If you’ve never heard of Winnetou, Old Shatterhand, Kara Ben Nemsi or Old Surehand, you probably didn’t grow up in Germany or another German-speaking country. Those characters created by the German author Karl May (1842-1912) are as well-known in Germany and a few other European countries as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, or Tarzan are in the English-speaking world. Unlike traditional American-style Westerns, May’s stories favored the Indians over the cowboys/frontiersman (Westmänner in May parlance). He portrayed his Native American characters as intelligent, noble people who appreciated Nature and were generally more honest and trustworthy than the paleface frontier people they encountered. In doing so, May (pronounced MY) also romanticized the life and culture of American Indians, sparking a longtime cultural and literary debate in Germany that continues to this day. May also had errors and inconsistencies in his novels, which were written and revised over many years at different times.

The Apache chieftain Winnetou (left) is one of Karl May’s best known fictional characters. His German friend Old Shatterhand is equally famous. This book, Part II (Vol. 8) of the Winnetou trilogy, was first published in 1893, although May had first invented an early version of Winnetou in 1878. The book pictured here, part of the classic “green volumes” (grüne Bände), was published in Bamberg, West Germany by the Karl-May-Verlag (founded in 1913) with a 1951 copyright. The postwar German division and the Soviet Occupation Zone led to the publisher moving operations from East Germany to Bamberg. A Radebeul office opened in 1996. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Neither the Tonto nor the Tarzan portrayals in American movies and television managed to avoid stale stereotypes and tropes. Neither Tonto nor Tarzan spoke English very well. The original Tarzan, as written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and first published in 1912, was well-spoken, but none of the Johnny Weissmuller movies were based on the original novels. On the other hand, Winnetou, Karl May’s Apache chieftain, speaks perfect German/English: Er sprach ein reines Englisch. (“He spoke perfect English.”) – Winnetou I.

The Tonto sidekick character was invented (for the radio series) so that the Lone Ranger, played by Clayton Moore in most of the later TV episodes, would have someone to talk to. The good part was that the TV Tonto was at least played by the indigenous Canadian actor Jay Silverheels, a rarity in movies and TV of the 1950s. The US television series aired on the ABC network from 1949 to 1957, with an amazing 221 30-minute episodes. For the 2013 Lone Ranger movie, there was criticism aimed at a non-indigenous actor (Johnny Depp) playing Tonto. (See Hollywood Indian Sidekicks and American Identity from Essais.)

The LONE RANGER television series featured Clayton Moore as the masked title figure and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, his Indian sidekick. PHOTO: American Broadcasting Company

In the German Winnetou “sauerkraut Western” film adaptations of the 1960s, as with Tarzan, the movie scripts often deviated from May’s original stories. Many Europeans’ understanding of the Winnetou character (and American Indians in general) are still based on the film versions, over which May’s estate had little control. American actor Lex Barker (Alexander Crichlow Barker Jr, 1919-1973), who also played the film Tarzan, portrayed Winnetou’s friend Old Shatterhand – who comes from Germany. To this day, Barker is best known in German-speaking Europe for his Old Shatterhand role, for which he even received German film awards. The French actor Pierre Brice (pron. BREECE; Pierre-Louis Le Bris, 1929-2015) had a long career based on his Winnetou role on screen and in live pageants. In East Germany, the popular “Indianerfilme” (not “Westernfilme”!) featured the German-Serbian actor Gojko Mitić as Winnetou. More recently, in the 2016 made-for-TV movie Winnetou – Der Mythos lebt (“…the myth lives on”), Winnetou was played by Nik Xhelilaj of Albania. No, none of these guys was a Native American or even related to one.

The Lone Ranger character first appeared in The Lone Star Ranger (1914), a novel by the American Western writer Zane Grey (1872-1939). (German book title: Der Texasreiter [“the Texas rider”].) There was no Tonto character yet, as pointed out above. Grey’s all-time bestseller was his 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage (Das Gesetz der Mormonen [“Mormon law”] in German), published in the same year as May’s death. Grey’s works, translated into German, are also well known in the German-speaking world. Zane Grey published more than 90 books, far fewer than Karl May’s 300 or so. During his writing career, Grey’s books were adapted as motion pictures. Riders of the Purple Sage, The Lone Star Ranger and other Zane Grey novels were made into feature films between 1916 and the 1940s, an opportunity that Karl May never had during his lifetime.

An evening performance at the Kalkberg open-air theater during the Karl-May-Spiele in Bad Segeberg, Germany. PHOTO: Claas Augner (Wikimedia Commons)

Considering that Karl May died in 1912, it’s remarkable that his Western novels and fictional characters are still a part of German popular culture today. While the German movies based on his tales of the Old West were mostly made in the the 1960s, the Karl May Festival (Karl-May-Spiele) performances in Bad Segeberg (Schleswig-Holstein) still attract thousands of fans from all over Germany to the open-air theater at the Kalkberg arena. (There are other similar pageants in various locations in Austria and Germany.) In 2022, May’s The Oil Prince (Der Ölprinz) is being presented in Bad Segeberg from 25 June until 4 September. Loosely based on May’s novel of the same name, the Bad Segeberg stage production is part of an amusement park attraction that includes an Indian Village and a “fan shop.” The shows are presented twice daily at 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm from Thursday through Saturday. On Sundays there is only a 3:00 pm show. Monday through Wednesday there are no performances. Each year, a fairly famous actor plays the role of the Apache chief Winnetou or his paleface blood brother Old Shatterhand. This all began in 1952 and has been running ever since then – except during the recent Covid-19 pandemic.

