Karl May 1842 – 1912

Karl May: the best German writer you've never heard of

A century after his death, the writer – who counted Einstein and Hitler amongst his fans – is being feted across Europe. So why isn't he better known here?

A lack of formal education and an impoverished start in life arguably helped propel him to his huge literary success. He became the creator of a plethora of highly memorable fictional characters, and his anniversary is being marked this year with a wide array of events.

No, not Charles Dickens, but Karl May, a German writer you may never have heard of, yet whose influence endures a century after his death.

May set his novels in the American old west and the Orient, presenting them as travel literature based on his experiences. He was, in fact, an outrageous myth-maker, exposed in 1899 as an armchair fantasist. But he was quickly forgiven, because by then May's books, which have now sold more than 200m copies around the world, were an established part of every child's reading.

At the time of the Kaiser, May provided Germans with a fantasy world to inhabit when ordinary people didn't travel. Later, when communism gripped large parts of Europe, his novels gave a sense of the world that was out of bounds to his captive audience, who hung on his words in a similar fashion to how downtrodden readers of another era must have lapped up their Dickens.