In the spring of 1926 the fledgling Socialist publishing house Büchergilde Gutenberg (Berlin) dramatically enlivened the literary scene by bringing out, within a few weeks of each other, two novels: Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship) and Der Wobbly — one about the life of an American sailor aboard a dilapidated freighter destined to be scuttled in an insurance fraud scheme, the other about the adventures of an American hobo suspected of being a Wobbly, a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, in the hinterland of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on the Gulf of Mexico. The name of their author, B. Traven, was unknown, except to readers of the Socialist daily Vorwärts where, since February 1925, three vignettes of Mexican life and history had been published and the first part of Der Wobbly had been serialized that summer as Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton-Pickers), which was also the title of the book editions from 1928 on. The author did not remain unknown for long. Like a bracing breeze from nowhere, the two novels, especially Das Totenschiff, had an immediate and powerful impact far beyond the membership of the trade-union oriented book club that Büchergilde Gutenberg served.
By the time Traven died in Mexico City in 1969, his books were selling by the millions, in many languages. As early as 1950, American college students could learn intermediate German from a textbook containing parts of Das Totenschiff; from 1971 on, they could study advanced Spanish
© Karl S. Guthke, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126.06
from a textbook edition of a translation of Traven’s Macario, and by the end of the century, at least one of Traven’s stories, “Assembly Line,”
first published in 1930 as “Der Großindustrielle” in the second edition of a volume of Traven’s narratives entitled Der Busch, was required reading in some American high schools, as was Die weiße Rose (1929; The White Rose) in some German high schools. John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), produced with at least some input from Traven himself, was, and still is, a cult film.
In the literary and socio-political landscape of Germany, Traven loomed largest after the demise of the Empire and before the Nazis’
rise to absolute power. To be sure, he did not come into full view until the second half of the Weimar Republic. But, in a sense, he was present at its very inception, or its prelude, and actively so. Under the fake-looking name of Ret Marut (which he had used from 1907 to 1915 as an actor in various provincial theaters, and since 1912 as the author of short prose fiction printed mostly in newspapers and magazines)1 he had published, and written virtually single-handedly, an anarchist-leftist journal in Munich, beginning in September 1917. Acerbic in its criticism of the social and political life of the waning years of the imperial regime, it was called Der Ziegelbrenner (“The Brickburner”), obviously with a view to providing building materials for the construction of a post-war, post-dynastic Germany. The time for this renewal arrived even before the capitulation: on 7 November 1918 the Republic was proclaimed in Munich. Marut’s Ziegelbrenner declared its solidarity, seeing nothing less than “die Welt-Revolution” beginning at that very moment. Marut himself played a highly visible role, primarily as a newspaper censor in the Central Committee of each of the two successive Bavarian
“Räterepubliken,” republics relying for their authority on the councils of workers, soldiers, and farmers that were established at the outbreak of the revolution. When the revolution failed on 1 May 1919, Marut was arrested in a Munich street and would, he had reason to believe, have been condemned to death by the cigarette-smoking lieutenant who summarily sentenced the prisoners in a court martial improvised at the Royal Bavarian Residence — if he had not managed to give his captors the slip at the last moment. Wanted for high treason by the Bavarian
1 Some were collected in Der blaugetupfte Sperling (1919); the epistolary novella An das Fräulein von S… was published in 1916 under the pseudonym of Richard Maurhut.
authorities, Marut went underground, sheltered by friends in various parts of Germany — until, after escaping first to London, where he eked out a precarious existence without papers from August 1923 to April 1924, he turned up in the Tampico region of Tamaulipas in the summer of 1924, working at odd jobs and beginning to write prose works in German under the name of B. Traven, which, in their way, continue and develop the critical socio-political stance of Ret Marut.
