Books: My Life and My Efforts
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Karl May >> My Life and My Efforts
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Herbal Book
Of the most learned and worldwide famous Dr. Petri Andreae
Matthioli. Now again with many beautiful new illustrations,
useful medicine also, and other good pieces, for the third time
with particular effort enlarged and printed,
by
Joachimum Camerarium,
Doctor of medicine at the praiseworthy city of Nuernberg.
With three, well ordered, useful registers of herbs' Latin and
German names, and then the medicine, with the usage of the same
included. Also ample information, on distilling and kilns.
With special privilege of His Roman Imperial Majesty,
not to be copied in any format.
Printed in Frankfurt am Main,
M. D. C.
*
* *
It was the most natural thing in the world for father to
immediately take this book and to study it eagerly. It contained
even more than the title promised. For instance, the names of the
plants were often also given in French, English, Russian,
Bohemian, Italian, and even in Arabic, which later helped me in
particular to a quite extraordinary degree. Father also turned
from one page of this delightful book to another, from one plant
to another. He added much, much more to the knowledge, he already
had; not just about the flaura itself, but also about its
nutritious and technical properties and its healing effects. The
ancestors had tested these effects and had added very many
marginal notes to the volume, telling about the results of these
tests. Later, this book became a source of the purest and most
natural pleasure for me, and I may well say that father
excellently supported me in this.
Another one of these books was a collection of biblical woodcuts,
probably from the earliest time of the xylographic art. I own it,
just like the Herbal Book, up to this day. It contains very many,
quite excellent pictures; some are unfortunately missing. The
first one is Moses and the last one the beast from the eleventh
chapter of the Revelation of John. The title page has been lost.
Therefore, I do not know who the author is or in what year this
volume was printed. Grandmother used this book as an aid when
telling us the biblical stories. We immensely enjoyed every one
of these tales, and this brings me to most outstanding quality,
grandmother possessed for us children, this was her incomparable
gift for story-telling.
Actually, what grandmother did was not that much story-telling as
it was creating, drawing, painting, shaping. Even the toughest
subject-matter gained shape and colour, being told by her lips.
And when twenty persons listened to her, every single one of these
twenty had the impression that she told what she told quite
exclusively for him alone. And it stuck, it lasted. Whether she
related a passage from the Bible or from the vast realm of her
fairy-tales, it always culminated to some profound insight in the
relationship between heaven and earth, the victory of good over
evil, and the warning that everything on earth was just a parable,
because the source of truth was not to be found in this low form
of life, but only in a higher existence. I am convinced that she
did not do this consciously and with the full intension; she was
not sufficiently educated for this, but it was a inborn gift, a
genius, and such a beneficial spirit will, as is well known, do
its work most surely, when it is neither discovered nor observed.
Grandmother was a poor, uneducated woman, but nevertheless a poet
with a god-given talent, and therefore a stroy-teller, who created
characters from the wealth of her stories, which not just existed
in those stories, but truly came alive.
Thinking back at my earliest memory, I do not come across the
fable of Sitara first, but rather the fable "of the lost and
forgotten human soul". I felt such endless pity for this soul. I
have wept for it with my blind, unseeing eyes of a child. To me,
this tale contained nothing but truth. But only years later,
after I had experienced how life could treat a person and after I
had extensively delved into the the heart of mankind, I realized
that the knowledge of the human soul had indeed been lost and
forgotten and that all of our psychology had not not yet been able
to return this knowledge to us. In my childhood, I have spent
hours sitting quietly and motionlessly, staring into the darkness
of my sick eyes, to contemplate where this lost and forgotten soul
might have ended up. I really, really wanted to find it. Then,
grandmother took me on her lap, kissed me on the forehead and
said: "Be quiet, my boy! Don't be sad for it! I have found it.
It is here!" "Where?", I asked. "Here with me", she answered.
