B. Traven
Encyclopedia
B. Traven was the pen name
of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B. Traven lived much of his life in Mexico
, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including his best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1927), which was adapted for the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name
in 1948.
Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. Most agree that Traven was Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist
, who supposedly left Europe
for Mexico around 1924. There are also reasons to believe that Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin
in Poland. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.
B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism
, betraying the socialist
and even anarchist
sympathies of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship
from 1926 and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927, in 1948 filmed by John Huston
, and the so-called Jungle Novels, also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany
), a group of six novels (including The Carreta and Government), published in the years 1930-1939, set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution
in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the war; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first and their English editions appeared later; nevertheless the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is not taken seriously.
daily Vorwärts
, the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
published the first short story signed with this pseudonym on 28 February. Soon, it also published Traven's first novel: Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton Pickers), which appeared in installments in June and July of the same year. The expanded book edition was published in 1926 by the Berlin based Buchmeister publishing house, which was owned by the left-leaning, trade unions affiliated book sales club
Büchergilde Gutenberg. The title of the first book edition was Der Wobbly, a common name for members of the anarcho-syndicalist
trade union
Industrial Workers of the World
; in later editions the original title Die Baumwollpflücker was restored. In the book, Traven introduced for the first time the figure of Gerald Gales (in Traven's other works his name is also Gale, or Gerard Gales), an American sailor, who looks for a job in different occupations in Mexico, often consorting with suspicious characters and witnessing capitalistic exploitation, nevertheless not losing his will to fight and striving to draw joy from life.
In the same year (1926), the book club Büchergilde Gutenberg, which was Traven's publishing house until 1939, published his second novel Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship
). The main character of the novel is again Gerald Gale, a sailor who, having lost his documents, also virtually forfeits his identity, the right to normal life and home country and, consequently, is forced to work as a stoker's helper in extremely difficult conditions on board a "death ship" (meaning a coffin ship
), which sails on suspicious voyages around the European and African coasts. The novel is an accusation of the greed of capitalist employers and bureaucracy of officials who deport Gale from the countries where he is seeking refuge. In the light of findings of Traven's biographers, The Death Ship may be regarded as a novel with autobiographical
elements. Assuming that B. Traven is identical with the revolutionary Ret Marut, there is a clear parallel between the fate of Gale and the life of the writer himself, devoid of his home country, who might also have been forced to work in a boiler room of a steamer on a voyage from Europe to Mexico.
Traven's best known novel, apart from The Death Ship, was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, published first in German in 1927 as Der Schatz der Sierra Madre. The action of the book is again set in Mexico, and its main characters are a group of American adventurers and gold seekers. In 1948 the book was filmed under the same title (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
) by the Hollywood director John Huston
. The film, starring Humphrey Bogart
and Walter Huston
, was a great commercial success, and in 1949 it also won three Academy Awards.
The figure of Gerald Gales returned in Traven's next book – The Bridge in the Jungle (Die Brücke im Dschungel), which was serialized in Vorwärts in 1927 and published in an extended book form in 1929. In the novel, Traven first dealt in detail with the question of the Indians
living in America and the differences between Christian and Indian cultures in Latin America; these problems also dominated his later Jungle Novels.
In 1929 B. Traven's most extensive book The White Rose (Die Weiße Rose) was published; this was an epic story (supposedly based on fact) of land stolen from its Indian owners for the benefit of an American oil company. According to some sources, the title of the book could have been the inspiration for the name of the anti-Nazi student organization White Rose
, active in Munich
during the Second World War, whose members were executed in 1943.
The 1930s are mainly the period in which Traven wrote and published the so-called Jungle Novels – the series of six novels consisting of The Carreta (Der Karren, 1931), Government (Regierung, 1931), March to the Monteria (Der Marsch ins Reich der Caoba, 1933), Trozas (Die Troza, 1936), The Rebellion of the Hanged (Die Rebellion der Gehenkten, 1936), and The General from the Jungle (Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel, the Swedish translation was published in 1939, the German original appeared in 1940). The novels describe the life of Mexican Indians in the state of Chiapas
in the early 20th century, who are forced to work under inhuman conditions at clearing mahogany
in labour camps (monterias) in the jungle, which results in a rebellion and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution
.
After the Jungle Novels, B. Traven practically stopped writing longer literary forms, publishing only short stories, including the novella
or Mexican fairy tale Macario, which was originally written in English but first published in German in 1950. The story, whose original English title was The Healer, was honored by The New York Times
as the best short story of the year in 1953.
Traven's last novel, published in 1960, was Aslan Norval (so far not translated into English), the story of an American millionairess, married to an aging businessman and at the same time in love with a young man, who is going to build a canal running across the United States
as an alternative for the nuclear arms race
and space exploration programs. The subject and the language of the novel, which were completely different from the writer's other works, resulted in its rejection for a long time by publishers, who doubted Traven's authorship; the novel was also accused of being "trivial" and "pornographic". The book was only accepted after its thorough stylistic editing by Johannes Schönherr, who adapted its language to the "Traven style". Doubts about Aslan Norval still remain and make the problem of the writer's identity and the true authorship of his books even more obscure.
A separate position in Traven's oeuvre is The Land of Springtime (Land des Frühlings) from 1928, a travel book about the Mexican state of Chiapas
, and in reality the presentation of the leftist and anarchist views of the writer on the contemporary world. The book, published by Büchergilde Gutenberg like his other works, contained 64 pages of photographs taken by B. Traven himself.
's and Jack London
's novels. Unlike the majority of adventure or western
literature, Traven's books, however, are not only characterized by a very detailed description of the social environment of their protagonists but also the consistent presentation of the world from the perspective of the "oppressed and exploited". Traven's characters usually come from the lower classes of society, from the proletariat or lumpenproletariat
circles, they are more antiheroes than heroes, and despite that they have this primal vital force which compels them to fight. The notions of "justice" or Christian morality, which are so visible in adventure novels by other authors, for example Karl May, are of no importance here.
Instead, there is usually an anarchist element of rebellion in the centre of the action of the novel. It always results from the rejection of the degrading living conditions of the hero, and it is always the oppressed who make themselves liberated or at least are trying to achieve this. Apart from that, there are virtually no political programmes in Traven's books; the clearest manifesto which ever appeared in his books is maybe the general anarchist demand "Tierra y Libertad" in the Jungle Novels. Professional politicians, including the ones who sympathize with the left, are usually shown in negative light; if they are mentioned at all, they usually play the roles of black characters. Despite this, Traven's books are par excellence political works. Although the author does not offer any positive programme, he always indicates the cause of suffering of his heroes. This source of suffering, deprivation, poverty and death is for him capitalism, personified in the deliberations of the hero of The Death Ship as Caesar Augustus Capitalismus. Traven's criticism of capitalism is, however, free of blatant moralizing. Dressing his novels in the costume of adventure or western literature, the writer tries to appeal with them to the less educated, first of all the working class.
In his presentation of oppression and exploitation, Traven did not limit himself to the criticism of capitalism, in the centre of his interest there were rather racial persecutions of Mexican Indians. These motifs, which are mainly visible in the Jungle Novels, were a complete novelty in the 1930s. Most leftist intellectuals, despite their negative attitude to the European and American "imperialism
", did not know about, or were not interested in persecutions of natives in Africa, Asia or South America. Traven deserves the credit for drawing public attention to these questions, long before anti-colonial movements
and struggle for emancipation
of black people
in the United States.
holder named in his books was "B. Traven, Tamaulipas, Mexico". Neither the European nor the American publishers of the writer ever met him personally, or at least the people with whom they negotiated the publication and later also the filming of his books always maintained they were only Traven's literary agents, the identity of the writer himself was to be kept secret. This reluctance to give any information about his life was explained by B. Traven in the words which were to become one of his best-known quotations:
Although the popularity of the writer was still rising (the German Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
devoted him an article as early as 1934,) B. Traven remained a mysterious figure. Literary critics, journalists and others were trying to discover the author's identity and were proposing more or less credible, sometimes fantastic hypotheses.
