Karl May’s Cactus Forest

Karl May is the best-selling author you’ve probably never heard of, even though his books have reportedly sold about 200 million copies over the years and he is the best-selling German writer of all time. He set about 20 of his books in Texas and the American West, including four on the Llano Estacado, a land he described as “one of the most dangerous corners of the distant West ” and  a place where the “vulture of death” circles endlessly overhead. Yikes. 

In the books, Old Shatterhand, along with his blood brother, Apache chief Winnetou, embark on a series of adventures across the broad expanses of the Llano Estacado, battling the elements, evil, injustice, and dastardly villains. Old Shatterhand, as imagined by May, was a German superman who could speak, read, and write 40 languages. He was witty and charming, generous to a fault and an expert marksman, but he never killed anybody who didn’t need killing. 

Karl May’s resume was, as we might expect, less glamorous. He was born poor in the German town of Ernstthal, where he found honest work as a teacher’s assistant but supplemented his meager salary by stealing things. He pilfered candles from a boarding school, neglected to return a watch he’d “borrowed,” and carried his impersonation of an eye doctor to the point of writing prescriptions for unwitting patients. 

The law caught up with him in 1865. A jury sentenced him to four years and one month at the reform prison Oberstein Castle near Zwickau. In a fortuitous twist of fate,  Karl May was assigned to work in the prison library. 

As a prisoner with access to thousands of books, May learned to use atlases, encyclopedias, and geographical and ethnological studies to describe the countries he wrote about, though sometimes his imagination got the best of him, like when he imagined a “cactus forest.” 

After his release from prison May went to work impersonating a police officer in order to confiscate “counterfeit money” from a grocer. Then he swiped some billiard balls from a tavern and stole a horse. Old Shatterhand would have  been hanged (or banished to a cactus forest) for such deeds, but Karl May just went back to prison for a few more years. 

He was 32 when he got out of prison for the last time. He went to work as an editor at a publishing house, then began to write pulp fiction, humor, travel essays and anything else he could dispense for dollars. Unlike most writers or his or any other day, he became rich and famous. Albert Einstein, Herman Hesse, and Adolph Hitler all grew up reading his books. 

But being a best-selling writer wasn’t enough for Karl May. He wanted to transform his stories from fiction to memoir and so he reinvented himself as the real life Old Shatterhand. He hired a studio photographer in Linz to make portraits of him dressed as Old Shatterhand, cradling rifles custom made by a Dresden gunsmith. He displayed the guns in his house, which he named “Villa Shatterhand.” 

As famous world travelers go, May didn’t get out of the house very much. He visited Egypt and surrounding countries twice, complaining of the stench, the food and the mass quantities of sand, which blew in his face more or less constantly. May blamed his travels for two nervous breakdowns. 

May later made it to the United States, land of his dreams and many of his novels, or as he labeled them now, his memoirs. He visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls from September to December of 1908. He bought souvenirs, sent postcards to Germany, and posed for pictures with an old Tuscarora chief wearing suspenders. By then, the unmasking of May’s masquerade was well underway. 

It began in May of 1899 with what’s been described as “a strange alliance of the gutter press and Christian zealots.” The press exposed May’s verifiable past as a thief and jailbird. The zealots criticized his works as “deeply amoral.” 

May tried to destroy the Austrian studio photographer’s plates of his sessions with Old Shatterhand, but images from the negatives had already spread far and wide. Even as he spent the last ten years of his life fighting the charges, banished to his own metaphorical cactus forest, his books continued to sell in the many thousands. 

The vulture of death descended on Karl May on March 30, 1912, but readers continued to suspend their disbelief and his books remained on German best seller lists. A series of 1960s films based on May’s western novels inspired a Karl May Society along with “Wild West Clubs” and “Cowboy Clubs,” including one called “Lubbock Town” outside of Cologne. Lubbock— the one in Texas—  was the site of a Karl May Conference in 2000.

May’s legacy survives today not as a writer of great novels, but as a writer whose greatest fiction was his own life.