For my money, you can keep the authors on Lucilla’s list of German-language nobelists. Admittedly, I’m only familiar with the big four plus Mommsen, but that’s enough. Mommsen, while valuable, is a victim of the style of his era. Clauses within clauses within clauses; sentences that would baffle Joyce or Faulkner. The others that I’m familiar with are all too consciously literary, especially Hesse and Böll. (I can’t stand Böll.) Mann has his moments, but is very fond of himself and all the repressed homo-eroticism is annoying. Grass is readable, but the man is a poseur and blew all of his goodwill recently when, after years of extremely harsh criticism of those who have tried to downplay or outright deny their Nazi past, revealed that he too had been a party member and is now trying to downplay it. (Much of this is probably a publicity ploy. Since his Nobel, he has become the forgotten man of German letters.)

No, give me the single best-selling German author of all time, a man who has been read by practically every German speaker in the last 100 years, admired by literary greats like Hesse and Carl Zuckmeyer, translated into virtually every European language except English, who has an entire publishing house devoted to reprinting his work: Karl May.

Though, generally considered a travel writer in his day, May wrote what are essentially adventure stories. His stories are set all over the world, but his best known take place in the wild west and the near east. Probably half of his works are told from a first-person perspective and the narrator is understood to be May himself. In the west he is known as Old Shatterhand, in the east as Kara ben Nemsi. Sure he’s something of a super hero: he can track like nobody else (except for his closest friend Winnetou, chief of the Mescalero Apache), he can speak any language like a native, he is an awesome shot (with his two rifles Bärentöter (Bearslayer), a double-barreled long-bore rifle, and the Henry rifle (an early prototype of a repeating rifle with a 25 shot magazine), and he can knock people out with one punch (which earned him his nickname),

And yet, his stories are always told with a great deal of (often self-deprecating) humor. More importantly, he says repeatedly that there are good people in every race and nationality, an amazingly progressive viewpoint for the late 19th and early 20th century. He has been compared to Rider Haggard, but I think Mark Twain might be a better comparison.

In German, they say, “Karl May gelesen, dabei gewesen.” (If you’ve read Karl May, you’ve been there.) And it’s largely true. Whenever I’ve come across things I know about, he always seems to be pretty much right on target. His English is sometimes off, but mostly he knows what he’s talking about. Amazingly, up until just a few years before his death, he had never been outside of Germany. He got it all from books.

The odd thing is that, despite the fact he was widely translated, he was never really translated into English. A handful of really bad translations were done for the Canadian market, and they flopped. But the translator also changed things around, altered character names, and a number of other things. His work may be known to a few movie buffs who have seen the films (very) loosely based on his works, most of which starred Lex Barker. Other than that, the only English speakers who know much about him are the Mescalero Apache, who encounter hundreds of German tourists every year, coming to visit the stomping grounds of their childhood idol. Recently, there has been a move afoot to produce decent translations. If they do get published, seek them out.