, who conjectured that the person who hides behind the pseudonym was the former actor and journalist Ret Marut. Marut, whose date and place of birth are unknown, performed on stage in Essen
, Suhl
, Crimmitschau
, Berlin
, Danzig
and Düsseldorf
before the First World War
; from time to time, he also directed plays and wrote articles on theatre subjects. After the outbreak of the war, in 1915, he declared to the German authorities that he was an American citizen. He also became politically engaged: in 1917 he started to publish the periodical Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner) with a clearly anarchistic profile (its last issue appeared in 1921). After the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic
in Munich
in 1919, Ret Marut was made director of the press division and member of the propaganda committee of this anarchist, Schein-Räterpublik (Fake-Soviet Republic), as the communists under Eugen Leviné
, who took over after a week, called it. Marut got to know Erich Mühsam, one of the leaders of the anarchists in Munich. Later, when B. Traven's first novels appeared, Mühsam compared their style and content with Marut's Ziegelbrenner articles and came to the conclusion that they must have been written by one and the same person. Ret Marut was arrested after the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic on May 1, 1919 and taken to be executed, but managed to escape (it is said). All this may explain why Traven always claimed to be American and denied any connections with Germany – in the German Reich, a warrant was out for Ret Marut's arrest since 1919.
Rolf Recknagel, an East German literary scholar from Leipzig
, came to very similar conclusions as Erich Mühsam. In 1966, he published a biography of Traven, in which he claimed that the books signed with the pen name B. Traven (including the post-war ones) had been written by Ret Marut. At present, this hypothesis is accepted by most "Travenologists".
journalists, Will Wyatt
and Robert Robinson, decided to investigate this matter. The results of their research were published in a documentary broadcast by the BBC on 19 December 1978 and in Wyatt's book The Secret of the Sierra Madre, which appeared in 1980. The journalists got access to Ret Marut's files in the United States Department of State
and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
, where they discovered that Marut was trying to get from Europe via Britain to Canada
in 1923, but was turned back from that country and was finally arrested and imprisoned as a foreigner without a residence permit in Brixton Prison
, London
on 30 November 1923. Interrogated by the British police, Marut testified that his real name was Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige and that he had been born in Schwiebus in Germany (modern day Świebodzin
in Poland) on 23 February 1882.
Wyatt and Robinson did research in the Polish archives and confirmed the authenticity of these facts: both the date and place of birth and the Christian names of Feige's parents agreed with Marut's testimony. What is more, Otto Feige's father was a potter, which would correspond with the title of the periodical "Der Ziegelbrenner" ("The Brick Burner") published by Marut. The British journalists also found out that after his apprenticeship and National Service in the German army around 1904/1905 Otto Feige disappeared leaving no trace. Robinson showed photographs of Marut and Traven to a brother and a sister of Feige, and they appeared to recognise the person in the photos as their brother.
Ret Marut stayed in Brixton prison till 15 February 1924. After his release in the spring of 1924, he went to the US consulate in London and asked for confirmation of his American citizenship. He claimed that he had been born in San Francisco in 1882, signed on a ship when he was ten and had been travelling around the world since then, but now wanted to settle down and get his life in order. Incidentally, Marut had also applied for US citizenship earlier, when he lived in Germany. He filed altogether three applications at that time, claiming that he had been born in San Francisco on 25 February 1882 to parents William Marut and Helena Marut née Ottarent. Naturally, the consulate officials did not take this story seriously, especially as they also received the other version of Marut's biography from the London police, about his birth in Schwiebus, which he had presented during the interrogation. In the opinion of Wyatt and Robinson, the version presented by Marut to the police is true – B. Traven was born as Otto Feige in Schwiebus (modern day Świebodzin) and only later changed his name to Ret Marut.
The hypothesis that B. Traven is identical with Ret Marut and Otto Feige is accepted by many scholars, but it is also often rejected as improbable. Tapio Helen points out that the adoption of such a version of the writer's biography would be very difficult to reconcile with many Americanism
s in his works and the general spirit of American culture pervading them – these must be proof of at least a long life of the writer in the American environment, which was not the case in Feige's or Marut's biography. On the other hand, if Marut was not identical with Otto Feige, it is difficult to explain how he knew the details of his birth so well, including his mother's maiden name.
The Otto Feige hypothesis was also rejected by Karl S. Guthke, who believed that Marut's version about his birth in San Francisco was nearer the truth even though Guthke agreed with the opinion that Marut fantasized in his autobiography to some extent.
, from there on board another "death ship" to Africa and, finally, on board a Dutch ship, reached Tampico
on the Gulf of Mexico
in the summer of 1924. He allegedly utilized his experiences from these voyages later in the novel The Death Ship. These allegations are partly supported by documents. Marut's name is on the list of the crew members of the Norwegian ship Hegre, which sailed from London to the Canary Islands
on 19 April 1924; the name is, however, crossed out, which could imply that Marut did not take part in the voyage in the end.
In the spring of 1917, after the United States entered the First World War, Mexico became a haven for American war resisters fleeing universal military conscription
(draft dodgers, slakers). Members of the IWW
(wobblies) also operated in Mexico. In 1918, Linn A(ble) E(aton) Gale (1892–1940) and his wife Magdalena E. Gale fled from New York to Mexico City. Gale soon was a founding member of one the early Communist Parties of Mexico (PCM). The Gales published the first Mexican issue of their periodical Gale's Journal (August 1917-March 1921), sometimes subtitled The Journal of Revolutionary Communism in October 1918: Ret Marut in Munich knew of Gale and his magazine. In 1918, the Mexican section of the anarcho-syndicalist
trade union Industrial Workers of the World
was also established. This was certainly a favourable environment for an anarchist and fugitive from Europe. In December 1920 Gale had even published an article in his magazine inviting revolutionaries to come. Gale, the person and the name, could well have been the source for the figure of Gerald Gale, the hero of many novels by B. Traven, including The Cotton Pickers (first published as Der Wobbly) and The Death Ship. From Traven's preserved notes, it appears that he also had to work in difficult conditions as a day labourer on cotton plantations and oil fields.
However, as, Tapio Helen points out, there is an enormous contrast between the experiences and life of Marut, an actor and bohemian in Munich and Traven's novels and short stories, characterized by their solid knowledge of Mexican and Indian cultures, seafaring themes, the problems of itinerant workers, political agitators and social activists of all descriptions, pervaded with Americanisms.
A solution to this riddle was proposed by the Swiss researcher Max Schmid, who put forward the so-called Erlebnisträger ("experience carrier") hypothesis in a series of eight articles published in the Zurich
daily Tages-Anzeiger
at the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964. According to this hypothesis (which was published by Schmid under the pseudonym Gerard Gale!), Marut arrived in Mexico from Europe around 1922/1923 and met an American tramp, someone similar to Gerard Gale, who wrote stories about his experiences. Marut obtained these manuscripts from him (probably by trickery), translated them into German, added some elements of his own anarchist views and sent them, pretending that they were his own, to the German publisher.
Schmid's hypothesis has both its adherents and opponents; at present its verification seems to be impossible. Anyway, B. Traven's (Ret Marut's) life in Mexico was as mysterious as his fate in Europe.
in 1924, where he often stayed and worked until 1931. Later, from 1930, he lived for 20 years in a house with a small restaurant on the outskirts of Acapulco
, from which he set off on his travels to Mexico. As early as 1926, Torsvan took part as a photographer in an archeological expedition to the state of Chiapas
led by Enrique Juan Palacios; one of the few photographs showing probably B. Traven, wearing a pith helmet
, which is reproduced at the beginning of this article, was taken during that expedition. He also travelled to Chiapas as well as to other regions of Mexico later, probably gathering materials for his books. He showed a lively interest in Mexican culture and history, following summer courses on the Spanish
and Mayan languages
, the history of Latin American literature
and the history of Mexico
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
(UNAM) in the years 1927 and 1928.
In 1930 Torsvan received a foreigner's identification card as the North American engineer Traven Torsvan (in many sources, there also appears another first name of his: Berick or Berwick). It is known that B. Traven himself always claimed to be American. In 1933, the writer sent the English manuscripts of his three novels – The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Bridge in the Jungle – to the New York City publishing house Alfred A. Knopf
for publication, claiming that these were the original versions of the novels and that the earlier published German versions were only translations of them. The Death Ship was published by Knopf in 1934; it was soon followed by further Traven books which appeared in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, comparison of the German and English versions of these books shows significant differences between them. The English texts are usually longer, in both versions there are also fragments which are missing in the other language. The problem is made even more complex by the fact that Traven's books published in English are full of Germanisms
whereas those published in German full of Anglicism
s.
B. Traven's works also enjoyed a soaring popularity in Mexico itself. The person who contributed to this was Esperanza López Mateos, the sister of Adolfo López Mateos
, the later President of Mexico, who translated eight books by Traven into Spanish from 1941 and in subsequent years was his representative in contacts with publishers and the real owner of the copyright – she took care of it and later transferred it to his brothers.
The commercial success of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, published in English by Knopf in 1935, induced the Hollywood Warner Bros.
company to buy the film rights of the book in 1941. They signed up John Huston
to direct it; however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
caused an interruption in work on the film, which was renewed after the war.
