Archeology – “Marek, you are a scoop!”

As a youthful adult, I was repeatedly asked with big eyes by friends: “Are you related to him?” Later it went on with colleagues. Under the pseudonym CW Ceram, my namesake wrote the archeology novel “Götter, Graves and Scholars”. Critics described it as the first non -fiction book in a popular form for the still young Federal Republic. His author thus became the most successful German writer of the post -war.

As soon as the 560-page work had entered the book trade, it became an egg-laying wool milk sow for the publisher. For decades, a long seller beyond Germany. In the shortest possible time, 12,000 copies went over the counter from the elaborately designed whole linen publication with gold embossing, colored dust jacket and image boards in low pressure.

The magnificent tape-about the excavations in Pompeii, the discovery of Troja and the tomb of Tutankhamuns cost a proud 18 D-Mark for the post-war period. The first edition was out of print within four weeks. To date, over five million copies have been sold worldwide, translated into 33 languages, later set to music and even filmed by Hollywood (“The Valley of Kings” with Eleanor Parker and Robert Taylor).

“You write a book and happiness comes,” Kurt W. Marek said his readers in 1953 after the quarter millionth of the exam was printed. “Götter, graves and scholars” is – as the subtitle suggests – a “novel of archeology”. With archaeologists, obsessed scientists and resourceful inventors. The places of the plot already had sonorous names: Tal der Königen, Mesopotamia Nineive, Peloponnes Troy and Yucatán. Marek assembled all of this in such a way that an academic discipline became a great adventure.

“Götter, graves and scholars” was an offer to escape other worlds in distant.

The bestseller is in the tradition of the new objectivity of the Weimar Republic: assembly principle, journalistic spelling and a pictorial language style characterize it. Unsencicically, Marek himself called his book, and that was also with his intention. He provides Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator from Troy, Robert Koldewey, who among other things the Babylon procession road with the Ischtar gate had uncovered, as well as Jean-Francois Champollion, which deciphered the hieroglyphs, the same detective legacies of antiquity. His book is like a crime novel.

The creation of the book itself was a thriller. Because the author name Ceram was a pseudonym and anagram: the name Marek read backwards. It has been handed down that Marek, as chief lecturer, went to his publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt and asked him to publish the book of a certain Ceram without revealing his own authorship. “One day I went to Rowohlt and said: Here is a book of a certain ceram, we have to bring that,” said Marek, in alluding to the friendship, later. Rowohlt asked him about whether the book was a bit of a thale at all. Marek-Ceram: “Of course, otherwise I would not suggest it!” In the beginning Rowohlt would have had great doubts that a novel would find its readers and read about the history of archeology. But Rowohlt had great confidence in Marek. “And so the incredible thing happened that the editor of a publisher accepted a book without anyone reading it.” He only stood his authorship later when the band was already in print. “Marek, you are a scoop,” Rowohlt is said to have replied.

Marek was born in Berlin on January 20, 1915. After a commercial training at the publisher Josef Singer, he worked as a freelance journalist for press and radio, was a film and literary critic, among others, at the “Berlin Börsen-Courier” and the “Berlin Illustrirten Zeitung”. In 1938, at the age of 23, he was moved into the Wehrmacht. He was stationed in the propaganda company of the Air Force, first in Paris, then on the Eastern Front and at the end of the war in Italy.

As a war rapporteur, he wrote for an front newspaper and was quite successful. Later, Marek reluctantly spoke about his active role in the Nazi propaganda. He himself played his experience as a war correspondent to the “purely descriptive presentation of experiences without the slightest political or propaganda comment”. Mare would much rather refer to his work “We held Narvik” from 1941. The renowned Munich Institute for Contemporary History is assessed that Marek had come to terms with the Nazi regime. About whether he operated clear war propaganda during the war can be argued. But “he was obviously not a regime critic, but wrote perseverance slogans for the front arrangements”.

After the end of the war, Marek became the chief of feuilleton in 1946 of the still british daily “Die Welt”, employees at the newly founded Northwest German Radio and finally chief lecturer at Rowohlt Verlag. During this diverse activities, “gods, graves and scholars” emerged. Marek said that he wanted to publish under a pseudonym with his awareness as a journalist. “It was clear to me that this Marek now came out with a novel of archeology, then this would not remove the criticism or the book trade, not to mention the audience. So I turned my name. “

The success of the factor had many reasons: “Götter, graves and scholars” was the first really well -equipped book of the post -war period. One that could be shown and put on the Christmas table. It provided innocent facts about a supposedly apolitical topic. And there was the tremendous thirst for knowledge of the post -war period: you wanted to learn, expand the horizon and conquer the world, but not through bloody campaigns. The departure from everyday gray debris life was on the cultural agenda in 1949: hunger for information, longing for culture and addiction to pleasure were mass needs of the post -war society. “Götter, graves and scholars” was an offer to escape other worlds in distant and at the same time a counter -world to the painfully experienced present. “The murderers are among us” was not just a film title, but social reality. The search for the new Adam and the desire for an unencumbered past contributed to the success of the cult book.

Stylistically and content was “gods, graves and scholars” a child of the Eurocentric zeitgeist. Ceram-Marek presents archaeological discoveries, especially as a heroic deeds of Western researchers, often without appreciating the role of indigenous cultures. The presentation of expeditions as success stories that largely hide the colonial structures of the time is particularly problematic. Indigenous communities usually only appear as extras or obstacles in the great narrative of the “discovery”. Not a word about National Socialism, the Second World War or the colonialist appropriation of foreign worlds.

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Nevertheless, the book remains a milestone of popular archeology, the influence of which cannot be underestimated – even if a more critical reading is required today. At the same time, Marek-Ceram served a trend: to prepare scientific topics in such a way that the interested layperson could also follow them. From the beginning, Marek himself saw himself as a educated amateur that his book was written without scientific ambitions. Rather, he tried to “make a certain science in such a way that the work of the researchers and scholars, especially in their inner tension, their dramatic link and their human bound, became visible.” This resulted in a work, ” that the scientist had to call unscientific. I only have an excuse for this that this was exactly with my intention «.

After the world success, Marek published an illustrated book, a collection of document and a work based on his own studies on the Hittiter: “Near Gorge and Schwarzer Berg”. In 1954 Marek moved to the USA and published an archeology of cinema about the development of film technology and industry of the film. But until his death in Hamburg in 1972, all of his actions outshone his first unprecedented success; “Götter, graves and scholars”.

For some years now I have rarely been asked about Marek Ceram, and if so, I answer with a wink, after all, I’m not related to him. For three generations, his book was part of the cultural memory and became a model for new formats of television such as for “Terra X” and “ZDF History”.