—not to mention policemen who enforced an awful lot of rules and regulations—absolutely loved stories about wild Indians roaming the endless forests of America.

So did Karl. Having grown up in a family of 14 children in a crowded tenement, with so little to eat that 9 of his brothers and sisters had died, he had always thrilled to the idea of the wild west of America. Lots of food. Lots of land. Freedom. Adventure!

A bell clanged loudly and a prison guard slammed the door to Karl’s cell. “Bedtime, May! Ditch the book! Now!”

Karl sighed and blew out his candle.

It was hard to stop fantasizing an adventure in the American wilderness when you were doing time in a German prison for theft, fraud, and impersonating a medical doctor.

The past 28 years of Karl May’s life hadn’t exactly been a raving success.

May was smart and ambitious, but he couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. At first it had just been stupid things. He’d been kicked out of teacher’s college for stealing a fistful of candles. Then he’d lost his job as a teacher’s assistant for making a pass at a married woman.

Then he’d stolen a watch.

The business with the watch had been more serious because that had earned him six weeks behind bars, and in 19th-century Germany a prison record was a serious liability. You couldn’t get a decent job once you had a prison record. You couldn’t even join the army—May had tried. The only jobs he was able to get involved an exhausting amount of lifting, digging, and hauling.

Pretty soon he was in trouble again. He began swindling people by impersonating officials—pretending to be a university professor, a lawyer, a notary’s assistant. One day, dressed as a police officer, he entered a grocery store and ordered the grocer to open his till.

“I’m checking for counterfeit money,” he said.

“I’m sure I don’t have any,” the grocer protested.

“I’ll be the judge of that!” May snapped. “Open it up!” He scooped up all the money in the till. “We’ll check it down at the police station,” he said. “You’ll get it back when it’s been checked—tomorrow.”

He was arrested for that caper two weeks later.

But when he was released, he did it again. He tried impersonating a doctor—and that worked a little better. He started a small medical practice in an outlying German village, but then got carried away and ordered five fitted suits from the local tailor. A doctor, after all, had to keep up appearances! Of course he wasn’t able to pay for them, and that led to enquiries. Bingo—another term in prison.

That time, as he was being taken from the court, he somehow managed to undo his chains and escape. But they caught him a year later and now he was serving four years at hard labor. The work involved sawing and splitting firewood 13 hours a day, 6 days a week—but unlike other prisons, this one had a library. Not that there was a lot of time to read—about half an hour a day at most, plus Sunday evenings.

Nevertheless, during the next four years, May managed to read a great many books—most of them adventure and travel stories about wild and exotic places. Several in particular—the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the travelogues of Friedrich Gerstäcker, and the west Texas travel accounts of the Irish writer Mayne Reid—fascinated May so much that he read them over and over.

As he read them, one thought kept occurring to him again and again: “I bet that I could write stories at least as good as these.”

When Karl May was released from prison in 1874, he was 32 years old. He’d spent 8 of the past 12 years in jail, and his prospects for finding a decent job couldn’t have been much worse.

But this time he had a plan. The Mayne Reid travel accounts he’d read in prison had given him enough details about the badlands of west Texas to serve as the setting for a story he called “Old Firehand.” He now proceeded to write that story. He wrote many drafts of it, trying it this way and that, again and again—crafting and polishing until he was finally convinced that it was really working, that it was the kind of story he himself liked to read.

He was surprised at how much he enjoyed doing it. He was also surprised at how the very act of writing made the adventure come alive in his mind—so alive that it eventually felt as if he’d taken that trip himself. As if he’d really been there.

When May was finally satisfied, he offered the story to the editor of a local publishing company.

“This is very good,” the editor said. “Very vivid, very strong. When did you travel in America?”

“Oh... in America? Well... for the past four years,” May said hastily.

“Quite the place, I hear,” the editor said.

“Oh, it’s quite the place, all right,” May agreed. “Cowboys. Indians. Buffalo. All those things.”

“Our readers like stories like this,” the editor said. “Have you got any more like it? If so, bring them to me tomorrow or the next day.”

May agreed.

As he walked out of the editor’s office, May probably hadn’t the slightest inkling that his little lie about traveling to America had just launched him on a scam that would change his life—and that of millions of readers—profoundly.

