¹⁸ Karl May offered a substitute world, an alternative to the period of storm and stress caused by technical innovations which brought about social and economic revolutions. The factory worker of the modern industrialized state, and even a great portion of the middle-class which had not found yet its position within the age of machines, escaped after having slaved away at the fetish machine, after the day’s burden, into spheres of beautiful illusions. May’s phantasm-world offered itself as a place where everything was still in order, instead of narrow factory-space there was the wideness of prairie and desert; no one would transform natural landscape into civilized territory — the Indians would take care of that by hampering the tasks of the hated white surveyors. And above all, everybody was a free human being, owing duties only to oneself or — with limitations — to the leader of the group.
Of course, such substitute world does create the danger to paralyse the capability of readers to interact in their real world. Once escaped into a sphere of harmony and wishful thinking they will be rather prepared to adapt without opposition to their real conditions, accepting them, resigning, instead of participating in efforts to change and to better them.
Karl May himself offers proof for such arguments in his autobiographical sketch „Joys and Agonies of a Widely Read“. He reports about men who let him know:
„Since we have read your works we are no Social Democrats anymore …“
In plain text, this includes: cementing of unpleasant conditions because it had been the Social Democrats who stood up for the interest of the proletariat. And in the same sketch Karl May proudly describes how he received in his „Villah Shatterhand“ four workers of a cardboard-factory as visitors who affirmed:
„The whole factory is reading your books, albeit only from the lending library. But all of us like you very much, and even the adults keep rather to your books than to go to the pub.“
But it were the pubs to which Social Democrats would call for clandestine meetings. There were practically no other localities available than dance halls or back rooms of pubs if such meetings should not take place in the open air where they were forbidden anyway. Thus, we can read from these comments that they did not mean only to renounce alcohol but also any political engagement which would oppose the ruling class. In this context the words of the worker’s principal, quoted by May as well, gets a different meaning: Karl May, he says, „is a true blessing for the whole cardboard-factory.“ …

Well, whilst we may meet Herr May himself later on our stage, focusing even more on his adventurous life as a fiction-writer, we failed completely to trace for this purpose another writer of German tongue who cannot be blamed to have the proletariat lulled to sleep with his novels. His travel-adventures were published in Germany by the club „Büchergilde Gutenberg“ whose books were read widely by workers. It can only be guessed who he really was — date of birth unknown, place of birth unknown — but he became a renown travel-writer a quarter of a century after Karl May.

CONTROL! ROLL THE TEXT PLEASE!

Literary scholars seem to be united in the opinion, that B. Traven was the assumed name of a former actor and journalist, theatre-director and revolutionary, Ret Marut. After the outbreak of the war, in 1915, he declared to the German authorities that he was an American citizen. He also became politically engaged: in 1917 he started to publish the periodical „Der Ziegelbrenner“ (The Brick Burner) with a clearly anarchistic profile (its last issue appeared in 1921). After the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich in 1919, Ret Marut was made director of the press division and member of the propaganda committee of this anarchist, „Schein-Räterepublik“ (Fake-Soviet Republic), as the communists under Eugen Leviné who took over after a week, called it.
Marut got to know Erich Mühsam, one of the leaders of the anarchists in Munich. Later, when B. Traven‘s first novels appeared, Mühsam compared their style and content with Marut‘s Ziegelbrenner articles and came to the conclusion that they must have been written by one and the same person.
Ret Marut was arrested after the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic on 1st May 1919 and taken to be executed, but managed to escape. It is said that he escaped first to Canada than to Central America where he lived in Southern Mexico among Indians writing there his early works under the pen name B. Traven.
Traven sent his works, himself or through his representatives, for publication from Mexico to Europe by post and gave a Mexican post office box as his return address. The copyright holder named in his books was „B. Traven, Tamaulipas, Mexico“. Neither the European nor the American publishers of the writer ever met him personally, or at least the people with whom they negotiated the publication and later also the filming of his books always maintained they were only Traven‘s literary agents, the identity of the writer himself was to be kept secret. This reluctance to give any information about his life was explained by B. Traven in the words which were to become one of his best-known quotations: „The creative person should have no other biography than his works.“

Comrade Trotsky, you would have been able to meet this other fugitive in your Mexican exile — although he may not have been that keen to meet you …

B. Traven's works can be best described as „proletarian adventure novels“. They tell about exotic travels, outlaw adventurers and Indians; many of their motifs can also be found in Karl May’s and Jack London’s novels. Unlike the majority of adventure or western literature, Traven’s books, however, are not only characterized by a very detailed description of the social environment of their protagonists but also the consistent presentation of the world from the perspective of the „oppressed and exploited“. Traven’s characters usually come from the lower classes of society, from the proletariat or lumpenproletariat circles, they are more antiheroes than heroes, and despite that they have this primal vital force which compels them to fight. The notions of „justice“ or Christian morality, which are so visible in adventure novels by other authors, for example Karl May, are of no importance here.
Instead, there is usually an anarchist element of rebellion in the centre of the action of the novel. It always results from the rejection of the degrading living conditions of the hero, and it is always the oppressed who make themselves liberated or at least are trying to achieve this. Apart from that, there are virtually no political programmes in Traven’s books; the clearest manifesto which ever appeared in his books is maybe the general anarchist demand „Tierra y Libertad“ in the Jungle Novels. Professional politicians, including the ones who sympathize with the left, are usually shown in negative light; if they are mentioned at all, they usually play the roles of black characters. Despite this, Traven’s books are par excellence political works. Although the author does not offer any positive programme, he always indicates the cause of suffering of his heroes. This source of suffering, deprivation, poverty and death is for him capitalism, personified in the deliberations of the hero of The Death Ship as Caesar Augustus Capitalismus. Traven’s criticism of capitalism is, however, free of blatant moralizing. Dressing his novels in the costume of adventure or western literature, the writer tries to appeal with them to the less educated, first of all the working class, and through their book-club „Büchergilde Gutenberg“ Traven was a hit with them, an achievement not common with many left-wing-writers.