Karl May as Old Shatterhand in a photo from 1896. The author was known for dressing up as some of his fictional characters. Some say he WAS Old Shatterhand, whose first name was Karl. May also named his house in Radebeul “Villa Shatterhand.” It is difficult to separate May’s alter egos from the man himself. PHOTO: Alois Schiesser (1866–1945; Wikimedia Commons)

Another, more modest, more recent Karl May festival (since 1992) takes place in May’s adopted hometown of Radebeul, close to Dresden in Saxony. Karl May was already living in the area when he bought the two-story house in Radebeul that now serves as the Karl May Museum. In 1896 he moved into his new house with his first wife Emma, and promptly named it “Villa Shatterhand,” spelled out in large letters on the street-facing facade of the building. The three-day event known as the Karl-May-Festtage (“festival days”) takes place annually in Radebeul at Villa Shatterhand and in the area known as the Lößnitzgrund, a shallow valley along the Lößnitz River where open-air events take place. The 29th edition ran from the 27th to the 29th of May 2022. Highlights included a “Westerncamp” and a “Westernstadt” (town), a Santa Fe train robbery reenactment, horse stunt performances, various other attractions for young and old, plus local country music performers. Past festival days have attracted up to 30,000 visitors.

Another remarkable aspect is the fact that Karl May never personally visited the American West before or after he wrote his Western tales. He did travel to the United States in 1908, long after he had become a successful author, but he and his second wife, Klara, never ventured farther west than Niagara Falls during their six-week Amerikareise. But he did extensive research on the American West and American Indians before writing his Westerns.

May also wrote adventure novels set in Latin America, China, Germany and the “Orient” – meaning the Middle East (Egypt) and other “exotic” locales. But as with his Western stories, he visited those places only after he had written about them. In 1899/1900 May traveled to Asia and Sumatra for about nine months, accompanied only by his servant Sejd Hassan. In December 1899 he joined his first wife, Emma, and their mutual friends, Richard and Klara Plöhn, in Egypt before returning to their home in Radebeul near Dresden. (May divorced Emma in 1903. The former Klara Plöhn would become May’s second wife.) Klara claimed that May suffered two separate nervous breakdowns during his travels, but he managed to recover without medical intervention.

May wrote many “travel tales” (Reiseerzählungen) between 1892 and 1910, most of which were later published in a 33-volume collection by Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld. The best known of these are the Orient Cycle (volumes 1–6, including Durch die Wüste/In the Desert, Durchs wilde Kurdistan/Through Wild Kurdistan and Old Surehand I, II, III), and the Winnetou Trilogy (volumes 7–9).

This 2001 German movie was a parody of the Karl May films made in the 1960s. The musical version played at Berlin’s Theater des Westens from December 2008 to May 2010. PHOTO: herbX Medienproduktion GmbH, Constantin Film

May’s many works have been copied and parodied, even during his lifetime. One notable modern example is the 2001 Michael “Bully” Herbig film Der Schuh des Manitu (“The Shoe of the Manitou”), a parody of the many Karl May Western films produced in the 1960s. It became a box office hit in Germany. It featured popular German actors such as Christian Tramitz (as Ranger), Sky du Mont (as Santa Maria), and Herbig himself in three different roles. The film was also partly a sendup of Spaghetti Westerns from the same period.

May was beset with detractors throughout his life, with people trying to exploit him, denigrate him for personal gain, and just plain steal from him. Late in his life, due to weak copyright laws, his works were edited and published without his permission. Even his own last wife, after his death, destroyed works that she felt might cause problems for his legacy.

A poster for the 2022 Bad Segeberg Karl-May-Spiele. PHOTO: karl-may-spiele.de

Ironically, in his early days May spent time in prison, mostly for minor offenses. May was born into a very poor family. Although some of his problems were caused by the social and class discrimination common in Germany at the time, May was something of a con-artist. His reform and turn towards a more productive life came at the hands of a sympathetic Catholic catechist during his four years of incarceration (1870-1874) in Waldheim, Saxony. But his reform came only after he had returned to a life of crime following a previous long-term prison stay in Zwickau, where May did a lot of reading in the prison library and discovered his talent for storytelling. Eventually, he was able to make a living from his writing. By 1878 May had become a freelance writer and editor. Although he suffered some setbacks, in 1892 the publication of Karl May’s Gesammelte Reiseromane (Collected Travel Novels) brought him financial security and recognition. But when he died in 1912 he was still being unjustly hounded by detractors.

Today in the German-speaking world, the name of Karl May still conjures up visions of travel and adventure in faraway, exotic places. His success during a time when there were no movies or television, much less the internet, has carried on to this day. Yes, Karl May is perhaps slightly less relevant in our modern world, but Winnetou and Old Shatterhand are still very much present in German culture.

– HF