For the rest of that day, sitting on his filthy little flophouse bunk, May wrote like a man possessed. It was suddenly clear to him that this was his big chance. Perhaps his only chance. Behind him lay a life of embarrassing failures and petty crime. Ahead of him, unless he could make this work, lay a life of drudgery, depression, and probably more time in prison.

But besides the desperation he also felt a burst of exhilaration. He was discovering something he was apparently good at—something he had a knack and an enthusiasm for. And now it seemed he’d found someone who was actually willing to pay him to do this for a living!

No question about it—he simply had to make this work.

May wrote through the entire evening. Then, using candles, he wrote through the entire night. He barely took time out for breakfast, and he completely ignored lunch. By late afternoon he was able to hand the editor a story he called “The Gitano.”

The editor was delighted. He bought both stories on the spot, and told May he would buy anything else he’d written along the same lines.

That day Karl May left the flophouse, rented himself an attic that didn’t have bedbugs or rats, and bought himself a supply of pencils and paper.

He was in the adventure-story writing business!

It wasn’t long before Karl May was making a good living writing stories for a variety of publishers, magazines, and newspapers. He wrote with astonishing speed, and he learned to write whatever his editors wanted: adventure stories, horror stories, war stories, romances. He even cranked out rape-and-murder stories that were known in those days as “penny dreadfuls”—stories in such dubious taste that he wrote them under a pseudonym.

His stories were mostly set in far-off, exotic, or mysterious places: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Africa, China, Japan, North America, South America. He had never been to any of these places, of course, but he read geography books and history books and travelogues and newspaper accounts—anything that would allow his vivid imagination to fantasize an exotic setting.

He wrote all his adventure stories in the first person, from his own perspective, as if they had actually happened to him. It was what German audiences wanted. True travelogues. The true travels of Karl May, intrepid adventurer. Every hero in his stories had a name that was some variant of “Karl.” It made him feel more connected to his stories that way, more directly involved. His publisher never questioned this, and neither did his audience. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this might cause him trouble later on in his life.

After half a dozen years of writing stories, May decided to try his hand at novels. That’s when his writing career really exploded.

He began with his Winnetou novels, which told the evolving story of a noble Apache chief (Winnetou) who befriends a German traveler (Karl May, alias “Old Shatterhand”) and teaches him how to live like an Indian in America’s wild West. They become blood brothers, and as their adventures in the Texas badlands multiply in novel after novel, they become an invincible duo, always fighting for the Good and the Right. Between them, they beat the tar out of more villains per page than Superman and Robin!

The Winnetou novels became a smash hit all over Europe, and no wonder. Karl May’s timing couldn’t have been better. A lot of people in 19th-century Europe had become tired of their leaders’ lofty claims about the superiority of their civilization. As far as they could see, all it had ever brought them was endless wars, famines, and disease. So they were fascinated by the idea of the “noble savage”—a person unspoiled by civilization, perhaps primitive, but inherently good, honest, and true. They felt a deep need to return to a kind of world in which goodness triumphed and evil was defeated. So—in sharp contrast to what usually happened when whites and Indians fought each other in American history—in Karl May’s novels, the Indians always won. His readers loved that.

By 1890 Karl May was a millionaire, and by 1895 he was the most popular novelist in Europe. His novels were being printed by the hundreds of thousands, and selling in translation as far abroad as Russia and China. He wrote so fast, he often produced two or three novels per year.

It was at this point that May’s ego started to run away with him. It had to do with his “autobiographical” adventures. In the beginning, he felt, he hadn’t truly lied to his readers about those travels. He’d just written about them from the personal perspective of someone with a name very like his own, and let his readers come to their own conclusions. If they wanted to believe that Karl May really had spent years with a noble Apache named Winnetou, outwitting and outgunning dozens of evil outlaws in the badlands of west Texas, that was their business. But now he began to conduct book promotion tours that were cleverly disguised as lectures—lectures about his own “travels” in the wilds of America and the Orient. These lectures proved enormously popular, attracting thousands of enthusiastic fans. They also, of course, sold huge quantities of books.

