by Peter Boehm
However, the later Mahdi in Karl May’s storyline not only represented the interests of the slave traders, but he also even actively participated in the trade himself. On the cover of the second volume, named after him, you can see a turbaned figure, frowning out of black kohl-ringed eyes, and the holy man the book describes – previously known only locally – is a villain bad to the core.
The Egyptian officer orders the Mahdi to be flogged, but Kara Ben Nemsi takes pity on him and gives the man, abandoned in the bush, water and food in order to save him from certain death. After all, Christians are the better people, and Kara Ben Nemsi had also proved this to the Mahdi in his intellectual superiority during a religious dispute a couple of hours earlier.
Karl May was one of the most widely read German writers in the decade before the turn of the century. But he wasn’t the classic exponent of Wilhelmine Imperialism which was developing in Germany at the time. The German Empire was too often put off by Karl May's forceful promotion of the pan-Christian idea of all-embracing brotherly love, and neither could he fully accept the necessary ideology of the time – that of the inferiority of the colonial subjects.
In the third volume in particular, where Kara Ben Nemsi travels to South Sudan, Karl May’s image of Africans is already extremely modern, and can hardly be distinguished from our image today. The main event in the third volume is the slave hunters’ raid on a native village – described in very dramatic terms – which Kara Ben Nemsi is forced to watch, chained and therefore helpless.
In this volume, the South Sudanese are generally portrayed as victims of unscrupulous Arabs, as innocent and rather naïve, but as people whom one absolutely must, as a good Christian, help, and as people who are never held responsible, even when they take part in a raid on their fellow tribe members. Thus, the volume could easily serve as an anti-slavery campaign for a human rights organisation today.
Sudan’s tribes and landscapes are constantly evident in the Mahdi trilogy. Kara Ben Nemsi travels on the headwaters of the White Nile, rides through the desert in the west, and crosses the swamps in the south. But when you know Karl May’s working technique, you soon notice that his exotic landscapes are interchangeable.
That’s because he writes almost automatically. Once he’d studied his sources, the material effectively burst out of him. “I write what comes from my soul, and I write it in the way I hear it within me. I never change or smooth it. So my style is my soul”, he wrote in his autobiography “My Life and My Efforts” – and this has also been confirmed by independent sources.
After just a brief time he’d already forgotten significant parts of his tales, to the extent that, for instance, in subsequent volumes he refers to events which hadn’t even happened in the preceding ones. Or he changed his characters’ names just a couple of pages after their first appearance, or spelled them completely differently.
For Karl May, the exotic landscapes were just the backdrop for his narcissistically-tinged adventure stories. They symbolised the foreign, the other, a world which the reader didn’t know, but they meant nothing in themselves. He could just as easily have set his traveller’s tales on another planet. He only travelled on foreign continents because they were a lot less known than they are today, and so he could depict them almost exactly as he wanted.
After all, for Karl May, writing was a therapeutic necessity as well as a literary creation. It was his way of diffusing the tensions of his inner conflicts, and it helped him to cope with living with a serious personality disorder. After writing his traveller’s tales he felt better. So of course, his audience couldn’t fail to feel the same!
This is why he believed that his books contained the “solution to mankind’s problems”. After discussing and working through his nervous breakdown in “And Peace on Earth”, he wrote to his publisher asking him to produce “a hundred special editions” of it. “Perhaps printed on special paper, certainly beautifully bound; copies I can give not only to all German nobles, but also to all others – even the Sultan, the Shah and the Emperors of China and Japan.”
So Karl May was a strange expatriate not only because he turned eccentric when finally confronted with things foreign but because, like the young Arthur Rimbaud, he projected his own issues into the unknown foreign world.
And there were plenty of such issues in Karl May’s highly neurotic character. Hans Wollschläger, who researched Karl May, diagnosed him with a “narcissistic neurosis of textbook proportions”. Karl May had had a very disturbed relationship with his mother, and narcissism occurs when a small child’s love has not been returned.
This is why, later on in life, Karl May perceived any renunciation of libido as a “loss of self”, and focussed his love on his “ideal egos” – in this case, Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi.
