My Life and My Efforts
by Karl May
- Pages
- about 380
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 7 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
My Life and My Efforts, Volume I
[Mein Leben und Streben, Band I]
Translated by Gunther Olesch in 2000 from the 1st edition of 1910
Karl May, born in 1842 under the name Carl Friedrich May,
published the first volume of his autobiography in November of
1910. He never found the time to write the planned second volume
or any of the other future works he is referring to in this book
before he died in 1912.
Rudolf Lebius felt insulted by what Karl May had to say about him
in his autobiography, and, less than one month after the sale of
this book had started, Lebius succeeded in obtaining an injunction
against it, so that it had to be taken out of the shops, and all
remaining copies had to be destroyed. Rudolf Lebius is portrayed
by Karl May as a villain of the worst kind, a man who changes his
political loyalties for money and specialises in blackmailing
people, after digging up dirt from their past, in order to control
and use them and, most of all, in order to extort money. It is a
fact that Lebius had been asking Karl May to "loan" him money, and
when Karl May refused to pay, Lebius started publishing ever more
aggressive articles against May in a newspaper he owned, full of
exaggerated and partially false accusations. Lebius had been
working for several newspapers with different political
backgrounds before joining the social democratic party and writing
for their newspapers. After founding his own newspaper, he left
the party and changed his political views into the very opposite.
Lebius then focused on anti-Semitic propaganda, and, after the
first world war, he even led an anti-Semitic party for a few
years. He died in 1946.
Thus, the first edition of Karl May's autobiography could only
reach a few hundred people, probably mostly among German speaking
readers outside of Germany, e.g. in Austria, where the injunction
of the German court did not apply.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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