To give these lectures more credibility, May began dressing in a buckskin jacket and leggings. He strutted around with a rifle slung across his chest and six-guns shoved into his belt. He wore a sombrero or ten-gallon hat, and spurs on his boots. At first he wore these outfits only on his lecture tours, but eventually he took to wearing them in everyday life as well. He began to lace his conversations with words and expressions he claimed were Apache. He chanted “Apache” chants, and took to handing around a peace pipe before his lectures.

He bought himself a large house just outside the city of Dresden, converted it into a hunting lodge, and named it “The Villa Shatterhand.” He then hired museum agents in Texas to fill it to bursting with buffalo bones and skulls, American guns, saddles, sombreros, and horseshoes—items he presented as the trophies and mementos of his many journeys to America and elsewhere. His study was crammed with stuffed animals he claimed he’d killed—coyotes, buffalo, mountain sheep, and a huge lion.

In the backyard he had carpenters build an “authentic” log cabin that he called “Villa Baerenfett” (Villa Bear Fat). He filled this cabin with a fortune’s worth of Indian artifacts and jewelry, eagle feathers, dance costumes, peace pipes, and an “authentic” teepee. It was essentially a museum, but was presented as a home away from home for his sidekick, Winnetou.

To journalists who interviewed him, he became unbelievably brazen. He not only implied that all this fakery was authentic, he began to insist on it. “Not a single person or event in any of my books is invented,” he assured one of them. “Everything is described exactly as I experienced it.” He said he could speak over 40 languages, and could understand 120 more. He began to call himself “Doktor” Karl May, implying he had earned a university doctorate—despite the fact that in Europe at this time, a doctorate was so rare and so highly prized that anyone falsely claiming to have earned one could be arrested.

His fans swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker—but certain tabloid journalists began to have their doubts. Rather than accepting May’s version of his life, they began to make enquiries. They tried to track down old friends or colleagues, and looked for family members and relatives.

But they didn’t hit pay dirt until somebody discovered that May had been divorced. Once they had tracked down May’s ex-wife, Emma, it was game over for Karl May. With Emma’s help, it didn’t take them long to unearth the whole unsavory truth about May’s less-than-heroic former life. German officialdom kept excellent records.

The resulting exposés made headlines all over Europe. “Popular Novelist a Jailbird.” “Originator of Winnetou Novels a Liar and a Thief!”

May’s fans were stunned, and many were appalled and outraged. His book sales dropped like a rock.

But there was worse to come. In their investigations, the journalists also discovered those lurid penny dreadfuls that May had produced under a pseudonym in his early writing days. Now they had a thief and a liar who also wrote disgusting stories about rape and murder.

It didn’t help that May’s old publisher promptly decided to take advantage of all this uproar by reprinting thousands of copies of these books—but this time with May’s real name prominently emblazoned on the covers!

It all came down on Karl May’s head like a ton of bricks.

If the muckrakers had been content to end their attack at this point, May’s writing career would probably have come to a crashing halt. But they didn’t stop. Their attacks became a real hate campaign. May was accused of being a “sexual pervert” and a “corrupter of youth.”

Those were devastating accusations even by European tabloid standards. May counterattacked by suing his old publisher, the newspaper owners, and every one of their journalists for libel. They were court cases he would end up pursuing for the rest of his life.

In the end, May’s tormentors went too far and the public began to feel sorry for him. Yes, he’d made some mistakes in his youth, there was no doubt about that. His travel claims and lectures had been untrue, and his books weren’t autobiographical at all. But the rest of the accusations against him really seemed over the top. The tabloid journalists had worked themselves into such a frenzy that one journalist even claimed the youthful May had earned his living as a highway robber, hiding out in the woods and attacking passersby with a meat ax!

And besides—when all was said and done, May’s books were still exciting to read. Even if they had turned out to be pure fiction.

Public sentiment began to turn against the muckrakers and to side with May. Increasingly, his public forgave him.

His book sales started picking up again.

Wisely, May abandoned his fake lecture tours and refocused all his attention on his writing. During the following decade, novels continued to pour out of him at an astonishing rate. By 1908 he had written 75 books, which had been translated into 39 languages.

