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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Karl May: The German 'cowboy'

29/11/2007Karl May: The German 'cowboy'

Karl May and Europe's fascination with the American Wild West go on show in Berlin.

 

 

For most of the last century and beyond, German writer Karl May's books on the American Wild West have made him a hero in more than 40 different countries.

Now 95 years after his death, crowds are flocking to see a Berlin exhibition devoted to May, whose adventure stories about cowboys and Apache warriors once seemed so real that generations of youngsters in Europe believed he had spent most of his life living among them.

In reality May, whose action-packed travel fiction about the American Wild West sold more than 200 million copies and were translated into more than 40 languages, had never set foot on American soil at the time he wrote about Apache chief Winnetou and his blood brother, German engineer, Old Shatterhand.

Only once did May ever visit the US -- in 1908 at the age of 66, when he first met a Native American. He never made it west of the Mississippi, though.

And four years later, the man who would capture the hearts and minds of young and old alike for years to come with his gripping adventure books died in his beloved Saxony in Germany.

A fascination

For a century or more May enjoyed enormous popularity among the young in Europe, more so in Germany, despite the uncertainty of some literary critics as to what had sparked the author's fascination with America's Wild West back in the late 1880s.

As illustrated by the show at Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum until January 6, May possessed a vivid imagination. He also enjoyed guises and dressing up in flamboyant clothes. At one time he was a schoolteacher, then a con man, accused of posing as a policeman.

May's misdemeanors led to his being jailed for seven years. He spent most of his time "inside" dreaming and scribbling down his Wild West ideas on scraps of paper. After his release, Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld, a Freiburg publisher, impressed by May's talent for turning out what was then termed "trashy literature" hired him to write westerns.

 

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