By the time the Weimar Republic drew to its close, the inauspicious and highly provincial literary beginnings of Ret Marut had blossomed into the world fame of B. Traven. To hear Die Büchergilde, the publisher’s in-house journal, tell it in 1931, “vor fünf Jahren war Traven noch ein unbekannter Mann, heute ist er eine Größe in der Weltliteratur” (“five years ago, Traven was a nobody, today he is a major player in world literature”), with translations into eleven languages published or in preparation.2 And just as Marut was more than a bystander in the unsettled political climate out of which the Weimar Republic grew, so Traven’s work produced during the mid to late twenties and early thirties — seven novels, a volume of stories and a kind of travelogue raisonné, all except Das Totenschiff about the wilds of Mexico — was critically, if indirectly, connected with the socio-political life of the increasingly turbulent Weimar Republic, notably with its left-of-center ideological factions. Less concerned with language in the sense of stylistic artistry than with a stirring story-line implying a social message, these books were a rousing appeal to a sense of personal responsibility vis-à-vis the rampant “Republikmüdigkeit,” that hedonistic apathy of the only seemingly “golden” twenties. In their refreshingly off-hand and down-to-earth manner, they championed the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, and the ignored of early twentieth-century society — proletarians one and all, whether they were stateless sailors or itinerant American laborers in the oil-fields near Tampico or, beginning in 1931 with Der Karren (The Carreta), indios enslaved by their colonial Spanish masters. Only now and then was there a touch of sentimentality or a fleeting sense of melancholy or suspicion of hopelessness in their forthright advocacy on behalf of the underprivileged.
2 Quoted from Karl S. Guthke, B. Traven: Biographie eines Rätsels (Frankfurt, 1987), 435. Translations are my own, unless indicated otherwise.
When the bell tolled for the Weimar Republic, it tolled for Traven. His books were among the first to be burnt by the Nazis in May 1933. The anti-fascist barbs of his novel Regierung (1931; Government) in particular were hard to miss.
But then, right after their seizure of power, which was soon followed by their seizure of Traven’s publishing house, the Nazis had also made an effort to acquire his books, or rather some of them, for sale under the new regime — much to Traven’s disgust, of course; but why had the Nazis been interested? Their inconsistency throws additional light on the nature of the works that had captivated such large audiences (nearly half a million copies of the German originals alone were sold by the spring of 1936).3 For apart from their implied or even overt denunciation of mentalities and conditions repressing the proletariat, anywhere in the world, Traven’s books were a good read, without degenerating into the light reading material that Germans call “Unterhaltungsliteratur.”
They were teeming with exotic adventures and stirring exploits by a cast of characters rarely, if ever, encountered in German literature, high modernist or otherwise. Moreover, there was the much-touted mystery about the author, which cannot have been detrimental to the sales either. The more successful the books turned out to be, the more the readers clamored for information about the author, and the more he — or was it she, Traven once suggested in order to throw pursuers off his scent — obscured his identity. In fact, he developed mystification into a cottage industry that grew ever more elaborate and intricate — and obsessive — over the years. Only on his deathbed did he allow his identity with Ret Marut to be made public. Until then he had usually claimed to be an American of Norwegian descent, born in Cook County, Illinois, in 1890, instead of somewhere in (northern) Germany in 1882. On one occasion he “revealed” that the B. in “B. Traven” did not stand for Bruno; but in any case, in private life in Mexico he was T(raven) Torsvan or Hal Croves, and he consistently avoided revealing his real name, the date and place of his birth, his parentage, education, and occupation prior to 1907, the year when “Ret Marut” stepped into the floodlights of the Municipal Theater of Essen in the Ruhr district as a minor actor.
3 Ibid.
The circumstances of the genesis of his works, on the other hand, he eagerly disclosed, sensing the appeal of the offbeat and exotic to German readers for whom the Mexico of bandits, gold-diggers, cottonpickers, cattle-drivers, and Indians was a “far-off land.”4 To the editors of Westermann’s Monatshefte he wrote on 21 July 1925:
Eine andere interessante Geschichte waere, Ihren Lesern mitzuteilen, unter welchen Muehsalen im Dschungel ein Manuskript geschrieben wird, besonders wenn der Schreiber nicht mit jener kostspieligen Ausruestung ausgestattet ist, wie sie reiche amerikanische Universitaeten oder reiche Privatliebhaber in Deutschland zur Verfuegung stellen. Bis zu welch kleinem Umfang eine Tropenausruestung hinuntergespart werden kann infolge Mangel an Mitteln und uebergrosser Abenteuerlust, darf ich nicht einmal Ihnen mitteilen, um nicht fuer einen glatten Luegner gehalten zu werden.