In 1946, Huston arranged to meet B. Traven at the Bamer hotel in Mexico City to discuss the details of the filming. However, instead of the writer, an unknown man turned up at the hotel and introduced himself as Hal Croves. a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio, and showed an alleged power of attorney from B. Traven, in which the writer authorized him to decide on everything in connection with the filming of the novel on his behalf. Croves, instead of the writer, was also present at the next meeting in Acapulco and later, as a technical advisor, all the time on location during the shooting of the film in Mexico in 1947. At this point, the mysterious behaviour of the writer and his alleged agent made a great number of the crew members believe that Hal Croves was B. Traven himself in disguise. When the film became a big box office success after its premiere on 23 January 1948 and later won three Academy Awards, a real Traven fever broke out in the United States. This excitement was partly fuelled by the Warner Bros. itself; American newspapers wrote at length about a mysterious author who took part incognito in the filming of the film based on his own book.
Many biographers of B. Traven repeat the thesis that the director John Huston was also convinced that Hal Croves was B. Traven. This is not true. Huston denied identifying Hal Croves with Traven as early as 1948. Huston also brought the matter up in his autobiography, published in 1980, where he wrote that he had been considering first that Croves might be Traven, but after observing his behaviour he had come to the conclusion that this was not the case. However, according to Huston, Hal Croves played a double game during the shooting of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Asked by the crew members if he was Traven, he always denied, but he did so in such a way that his interlocutors came to the conclusion that he and B. Traven were indeed one and the same person.
magazine offered a reward of $5,000 for finding the real B. Traven) induced a Mexican journalist named Luis Spota to try to find Hal Croves, who disappeared after the end of the shooting of the film in the summer of 1947. Thanks to information obtained from the Bank of Mexico, in July 1948, Spota found a man who lived under the name of Traven Torsvan near Acapulco. He formally ran an inn there; however, his shabby joint did not have many customers; Torsvan himself was a recluse, called El Gringo
by his neighbours, which would confirm his American nationality. Investigating in official archives, Spota discovered that Torsvan had received a foreigner's identification card in Mexico in 1930 and a Mexican ID card in 1942; on both documents the date and place of birth was 5 March 1890 in Chicago
. According to official records, Torsvan arrived in Mexico from the United States, crossing the border in Ciudad Juárez
in 1914. Using partly dishonest methods (Spota bribed the postman who delivered letters to Torsvan), the journalist found out that Torsvan received royalties payable to B. Traven from Josef Wieder in Zurich; on his desk, he also found a book package from the American writer Upton Sinclair
, which was addressed to B. Traven c/o Esperanza López Mateos. When Spota asked Torsvan directly whether he, Hal Croves and B. Traven are one and the same person, he denied this angrily; however, in the opinion of the journalist, he got confused in his explanations and finally admitted indirectly to being the writer.
Spota published the results of his investigations in a long article in the newspaper Mañana on 7 August 1948. In reply to this, Torsvan published a denial in the newspaper Hoy on 14 August. Soon after that, Torsvan disappeared, like Hal Croves earlier. The only information about him from later years was that he received Mexican citizenship on 3 September 1951.
, the later President of Mexico, played an increasingly important role in Traven's life. For example, in 1947, she went to Europe to represent him in contacts with his publishers; finally, in 1948, her name (along with Josef Wieder from Zurich) appeared as the copyright
holder of his books. Josef Wieder, as an employee of the Büchergilde Gutenberg book club, had already been cooperating with the writer since 1933. In that year, the Berlin based book club Büchergilde Gutenberg, which had been publishing Traven's books so far, was closed by the Nazis
after Adolf Hitler
took power. Traven's books were forbidden in Nazi Germany between 1933–1945, and the author transferred the publication rights to the branch of Büchergilde in Zurich, Switzerland, where the publishers also emigrated. In 1939, the author decided to end his cooperation with Büchergilde Gutenberg; since then, his representative was Josef Wieder, a former employee of the book club, who, however, never met the writer personally. Esperanza López Mateos died, committing suicide, in 1951; her successor was Rosa Elena Luján, Hal Croves' future wife.
In January 1951, Josef Wieder and Esperanza López Mateos, and after her death Rosa Elena Luján, started publishing hectograph
ically the periodical BT-Mitteilungen (meaning in free translation Announcements about B. Traven's Life, or shorter BT-Bulletins), which promoted Traven's books and appeared till Wieder's death in 1960. According to Tapio Helen, the periodical used partly vulgar methods, often publishing obvious falsehoods, for example about the reward offered by Life magazine when it was already known that the reward was only a marketing trick. In June 1952, BT-Mitteilungen published Traven's "genuine" biography, in which it claimed that the writer had been born in the Midwestern United States
to an immigrant family from Scandinavia
, that he had never gone to school, had had to make his living from the age of seven and had come to Mexico as a ship boy on board a Dutch steamer when he was ten. The editors also repeated the thesis that B. Traven's books were originally written in English and only later translated into German by a Swiss translator.
, where they ran the Literary Agency R.E. Luján. Following Josef Wieder's death in 1960, Rosa was the only copyright holder for Traven's books.
In October 1959, Hal Croves and Rosa Elena Luján visited Germany to take part in the premiere of the film The Death Ship based on Traven's novel. During the visit reporters tried to induce Croves to admit to being Traven, but in vain. Such attempts ended without success also in the 1960s. Many journalists tried to get to Croves' home in Mexico City; but only very few were admitted to him by Rosa, who guarded the privacy of her already very aged, half blind and half deaf husband. The articles and interviews with Croves always had to be authorized by his wife. Asked by journalists if he was Traven, Croves always denied or answered evasively, repeating Traven's sentence from the 1920s that the work and not the man should count.
state.
This seemed the final solution to the riddle of the writer's biography – B. Traven turned out, as he always claimed himself, to be an American, not the German Ret Marut. However, the solution was only seeming. Some time after Croves' death, his widow gave another press announcement in which she claimed that her husband had authorized her to reveal the whole truth about his life, also the facts that he had left unsaid in his will. The journalists heard that Croves had also been a German revolutionary named Ret Marut in his youth, which reconciled both the adherents of the theory of the Americanness and the proponents of the hypothesis about the Germanness of the writer. Rosa Elena Luján gave more information about these facts in her interview for the International Herald Tribune
on 8 April 1969, where she claimed that her husband's parents had emigrated from the United States to Germany some time after their son's birth. In Germany, her husband published the successful novel The Death Ship, following which he went to Mexico for the first time, but returned to Germany to edit an anti-war magazine in the country "threatened by the emerging Nazi movement". He was sentenced to death, but managed to escape and went to Mexico again. This interview raises serious doubts first of all because of mixed chronology – The Death Ship first appeared in 1926, not before the First World War.
On the other hand, the hypothesis of B. Traven's Germanness seems to be confirmed by Hal Croves' extensive archive, to which his widow granted access to researchers sporadically until her death in 2009. Rolf Recknagel conducted his research in it in 1976, and Karl Guthke in 1982. These materials contain, among other documents, train tickets and banknotes from different East-Central European countries, possibly keepsakes Ret Marut retained after his escape from Germany after the failed revolution in Bavaria in 1919. A very interesting document is a small notebook with entries in the English language. The first entry is from 11 July 1924, and on 26 July the following significant sentence appeared in the notebook: "The Bavarian of Munich is dead". The writer might have started this diary on his arrival in Mexico from Europe, and the above note could have expressed his willingness to cut himself from his European past and start a new existence as B. Traven.
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B. Traven lived much of his life in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including his best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1927 novel by the mysterious German-English bilingual author B. Traven, in which two penurious Americans of the 1920s join with an old-timer, in Mexico, to prospect for gold...
(1927), which was adapted for the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (film)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American film written and directed by John Huston, a feature film adaptation of B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, in which two Americans Fred C. Dobbs and Bob Curtin during the 1920s in Mexico join with an old-timer, Howard , to prospect for gold...
in 1948.
Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. Most agree that Traven was Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, who supposedly left Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
for Mexico around 1924. There are also reasons to believe that Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin
Swiebodzin
Świebodzin is a town in western Poland with 21,757 inhabitants . It is the capital of Świebodzin CountyIt was formerly part of the Zielona Góra Voivodeship , a reconfiguration of the old German state of Prussia, the eastern 40% of which was inherited by Poland in 1945, and led to the expulsion of...
in Poland. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.
