"Nebenintervenient"
there are any more proper legal terms for this in English.)
A "main intervener" sues both parties and thus starts a new
trial. A "co-intervener" joins an existing trial to defend
his or her own interests, without joining either one of the
two main parties.
In this manner, they had talked to Fischer, and this persuaded him
to buy the business. Of this, he assured me. That my novels had
been altered, he knew. He only did not know precisely by whom.
Probably by Walter. After all, he had nothing else to do than
these kinds of things, and he also had to read the proof sheets.
And this was not a difficult task at all and could be done very
quickly. Only one word would have to be changed or a few words
would have to be added, and already the "indecency" is there,
without which such novels are quite inconceivable. I would be
able to prove these changes quite easily; I would only have to
present my original manuscripts.
"But they have been burnt!" I interjected.
But Fischer denied this quite decisively. He insisted that they
were still there. He could get them for me, though, of course, he
would not do so under the present conditions, with me being his
opponent in a lawsuit and ruining him with my injunction. He
could only help me and testify in my favour, if I would drop this
injunction and settle with him.
This conversation was infinitely important to me. I had to be
careful. I wondered, whether I could trust him. If the original
manuscripts were really still there, I would indeed been able to
silence all accusations against me, as Fischer had said, with a
single stroke. But he might have intended to deceive me, or he
might have been deceived himself. I was not allowed to decide too
hastily; I had to observe and to think, especially since this
turn of events in my affairs occurred at a time in which severe
internal struggles kept me thus busy that I was unable to find
either time or space for other things. This was the time of my
divorce.
To be honest, I very much tend towards the Catholic view of
marriage, regarding it as a sacrament. If I would not be of this
opinion, I would have taken this step much sooner and not only
when my health, my life, and my entire internal and external
existence was at stake. This step has been held against me to a
high degree, and very unjustly so. Catholic critics, who, instead
of staying on a factual basis, let their attacks wander over into
the personal, have accused me in the same breath of being a
Protestant and of having divorced my wife. How unlogical! It is
because I am regarded as a Protestant that nobody has the right to
hold that second fact against me. To every even just mildly
decent person, a divorce is a matter which is most naturally
treated with discretion. But mine was dragged through the
newspapers, supplemented with the most disgusting marginal
glosses, and abused for the most outrageous speculations. I want
to skip all of this here, to remark on this, if I should be forced
to do so, in another place. This time was not just for me, but
also for Mrs. Ploehn, a time of almost deadly afflictions, because
it deprived her of her husband, whom she loved with a
self-sacrifice, as rarely a man was ever loved. I have already
said that Ploehn had become ill on the journey to Egypt. He only
seemed to recover. The malady was repeated, after he had returned
home. One year later, death came. Mrs. Ploehn almost collapsed.
If it had not been for her mother, she would have surely died,
following her husband. Fortunately, the correspondence she
conducted for me with my readers also offered her the spiritual
relief and support she required. She owned two rented houses in
Dresden, which she would have liked to sell, to be able to buy a
piece of land in the country, belonging to the village
Niedersedlitz, which had been offered to her. Fischer had moved
his printing-plant there. His private apartment was also there.
Mrs. Ploehn asked me to accompany her on a visit of this lot, and
once we happened to be in Niedersedlitz, the idea came most
naturally to let Fischer know about it. He invited us to his
private apartment, and there a negotiation evolved which led to a
settlement the day after.