For Karl May, a consequence of this narcissistic wound during his childhood was probably the development of “pseudologia fantastica”. In psychoanalytical literature, this is defined as “portraying to others a fantasy as though it were reality”. And the difficultly of differentiating between imagination and reality is a common theme running through Karl May’s life.
Even when he clashed with the law as a young man, the strong pseudological traits in his character were clear. All his criminal offences appeared to be high-spirited confidence tricks, where he made himself out to be a doctor or a detective who had to seize counterfeit money.
Later, as a writer, he created Kara Ben Nemsi and Old Shatterhand, and thought up all kinds of adventures in exotic corners of the world for these super heroes. And then, when he became famous in the mid 1890s, he couldn’t resist his readers’ worship of his ideal egos. It was like balm to his ego weakness. And so took off the strange public idea of the equation Karl May = Old Shatterhand = Kara Ben Nemsi.
In the event, however, the difference between these fantasy identities and the real person couldn’t have been greater. Whereas Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi’s abilities seemed to know no bounds, their creator was a nice, slightly elderly man named Karl May.
“May, then pushing sixty”, as his biographer Otto Forst-Battaglia noted, referring to an excursion near Vienna around the turn of the century, “went to the slopes of the Kahlenberg at Mardi Gras. The happy company was, as arranged, harmlessly attacked by disguised artists. May was embraced and playfully hassled by people unknown and strange to him. What did Old Shatterhand do? Did he knock the strangers to the ground with his fists? Did he force them to bashful admiration with his commanding gaze? Certainly not! He screamed piercingly for the police. ‘Something like this could only happen in Vienna’, he exclaimed in disgust.”
But, in letters to his readers from 1896 onwards, the same man claimed to have experienced for himself everything he described in his traveller’s tales. He had photographs taken of himself in Old Shatterhand’s trapper clothing and in Kara Ben Nemsi’s flowing robes; claimed to speak a total of “1,200 languages”, “2 Kurdish dialects, 6 Chinese dialects, Malay, Nama, some Sunda idiom, Swahili, Hindustani, Turkish and the American Indian languages of the Sioux, the Apache, the Comanche, the Snakes, the Utes, the Kiowa, as well as Ketchum and 3 South American dialects. I won’t count Lappish”, to name but a few of the exotic ones.
With his wondrous rifle – the Henry Carbine – he could fire 100 shots a minute without its barrel getting hot. On the other hand, however, the weapon’s calibre was so low that he had to carry 1,728 cartridges for it in his belt.
He had apparently been to the Wild West over 20 times and, taking the place of the deceased Winnetou, could command 35,000 Indians there.
And Karl May genuinely believed his own tales. To the astonishments of onlookers, he often bared his torso to show the scars the battles had marked him with. As he described Winnetou’s death to an audience, he burst into tears. And his second wife reported that, while he was writing in his study, he would talk, laugh and cry with his characters.
And neither did he have to worry about rocking the foundations of sc
ience with his tall stories. After all, the more outlandish his claims became, the more his followers seemed to believe him. If necessary, he often publicly stated different dates for Winnetou’s death, but in spite of this his “Villa Shatterhand” in the town of Radebeul in eastern Germany became a site of pilgrimage for his readers, and wherever he appeared publicly crowds would gather.
He was a popular guest of European nobility. It’s said that he even asked the wife of the Austrian Crown Prince, “Your Imperial Highness, should I conduct the conversation as a cowboy or as a writer?”
At the end of the 1890s, Karl May was at the peak of his popularity. What could happen to him now?
In situations like this, it’s easy to become careless, and the euphoria which this hero worship brought Karl May had very dangerous consequences for him. He now began to plan his first real trip to the sites of his tales. He wrote to his publisher that he was expecting to find material for new books. And of course, he’d put himself under pressure too, through his appearances as Kara Ben Nemsi and Old Shatterhand, which had been publicised in the newspapers.