B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, betraying the socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and even anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
sympathies of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship
The Death Ship
The Death Ship is a novel by the pseudonymous author known as B. Traven. Originally published in German in 1926, and in English in 1934, it was Traven's first major success and is still the author's second-best-known work after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre...
from 1926 and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927, in 1948 filmed by John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
, and the so-called Jungle Novels, also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany
Mahogany
The name mahogany is used when referring to numerous varieties of dark-colored hardwood. It is a native American word originally used for the wood of the species Swietenia mahagoni, known as West Indian or Cuban mahogany....
), a group of six novels (including The Carreta and Government), published in the years 1930-1939, set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the war; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first and their English editions appeared later; nevertheless the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is not taken seriously.
Novels
The writer with the pen name B. Traven, previously completely unknown, suddenly appeared on the German literary scene in 1925, when the BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
daily Vorwärts
Vorwärts
Vorwärts was the central organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany published daily in Berlin from 1891 to 1933 by decision of the party's Halle Congress, as the successor of Berliner Volksblatt, founded in 1884....
, the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
published the first short story signed with this pseudonym on 28 February. Soon, it also published Traven's first novel: Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton Pickers), which appeared in installments in June and July of the same year. The expanded book edition was published in 1926 by the Berlin based Buchmeister publishing house, which was owned by the left-leaning, trade unions affiliated book sales club
Book sales club
A book sales club is a subscription-based method of selling and purchasing books. It is more often called simply a book club, a term that is also used to describe a book discussion club, which can cause confusion.-How book sales clubs work:...
Büchergilde Gutenberg. The title of the first book edition was Der Wobbly, a common name for members of the anarcho-syndicalist
Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. The word syndicalism comes from the French word syndicat which means trade union , from the Latin word syndicus which in turn comes from the Greek word σύνδικος which means caretaker of an issue...
trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
; in later editions the original title Die Baumwollpflücker was restored. In the book, Traven introduced for the first time the figure of Gerald Gales (in Traven's other works his name is also Gale, or Gerard Gales), an American sailor, who looks for a job in different occupations in Mexico, often consorting with suspicious characters and witnessing capitalistic exploitation, nevertheless not losing his will to fight and striving to draw joy from life.
In the same year (1926), the book club Büchergilde Gutenberg, which was Traven's publishing house until 1939, published his second novel Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship
The Death Ship
The Death Ship is a novel by the pseudonymous author known as B. Traven. Originally published in German in 1926, and in English in 1934, it was Traven's first major success and is still the author's second-best-known work after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre...
). The main character of the novel is again Gerald Gale, a sailor who, having lost his documents, also virtually forfeits his identity, the right to normal life and home country and, consequently, is forced to work as a stoker's helper in extremely difficult conditions on board a "death ship" (meaning a coffin ship
Coffin ship
Coffin ship is the name given to any boat that has been overinsured and is therefore worth more to its owners sunk than afloat. These were hazardous places to work in the days before effective maritime safety regulation. They were generally eliminated in the 1870s with the success of reforms...
), which sails on suspicious voyages around the European and African coasts. The novel is an accusation of the greed of capitalist employers and bureaucracy of officials who deport Gale from the countries where he is seeking refuge. In the light of findings of Traven's biographers, The Death Ship may be regarded as a novel with autobiographical
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
elements. Assuming that B. Traven is identical with the revolutionary Ret Marut, there is a clear parallel between the fate of Gale and the life of the writer himself, devoid of his home country, who might also have been forced to work in a boiler room of a steamer on a voyage from Europe to Mexico.
Traven's best known novel, apart from The Death Ship, was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1927 novel by the mysterious German-English bilingual author B. Traven, in which two penurious Americans of the 1920s join with an old-timer, in Mexico, to prospect for gold...
, published first in German in 1927 as Der Schatz der Sierra Madre. The action of the book is again set in Mexico, and its main characters are a group of American adventurers and gold seekers. In 1948 the book was filmed under the same title (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (film)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American film written and directed by John Huston, a feature film adaptation of B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, in which two Americans Fred C. Dobbs and Bob Curtin during the 1920s in Mexico join with an old-timer, Howard , to prospect for gold...
) by the Hollywood director John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
. The film, starring Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon.The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema....
and Walter Huston
Walter Huston
Walter Thomas Huston was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.-Life and career:...
, was a great commercial success, and in 1949 it also won three Academy Awards.
The figure of Gerald Gales returned in Traven's next book – The Bridge in the Jungle (Die Brücke im Dschungel), which was serialized in Vorwärts in 1927 and published in an extended book form in 1929. In the novel, Traven first dealt in detail with the question of the Indians
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
living in America and the differences between Christian and Indian cultures in Latin America; these problems also dominated his later Jungle Novels.
In 1929 B. Traven's most extensive book The White Rose (Die Weiße Rose) was published; this was an epic story (supposedly based on fact) of land stolen from its Indian owners for the benefit of an American oil company. According to some sources, the title of the book could have been the inspiration for the name of the anti-Nazi student organization White Rose
White Rose
The White Rose was a non-violent/intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor...
, active in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
during the Second World War, whose members were executed in 1943.
The 1930s are mainly the period in which Traven wrote and published the so-called Jungle Novels – the series of six novels consisting of The Carreta (Der Karren, 1931), Government (Regierung, 1931), March to the Monteria (Der Marsch ins Reich der Caoba, 1933), Trozas (Die Troza, 1936), The Rebellion of the Hanged (Die Rebellion der Gehenkten, 1936), and The General from the Jungle (Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel, the Swedish translation was published in 1939, the German original appeared in 1940). The novels describe the life of Mexican Indians in the state of Chiapas
Chiapas
Chiapas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutierrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las...
in the early 20th century, who are forced to work under inhuman conditions at clearing mahogany
Mahogany
The name mahogany is used when referring to numerous varieties of dark-colored hardwood. It is a native American word originally used for the wood of the species Swietenia mahagoni, known as West Indian or Cuban mahogany....
in labour camps (monterias) in the jungle, which results in a rebellion and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
.
After the Jungle Novels, B. Traven practically stopped writing longer literary forms, publishing only short stories, including the novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
or Mexican fairy tale Macario, which was originally written in English but first published in German in 1950. The story, whose original English title was The Healer, was honored by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
as the best short story of the year in 1953.
Traven's last novel, published in 1960, was Aslan Norval (so far not translated into English), the story of an American millionairess, married to an aging businessman and at the same time in love with a young man, who is going to build a canal running across the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
as an alternative for the nuclear arms race
Nuclear arms race
The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War...
and space exploration programs. The subject and the language of the novel, which were completely different from the writer's other works, resulted in its rejection for a long time by publishers, who doubted Traven's authorship; the novel was also accused of being "trivial" and "pornographic". The book was only accepted after its thorough stylistic editing by Johannes Schönherr, who adapted its language to the "Traven style". Doubts about Aslan Norval still remain and make the problem of the writer's identity and the true authorship of his books even more obscure.
Other works
Apart from the above twelve novels, B. Traven is also the author of many short stories, some of which have never been published. Besides the already mentioned Macario, the writer adapted for example the Mexican legend about The Creation of the Sun and the Moon (Sonnen-Schöpfung, first published in Czech translation in 1934, the German original appeared in 1936). The first collection of Traven's short stories entitled Der Busch appeared in 1928 (its second, enlarged edition was published in 1930), from the 1940s onwards many of his short stories also appeared in magazines and anthologies in different languages.A separate position in Traven's oeuvre is The Land of Springtime (Land des Frühlings) from 1928, a travel book about the Mexican state of Chiapas
Chiapas
Chiapas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutierrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las...
, and in reality the presentation of the leftist and anarchist views of the writer on the contemporary world. The book, published by Büchergilde Gutenberg like his other works, contained 64 pages of photographs taken by B. Traven himself.
Message of B. Traven's works
B. Traven's works can be best described as "proletarian adventure novels". They tell about exotic travels, outlaw adventurers and Indians; many of their motifs can also be found in Karl MayKarl May
Karl Friedrich May was a popular German writer, noted mainly for adventure novels set in the American Old West, and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East . In addition, he wrote stories set in his native Germany, in China and in South America...
's and Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
's novels. Unlike the majority of adventure or western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
literature, Traven's books, however, are not only characterized by a very detailed description of the social environment of their protagonists but also the consistent presentation of the world from the perspective of the "oppressed and exploited". Traven's characters usually come from the lower classes of society, from the proletariat or lumpenproletariat
Lumpenproletariat
Lumpenproletariat, a collective term from Lumpenproletarier , was first defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology and later elaborated on in other works by Marx...
circles, they are more antiheroes than heroes, and despite that they have this primal vital force which compels them to fight. The notions of "justice" or Christian morality, which are so visible in adventure novels by other authors, for example Karl May, are of no importance here.