I want to make it as brief as possible. Fischer complained that,
in buying the Muenchmeyer business, he had degraded himself to the
level of a "trashy publisher"; he assured us that he was yearning
to get out of this, and he insisted that I could assist him in
this like nobody else. Of the latter, I was also convinced. He
had purchased the altered novels, without Mrs. Muenchmeyer having
the right to sell them to him. If he made sure that my original
manuscripts were returned to me, he could drop the trashy stuff
and publish my originals in their place; this would help him and
me as well; he would no longer be a trashy publisher, and I would
be able to prove that I had not written anything indecent. This
was the basic idea of the settlement, and when we signed it, I was
convinced that all disputes were resolved. At this time, Fischer
attested to me publicly in the newspapers that the indecent
passages of my Muenchmeyer novels _were_not_the_product_of_my_
_pen,_but_rather_had_been_put_in_by_a_third_party._
But unfortunately, my hopes turned out to be deceptive. Fischer
was unable to get my original manuscripts; they did not exist any
more; they had really been destroyed. So, it had been impossible
for him to transform from a "trashy publisher", as he described
himself in a letter to me, into a book publisher. He did make the
attempt, though, to obtain an original novel even without my
original manuscripts, in order to be able to drop the trash then,
but I had to deny him the help, he demanded from me in this. What
he demanded from me was to change the trash back into its former,
impeccable version just based on my memory; but this was,
considering the huge amount of about thirty thousand pages,
tightly filled with text, an absolute impossibility. But he
insisted on his contract, on our settlement, and though he was
unable to do as he had promised, I was still supposed to do
everything, which was, even if for no other reason than him,
impossible. From this resulted a new disagreement and a new
struggle, which extended beyond his death and was only by his
heirs brought to a peaceful conclusion. They saw things clearer
than he did, and they were of calm, unbiased minds. They were
experts, which is to say: lawyers, merchants, owners of
printing-plants and bookbinderies. They agreed on the following
declaration:
| "In a lawsuit between Mr. Karl May and the heirs of Mr. |
| Adalbert Fischer, the heirs of Mr. Fischer have declared that |
| the novels by the author Karl May, published by the company |
| of H.G. Muenchmeyer, have in the course of time been altered |
| by means of additions and variations by a third party to such |
| an extent that in their present form, they can no longer be |
| regarded as Karl May's creation. Mr. May has been authorised |
| to publish this declaration. |
| "Dresden, October 1907." |
This declaration is signed by the widow Mrs. Elisabeth Fischer,
the merchant Arthur Schubert, the owner of a printing-plant Otto
Fischer, the owner of a bookbindery Alfred Sperling, the lawyer
Trummler, the lawyer Bernstein, the lawyer Dr. Elb. Irresponsible
people have pretended that this declaration had only been made by
children and mentally incompetent persons. From this, you can
also see with what kinds of weapons I am being attacked. But for
me, the section of my Muenchmeyer trial dealing with Fischer has
been closed by this. But the section dealing with Pauline
Muenchmeyer still exists. I now have to turn to her in the
following.
I even dare to start this section with the plan I found out from
Fischer, which was:
| "May has been to prison. He has to keep this a secret. We |
| have him in our hands. Two lines are enough, and he will be |
| quiet. If he sues us, we will destroy him by publishing his |
| prior convictions in all newspapers throughout Germany. What |
| May has agreed upon with Muenchmeyer is irrelevant. What |
| matters is, who will get the opportunity to testify under |
| oath. And we will know how to make sure that May will not |
| get this opportunity." |
By no means, Fischer has only talked about this plan in private,
but he also testified about this, putting it on record, and it had
been incessantly confirmed in the course of the legal dispute,
which now already lasts for nine years. I do not want to talk
here about those things which the lawyer Dr. Gerlach, in the name
of his client Pauline Muenchmeyer, has asserted and denied
contrary to the truth. But he has portrayed me right from the
start as a person who is to the highest degree unqualified for
taking the oath. I simply cannot list all those offensive
swear-words here he has showered me with for as long as the last
nine years and continues to do so without me being able to have
him punished for this, because, as a lawyer, he is protected by
the very same article of the law which forces me to put up with
liberties from him which no other person would ever take. Being
repeatedly admonished by the judges and asked to answer for
himself by other lawyers, he nevertheless remains faithful to this
speciality of his. To carry out the Muenchmeyers' plan, it was
first of all necessary to obtain my criminal records. For this
purpose an unfounded complaint for gross insult was issued, which
was instantly retracted as soon as the purpose had been reached.
From that time on, more or less allusive notes appeared in the
newspapers about my past. "I know even more!" one of them wrote;
"You would know what I mean, wouldn't you, Mr. May?" another one
asked. The "destruction" began. But the spiritus rector, the
real perpetrator, always remained cleverly hidden in the shadows;
he never showed himself; he always reached his ends through other
persons. The area of his work reaches far beyond his professional
duties, his correspondence is very extensive, concerning almost
exclusively Karl May. He is in intimate contact with all of my
literary opponents, and wherever a paper is writing about me, a
letter by him or one of his confidants is sure to follow. And
almost everywhere, they believe him. They believe him just as
Cardauns used to believe this liar who told him so convincingly
that the Muenchmeyer novels had been written by me precisely as
they had been printed.