It would make for another interesting story to inform your readers of the hardships one must endure to write a manuscript in the jungle, particularly when the writer does not enjoy the expensive amenities which rich American universities or rich German patrons would supply.
Lest I be held for a liar, I cannot tell even you just how much one can skimp when putting a tropical outfit together if one has no means, but more than enough of an adventurous spirit.5
Writing to his editor at the Büchergilde Gutenberg on 5 August 1925, he reported:
Die Novelle “Im tropischen Busch” [later “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch”]
wurde gleichfalls und zwar urspruenglich englisch im Dschungel geschrieben. In Ihrer kleinen Zeitschrift schreiben Sie ueber die geistigen Qualen, die ein Schriftsteller zu erleiden hat, um sein Werk zu gebaeren.
Zu diesen geistigen Qualen, die unertraeglich sind, kommen hier, bei mir wenigstens, physische Qualen, die ich vielleicht einmal in Ihrer Zeitschrift veroeffentliche. Qualen, die ihre Ursache in dem tropischen Klima und in der tropischen Umgebung finden. Zu arbeiten in diesem Klima, auf den gluehenden Feldern, das macht mir wenig aus. Aber schreiben in diesen Laendern, wenn man nicht in einem modernen Hotel wohnen kann, sondern in Barracken oder Huetten wohnen muss, das
4 I am taking this phrase from the concluding sentence of Marut’s fairy tale
“Khundar,” published in Ziegelbrenner, IV: 26–34 (1920), 72 (Reprint: Berlin 1976).
For context, see Guthke, 255.
5 Guthke, 347; B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends, trans. Robert C. Sprung (Brooklyn, NY, 1991), 220.
ist die Hoelle. Nicht nur das Hirn, nein ebenso sehr die von Mosquitos und anderem Hoellengelichter zerstochenen und blutenden Haende und Beine und Backen rebellieren gegen den Schreiber und gegen das Zusammenhalten des Gedankengefueges und der notwendigen Farbengebilde.
The novella “Im tropischen Busch” [original title of “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch” (“The Night Visitor”)] was also written in the jungle, and originally in English. In your little magazine you write about the intellectual torments a writer must undergo in order to bring his work into the world. To these intellectual torments, which are unbearable, are added, at least in my case, physical torments which I might one day describe in your magazine. Torments caused by the tropical climate and the tropical environment. Working in this climate, in the simmering fields, does not bother me all that much. But writing in such countries, when one cannot stay in a modern hotel, but must live in shanties or huts, that is truly a living hell. Not only the brain, but also the hands and legs and cheeks, bleeding from the bites of mosquitoes and other demons, rebel against the writer and against his ability to control his thoughts and their images.6
Earlier in this letter he discussed Der Wobbly:
Den Roman schrieb ich in einer Indianerhuette im Dschungel, wo ich weder Tisch noch Stuehle hatte und mir ein Bett aus zusammengeknuepften Bindfaden in der Art einer noch nie erlebten Haengematte selbst machen musste. Der naechste Laden, wo ich Papier, Tinte oder Bleistifte kaufen konnte, war fuenfunddreissig Meilen entfernt. Ich hatte gerade sonst nichts anderes zu tun und hatte ein wenig Papier. Es war nicht viel und ich musste es auf beiden Seiten beschreiben mit einem Stueck Bleistift und als das Papier zu Ende war, musste auch der Roman zu Ende sein, obgleich er dann erst anfangen sollte. Ich gab das Manuskript, das ich in der unleserlichen Form niemand haette einsenden koennen und das so niemand gelesen haette, einem Indianer mit, der zur Station ritt, und sandte es nach Amerika zum Abschreiben in der Maschine.