Instead, there is usually an anarchist element of rebellion in the centre of the action of the novel. It always results from the rejection of the degrading living conditions of the hero, and it is always the oppressed who make themselves liberated or at least are trying to achieve this. Apart from that, there are virtually no political programmes in Traven's books; the clearest manifesto which ever appeared in his books is maybe the general anarchist demand "Tierra y Libertad" in the Jungle Novels. Professional politicians, including the ones who sympathize with the left, are usually shown in negative light; if they are mentioned at all, they usually play the roles of black characters. Despite this, Traven's books are par excellence political works. Although the author does not offer any positive programme, he always indicates the cause of suffering of his heroes. This source of suffering, deprivation, poverty and death is for him capitalism, personified in the deliberations of the hero of The Death Ship as Caesar Augustus Capitalismus. Traven's criticism of capitalism is, however, free of blatant moralizing. Dressing his novels in the costume of adventure or western literature, the writer tries to appeal with them to the less educated, first of all the working class.
In his presentation of oppression and exploitation, Traven did not limit himself to the criticism of capitalism, in the centre of his interest there were rather racial persecutions of Mexican Indians. These motifs, which are mainly visible in the Jungle Novels, were a complete novelty in the 1930s. Most leftist intellectuals, despite their negative attitude to the European and American "imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
", did not know about, or were not interested in persecutions of natives in Africa, Asia or South America. Traven deserves the credit for drawing public attention to these questions, long before anti-colonial movements
Anti-imperialism
Anti-imperialism, strictly speaking, is a term that may be applied to a movement opposed to any form of colonialism or imperialism. Anti-imperialism includes opposition to wars of conquest, particularly of non-contiguous territory or people with a different language or culture; it also includes...
and struggle for emancipation
Emancipation
Emancipation means the act of setting an individual or social group free or making equal to citizens in a political society.Emancipation may also refer to:* Emancipation , a champion Australian thoroughbred racehorse foaled in 1979...
of black people
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
in the United States.
The mystery of B. Traven's biography
B. Traven sent his works himself or through his representatives for publication from Mexico to Europe by post and gave a Mexican post office box as his return address. The copyrightCopyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
holder named in his books was "B. Traven, Tamaulipas, Mexico". Neither the European nor the American publishers of the writer ever met him personally, or at least the people with whom they negotiated the publication and later also the filming of his books always maintained they were only Traven's literary agents, the identity of the writer himself was to be kept secret. This reluctance to give any information about his life was explained by B. Traven in the words which were to become one of his best-known quotations:
Although the popularity of the writer was still rising (the German Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie is a German-language encyclopedia published by Brockhaus.The first edition originated in the Conversations-Lexikon mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die gegenwärtigen Zeiten by Renatus Gotthelf Löbel and Christian Wilhelm Franke, published in Leipzig 1796-1808...
devoted him an article as early as 1934,) B. Traven remained a mysterious figure. Literary critics, journalists and others were trying to discover the author's identity and were proposing more or less credible, sometimes fantastic hypotheses.
Ret Marut theory
The author of the first hypothesis concerning B. Traven's identity was the German journalist, writer and anarchist Erich MühsamErich Mühsam
Erich Mühsam was a German-Jewish anarchist essayist, poet and playwright. He emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic....
, who conjectured that the person who hides behind the pseudonym was the former actor and journalist Ret Marut. Marut, whose date and place of birth are unknown, performed on stage in Essen
Essen
- Origin of the name :In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for the act of eating, and/or the German noun for food. Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of...
, Suhl
Suhl
- Geography :Suhl sits on the south edge of the Suhler Scholle, an upthrust granite complex that is streaked by numerous dikes. This is part of the Ruhla-Schleusingen Horst that defines the southwest side of the Thuringian Forest...
, Crimmitschau
Crimmitschau
Crimmitschau is a town in the district of Zwickau in the Free State of Saxony.-Geography:Crimmitschau lies on the River Pleiße in the northern foothills of the Erzgebirge.-Neighboring municipalities:...
, Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Danzig
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
and Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
before the First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
; from time to time, he also directed plays and wrote articles on theatre subjects. After the outbreak of the war, in 1915, he declared to the German authorities that he was an American citizen. He also became politically engaged: in 1917 he started to publish the periodical Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner) with a clearly anarchistic profile (its last issue appeared in 1921). After the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic
Bavarian Soviet Republic
The Bavarian Soviet Republic, also known as the Munich Soviet Republic was, as part of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the short-lived attempt to establish a socialist state in form of a council republic in the Free State of Bavaria. It sought independence from the also recently proclaimed...
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
in 1919, Ret Marut was made director of the press division and member of the propaganda committee of this anarchist, Schein-Räterpublik (Fake-Soviet Republic), as the communists under Eugen Leviné
Eugen Levine
Eugen Leviné was a Communist, revolutionary and leader of the short lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.-Background:...
, who took over after a week, called it. Marut got to know Erich Mühsam, one of the leaders of the anarchists in Munich. Later, when B. Traven's first novels appeared, Mühsam compared their style and content with Marut's Ziegelbrenner articles and came to the conclusion that they must have been written by one and the same person. Ret Marut was arrested after the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic on May 1, 1919 and taken to be executed, but managed to escape (it is said). All this may explain why Traven always claimed to be American and denied any connections with Germany – in the German Reich, a warrant was out for Ret Marut's arrest since 1919.
Rolf Recknagel, an East German literary scholar from Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
, came to very similar conclusions as Erich Mühsam. In 1966, he published a biography of Traven, in which he claimed that the books signed with the pen name B. Traven (including the post-war ones) had been written by Ret Marut. At present, this hypothesis is accepted by most "Travenologists".
Otto Feige theory
The Ret Marut hypothesis did not explain how the former actor and anarchist got to Mexico; it did not provide any information about his early life either. In the late 1970s, two BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
journalists, Will Wyatt
Will Wyatt
Will Wyatt is a British media consultant and company director, formerly a journalist, television producer and senior executive at the BBC. His career began in 1964 as a trainee journalist on the Sheffield Telegraph newspaper, before moving to the BBC in 1965 as a sub-editor in BBC radio news...
and Robert Robinson, decided to investigate this matter. The results of their research were published in a documentary broadcast by the BBC on 19 December 1978 and in Wyatt's book The Secret of the Sierra Madre, which appeared in 1980. The journalists got access to Ret Marut's files in the United States Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, commonly called the Foreign Office or the FCO is a British government department responsible for promoting the interests of the United Kingdom overseas, created in 1968 by merging the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office.The head of the FCO is the...
, where they discovered that Marut was trying to get from Europe via Britain to Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
in 1923, but was turned back from that country and was finally arrested and imprisoned as a foreigner without a residence permit in Brixton Prison
Brixton (HM Prison)
HM Prison Brixton is a local men's prison, located in Brixton area of the London Borough of Lambeth, in inner-South London, England. The prison is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service.-History:...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
on 30 November 1923. Interrogated by the British police, Marut testified that his real name was Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige and that he had been born in Schwiebus in Germany (modern day Świebodzin
Swiebodzin
Świebodzin is a town in western Poland with 21,757 inhabitants . It is the capital of Świebodzin CountyIt was formerly part of the Zielona Góra Voivodeship , a reconfiguration of the old German state of Prussia, the eastern 40% of which was inherited by Poland in 1945, and led to the expulsion of...
in Poland) on 23 February 1882.
Wyatt and Robinson did research in the Polish archives and confirmed the authenticity of these facts: both the date and place of birth and the Christian names of Feige's parents agreed with Marut's testimony. What is more, Otto Feige's father was a potter, which would correspond with the title of the periodical "Der Ziegelbrenner" ("The Brick Burner") published by Marut. The British journalists also found out that after his apprenticeship and National Service in the German army around 1904/1905 Otto Feige disappeared leaving no trace. Robinson showed photographs of Marut and Traven to a brother and a sister of Feige, and they appeared to recognise the person in the photos as their brother.
Ret Marut stayed in Brixton prison till 15 February 1924. After his release in the spring of 1924, he went to the US consulate in London and asked for confirmation of his American citizenship. He claimed that he had been born in San Francisco in 1882, signed on a ship when he was ten and had been travelling around the world since then, but now wanted to settle down and get his life in order. Incidentally, Marut had also applied for US citizenship earlier, when he lived in Germany. He filed altogether three applications at that time, claiming that he had been born in San Francisco on 25 February 1882 to parents William Marut and Helena Marut née Ottarent. Naturally, the consulate officials did not take this story seriously, especially as they also received the other version of Marut's biography from the London police, about his birth in Schwiebus, which he had presented during the interrogation. In the opinion of Wyatt and Robinson, the version presented by Marut to the police is true – B. Traven was born as Otto Feige in Schwiebus (modern day Świebodzin) and only later changed his name to Ret Marut.