Even if, at this point, no-one was yet asking awkward questions in public, such questions had, of course, always occurred to anyone who still had all their marbles – had he really been there? Can he really have experienced even a taste of all this?
Karl May felt that the time was now ripe for him to provide evidence. Thus, in March 1899, fate took its course. Kara Ben Nemsi Effendi travelled to the wild Orient.
Karl May’s six-month journey which followed is certainly the most farcical spectacle since the invention of steamship travel.
Before the trip, he made his will – well, you never know! – but in the end the 57-year-old went on a cruise. Apart from just a few exceptions, he stuck to harbour towns and stayed in cosy hotels, ideally called “The German House” or “The Bavarian Court”.
And all his time spent writing postcards to newspapers and to his admirers back home meant that he was hardly able to leave his expensive hotel rooms. In Cairo he wrote 78 postcards in one day alone, and even 100 from Uleh-leh in Sumatra, not to mention the letters. “25 just to the Bavarian princes”, he told his future wife Klara Plöhn, “because they want to have the whole collection.”
In the end, the trip took him to Egypt, Massawa/Eritrea, Aden/Yemen, Colombo/Sri Lanka – he couldn’t land in Bombay because of the plague – and as far as Sumatra/Indonesia. From there, he telegraphed to his friends, the Plöhn couple, and to his first wife, asking them to join him in Egypt. With the three of them, he then visited Palestine, Damascus, Istanbul and Athens.
It’s nothing new for someone to go on a journey but to never really arrive. Karl May’s entire trip is evidence of this phenomenon. Throughout this time he was writing his sweet and effusive “love poems”. Whilst still in Egypt he was eulogising Lake Lucerne, “Evening was just kissing night/In sacred solemn starlight/And now I sallied forth again”.
Then, in Aden, he describes an autumnal mood reminiscent of home: “I am so tired, so autumn-weary/And would like best of all to depart./The leaves are falling all around;/How long, Lord, must I stay?”
But his travel diary and his letters contain so little of what he must have seen and experienced during his trip that it’s as though he was never there.
It wasn’t until he was travelling with the Plöhns and his wife that he even began to write down just a little of what was going on around him.
However, the journey didn’t add anything new to the perception of Karl May, the desk-bound travel writer. And the photos which his future second wife Klara (Plöhn’s widow) had taken of him also tell their part. They show an elderly man with a sun helmet and a snow-white suit, standing slightly lost against an Oriental backdrop – and one who seemed to be fully aware of this too.
Karl May first described, in writing, his nervous breakdown in his book “And Peace on Earth”, published a year after the trip. But no-one could have known of this at the time, as only the Plöhns and Karl May’s wife had been aware of the crisis on the trip to the Orient.
At the time, the German public had to believe that Kara Ben Nemsi Effendi was travelling to the sites where his adventures had taken place. He wrote countless letters to German newspapers, which were keen to publish the famous writer’s greetings from far-flung lands.
En route he wrote to his publisher, for instance, that the trip would take him “to Arabia and Hadschi Halef, then through Persia and India to China, Japan and America, to my Apaches”. And he wrote to the editor-in-chief of Germany’s “Pfälzer Zeitung” from a “Bishari camp. Six hours’ ride from Shellal, in Nubia”, “ I’d like to write immediately and thank you, even though there is neither writing paper nor envelopes here in the Bedouin camp. There’s some everyday paper in my saddlebag, and the Sheikh’s wife has got me a little Acacia gum, to stick it up with, from her potty. Then a messenger will be sent to Shellal with the letter. I’m now going to Sudan. The English won’t tolerate this, so I’ll travel my old caravan routes as Kara Ben Nemsi. Then I want to go via Mecca to Arabia, to my Hadschi Halef, and then with him through Persia to India. You can see that my books aren’t created in my study, as some smart alecks sometimes claim. If you could see and hear all that is going on around me in the camp, you’d think it impossible for anyone to be able to write here at all. You see, I’m among camel buyers, and the nomads, with their half-shaven heads, give me no peace. In these few months I have already collected material for 5-6 volumes. I get new ideas and new thoughts every day – new viewpoints open up daily. Dear Sir, you’ve no idea what you can learn, if you are willing, from these “so-called” feral or half-feral people!”
