Karl May again and again: Saxony or the USA, the main thing is the Orient

In 2022, Germany will suffer a nervous breakdown: Karl May should be banned! Or something like that. The Ravensburger publishing house is voluntarily withdrawing its picture book merchandise that was supposed to accompany a new May film adaptation – perhaps it was just too stupid for it. Perhaps the pressure from the cancel wokers was too great and there was fear of damage to the company’s image that could not have been remedied with the possible income. You shouldn’t always assume the best. It was something like that. You can research how exactly. But very few people do, but they still react extremely, take to the streets or even buy books from the literary giant – before it’s no longer possible.

Unfortunately, these reactions were the most interesting thing about the whole thing. That Karl May would now also be banned, which you read as a child and who was the first to awaken your interest in Indians/oppressed people/Native Americans/Indigenous people/outsiders/adventurers and so on. Who sensitized you so much. Yes, okay. Clear.

What kind of person was he anyway? What social circumstances and personal life circumstances gave rise to him as an author and favored his continued iridescence? He is a writer who continues to be useful for projection and whose work is constantly caught up in cultural battles. Whether it is actually still read is another question. But what you can definitely say is that a lot of things in Karl May’s life didn’t necessarily really happen, but they were true. And that’s exactly what the book “Karl May” by Enis Maci and Mazlum Nergiz is about.

In the subtitle, May is described as a “petty criminal, con artist, Germany’s most successful writer.” The two authors emphasize that little in his biography is completely certain. What is relatively certain is that he was born in 1842 in Ernstthal, Saxony, as one of 15 siblings. Then school and training, work as a teacher, and later a stay in prison after he stole a “friend”‘s case and pen, among other things. Claim: It was just borrowed. In the end you can no longer prove it. But there must have been something true about it because, according to official history, May ended his imprisonment a different person, broken in some way. From then on he called himself Dr. May and until the end of his life published bestsellers about places he had never visited himself, wrote about people he had never had contact with and about whom he had only read.

His life took place primarily in Saxony, he mentally relocated the Elbe Sandstone Mountains to the USA or the Middle East; in his novels he himself rode through the area as Kara Ben Nemsi or Old Shatterhand and embodied the prototype of a “Germanic Indian”. – entirely in accordance with May’s personal ideas about “race”.

In their book, Maci and Nergiz deconstruct not the person, but “the phenomenon” of Karl May. Ideas and events that you may have heard of are put into relationships and connections. The image of the “noble savage,” for example, in which the authors touch on the history of slavery. Or put May next to contemporary con artists like Wolfgang Beltracchi or Fabian Wolff. This is not really literary criticism, perhaps more of a kind of distant reading: the interpretation of the work is not based on the text itself, but on the way in which the work, as the origin of projection, still works today.

In general, projection is a prerequisite for knowledge. What is to be recognized becomes, so to speak, part of one’s self. This is the only way it can be connected to our experience and knowledge. For Maci and Nergiz, the author May projected himself onto the “West” of the USA and this in turn became Prussia – also the site of his projection. For him, Winnetou is the perfect Prussian. This is ridiculous, but it somehow fits: the original Slavic areas of Prussia and Saxony were conquered and “Germanized” during the medieval settlement of the East. If one imagines Prussia as a contested territory of “cowboys and Indians,” it may not be as far-fetched as it might first seem.

Even today, the view of the USA is characterized by projection. Everyone seems to have an idea of ​​certain US cities like New York or Los Angeles without ever having been there. At the same time, the digitally mediated world is pushing to project itself onto the American world. That’s what makes Maci and Nergiz’s book so exciting and current. However, it is not just about examining the projections onto others, but also about understanding yourself as a projection of the others. This is where one of the roots of postcolonial literary criticism can be found: people who were fantasized now read those fantasies themselves. This experience is reflected in “Karl May”.

The Germans Maci (with Albanian roots) and Nergiz (born in Turkey) read the German projections of the “exotic” other, a category that they themselves could in a certain way fall under. This form of “reencounter” is not only uncanny, but also productive in that it makes the dynamics of projection visible. The “first encounter” with “the German” is also important: the two authors talk in one voice and remember how, as children, they learned Grimm’s fairy tales by heart in order to avoid their parents’ mistakes in German. Would the Brothers Grimm have expected this with their national philology?

»Karl May« tests the aesthetics of coordinate systems superimposed by projection. For Maci and Nergiz, these aesthetics are the main appeal of May: a Prussian as a Native American or a petty criminal conman as a writer with a doctorate. These transformations do not happen smoothly; tension only arises through friction.

Before they wrote their book, Maci and Nergiz staged a play about Karl May for the Berliner Volksbühne, which they often return to. Three actors talk about Karl May, the West and the terrible task of creating themselves and “the others”. You stand in front of a large screen onto which the visions of the exotic and sometimes the actors themselves are projected, which the book cover gives an impression of.

Enis Maci/Mazlum Nergiz: Karl May. Petty criminal, con artist, Germany’s most successful writer. Suhrkamp, ​​200 pages, br., 18 €.