My Life and My Efforts

by Karl May

Radebeul-Dresden, October 1910.

Karl May.

IX. Conclusion

Just as my "traveller's tales" are only sketches, this work before you is also just a sketch. It could not be anything else, because what I am telling you has not ended yet and because numerous lawsuits, which have been forced upon me, are taking aim at me like menacing revolvers. Furthermore, brutal physical pain prevents me from writing as I would like to. To receive, during a time of ten years, four times a day, entire stacks of letters and newspapers, overflowing with venom, mockery, and gloating, is more than any Samson or Hercules could endure. Mind and soul have remained strong. Not the slightest part of my inner self has changed. My confidence in God and my love for mankind have not been shaken. But in the end, it has still got the best of my body, which used to seem so indestructible in the past. It is on the verge of collapse. For one year, I lack natural sleep. Whenever I want to rest for a few hours, I must resort to artificial means, to sleeping powders, which only numb the senses and are not harmless in their effect. I also cannot eat. Just a few bites a day, my poor, dear wife forces me to take. But instead, I am in pain, an incessant, terrible neuralgic pain, which forces me up from my bed at night and rips the pen out of my hand a hundred times during the day! I feel, as if I had to scream all of the time, to shout for help. I cannot lie down, cannot sit, cannot walk, and cannot stand up, and yet I have to do all of these things. Most of all, I would like to die, die, die, and yet I do not want to die and may not die, because my time is not up yet. I have to solve my task.

My task? Yes, my task! I have finally, finally realized what it is. It is just what I had thought, and yet so very, very different. I have already said: The Karl-May-problem is, like every other mortal's problem, an individual example of a problem which concerns all of mankind. But while most people are only called upon to represent to their small, immediate surroundings certain phases of the great problem, there are also others who have been given the hard task to serve as a representation of it, though also just on a small scale, but not just representing an individual detail, but rather the whole. The many represent parts of mankind, while the few represent images of mankind. The many can keep their narrow surroundings clean; people like this exist by the dozens; they can even appear as exemplary people. But the few are assigned the virtue and the sin, the purity and the filth of the entire mankind in a representative ratio; they can become famous generals or crude murderers, great diplomats or notorious swindlers, philanthropic financial geniuses or despicable pickpockets, but never exemplary people. They have not been granted the enjoyable fortune of unconscious mediocrity. If the forces around them are more powerful than they, they are torn between virtue and vice, between height and depth, between cheer and desperation, until they dissolve above the clouds or plunge into the abyss. If they are the stronger ones and if they are born into fortunate surroundings, they will proudly and calmly go on their shining course; but if they came into this world where baseness, poverty, and want rule, they will still reach their goal, because they have to, but the resistance they will have to overcome will be brutal and unrelenting, and, once they have ascended to this top, before they will be able to sound their cry of victory, they will collapse with exhaustion, to close their eyes to this word.

One would think that everyone knew which of these types of people he would belong to, or at leat, everyone should feel obliged to think about this. I have done this and have arrived at the conclusion that I had no right to expect a simple, averagely happy life, but that I had to get acquainted with mankind's misery in its deepest depths, in order to work myself up from this misery just as persistently and just as exhaustingly as mankind requires floods of sweat and blood as well as millenia of time to rise from its. Likewise, I am convinced that I had been destined to meet with this unrelenting resistance, which opposes me up to this day, and that I have no right to complain about it, because I have brought it upon myself just as all of mankind would progress faster, if they would finally stop blocking their own path with obstacles. It is plain to see that I do not accuse anybody but myself.

If I ever spoke too tough or harsh in this book, if I have been unfair or stubborn, then this has, by no means, been intentional or deliberate, but it has been the still not quite overcome anima, dictating this to me. As long as a person moves in the low realm, and this is what I had to do in this description of my life to a more than large extent, the low matters have some power over him, and I was not allowed to be untrue; I had to write as my social surroundings required. But now, that I am reaching the end and am starting to breathe a better, cleaner air, I am also cleaner and freer in what I am writing and am regaining the strength to overcome everything which seeks to embitter me.

