Karl May, à la recherche du paradis perdu

Karl May (1842-1912) was the most popular of all German writers; his novels, translated to dozens of languages sold more than 200 million copies worldwide. They are still in print, and still selling in Germany and abroad. Every summer his works are put on stage at the Karl May festival in Bad Segeberg in Germany, and there are web sites devoted to his writing.

May was a pulp writer, but one of some size. Many of his novels are set in an Aryanized American Southwest, centering on the blood brotherhood of Old Shatterhand, a German surveyor, and Winnetou, an honorable Apache. Others are set in (real and imagined) Oriental countries. "Natives" are depicted as noble, but irrevocably doomed by encroaching civilization. May's novels were devoured by German readers from one end of the political spectrum to the other and exerted a strong influence on Adolf Hitler, who saw the "colonization" of Eastern Europe in May's terms. When Nazi troops were being decimated by Soviet resistance, Hitler sent 300,000 copies of May's novels to Eastern Front to be distributed among the soldiers. In Hitler's words, "The struggle we are waging there against the partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory will go to the strong, and strength is on our side."

Although all filmmakers of the New German Cinema in the seventies and eighties (Fassbinder, Schlöndorff,…) were obsessed in various degrees with Nazism, Syberberg was the most systematic on the subject. In his movies he explores the various currents in German culture, both highbrow (Wagner, in the movie Parsifal, 1982) and kitsch (May) that contributed, unwittingly and in unexpected ways to the state of the German psyche that accepted and followed massively an ideology as monstrous as Nazism.

As for the film itself, it concentrates on May's last years, apparently spent in legal actions against ex-wives, ex-editors, detractors and combinations thereof. It turns out that May was somewhat of a scoundrel, had serious brushes with the law and served time in his youth. He claimed later, falsely, that his novels were the product of actual experience (he seems not to have even visited any of his scenarios). The film is not very explicit on his influence on Nazism except for one passage where Adolf Hitler, then a young man living in a Vienna flophouse borrows a pair of shoes to go and hear May speak.

I believe that this film can only be appreciated fully by someone who was exposed in his/her youth to May's writing. As Syberberg has said, "Anyone that knows the significance of Karl May for the German people, how every schoolboy grows up with his works, also knows how close we are here to a history of German sentiment, to its adventures of the soul and its myths of the Good Man, the German who fights and conquers for all that is noble."

Syberberg's casting is somewhat perverse; several of his actors had flourishing careers in the cinema of the Third Reich, careers that continued smoothly in the postwar West German cinema. Surely there is a message here.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is a representative of the Neuer Deutscher Film, and it took decades until his works are starting now to reach worldwide distribution. "Karl May" (1974) is one part of Syberberg's Trptychon, besides "Hitler" and "Ludwig II".

While both Hitler and Ludwig II are sufficiently known to the US public, Karl May is probably not, although generations of German children owe their knowledge of American history, especially American-Indian wars. to his over hundred novels and novellas. However, that May has never gained fame in the New World which he loved so much, has its good reasons: Karl May has his whole live, on hundred thousands of pages, described landscapes between the Apalachian Mountains and the Californian Coast without ever having set one foot into the New World. He used encyclopedic dictionaries, reference works, every printed story and each picture he good get to let his fantasy wander through the Plano Estacado or to the shore of the "Silver Sea", to drink for blood brotherhood with Winnetou or to meet Old Shurehand or the Shut. During the decades, May's own inventions became so real that he toured through Saxonia (which he never left), clothed as Old Shatterhand and believing that he is Old Shatterhand. Besides using a fake doctor title (which was "appointed" to him by a Chicagoan shoe-maker) and a series of criminal acts in his youth and early years for which he had spent some years behind the bars, it is a fact that nobody was more successful, in the 19th century, than him in editing worthless but very entertaining dime novellas. I remember the 60ies and 7oies when there had been, in Germany, the last big Karl May-Wave, when pupils spent their last cent for getting used Karl-May-volumes in thrift-shops or antique book-stores. It was the time when Pierre Price and Lex Barker in the main role filmed May's most famous works, the "Winnetou"-novels.

Syberberg's film is a well crafted piece of high art, I respectfully admit that, not being a Syberberg-fan. But besides that, he has a crew in this two-parted movie that you will never find so easily on 1 or 2 discs. I just mention Helmut Käutner, Kristina Söderbaum, Attila Hörbiger, Käthe Gold, Mady Rahl and Lil Dagover. To see them again - many of them were at the end of their lives when the film was made - is alone worth watching this strange and uniquely made movie.