This gentleman Dr. Hermann Cardauns is inseparably connected with
this very dark and very ugly chapter of the contemporary history
of literature which is referred to as "Karl-May-persecution". He
did not want to have it any other way. There, he stands in close
union with people he otherwise does not belong to. This is also
how he wanted it to be. His crushing style, his infallible way of
choosing his words, his "abysmal" or "evident" pleonasms became a
model for others, especially for those who construct those
figurative nooses around my neck, to "whip me out of the Germen
arts". But the entire conglomeration of what he has spoken and
written in lectures and newspapers against me, constitutes by no
means a sturdy column, which no one would be able to shake, but
rather a paper kite in the shape of a dragon, compiled from lots
of vague circumstantial evidence, the rope of which nobody wants
to hold any more aside from Mr. Cardauns himself. It surely takes
a lot of blind faith, to think like him that my "indecencies"
could also be proven by other means than only by the presentation
of my original manuscripts. Just making a lot of words will not
do it; assertions will also remain unsuccessful, as long as they
are not proven. Though there is a lot to be read in Cardauns's
essays against me about files, documents, and other evidence, he
claims to possess proving my guild, I have not yet been shown a
single official file and no single document. As it seems, this
gentleman owns an older printed copy by Muenchmeyer and a later
edition by Fischer and presumes the first one to be a literal copy
of my original. But I regard it as truly inconceivable that a
"main or chief editor" could be thus mistaken. I am just too
willing to consent that he has no idea what kinds of things are
commonly practised by a notorious publisher of trash and
colportage and what kind of a swindle this entire business is, but
this does not excuse, but rather incriminate, him, because not
knowing this, he also should not take the liberty of drawing
conclusions from the reasoning of the filthy colportage which may
only be dawn from the reasoning of honourable people. Fischer
could only enjoy the tremendous success of the rewritten trashy
novels thanks to the excessively loud roll of the drums of Mr.
Cardauns. Even the most incompetent politician knows that these
kinds of things can only be killed by silence and not by gongs and
tomtoms. But I, who was supposed to be struck dead by these
tomtoms, these speeches and newspaper articles, have been rendered
unable by this to remove this trash entirely from the face of this
world as I had intended. My intentions were good; but since Mr.
Cardauns supported my opponents by keeping me from carrying out
those intentions, he has done Muenchmeyer's colportage a service,
for which they will always think gratefully of him. During all of
this long time until now, he has been their faithful champion;
whether he had planed it this way or not, the effect remains the
same.
The second champion for Muenchmeyer's cause, ranking highly above
the first one, even mentally, is the former social democrat Mr.
Rudolf Lebius in Charlottenburg, who had seceded from the
Christian church. Concerning him, I will quote a passage from my
written statements to the fourth criminal division of the Royal
Superior Court III in Berlin:
In the year 1902, I was travelling in the South, and at the Lake
Garda, the mail from home caught up with me, containing among
others a letter by a certain Lebius, who described himself in a
rather exuberant manner as a man who intimately knew and admired
my work, and he made the request to be permitted to visit me at
some time. This exuberance instantly arose my suspicion. "He
wants money, nothing else", I said to myself. I replied to him
that I was not at home and that I therefore was unable to invite
him. In answer to this, he wrote to me on April the 7th, 1904:
"Dear Sir!
"As early as one and a half years ago, I had attempted to get in
contact with you, to which the enclosed card will serve as
evidence. In the meantime, I have published a new newspaper,
here, which has won great popularity. Could you be persuaded to
write something for my paper? Something biographical perhaps, on
the way you work, or on such details which might interest the
German readership of Karl May. I would also like to interview
you.
_"With_outstanding_admiration_
"Rudolf Lebius,
publisher and editor."
So, Lebius had carefully kept my card all this time, to gain
entrance into my house. He had signed his letter "with
outstanding admiration". Again, I said to myself: "He only wants
money." The assertion that his new newspaper had "won great
popularity" was not the truth. I was to be lured in by this.
Such a visitor must not be turned away, especially when he comes
armed with a newspaper, however small it may be, or else he will
get even. Thus, I wrote to him that he would be allowed to come,
and he answered on April the 28th:
"Many thanks for your kind letter. Of course, I am happy to
accept your friendly invitation. Unless you will give me another
time, I will come to see you on Monday, May the 2nd, at three
o'clock (departure at 3:31).
_"With_great_respect_and_admiration_
"Rudolf Lebius."
He came. But I did not allow him to interview me. I did not put
up with that. My wife, who had opened the door for him, had only
showed him to me under the condition that absolutely nothing would
be published. He gave his word on this, first to her and then
also to me. He stayed for coffee, and he stayed until after
dinner. He spoke very much; he spoke almost incessantly. I
remained intentionally silent. I only said what was unavoidable.