Good old Kara Ben Nemsi hadn’t yet lost his sense of humour. The Bishari camp really was six hours’ ride from Shellal. But just 15 minutes’ donkey ride from Aswan, where Karl May was staying.
And of course, soon after this there was no more talk of a strenuous journey through Sudan – and who knows where else! At this point Karl May had already decided he wasn’t going to leave the well-trodden tourist paths.
But even if you hide yourself away so well and build so many walls of luxury around yourself, you can still never be entirely certain that reality won’t break into your own sphere anyway.
In Padang in Sumatra, things suddenly turned serious. Kara Ben Nemsi’s day of awakening had arrived.
There’s just one place in “And Peace on Earth” which suggests what the cause of May’s nervous breakdown could have been: “Travellers arriving in the East by steamship encounter for the first time, here in Penang, Chinese figures, forms and customs from which they will be unable to take their eyes. They find what they see so strange, so far from their usual feelings and thoughts, that they instinctively wonder whether they will be able to remain their old selves among all these new impressions. And they are justified, and have good reason to wonder this, as all these phenomena all contain a boundless force, a convincing naturalness which, in the very first hours, will entirely destroy the view that they are simply decrepit, frail states.”
After Karl May’s death, his second wife denied everything in his chronicle of the trip which had suggested this nervous breakdown. She was always keen to keep up his reputation, and had played a large part in creating the legend around him.
For example, the pair had returned from their trip to America in 1908 earlier than planned, but they’d kept their heads down and hadn’t contacted anyone, to make it appear that Karl May had travelled from the Niagara Falls tourist attraction deeper into the Wild West.
And as for the trip to the Orient, Klara later also tried to conceal the three months they spent together in Arenzano, Italy.
Before the Mays and the Plöhns could set off for the second part of their trip, they’d had to spend some time in the northern Italian coastal resort, because Richard Plöhn had suddenly been taken ill.
And, as you’d probably have expected from a jack-of-all-trades like Kara Ben Nemsi, she invented a detour for
him to Persia to account for this period. She cut the whole of December out of his diary of the trip to the Orient, and destroyed almost all his letters to his first wife. And today only a partial manuscript of the second volume of the travel diary remains.
Nonetheless, she left behind a laconic note entitled “Additions to my account of K. M., which may be necessary”, which makes clear what happened in the time spent with Kara Ben Nemsi (alias K. M.) in Padang and Istanbul: “K. M. wrote home from Sumatra that he had suffered an attack of such terrible, torturing impact which led him to his senseless acts. He had had to fight these attacks for 8 days and during this time, as he clearly saw in retrospect and as his servant, Hassan, told him, he had acted like a madman. A compulsion drove him to throw all food into the toilet. He did this, and starved, until normality finally triumphed. He was alone here, and realisation only dawned from his report. A second such case, which I saw, struck in Constantinople. K. M. had, one evening, been with his friend Schmitz du Moulin, whom he had met through Adbul Hamed, to a place where, at the time, girls were still trafficked in secret. The place, and the people frequenting it, must have made such an impression on K. M. that, following the visit, he found himself in such an abnormal state that we were so concerned and shocked that we feared we would have to take him to a lunatic asylum. After 8 days, exactly like in Sumatra, the condition abated, he began to eat again, but never referred to the horrific time he had just survived. We, too, avoided asking any questions.”
It really is a classic situation. Karl May’s compulsion to flush food down the toilet leaves no doubt remaining. It makes all too evident his regression to the compulsive phases of his childhood.
Suddenly, all you can see is the defenceless child, whose narcissistic shell was once again collapsing around him like a house of cards. He was now helpless and alone, in a foreign country, with only his most loyal servants and his closest friends in Istanbul. They didn’t say a word about it. They didn’t want to damage the reputation of Kara Ben Nemsi, conqueror of the Orient. It was only recorded for posterity through a terse announcement by his widow who, for whatever reason, ultimately broke the silence.