You could almost forgive the New German Cinema for Fassbinder, after watching this extraordinary, one-off biography. Syberberg was always the most innovative and uncontaminated of their film makers and you can see that this is from the director of PARSIFAL with it's length, solemnity and operatic quality but this film manages to add purpose to weightiness.

Karl May was, of course, the German children's' author who wrote cowboy stories without ever leaving home. His most famous characters Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Warrior are still known and sparked a cycle of sixties movies with Lex Barker, Stewart Granger, Pierre Brice and Rod Cameron - who was casting that lot.

The film finds an aged May, in Nazi Germany, up on charges of immorality springing from his claim that he actually was Old Shatterhand and the authorities wanting to know what he was doing out in the piny woods with that naked red man? One of the best scenes has Kaütner as May refusing to reply to his lawyer's entreaty that he deny the allegation as the old man turns him out.

This sinister-comic proposition is striking enough in itself but it is handled in a manner slowed down to the age of its veteran participants - Kaütner the great German director of the forties and fifties now again become an actor (the feeble HAUSER'S MEMORY was his other outing, making the point of Syberberg's skill),the legendary Lil Dagova from CALIGARI and The CONGRESS DANCES, one time blonde 3rd Reich tootsie Söderbaum, on and on. There is the double impact of the unfamiliar but justified pacing and the recognition of all these once significant talents in a serious, unfamiliar vehicle.

It's not a crowd pleaser but it does show the potential of movies being pushed to the limits by a major imagination and should be valued for that more than the films made about it, which are still uncritically recycled.

In looking for "Our Hitler," which I've never actually seen, I was surprised that the only thing my major-city public library system had by Syberberg is this earlier film, which is much lesser-known than "OH" or "Parsifal." There is some brief use of the toy sets, superimpositions and such that would be greatly more prominent in those much more famous (and experimental) films. But "Karl May" is by contrast a pretty straightforward costume-drama biopic, if a slow and of course very long one, as is Syberberg's wont.

The hugely popular German author of western adventures is portrayed primarily in later (roughly turn-of-the-19th-century) years, when he was already wealthy and famous. The main focus is on his persecution by those who wanted to bring him down via lawsuits and press scandals. May was indeed a bit of a slippery character: He had some early criminal history (mostly a result of extreme poverty, it seems, given such "crimes" as stealing candlesticks), plagiarized some of his works from other sources, and claimed to write about his personal adventures when he'd never been to America whatsoever, let alone ridden the Wild West with a "Red Indian" pal. But as portrayed here, he seems less a con man than a semi-delusional fabulist whose foes are mostly motivated by greed and jealousy.

In contrast to Syberberg's best-known later work, this film is naturalistically shot on period-suitable exterior and interior locations, even if its costume-drama plushness is somewhat undercut by a square aspect ratio and pedestrian cinematography. (Admittedly, this may or may not be partly the fault of the DVD I watched, whose transfer looks like it was duped from TV-or perhaps "Karl May" was produced for broadcast in the first place?) Indeed, the whole enterprise is talky, slackly paced and lacking in much tension or dramatic momentum, despite the competent performances.

If you're looking for much exploration of May's unique place in German culture and its philosophical/social/et al. connotations-as "Our Hitler" and "Parsifal" manages with different subjects-you won't find it in this rather straightforward, even unimaginative biopic, at least not until it finally staggers towards its prolonged end. If Syberberg had progressed no further than this film, he never would have gotten international attention. "Karl May" is a worthy yet dullish treatment of an interesting subject, and it doesn't take long for the viewer to realize they won't gain much more insight from its three hours than they would from reading an encyclopedia entry about May.

Well, you do get reminded that in the 19th century, many people (particularly those in positions of authority) viewed the poor as morally inferior, and saw May's rather minor failings as the inevitable result of his being born "riffraff"-rather than seeing the inspirational upside of his triumphing over incredible adversity (including nine siblings dying in infancy) to become a literary figure almost as popular as Dickens. Though it's not really spelled out that way, you could view the whole story here as an illustration of the era extreme class divisions, with the resentful "upper" class attempting to ruin a lower-caste man who had the good luck and sheer nerve to reach their own economic level, and then some.