I did not trust him, and, to be protected by a witness, I had
invited the military author and editor Max Dittrich [a] for the
same time, who conducted the conversation in my place.
[a] Julius Eduard Maximilian Dittrich (1844-1917) and Karl May
had been to prison in Zwickau at the same time. Later,
Dittrich worked as an editor in charge of articles on the
military for several newspapers. He also wrote numerous
books, mostly on military history.
Lebius drank much wine, while I only sipped. He became
increasingly agitated, while I remained calm and circumspect. He
tried very hard to convince me and my wife that he had the stuff
it took to be a "real man". This was his favourite expression,
which he often used. Incessantly, he spoke about his principles,
his views, his plans, about his great skillfulness, his ample
experiences, and his excellent success as a journalist and an
editor, as a publisher and a manager, as a leader of the flock and
a tribune of the people.
This man attempted to impress us in a manner which only a quite
ordinary, imprudent person would use, who is thus convinced of his
own outstanding qualities, that he does not even consider that
others might laugh about his conduct. When he saw that I did not
respond to any of his tricks, his efforts became more desperate.
He had to convince me of his excellent qualities, at any price!
After all, he needed money, lots of money! And I seemed to be his
final hope to get it! Therefore, in his financial angst, he
revealed to us the most secret principles of his business and his
way of life. Because of the large amount of wine, he believed he
could win us over by this, but only affirmed our repulsion. Since
I have to be brief here, I will only reproduce the three most
important ones of these principles of his. These are:
1. Editors and journalists like us usually have no money.
Therefore, we also cannot afford the luxury of a personal
opinion. We want to live. Therefore, we sell our services.
_Whoever_pays_the_most,_gets_us!_
2. Every person has some dark spots on his character or in his
life. _Even_every_employer,_every_official,_every_policeman,_
_every_judge_or_prosecutor_has_such_a_skeleton_in_his_closet._
These things have to be found out, wisely and clandestinely.
No difficulty may be a discouragement in this. And once it
has been found out, the game is won. A note will then be
placed in the newspaper, telling the person concerned that all
is known, but in a manner so that he cannot sue. Then, he
will be in our hands, and we can do with him as we please. He
will surrender. In this manner I have already often worked to
the benefit of my readers!
3. In a social respect, mankind can be divided into sheep and
rams, masters and servants, those who command and those who
obey. Whoever wants to stop being a human member of the
flock, _has_to_cast_aside_the_conscience_of_the_flock._ Once
he does so, all who are still burdened by this conscience will
come running after him. It does not matter at all which flock
he might want to belong to. He can leave one and join
another, he can switch sides. This does not hurt him. He
only has to make sure that it is done with the necessary
warmth and conviction, for this elates the crowd. If the
social democrats do not follow him, the others will!
When the three of us heard these astonishing lessons, Max Dittrich
burst out in rage several times; my wife was quiet with
amazement; but I left the room to overcome my disgust! Thus,
Lebius received neither money nor anything else from me. So, he
came to realize that this unprecedented self-incrimination had not
just been entirely in vain, but that by it he had also delivered
himself into our hands. Now, the three of us were the most
dangerous people there were for him. _He_could_never_allow_us_to_
_state_our_case_in_court,_ but rather had to do everything _to_
_portray_us_as_untrustworthy_persons,_who_had_no_right_to_testify_
_under_oath._ It is very important to me to emphasise this in
particular, for
| this is the only right key for all of his later actions, |
| which would hardly be understandable without this key, |
| because the hatred this man has against the three of us seems |
| to be almost inhuman. |
Even before he left on this night together with Max Dittrich, I
had purposefully complained about the many letters in which I, not
being a rich man at all, had been besieged with requests for
money, and did so in a manner which had to keep any educated,
honourable man from approaching me with similar wishes: As soon
as the very next day, he wrote me the following letter:
"Dresden-A., 5/3/04.
"Dear doctor!
"Cordially thanking you for the friendly reception and your
hospitality, I am asking you, in case you should visit the art
exhibit or should happen to come to Dresden on another occasion,
to have lunch or coffee with us.
"In one respect, I have to go back on the agreement we reached
yesterday. I cannot accept your offer to work for us free of
charge. We will pay ten pfennig per line, which would be the same
price you are likely to have received from other newspapers.