"You are this soul, you!" "But I am not lost", I objected. "Of
course, you are lost. You have been cast down into the poorest,
dirtiest Ardistan. But you will be found; because even when
everybody and all have forgotten about you, God has not forgotten
about you." - I did not comprehend this, then; I only understood
it later, much, much later. Actually, in this time of my early
childhood, every living being was just a soul to me, nothing but a
soul. I saw nothing. To me, there were neither appearances nor
shapes, nor colours, neither locations nor movement from one
location to another. I was very well able to feel, hear, and
smell the persons and objects, but this was not enough to picture
them truly and vividly. I could only imagine them. I did not
know how a person, a dog, a table would look like; I could only
picture it in my soul, and this picture reflected its soul.
Whenever somebody spoke, I did not hear his body, but his soul.
Not his external, but his internal appearance approached me. To
me, there were only souls, nothing but souls. And so it has
continued to be, even after I had learnt to see, from my boyhood
on, up to this day. This is the difference between myself and
others. This is the key to my books. This is the explanation for
everything which has been praised or condemned in me. Only he who
had been blind and became seeing again, and only he who possessed
such a deeply rooted and powerful world within himself that it,
even after he became seeing, dominated the world outside for his
entire life, only he will be able to put himself in my place and
understand everything what I was planning, what I did, and what I
wrote, and only he will have the ability to criticise me, _nobody_
_else!_
I spent the entire day not with my parents, but with grandmother.
She meant everything to me. She was my father, my mother, my
teacher, my light, my sunshine which my eyes lacked. Everything
that became a part of me, physically and mentally, I got from her.
Thus, I most naturally came to resemble her. Whatever she told
me, I told back to her, adding what my youthful imagination
partially guessed, partially grasped. I told it to my sisters and
to others who came to me, because I could not come to them. I
told it in grandmother's tone of voice, with her confidence that
left no room for any doubt. This sounded precociously and
convincingly. It gave me the nimbus of a child well beyond his
age in intelligence. Thus, adults came as well, to listen to me,
and I might have degenerated into an oracle or miracle child, if
grandmother had not been so very modest, truthful, and
intelligent, to intervene wherever any kind of danger arose to me.
A blind child is given little work. He has more time to think and
ponder, than other children. So, he might easily appear more
intelligent than he is. Unfortunately, father did not possess
grandmother's intelligent modesty, nor mother's silent
thoughtfulness. He enjoyed talking very much and exaggerated, as
we already know, in everything he did and said. So it happened
that this fate, which I escaped here, later, nevertheless, was to
come over me, that awful fate, to be praised to death.
When I learnt to see, my inner self was already developed and
fixed in its later major features to such an extent that even the
world of light, opening now before my eyes, did not possess the
power to draw the centre of my inner being outside towards it. I
remained a child for all times, just turning into an older child,
the older I grew; I remained a child in which the soul dominated
and still dominates today, so that no consideration for the world
outside and the physical life could ever keep me from doing
something, what I have found to be right for the soul. And in all
of my life, I have incessantly made the experience that with
entire peoples it is in no way different than with me. They
preferably act not due to external causes, but on account of
themselves, their souls. The greatest and most beautiful deeds of
a nation were born out of its inner self. And no matter how
strong and how inventive a poet's mind might be, he would still
never succeed in forcing the plot of a great, national drama upon
the history of a people, if it was not already in the people's
soul. And even if we would found hundreds of associations and
commissions of authors of books for young people and thousands of
libraries for children, students, and the general public, we will
arrive at the opposite of what we intent, if we choose books which
only satisfy the needs of our pedantry and our methodics, but not
the needs of those souls, upon which we force them. I have come
to know these souls, have studied them since the time of my youth.
I have been such a soul myself, and am it even still today.
Therefore I know that the general public and the younger
generation must not be given books full of paragons of virtue,
simply because there is no person who is a paragon of virtue. The
reader wants truth, wants real life. He hates the virtuous
dummies, which always stay where they were once placed, possess
neither flesh nor blood, and are only clothed in whatever that
dress-maker called "textbook morality" has dressed them up with,
and nothing more. The task of an author writing for a young
audience does not consist of the creation of characters who act so
exceedingly delightfully impeccable in every situation that the
reader necessarily has to get bored by them, but such an author's
art is rather to allow his characters to commit all those errors
and stupidities, he wants to save his youthful readers from. It
is a thousand times better he would let his fictional characters
perish, than to have the disgruntled boy transfer the evil, which
did not occur, though it should have occurred in all truthfulness,
from the book into the real life. This is the axis around which
our literature for the youth and the general public has to
revolve. Exemplary boys and men are bad role-models; they repel.