The hypothesis that B. Traven is identical with Ret Marut and Otto Feige is accepted by many scholars, but it is also often rejected as improbable. Tapio Helen points out that the adoption of such a version of the writer's biography would be very difficult to reconcile with many Americanism
Americanism (ideology)
Americanism is an ideology or belief in devotion, loyalty, or allegiance to the United States of America or to its flag, traditions, customs, culture, symbols, institutions, or form of government.It is like Country-love...
s in his works and the general spirit of American culture pervading them – these must be proof of at least a long life of the writer in the American environment, which was not the case in Feige's or Marut's biography. On the other hand, if Marut was not identical with Otto Feige, it is difficult to explain how he knew the details of his birth so well, including his mother's maiden name.
The Otto Feige hypothesis was also rejected by Karl S. Guthke, who believed that Marut's version about his birth in San Francisco was nearer the truth even though Guthke agreed with the opinion that Marut fantasized in his autobiography to some extent.
Arrival in Mexico
After his release from the London prison, Ret Marut supposedly got from Europe to Mexico. The circumstances of this journey are not clear either. According to Rosa Elena Luján, the widow of Hal Croves, who is identified with B. Traven by many scholars (see below), her husband signed on a "death ship" after his release from prison and sailed to NorwayNorway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
, from there on board another "death ship" to Africa and, finally, on board a Dutch ship, reached Tampico
Tampico
Tampico is a city and port in the state of Tamaulipas, in the country of Mexico. It is located in the southeastern part of the state, directly north across the border from Veracruz. Tampico is the third largest city in Tamaulipas, and counts with a population of 309,003. The Metropolitan area of...
on the Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico is a partially landlocked ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. In...
in the summer of 1924. He allegedly utilized his experiences from these voyages later in the novel The Death Ship. These allegations are partly supported by documents. Marut's name is on the list of the crew members of the Norwegian ship Hegre, which sailed from London to the Canary Islands
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
on 19 April 1924; the name is, however, crossed out, which could imply that Marut did not take part in the voyage in the end.
In the spring of 1917, after the United States entered the First World War, Mexico became a haven for American war resisters fleeing universal military conscription
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
(draft dodgers, slakers). Members of the IWW
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
(wobblies) also operated in Mexico. In 1918, Linn A(ble) E(aton) Gale (1892–1940) and his wife Magdalena E. Gale fled from New York to Mexico City. Gale soon was a founding member of one the early Communist Parties of Mexico (PCM). The Gales published the first Mexican issue of their periodical Gale's Journal (August 1917-March 1921), sometimes subtitled The Journal of Revolutionary Communism in October 1918: Ret Marut in Munich knew of Gale and his magazine. In 1918, the Mexican section of the anarcho-syndicalist
Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. The word syndicalism comes from the French word syndicat which means trade union , from the Latin word syndicus which in turn comes from the Greek word σύνδικος which means caretaker of an issue...
trade union Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
was also established. This was certainly a favourable environment for an anarchist and fugitive from Europe. In December 1920 Gale had even published an article in his magazine inviting revolutionaries to come. Gale, the person and the name, could well have been the source for the figure of Gerald Gale, the hero of many novels by B. Traven, including The Cotton Pickers (first published as Der Wobbly) and The Death Ship. From Traven's preserved notes, it appears that he also had to work in difficult conditions as a day labourer on cotton plantations and oil fields.
However, as, Tapio Helen points out, there is an enormous contrast between the experiences and life of Marut, an actor and bohemian in Munich and Traven's novels and short stories, characterized by their solid knowledge of Mexican and Indian cultures, seafaring themes, the problems of itinerant workers, political agitators and social activists of all descriptions, pervaded with Americanisms.
A solution to this riddle was proposed by the Swiss researcher Max Schmid, who put forward the so-called Erlebnisträger ("experience carrier") hypothesis in a series of eight articles published in the Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
daily Tages-Anzeiger
Tages-Anzeiger
Tages-Anzeiger, also abbreviated Tagi or TA, is a German language Swiss national daily newspaper based in Zurich. Among newspapers in Switzerland, it has one of the largest readerships, reaching around 550,000 readers. The Tages-Anzeiger was first published in 1893...
at the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964. According to this hypothesis (which was published by Schmid under the pseudonym Gerard Gale!), Marut arrived in Mexico from Europe around 1922/1923 and met an American tramp, someone similar to Gerard Gale, who wrote stories about his experiences. Marut obtained these manuscripts from him (probably by trickery), translated them into German, added some elements of his own anarchist views and sent them, pretending that they were his own, to the German publisher.
Schmid's hypothesis has both its adherents and opponents; at present its verification seems to be impossible. Anyway, B. Traven's (Ret Marut's) life in Mexico was as mysterious as his fate in Europe.
Traven Torsvan theory
Most researchers also identify B. Traven with the person named Berick Traven Torsvan, who lived in Mexico from at least 1924. It is known that he rented a wooden house north of TampicoTampico
Tampico is a city and port in the state of Tamaulipas, in the country of Mexico. It is located in the southeastern part of the state, directly north across the border from Veracruz. Tampico is the third largest city in Tamaulipas, and counts with a population of 309,003. The Metropolitan area of...
in 1924, where he often stayed and worked until 1931. Later, from 1930, he lived for 20 years in a house with a small restaurant on the outskirts of Acapulco
Acapulco
Acapulco is a city, municipality and major sea port in the state of Guerrero on the Pacific coast of Mexico, southwest from Mexico City. Acapulco is located on a deep, semi-circular bay and has been a port since the early colonial period of Mexico’s history...
, from which he set off on his travels to Mexico. As early as 1926, Torsvan took part as a photographer in an archeological expedition to the state of Chiapas
Chiapas
Chiapas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutierrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las...
led by Enrique Juan Palacios; one of the few photographs showing probably B. Traven, wearing a pith helmet
Pith helmet
The pith helmet is a lightweight cloth-covered helmet made of cork or pith...
, which is reproduced at the beginning of this article, was taken during that expedition. He also travelled to Chiapas as well as to other regions of Mexico later, probably gathering materials for his books. He showed a lively interest in Mexican culture and history, following summer courses on the Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and Mayan languages
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
, the history of Latin American literature
Latin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
and the history of Mexico
History of Mexico
The history of Mexico, a country located in the southern portion of North America, covers a period of more than two millennia. First populated more than 13,000 years ago, the country produced complex indigenous civilizations before being conquered by the Spanish in the 16th Century.Since the...
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
National Autonomous University of Mexico
The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México is a university in Mexico. UNAM was founded on 22 September 1910 by Justo Sierra as a liberal alternative to the Roman Catholic-sponsored Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (National Autonomous...
(UNAM) in the years 1927 and 1928.
In 1930 Torsvan received a foreigner's identification card as the North American engineer Traven Torsvan (in many sources, there also appears another first name of his: Berick or Berwick). It is known that B. Traven himself always claimed to be American. In 1933, the writer sent the English manuscripts of his three novels – The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Bridge in the Jungle – to the New York City publishing house Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
for publication, claiming that these were the original versions of the novels and that the earlier published German versions were only translations of them. The Death Ship was published by Knopf in 1934; it was soon followed by further Traven books which appeared in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, comparison of the German and English versions of these books shows significant differences between them. The English texts are usually longer, in both versions there are also fragments which are missing in the other language. The problem is made even more complex by the fact that Traven's books published in English are full of Germanisms
Germanisation
Germanisation is both the spread of the German language, people and culture either by force or assimilation, and the adaptation of a foreign word to the German language in linguistics, much like the Romanisation of many languages which do not use the Latin alphabet...
whereas those published in German full of Anglicism
Anglicism
An Anglicism, as most often defined, is a word borrowed from English into another language. "Anglicism" also describes English syntax, grammar, meaning, and structure used in another language with varying degrees of corruption.-Anglicisms in Chinese:...
s.
B. Traven's works also enjoyed a soaring popularity in Mexico itself. The person who contributed to this was Esperanza López Mateos, the sister of Adolfo López Mateos
Adolfo López Mateos
Adolfo López Mateos was a Mexican politician affiliated to the Institutional Revolutionary Party who served as President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964...
, the later President of Mexico, who translated eight books by Traven into Spanish from 1941 and in subsequent years was his representative in contacts with publishers and the real owner of the copyright – she took care of it and later transferred it to his brothers.
Filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre & Hal Croves theory
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
company to buy the film rights of the book in 1941. They signed up John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
to direct it; however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941...
caused an interruption in work on the film, which was renewed after the war.
In 1946, Huston arranged to meet B. Traven at the Bamer hotel in Mexico City to discuss the details of the filming. However, instead of the writer, an unknown man turned up at the hotel and introduced himself as Hal Croves. a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio, and showed an alleged power of attorney from B. Traven, in which the writer authorized him to decide on everything in connection with the filming of the novel on his behalf. Croves, instead of the writer, was also present at the next meeting in Acapulco and later, as a technical advisor, all the time on location during the shooting of the film in Mexico in 1947. At this point, the mysterious behaviour of the writer and his alleged agent made a great number of the crew members believe that Hal Croves was B. Traven himself in disguise. When the film became a big box office success after its premiere on 23 January 1948 and later won three Academy Awards, a real Traven fever broke out in the United States. This excitement was partly fuelled by the Warner Bros. itself; American newspapers wrote at length about a mysterious author who took part incognito in the filming of the film based on his own book.
Many biographers of B. Traven repeat the thesis that the director John Huston was also convinced that Hal Croves was B. Traven. This is not true. Huston denied identifying Hal Croves with Traven as early as 1948. Huston also brought the matter up in his autobiography, published in 1980, where he wrote that he had been considering first that Croves might be Traven, but after observing his behaviour he had come to the conclusion that this was not the case. However, according to Huston, Hal Croves played a double game during the shooting of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Asked by the crew members if he was Traven, he always denied, but he did so in such a way that his interlocutors came to the conclusion that he and B. Traven were indeed one and the same person.
The "exposure" and vanishing of Torsvan
The media publicity which accompanied the premiere of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the aura of mystery surrounding the author of the literary original of the film (rumour had it that LifeLife (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
magazine offered a reward of $5,000 for finding the real B. Traven) induced a Mexican journalist named Luis Spota to try to find Hal Croves, who disappeared after the end of the shooting of the film in the summer of 1947. Thanks to information obtained from the Bank of Mexico, in July 1948, Spota found a man who lived under the name of Traven Torsvan near Acapulco. He formally ran an inn there; however, his shabby joint did not have many customers; Torsvan himself was a recluse, called El Gringo
Gringo
Gringo is a slang Spanish and Portuguese word used in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America, to denote foreigners, often from the United States. The term can be applied to someone who is actually a foreigner, or it can denote a strong association or assimilation into...
by his neighbours, which would confirm his American nationality. Investigating in official archives, Spota discovered that Torsvan had received a foreigner's identification card in Mexico in 1930 and a Mexican ID card in 1942; on both documents the date and place of birth was 5 March 1890 in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
. According to official records, Torsvan arrived in Mexico from the United States, crossing the border in Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...
in 1914. Using partly dishonest methods (Spota bribed the postman who delivered letters to Torsvan), the journalist found out that Torsvan received royalties payable to B. Traven from Josef Wieder in Zurich; on his desk, he also found a book package from the American writer Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
, which was addressed to B. Traven c/o Esperanza López Mateos. When Spota asked Torsvan directly whether he, Hal Croves and B. Traven are one and the same person, he denied this angrily; however, in the opinion of the journalist, he got confused in his explanations and finally admitted indirectly to being the writer.
Spota published the results of his investigations in a long article in the newspaper Mañana on 7 August 1948. In reply to this, Torsvan published a denial in the newspaper Hoy on 14 August. Soon after that, Torsvan disappeared, like Hal Croves earlier. The only information about him from later years was that he received Mexican citizenship on 3 September 1951.
B. Traven's agents & BT-Mitteilungen
Esperanza López Mateos had been cooperating with B. Traven since at least 1941 when she translated his first novel The Bridge in the Jungle into Spanish. (Later she also translated seven other novels of his.) Esperanza, the sister of Adolfo López MateosAdolfo López Mateos
Adolfo López Mateos was a Mexican politician affiliated to the Institutional Revolutionary Party who served as President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964...
, the later President of Mexico, played an increasingly important role in Traven's life. For example, in 1947, she went to Europe to represent him in contacts with his publishers; finally, in 1948, her name (along with Josef Wieder from Zurich) appeared as the copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
holder of his books. Josef Wieder, as an employee of the Büchergilde Gutenberg book club, had already been cooperating with the writer since 1933. In that year, the Berlin based book club Büchergilde Gutenberg, which had been publishing Traven's books so far, was closed by the Nazis
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
after Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
took power. Traven's books were forbidden in Nazi Germany between 1933–1945, and the author transferred the publication rights to the branch of Büchergilde in Zurich, Switzerland, where the publishers also emigrated. In 1939, the author decided to end his cooperation with Büchergilde Gutenberg; since then, his representative was Josef Wieder, a former employee of the book club, who, however, never met the writer personally. Esperanza López Mateos died, committing suicide, in 1951; her successor was Rosa Elena Luján, Hal Croves' future wife.
In January 1951, Josef Wieder and Esperanza López Mateos, and after her death Rosa Elena Luján, started publishing hectograph
Hectograph
The hectograph or gelatin duplicator or jellygraph is a printing process which involves transfer of an original, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame.-Process:...
ically the periodical BT-Mitteilungen (meaning in free translation Announcements about B. Traven's Life, or shorter BT-Bulletins), which promoted Traven's books and appeared till Wieder's death in 1960. According to Tapio Helen, the periodical used partly vulgar methods, often publishing obvious falsehoods, for example about the reward offered by Life magazine when it was already known that the reward was only a marketing trick. In June 1952, BT-Mitteilungen published Traven's "genuine" biography, in which it claimed that the writer had been born in the Midwestern United States
Midwestern United States
The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....
to an immigrant family from Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, that he had never gone to school, had had to make his living from the age of seven and had come to Mexico as a ship boy on board a Dutch steamer when he was ten. The editors also repeated the thesis that B. Traven's books were originally written in English and only later translated into German by a Swiss translator.
Return of Hal Croves
In the meantime, Hal Croves, who had disappeared after shooting the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, appeared on the literary scene in Acapulco again. He acted as a writer and the alleged representative of B. Traven, on behalf of whom he negotiated the publication and filming of his books with publishers and film producers. Rosa Elena Luján became Croves' secretary in 1952, and they married in San Antonio, Texas, on 16 May 1957. After the wedding, they moved to Mexico CityMexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, where they ran the Literary Agency R.E. Luján. Following Josef Wieder's death in 1960, Rosa was the only copyright holder for Traven's books.
In October 1959, Hal Croves and Rosa Elena Luján visited Germany to take part in the premiere of the film The Death Ship based on Traven's novel. During the visit reporters tried to induce Croves to admit to being Traven, but in vain. Such attempts ended without success also in the 1960s. Many journalists tried to get to Croves' home in Mexico City; but only very few were admitted to him by Rosa, who guarded the privacy of her already very aged, half blind and half deaf husband. The articles and interviews with Croves always had to be authorized by his wife. Asked by journalists if he was Traven, Croves always denied or answered evasively, repeating Traven's sentence from the 1920s that the work and not the man should count.
Hal Croves' death
Hal Croves died in Mexico City on 26 March 1969. On the same day, his wife announced at a press conference that her husband's real name was Traven Torsvan Croves, that he had been born in Chicago on 3 May 1890 of the Norwegian father Burton Torsvan and mother Dorothy Croves of Anglo-Saxon descent and that he had also used the pseudonyms B. Traven and Hal Croves in his life. She read this information from her husband's will, which had been drawn up by him three weeks before his death (on 4 March). Traven Torsvan Croves was also the name on the writer's official death certificate; his ashes, following cremation, were scattered from an airplane above the jungle of the ChiapasChiapas
Chiapas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutierrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las...
state.
This seemed the final solution to the riddle of the writer's biography – B. Traven turned out, as he always claimed himself, to be an American, not the German Ret Marut. However, the solution was only seeming. Some time after Croves' death, his widow gave another press announcement in which she claimed that her husband had authorized her to reveal the whole truth about his life, also the facts that he had left unsaid in his will. The journalists heard that Croves had also been a German revolutionary named Ret Marut in his youth, which reconciled both the adherents of the theory of the Americanness and the proponents of the hypothesis about the Germanness of the writer. Rosa Elena Luján gave more information about these facts in her interview for the International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune
The International Herald Tribune is a widely read English language international newspaper. It combines the resources of its own correspondents with those of The New York Times and is printed at 38 sites throughout the world, for sale in more than 160 countries and territories...
on 8 April 1969, where she claimed that her husband's parents had emigrated from the United States to Germany some time after their son's birth. In Germany, her husband published the successful novel The Death Ship, following which he went to Mexico for the first time, but returned to Germany to edit an anti-war magazine in the country "threatened by the emerging Nazi movement". He was sentenced to death, but managed to escape and went to Mexico again. This interview raises serious doubts first of all because of mixed chronology – The Death Ship first appeared in 1926, not before the First World War.
