There is one among the numerous books published in quick succession by the Büchergilde Gutenberg from 1926 to 1940 that does not quite fit the description of Traven’s literary output offered so far. This volume, Der Busch (1928; enlarged edition, 1930), is not a novel but a collection of stories about Mexico, which were frequently reissued in several languages.13 Most of them are familiar to English-speaking readers from The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories (New York: Hill, 1975), The Night
11 For a reading of the series as a statement of Traven’s disappointment with the Revolution and its aftermath, see Zogbaum, esp. 200–202, 208, 209–211.
12 Zogbaum sees this return of some of the revolutionaries to communal life as a sign of complacency and acquiescence to “the system that they have vowed to destroy”
(202).
13 Edward N. Treverton, B. Traven: A Bibliography (Lanham, MD, and London 1999), 103–112. My references are to the second edition, enlarged from twelve to twenty stories (n. 8 above). Some of the stories had been published previously in periodicals.
See the textual apparatus in volume II of Erzählungen, ed. Werner Sellhorn (Zürich, 1968).
Visitor and Other Stories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), and Stories by the Man Nobody Knows (Evanston, Illinois: Regency, 1961).14 Unlike the novels preceding or following, the short fiction of Der Busch for the most part avoids Traven’s sometimes ham-fisted socio-political editorializing that results from his leftist ideological stance. Instead, it is by and large a record of the European refugee’s encounter with the indigenous population, its mores and culture and history. Told in an unpretentious, at times rough-and-tumble style, it is often without subtlety of diction but full of down-to-earth idiomatic German and sprinkled with the usual Anglicisms, not to mention Traven’s familiar irony, sarcastic humor, and outrageously grotesque turns of phrase that sometimes rub shoulders with bits of Wilhelminian high-school erudition (120, 134, 165).
Of course, the novels following Das Totenschiff had been set in Mexico as well. But, to repeat: to the extent that they are significantly focused on the native population, they fit the image of the indios into the ideological framework of a somewhat schematic conflict between the exploitative Yankee business mentality, on the one hand, and the native values of deep-rooted communality and respect for individual worth, on the other. The six montería novels, finally, are clearly driven by Traven’s socio-political agenda, targeting the entrepreneurial abuses. It is only in the more occasional pieces of Der Busch that the author focuses more on the mind and the realities of the “far-off land” that he — like the protagonist of Marut’s “German Fairy Tale”, “Khundar” — had absconded to. At the same time he is to all appearances still, as he was in Der Wobbly, somewhat personal in an autobiographical way (introducing even a mule named Bala after the mule of his Chiapas diaries [152] and a narrator earning his keep by giving English lessons [157] as Traven did in his early years in Mexico).15 And throughout, the author-narrator is more relaxed in that he wields less fiercely the ideological axe that he felt he had to grind in earlier (and later) works. What takes over now is Traven’s sharp-eyed narrative exuberance. In a series of telling
14 The English titles of individual stories cited in what follows are those used in these volumes. However, some Busch stories are not included in them; so their English titles are my own improvisations.
15 Zogbaum, 21. To be sure, Traven taught an American farmer’s daughter, whereas the narrator in “Der Banditendoktor” teaches bandits eager to rob American residents. Zogbaum’s book contains a chapter on Traven’s “Discovery of the Mexican Indian,” which does not, however, touch upon the points made here.
vignettes of the life of the natives, he focuses on his encounter with the (as he often puts it) “pure-blooded” Indian other, “in the bush in Mexico” where, according to the “American Song” that serves as the overture of the volume, he finds himself trapped, for better or for worse.
Der Busch, then, is an account of total immersion in the “fremde Land” (183). And yet the narrator (who is often a first-person narrator whom, for all our narratological sophistication that has become de rigueur, we may to some extent identify with Marut-Torsvan-Traven himself) does not “go native.” Far from it: he is critically alert to what he perceives as the strange and sometimes childish ways and values of his new neighbors, but he is no less, and no less critically, aware of his own European or (as he claims) American cultural heritage and perspective.
For not only are there references, throughout these Mexican stories, to Mexican pre- and post-Revolutionary social history and politics (to Presidents Porfirio Díaz and Plutarco Elías Calles, for example) but also to American, European, and specifically German conditions, customs, and values of socio-political life.16 The fact that these short narrative pieces are told from the European outsider’s perspective is never lost sight of, but neither is the awareness that this perspective can be reversed to show European-American-German ways as they are perceived with the eyes of the inhabitants of a far-away country with a very different culture. As a result of this dual perspective, both cultures are critically brought into clear focus, mutually questioning or relativizing each other with their distinctly alternative cultural assumptions. It is this dual perspective, too, that lends Der Busch not only its internal coherence and unity (which give it a place of honor alongside the “novels”, which tended to dissolve the overall narrative sweep into incoherence) but also its intense appeal to readers outside Mexico, and in Germany in particular. For it was here, during the Weimar Republic — years of socio-political experimentation and an attempted revolution of values and mores — that Traven’s, the ex-German’s, challenge to conventional ways, derived from his refreshing experiences in an alien “Wunderland”
(198), fell on eager ears. What exactly, then, was the critical image of the predominantly non-white “other” with which the celebrity author from nowhere confronted his German audiences?
16 Europe: 22, 75, 91, 117, 127, 137; USA: 23, 68, 100, 163, 165, 197; Germany: 137, 147, 214.