Show the negative, but true to life and thrilling, thus you will
achieve the positive.
After we had moved into a rented place, we lived at the market,
with the church in its centre. This square was the children's
favourite playground. In the evenings, the older school-boys
gathered at the church gate to tell stories. This was a most
exclusive club. Not everyone was allowed to go there. When
someone came, they did not like, they made no fuss; he was sent
away with a thrashing and surely would not return. I, on the
other hand, did not come, nor did I ask, but rather I was invited
in, though I was only five years old, while the others were
thirteen and fourteen. What an honour! Such a thing had never
happened before! I had grandmother and her tales to thank for
this! At first, I kept quiet and just listened, until I knew all
of the tales which were going around here. They did not hold it
against me, because I had learnt to see only a short time ago,
kept my eyes still half bandaged, and was treated with some
consideration by everyone. But once this was over, I had to take
my turn. Every day another fairy-tale, another story, another
narration. This was asking much, very much, but I delivered, and
with pleasure. Grandmother worked with me. What I was to tell at
dusk, we worked out in the early mornings, even before we ate our
morning soup. Then, I was well prepared when I reached the church
gate. Our beautiful book, "The Hakawati", supplied our stories
for a long time. On top of it, this stock of stories increased
quite extraordinarily over time, of course not in the book, but in
me. This was the very simple and natural consequence of me having
to translate, after I had become seeing, the world of my soul,
generated by the Hakawati in me, into the visible world of
colours, shapes, bodies, and surfaces. By this, innumerable
variations and multiplications were created, which I could only
put into a fixed shape and form by telling them.
By this time, father had managed to get me the permission to
attend school. Normally this permission was only granted after
the age of six; but my mother was, in her capacity as a midwife,
in frequent contact with the minister, who enjoyed granting her
this wish, since he also served as the local school inspector, and
father met the elementary school teacher Schulze twice a week to
play skat or schafkopf [a], and therefore it did not turn out to
be difficult to obtain his permission as well. I learnt to read
and write very quickly, because father and grandmother helped with
it, and then, once I could do this, father thought the time had
come to start carrying out the plans he had for me. He wanted to
fulfil in me what was not fulfilled in him. At the forester's
house, he had been granted a glimpse at better and more humane
conditions. And he was always haunted by the idea that there had
been important men among out ancestors, about whom we, their
descendants, had to say that we were not worthy of them. He
wanted to live up to their example, but was violently pushed down
by the circumstances. This offended and annoyed him. For
himself, he had settled with these circumstances. He had to
remain what he was: a poor, uneducated craftsman. But now, he
transfered all of his wishes, hopes, and everything else onto me.
And he was resolved to do everything possible and not to miss any
opportunity to turn me into the man he had been denied to become.
This can surely only be regarded as a commendable act of his. But
the important thing was what path and manner he gave to my
education. He wanted whatever was good and beneficent to me. He
could only achieve this with good and beneficent means. But
unfortunately, I have to say, without telling too much about
future events, that my "childhood" came to an end now, at the age
of five. It died in the very moment when I opened my eyes to see.
What those poor eyes got to see from then on up to today, was
nothing but work and work again, worry and worry again, suffering
and suffering again, up to my present agony, like being tied to a
stake and being incessantly tortured without any end being in
sight. - - -
[a] Skat, Schafkopf: Two popular games of cards. The word
"Skat" is derived from the Italian "scarto" (discarding
cards), and "Schafkopf" means literally "sheep's head".
III. No Boyhood
Oh dear, beautiful, golden time of youth! How often have I seen
you, how often have I found joy in you! With others, always just
with others! You have never been with me. You steered clear of
me, keeping in a far, far distance. I was not envious, truly not,
because there is no room in me for envy at all, but it hurt
nonetheless, when I saw the sunshine warming other people's lives,
while I stood in the most remote, cold corner of the shadows.