That year, at the age of 66, May finally took a trip to the United States, the setting for over 30 of his adventure novels. He’d been reluctant to do this before, because when he’d taken a trip to the Orient 10 years earlier, he’d found the people and the landscapes so different from what he’d described in his novels that he was never able to write a novel set there again. In fact, May had been so shocked at how much he’d misunderstood that he’d actually had a weeklong mental breakdown in his hotel in Sumatra, and was nearly committed to an insane asylum.

Unfortunately, his trip to America was a similar disaster. Arriving in New York, he started off by visiting a number of Seneca Indian burial sites and spent several days researching Native American history in the American Museum of Natural History. There, he promptly discovered he’d made all sorts of mistakes in his Winnetou novels, too. He’d assumed the west Texas badlands were a sandy desert, like the Sahara. He’d gotten the Apache and the Pueblo Indians all mixed up, and reported them living in the wrong areas. His European readers had never known the difference, of course, and probably didn’t care, but the Americans did—which was one reason why Karl May’s novels were largely a flop in the United States.

May was apparently so embarrassed at his discovery that he completely abandoned his plan to visit the American West. In fact, to everyone’s astonishment he never ventured beyond a 640-kilometer (400-mile) radius of New York, spending most of his time in a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls and several days touring Toronto and Montreal. About as close as he got to an American Indian was the statue of the Seneca chief Sagoyewatha in a Buffalo cemetery.

He escaped back to Germany after only 42 days in North America, having achieved very little in the way of research or exploration. His bags, however, were bulging with more Indian artifacts, which he’d purchased in New York.

May did write a final Winnetou novel after his return, in which an aging Old Shatterhand returns to Texas from Germany and shows America’s Indians how to survive the American government’s efforts to annihilate them. This advice provoked John Brant-Sero, an Ojibway Indian visiting Germany, to write an open letter to Germany’s newspapers, saying he wished to inform Germany’s citizens that he, an American Indian, was getting mightily tired of May’s fake expertise. He claimed that he’d tried to contact May to discuss this matter in person, and that May had ignored his letters and his requests to visit.

Not long after that, May abandoned settings in the known world entirely. Instead, he began to write mystical science-fiction tales that took place in outer space or on other planets. He’d never been there either, but the chance of anyone discovering his mistakes in these settings—at least in his lifetime—was low.

Curiously, although his fans weren’t terribly interested, the literary critics who had sneered at his previous adventure novels judged these books to be his very best.

By the time Karl May died two years later, in 1912, he had written an astounding 82 books, with worldwide sales of over 5 million copies. Despite the exposure of his prison record, and the way he’d deceived his readers, he still remained the best-selling novelist in Europe.

Ironically, Karl May’s fakery didn’t end with his death. Other entrepreneurs took over his legacy and propelled it to even greater heights. Over half a dozen large outdoor theaters in Germany now put on live performances of scenes from May’s novels every summer, featuring German cowboys and German Indians on live horses firing six-guns and rifles. Every weekend, thousands of members of several hundred Karl May societies—doctors, secretaries, plumbers, bus drivers, and lawyers—swarm out into Germany’s forests to live in imitation Indian villages, dress in fake cowboy and Indian gear, hold imitation powwows, chant imitation Indian chants, and take imitation ceremonial sweat baths.

They take it all quite seriously—it’s not a joke. They see it as a way of getting back to nature, to a world that’s more pure and simple than their own crowded, pollution-choked daily lives. And many of them save up for years to travel to North America to visit the places Karl May described in his novels.

Even though he’s been dead for almost a century, Karl May remains one of the top-selling authors in the whole world. His book sales have now topped the 200 million mark, and are still climbing steadily. Villa Shatterhand remains one of the most popular museums in Germany, welcoming tens of thousands of visitors every year.

As scams go, this is quite unusual. Most scam victims feel betrayed, cheated, or taken advantage of once the deception has been exposed. But obviously, this isn’t always the case. The “victims” of Karl May’s deception have decided not to be bothered at all by his fakery.

Which begs the rather interesting question: does a scam remain a scam if its victims refuse to feel scammed? Hard to say, but at least this much seems clear: a scam, if it’s entertaining enough, can be enjoyed by its victims—and readers!