And there has been more than enough reason for me to be embittered. In this, I am only talking about the last ten years and what has happened as a consequence of the lawsuit against the Münchmeyers. This lawsuit has been conducted by my opponents, or rather by their lawyer Gerlach, in a manner which I had thought entirely impossible before. I had no idea to what an extent the law protects a lawyer in this respect. For the purpose of degrading the opposing party before the judge, he is at liberty to use means which nobody else is permitted to use. He is under the protection of article 193, because he is acting in his client's interests. I am going to list a selection of sample expressions, I had to put up with from the Münchmeyers' advocate Dr. Gerlach, because he employed them in his capacity as a lawyer:

He accused me of "imprudent extortions", "unjustified demands", numerous "audacities", and "mumbo jumbo". He called me "cunning", "fresh", "audacious", "slandering", "pathologically provoking untruthfulness", "liar", "lying May", "show-off", "Münchhausen", "boaster", "fraud", "scoundrel", "swindler", "commonplace swindler", "burglar", "imposter", "convict", etc. etc. I am asking you: Are these kinds of offensive statements, even if there was some truth in them, permitted in everyday life? Would a truly well-educated man want to move in the same circles as someone who has made them? Well, in the circles of the court they are permitted, for I have sued this lawyer on account of them for gross insult and have been rejected. But there is even more: In response to this complaint of mine, he filed counter-charges against me, and this was not rejected. The judge is perfectly innocent in this; he could not act any other way; the law proscribes it like this! One day, when the testimonies of the witnesses had turned out to be unfavourable for the Münchmeyers' party, this lawyer said to the judge: "But in any case, it is entirely impossible that a person with prior convictions, like May, could win this trial!" "You'll just have to wait and see," the judge answered to him. I was right there and had to put up with this insult, because the law allowed him to make it. For almost ten years, this has been going on like this and is still going on up to this day in the same tone and in the same manner. A very high-ranking judge said, regarding this, to my lawyer: "Never in all of my long time on the bench, a case has touched me so deeply like the that of Karl May. How much must this poor, old man have suffered!" He might very well have added: "How much is he still suffering, and how much more will he suffer!" This judge knew my prison record very well; he had studied the files which existed on it. Nevertheless and in spite of the verbal abuse of my opponents, I won the trial and all appeals, surely an expressive proof that German judges are not influenced by invectives on the lawyers' part; but nevertheless, I had to listen to them without being able to speak up and I still have to do so up to this day. And they work their effect, though not on the verdict, but definitely into another direction. They introduce a cruel rudeness into the way the parties interact with each other and extent beyond the courtroom, out into the public and even into the private life. All those insulting expressions about me, which I have listed above, one would already have read in the newspapers and would likewise also have come across them in private conversations. This is the necessary consequence of those liberties which every malicious, unscrupulous lawyer is allowed to take, once he sees that crude rudeness will get him further than humaneness. He writes these rude statements into his legal documents, and from there, he arranges it for them to appear as official files proving his case in the newspapers. Or he might first sent them to the newspapers and then submit them in printed form to the court as evidence, without saying that they originally came from him. If such a lawyer has several like-minded, or by him persuaded, newspapers or small papers on his side, it is easy for him to shatter, or possibly even to destroy, within a short time, every existence, no matter how firm it might stand. "To destroy in the newspapers of all of Germany", this is called. And the law encourages this practice!

There is also another, most interesting example I care about, which, if anything, will sound less than favourable for me. But I am mentioning it nevertheless, because, intending to write for the benefit of the general public, I must not ask whether I might harm my own interests by this. My first wife had insulted the wife of an author from Dresden, who had been told by the Münchmeyers that I had been previously convicted. He got even by informing against me with a German sovereign and told him that his relatives were reading my books and also visited me in person. The sovereign gave no reply. Then came a second letter with accusations, and now the sovereign was compelled to turn to Dresden, in order to find out what my prior convictions were all about. He received detailed information. An official was sent to Radebeul, to conduct on-the-spot investigations. He found out that my marriage had not been a happy one, which was the reason why I had not stayed at home in me free time, and that I had written in my books about countries where I had never been; everything I reported in them was not true. Therefore, the files of the police of Dresden record about me that I was leading an unsteady life and was an imposter by means of my literature. The sovereign was informed of this, and one of those relatives, he matter was concerned with, passed it on to me at the next opportunity in all the details. He knew very well how much there was to this matter, but asked me to be discrete, so that I had been compelled to keep silent about this. I also believed that I could keep silent, because I presumed that these kinds of police records were among the most secretive things in the administration. But now, they are being published by Lebius to my astonishment and are being exploited accordingly by my opponents. How does a former social democrat, who has seceded from the church, get hold of these secret records of the police of Dresden? The law permits it! Quite naturally, I now no longer feel obliged to be discrete and will insist that these records will be revised and corrected.