Yet, I also had a heart, I also yearned for light and warmth. But
even the poorest of all lives requires love, and if this most poor
one is sufficiently determined, he can become richer than the
rich. He just has to search within himself. There, he will find
what fate has denied him, and can pass it out to all, all of those
who give him nothing. For truly, truly, it is better to be poor
and nevertheless giving, than to be rich and nevertheless do
always nothing but receiving!
I guess, this is the right place to clarify a misconception about
me from the very start. This is that I am regarded as very rich,
a millionaire even; but I am no such thing. Until now, I had
just enough "to get along comfortably", nothing more. Even this
is most likely to come to an end soon, since the relentless
attacks against me will eventually bring about, what was to be
brought about by them all along. I am getting used to the idea
that I will die just as I was born, as a poor man without any
possessions. But this does not matter. This is just externally.
This cannot change any part of my inner self and its future.
The lie that I was a millionaire, that my income had amounted to
180.000 marks, was invented by a tricky and very intelligently
calculating opponent, who possesses a keen knowledge of human
nature, and would not hesitate for a moment to use this knowledge,
even if his own conscience should urge him otherwise, to obtain
profit and advantages. He knew very well what he did, when
placing his lie into the newspapers. By this, he stirred up the
very lowest and ultimately worst enemy against me: envy. The
previous attacks against me hardly matter any more, now; but
since I am believed to be in the possession of millions, I am
assaulted quite mercilessly and pitilessly. Even in the articles
of otherwise rather respectable and humane critics, this financial
vindictiveness plays a part. It causes a boundless feeling of
embarrassment to see people, who have proven themselves as
courteous knights of literature in every other case, riding around
on this vulgar horse! I own a house, not encumbered with debts, I
live in, as well as a small amount of money I keep saved for my
travels, nothing else. I am left with nothing of my income. It
is just barely enough for my modest household and for the hard
sacrifices I have to make for the lawsuits I have been forced
into. In the past, I could follow my heart and be giving to the
poor, especially to poor readers of my books. This has stopped
now. Nonetheless, I am now, more than ever, pestered by letters
demanding money from me, on account of this cunning lie of being a
millionaire, but unfortunately I cannot help any more, and almost
everyone I have to turn away, feels disappointed and becomes my
enemy. I conclude that this unscrupulous act of depicting me as a
filthy rich man, has harmed me more, much more than all adverse
criticism and other hostilities put together.
After this digression, which I deemed necessary, I will now turn
back to the "boyhood" of this alleged "millionaire", who seeks
such a very different kind of treasure than all those who aim to
exploit him.
It had been a dreadful time, especially for the poor inhabitants
of that area were I was at home. Living in the present times of
prosperity, it is almost impossible to imagine how miserably
people starved through their days in the end of the 1840s.
Unemployment, deformity, inflation, and revolution, these four
words explain it all. We lacked almost everything that is
required for the body's sustenance and relief. At lunchtime, we
asked our neighbour, the innkeeper of the inn called "Zur Stadt
Glauchau"
, for the potato peelings, to
use the few scraps that might still be attached to them for a
hunger-soup. We went to the "Red Mill", where we got a handful of
dust from the empty bags and the spelt that had been thrown out
for free, to turn it into something resembling food. We plucked
atriplex [a] from the rubble dumps, otterzungen [b] from the
ridges of the fields, and wild lettuce from the fences, to cook it
and to fill our stomachs with it. The leaves of the atriplex felt
greasy. This resulted in two or three little drops of fat
floating on the surface of the water, when they were cooked. How
nutritious and how delicious did this seem to us! Luckily, there
were also a few stocking-weavers among the many unemployed weavers
of our town, whose business had not stopped entirely. They wove
gloves, these extremely cheap, white gloves, corpses are dressed
up with, before they are buried. Mother succeeded in getting the
job of sewing such burial-gloves together. There we sat, all of
us except father, from early in the morning until late at night,
stitching away. Mother sewed the thumbs, for this was difficult,
grandmother sewed the sides with little finger, and I, together
with my sisters, sewed the middle fingers. When we had all worked
very hard, we had all together earned eleven or even twelve
new-groschen by the end of the week. What a financial stock! For
this, we got beetroot-syrup for five pfennig, spread on five tiny
rolls of bread; these were very conscientiously divided into
pieces and passed around. It was just as much a reward for the
past week as it was an incentive for the next.
