Karl May

Karl May is a curious phenomenon – a small-time criminal, a conman, and Germany’s most successful writer of all time. Millions of Germans grew up with his books set in the Wild West, and with his characters Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Not Enis Maci and Mazlum Nergiz. In this book, the two authors try to get to the bottom of this phenomenon: What’s all this about lying and surviving? What separates the fake from the original? And when will the highway from the wild expanses of Kurdistan to the land of the Albanians finally be built?

 

Other highlights include: an author who thinks he’s the hero of his own novels. Mountains in Saxony pretending to be in Utah. And an endless stream of distorted images of the foreign.

 

This book zooms in on landscapes that couldn’t be any more beautiful. All show, all truth.