I wrote the novel in an Indian hut in the jungle, where I had neither table nor chairs, and I had to make my own bed out of string tied together in the form of a hammock the likes of which has never before been seen.
The nearest store where I could buy paper, ink, or pencils, was thirty-five miles away. At the time I had nothing much else to do, and had some paper. It wasn’t much, and I had to write on both sides with a pencil,
6 Ibid.
and when the paper was used up, the novel had to come to a close as well, although it really was just getting started. As I never could have submitted the manuscript to anyone in its illegible state, and as no one would have read it had I done so, I gave it to an Indian, who rode to the station and sent it to America to be typed.7
The milieu that generated Traven’s fiction is powerfully evoked in the opening paragraph of “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch” (“The Night Visitor”):
Undurchdringlicher Dschungel bedeckt die weiten Ebenen der Flußgebiete des Panuco und des Tamesi. Zwei Bahnlinien nur durchziehen diesen neunzigtausend Quadratkilometer großen Teil der Tierra Caliente. Wo sich Ansiedelungen befinden, haben sie sich dicht und ängstlich an die wenigen Eisenbahnstationen gedrängt.
Europäer wohnen hier nur ganz vereinzelt und wie verloren. Die ermüdende Gleichförmigkeit des Dschungels wird von einigen sich langhinstreckenden Höhenzügen unterbrochen, die mit tropischem Urbusch bewachsen sind, der ebenso undurchdringlich ist wie der Dschungel, und in dessen Tiefen, wo immer Dämmerung herrscht, alle Mysterien und Grauen der Welt zu lauern scheinen. An einigen günstigen Stellen, wo Wasser ist, sind kleine Indianerdörfer über die Höhen verstreut; Wohnplätze, die schon dort waren, ehe der erste Weiße das Land betrat. Sie liegen fernab der Eisenbahn. Auf Eselskarawanen werden die Waren, die hier gebraucht werden, hauptsächlich Salz, Tabak, billige Baumwollhemden, Zwirnhosen, Musselinkleider, spitze Strohhüte für die Männer und schwarze Baumwolltücher für die Frauen herbeigebracht. Als Tausch werden Hühner, Eier, Eselsfüllen, Ziegen, Papageien und wilde Truthähne gegeben.
Impenetrable jungle covers the broad plains along the Panuco and Tamesi rivers. Just two railway lines cross this ninety-thousand-square-kilometer stretch of the Tierra Caliente. The settlements which do exist have nestled themselves timidly near the few train stations. Europeans live here only very sparsely and virtually lost to each other. The tiring monotony of the jungle is interrupted by a few long ranges of hills covered with tropical bush as impassable as the jungle, and in its depths, which are always enveloped in twilight, all the mysteries and horrors of the world seem to lie in wait. At a few favorable spots where there is water one finds small Indian villages scattered among the hills, settlements which were there before the first white man ever arrived. They lie far
7 Ibid. 347 and 221, respectively.
from the railway. Mule carts bring what goods they need, mainly salt, tobacco, cheap cotton shirts, work pants, muslin dresses, pointed straw hats for the men and black cotton scarves for the women. In trade they offer chickens, eggs, young donkeys, goats, parrots, and wild turkeys.8 Mexico, though not the hut in the hinterland of Tampico, remained Traven’s home for the rest of his life. Since the late twenties, he was often to be found in Mexico City; about 1930 he moved to Acapulco, where he managed an orchard; after his marriage to Rosa Elena Luján in 1957, his domicile was in Mexico City, where he eventually acquired a modern three-story house in upscale Calle Río Mississippi. While he frequently traveled up and down his chosen homeland, especially to the state of Chiapas on the border of Guatemala, in search of material for his books, he returned to Germany only once, in 1959, for the premiere of the Totenschiff film starring Horst Buchholz. He had become a stranger in the homeland that he had written about early on; the great mystery man of twentieth-century literature was now the author of “Mexican”
novels.