On the other hand, the hypothesis of B. Traven's Germanness seems to be confirmed by Hal Croves' extensive archive, to which his widow granted access to researchers sporadically until her death in 2009. Rolf Recknagel conducted his research in it in 1976, and Karl Guthke in 1982. These materials contain, among other documents, train tickets and banknotes from different East-Central European countries, possibly keepsakes Ret Marut retained after his escape from Germany after the failed revolution in Bavaria in 1919. A very interesting document is a small notebook with entries in the English language. The first entry is from 11 July 1924, and on 26 July the following significant sentence appeared in the notebook: "The Bavarian of Munich is dead". The writer might have started this diary on his arrival in Mexico from Europe, and the above note could have expressed his willingness to cut himself from his European past and start a new existence as B. Traven.
Other theories
The above hypotheses, identifying B. Traven with Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, Ret Marut and possibly Otto Feige, are not the only ones concerning the writer's identity which have been appearing since the mid 1920s. Some of them are relatively well-founded; others are quite fantastic and incredible. Some of the most common hypotheses, apart from those already mentioned, are presented below:- B. Traven was German; however, he did not come from Schwiebus but from northern Germany, the region between HamburgHamburg-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
and LübeckLübeckThe Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second-largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and, because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage, is listed by UNESCO as a World...
. It is possible to conclude this on the basis of a preserved cassette, recorded by his stepdaughter Malú Montes de Oca (Rosa Luján's daughter), on which he sings two songs in Low GermanLow GermanLow German or Low Saxon is an Ingvaeonic West Germanic language spoken mainly in northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands...
, a dialect of the German language, with some language features which are typical of this region. Torsvan is a relatively common name in this area, through which also the River TraveTraveThe Trave is a river in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is approximately 124 kilometres long, running from its source near the village of Gießelrade in Ostholstein to Travemünde where it flows into the Baltic Sea. It passes through Bad Segeberg, Bad Oldesloe, and Lübeck, where it is linked to the...
runs. In the neighbourhood there are also such places as TraventhalTraventhalTraventhal is a municipality in the district of Segeberg, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It gave name to the Peace of Travendal treaty signed there in 1700....
, TravenhorstTravenhorstTravenhorst is a municipality in the district of Segeberg, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany....
and TravemündeTravemündeTravemünde is a borough of Lübeck, Germany, located at the mouth of the river Trave in Lübeck Bay. It began life as a fortress built by Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, in the 12th century to guard the mouth of the Trave, and the Danes subsequently strengthened it. It became a town in 1317 and in...
(Lübeck's borough) – a large ferry harbour on the Baltic SeaBaltic SeaThe Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...
. - B. Traven was an illegitimate son the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Such a hypothesis was presented by Gerd HeidemannGerd HeidemannGerd Heidemann is a German journalist best known for his role in the publication of purported Hitler Diaries that were subsequently proved to be forgeries....
, a reporter from SternStern (magazine)Stern is a weekly news magazine published in Germany. It was founded in 1948 by Henri Nannen, and is currently published by Gruner + Jahr, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. In the first quarter of 2006, its print run was 1.019 million copies and it reached 7.84 million readers according to...
magazine, who claimed that he had obtained this information from Rosa Luján, Hal Croves' wife. Later, however, the journalist distanced himself from this hypothesis. Heidemann himself compromised himself through his complicity in the falsification of Hitler's diaries in the 1980s. - B. Traven was, in fact, the American writer Jack LondonJack LondonJohn Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
, who only faked his suicide and then moved to Mexico and continued writing his books. - B. Traven was the pseudonym of the American writer Ambrose BierceAmbrose BierceAmbrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...
, who went to Mexico in 1913 to take part in the Mexican RevolutionMexican RevolutionThe Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
and disappeared there without trace. - B. Traven was the pseudonym of Adolfo López MateosAdolfo López MateosAdolfo López Mateos was a Mexican politician affiliated to the Institutional Revolutionary Party who served as President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964...
, the President of Mexico in the years 1958-1964. The source of this rumour was probably the fact that Esperanza López Mateos, Adolfo's sister, was Traven's representative in his contacts with publishers and a translator of his books into Spanish. Some even claimed that the books published under the pen name B. Traven were written by Esperanza herself. - The pseudonym B. Traven was used by August Bibelje, a former customs officer from Hamburg, gold prospector and adventurer. This hypothesis was also presented – and rejected – by the journalist Gerd Heidemann. According to Heidemann, Ret Marut met Bibelje after his arrival in Mexico and used his experiences in such novels as The Cotton Pickers, The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, Bibelje himself returned to Europe later and died during the Spanish Civil WarSpanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
in 1937.
B. Traven – Stand-alone works
- The Cotton Pickers (1927; retitled from The Wobbly) ISBN 1-56663-075-4
- The Treasure of the Sierra MadreThe Treasure of the Sierra MadreThe Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1927 novel by the mysterious German-English bilingual author B. Traven, in which two penurious Americans of the 1920s join with an old-timer, in Mexico, to prospect for gold...
(1927; first English pub. 1935) ISBN 0-8090-0160-8 - The Death Ship: the Story of an American SailorThe Death ShipThe Death Ship is a novel by the pseudonymous author known as B. Traven. Originally published in German in 1926, and in English in 1934, it was Traven's first major success and is still the author's second-best-known work after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre...
(1926; first English pub. 1934) ISBN 1-55652-110-3 - The White Rose (1929; first full English publication 1979) ISBN 0-85031-370-8
- The Night Visitor and Other Stories ISBN 1-56663-039-8
- The Bridge in the Jungle (1929; first English pub. 1938) ISBN 1-56663-063-0
- Land of Springtime (1928) – travel book – untranslated
- Aslan Norval (1960) ISBN 978-3257050165 – untranslated
- "Stories By The Man Nobody Knows" (1961)
- The Kidnapped Saint & other stories (1975)
- The Creation of the Sun & the Moon (1968)
B. Traven – The Jungle Novels
- The Carreta (1931, released in Germany 1930) ISBN 1-56663-045-2
- Government (1931) ISBN 1-56663-038-X
- March to the Monteria (a.k.a. March To Caobaland) (1933) ISBN 1-56663-046-0
- Trozas (1936) ISBN 1-56663-219-6
- The Rebellion of the Hanged (1936; first English pub. 1952) ISBN 1-56663-064-9
- A General from the Jungle (1940) ISBN 1-56663-076-2
Works by Ret Marut
- To the Honorable Miss S... and other stories (1915–19; English publication 1981) ISBN 0-88208-131-4
- Die Fackel des Fürsten - Novel (Nottingham: Edition Refugium 2009) ISBN 0-9506476-2-4;ISBN 978-0-9506476-2-3
- Der Mann Site und die grünglitzernde Frau - Novel (Nottingham: Edition Refugium 2009) ISBN 0-9506476-3-2; ISBN 978-0-9506476-3-0
External links
- B. Traven Website of the International B. Traven Society
- Helen Tapio B. Traven's Identity Revisited University of Helsinki, Department of History
- Who is B. Traven?, by Jaime Perales Contreras from Americas Magazine, February 2010
- B. Traven, from Books and Writers
- B. Traven, from the Anarchist Encyclopedia
- B. Traven, biography with pictures from libcom.org
- Frank Nordhausen, Der Fremde in der Calle Mississippi Berliner Zeitung of 11 March 2000
- B. Traven in Lexikon der Anarchie
- The B. Traven Collections at UC Riverside Libraries
- Kurt Tucholsky, B. Traven Kurt Tucholsky about Traven (review), Die Weltbühne of 25 November 1930
- Peter Neuhauser, Der Mann, der sich B. Traven nennt Die Zeit of 12 May 1967
- Jan-Christoph Hauschild, B. Traven – wer ist dieser Mann? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 17 July 2009
- Rolf Cantzen, Die Revolution findet im Roman statt. Der politische Schriftsteller B. Traven SWR Radio broadcast and ist transcript
- Rolf Raasch, B. Traven: ein deutsch-mexikanischer Mythos
- Larry Rohter, His Widow Reveals Much Of Who B. Traven Really Was The New York Times of 25 June 1990
- James Goldwasser, Ret Marut – The Early B. Traven