[a] Melde = atriplex: some kind of a weed from the goosefoot
family (chenopodiaceae), also known as orach or orache in
English.
[b] Otterzungen: Germany's most respected dictionary, the
"Duden", defines this as a "petrified fish-tooth". This seems
a bit strange to me. I would rather guess that it must be
some kind of a plant. Literally it would mean "adders'
tongues".
While we were busily working at home in this manner, father was
just as busy outside; but unfortunately his work was of that kind
which yields more honour than sustenance. He joined the effort to
save king Frederic August and the entire Saxonian government from
certain ruin. Just a short time ago, public opinion had demanded
the very opposite: The king was to be dethroned, and the
government to be chased out of the country. This was desired by
almost all of Saxony, but in Hohenstein and Ernstthal, minds soon
changed, and did so for the most excellent reasons: It was too
dangerous! Those who were screaming the loudest had joined
together and ransacked a bakery. Then, came the Santa
Hermandad [a] and locked them all up. They regarded themselves as
victims and martyrs of politics for a few days though, great and
powerful, but their wives were not interested in this kind of
heroism; they fought it all the way. They met; they parted;
they ran up and down; they convinced the other women; they
talked politically, diplomatically, threateningly, beggingly.
Calm, reasonable men joined them. The old, venerable, minister
Schmidt made speeches for peace; and Judge Layritz, too. The
policeman Eberhardt went from house to house, warning people of
the terrible consequences of a rebellion; police-sergeant Grabner
supported him in this. At the church gate, at dusk, the boys only
told stories about being shot, being hanged, and especially about
the scaffold, which was described in such a manner that everyone
hearing it reached for the front or back of his neck. So it came
about that the mood changed quite thoroughly. Dethroning the king
was now entirely out of the question. On the contrary, he had to
stay, for there could not be a better one than him anywhere in the
world. From now on, the object was no longer to drive him out,
but rather to protect him. Meetings were held to discuss in what
manner this could best be achieved; and since there was talk of
fighting, war, and victory all over the place, it came quite
naturally that we boys, also, increasingly put ourselves not just
in a militant mood, but also in militant clothes, and imagined
ourselves in acts of militant heroism. Granted, I did all of this
only from a distance, because I was too small for this and had no
time; I had to sew gloves. But all the other boys and girls were
standing together in all kinds of corners and niches, telling each
other what they had heard at home when they were with their
parents, and had most important discussions about the manner in
which the monarchy was to be preserved and the republic was to be
prevented. They were particularly outraged at some old, evil
woman. She was to be blamed for everything. Her name was
Anarchy, and she lived in the deepest forest; but at night, she
came into the towns, to tear down the houses and to burn down the
barns; what a beast! Luckily, all of our fathers were heroes, no
one of them was afraid of anybody, not even of this boorish
Anarchy. It was decided to put all citizens in arms for king and
fatherland. In Ernstthal, there had been, for a long time, a
company of riflemen and a company of guardsmen. The first shot at
a wooden bird and the latter at a wooden disk. In addition to
these two, two or three other companies were to be founded,
especially a Polish company of scythe-men, to stab the enemy to
death from a large distance. And so it turned out, then, that in
our little town there was an unusually large number of people with
an immensely militant disposition, for both strategical and
tactical planning. Every one of them was in great demand. They
were counted. There were thirty-three of them. This suited very
well and worked out rather smoothly, because: Each company needed
one captain, one first lieutenant, and one second lieutenant; if,
in addition to the riflemen and the guard, nine new companies were
to be founded, this added up to eleven and all thirty-three
officers were taken care of. This suggestion was carried out,
which of course meant that the number of men in the individual
companies could only be rather small; but the drum-major, the
master [b] stocking-weaver Loeser, who had served in the military
and therefore had to train all thirty-three officers, maintained
that this could only be advantageous, because the fewer men there
were in a company, the fewer could be shot down and lost from that
company in a war; and so the decision was left as it was.
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