Syllabus German Karl May Films
This course is designed for advanced students of German and fluent speakers. The language of all films and conversation is in German. Classic Karl May films produced in the 1960’s will be shown. Subtitles in German (Deutsch für Hörgeschädigte) assist those who do not understand the entire spoken dialog in order to both improve their listening comprehension and follow the action of the film.
The films available for the course are: Der Schatz im Silbersee 1962 106 min Winnetou 1 1963 97 min Winneout 2 1964 91 min Unter Geiern 1964 99 min Winnetou 3 1965 89 min Der Ölprinz 1965 87 min Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi 1966 87 min Winnetou and sein Freund Old Firehand 1966 91 min Old Surehand 1965 89 min
Because of the length of the films several class periods will be devoted to each and class members will decide which films to watch. Time will be alloted for discussion and sharing of memories.
Every boy and many girls growing up during the twentieth century in Germany and elsewhere in Europe assiduously devoured the Karl May adventure novels. Karl Friedrich May (pronounced „My“ was born February 25, 1842 and died March 30, 1912. He is one of the best selling German writers of all time, noted mainly for books set in the American Old West and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East. With the advent of the 1960’s films children and adults of all ages enjoyed Karl May in the film versions and the series soon became classics in Germany much as the Humphrey Bogart films did in the US.
Between 1912 and 1968 German cinema produced 23 movies made after novels by May. In thirteen of these movies American actor Lex Barker starred either as Old Shatterhand, Kara Ben Nemsi, or Doctor Sternau. Three movies have seen British actor Stewart Granger in the leading role as Old Surehand and one movie starred American actor Rod Cameron as Old Firehand. May considered the prefix "Old" to the names of several of his heroes as illustrating the great experience of the heroes. Eleven movies featured French actor Pierre Brice as the fictional Apache chief "Winnetou".
May visited North America only in 1908, long after writing the novels set there, never travelling west of Buffalo, New York. He compensated successfully for this lack of direct experience of the Western milieu by an ingenious combination of creativity, imagination, and factual sources including maps, travel accounts and guide books, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies.
For the novels set in America, May described the characters of Winnetou, the wise chief of the Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand, the author's alter ego and Winnetou's white blood brother. Another successful series of novels is set in the Ottoman Empire. Here the narrator-protagonist calls himself Kara Ben Nemsi, i.e., Karl, son of Germany, and travels with his local guide and servant Hadschi Halef Omar through the Sahara desert and the Near East, all the while experiencing many exciting adventures. Both series are linked not only by the common narrator, the author himself as either Old Shatterhand or Kara Ben Nemsi, but also by numerous other references and shared minor characters.
May's works were extremely successful, particularly in continental Europe, and have been translated into more than thirty different languages including Hebrew, Latin, Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido. More than 200 million copies of May's books have been sold worldwide. Recently his work has become popularized among English-speakers, mainly through the efforts of translators such as Marlies Bugmann from Tasmania, Australia, a widely known artist and writer of children's adventure books, who set as her goal to translate all of May's enormous literary output into the English language within five years. Several of his novels were made during the 1960s into sixteen films, usually with the scenery of the former Yugoslavia doubling for the Wild West.
May's works had famous admirers, including Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Mann, Karl Liebknecht, Adolf Hitler, and Bertha von Suttner. Carl Zuckmayer named his daughter after the character "Winnetou" (although Winnetou is a male name in the book, it is a female name in reality). For a long time, literary critics tended to regard May's literature as trivial. The Karl May Society (Karl-May- Gesellschaft) was founded in 1969 to commemorate his life and works.
May's house in Radebeul near Dresden in Germany has been made a museum devoted to him and his collection of anthropological artifacts of native American Indian origin.