B. Traven (; Bruno Traven in some accounts) was the pen name of a novelist, presumed to be German, known for his novels on injustice and exploitation around the world, and especially in Mexico. His name, nationality, date and place of birth have been subject to dispute. One certainty about Traven's life is that he lived under the name of Ret Marut in Germany until 1923 and arrived in 1924 in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set. However, Ret Marut was an assumed name and debate remains about his birth name, and Traven himself obscured the subject.
His most famous work The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927) is set in Mexico, as is the film adaptation which won three Academy Awards in 1949.
Life There have been many hypotheses on the paternity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. It has been generally accepted that Traven was also known as Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist, who edited an anarchist magazine in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Traven's widow Rosa Elena Luján announced that her husband and Marut were one and the same in a statement after his death in 1969.Novedades de México, 25 March 1969 Marut was a pseudonym possibly related to his real name as well as to Hindu mythology.
Marut's career as an actor and later pamphleteer has been traced from 1907 by and in detail by , his most complete biographer.
Of the names suggested for the author, one was traceable to a documented birth. This was Hermann Albert Otto Maximilian Feige, born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg on 23 February 1882. An identity document with this name and date were given by Marut to the British police in London in 1923 after he had been arrested as an unregistered alien.BBC documentary film B.Traven: A Mystery Solved, 1978, and The Man Who Was B. Traven by Will Wyatt. Jonathan Cape, 1980. Traven frequently used identity papers borrowed or obtained from friends or acquaintances like the Feige document: a similar borrowed identity document has been found in the Traven archive. The Feige identification has been challenged, including by representatives of the B. Traven Estate who advanced an alternative claim that "Moritz Rathenau", an alleged illegitimate son of industrial tycoon Emil Rathenau, was the author (see Identity for discussion and sources). In December 1990 Traven's stepdaughter Maria Eugenia Montes de Oca Luján and her husband Timothy Heyman were told by Gabriel Figueroa, the renowned Mexican cinematographer, one of Traven's closest friends in Mexico, that Traven was the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau, the founder of AEG, and Helen Mareck, an Irish actress, and that his name was Moritz Rathenau. Heyman subsequently investigated this revelation and published an article advancing the claim in the Mexican magazine Letras Libres in May 2019, citing onomastic arguments (e.g., letter-rearrangement similarities among "Ret Marut," "B. Traven," and "Moritz Rathenau") and materials he attributes to the Gabriel Figueroa family archive.
Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period, were translated into multiple languages, and retained this popularity after the Second World War. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first, with their English editions appearing later. However, the author always claimed the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is mostly treated by Traven scholars as a diversion or a joke, although there are those who accept it.
In 1957, Traven married Rosa Elena Luján, who was divorced and had two daughters. The family lived in Mexico City. Luján worked as Traven's translator since 1953 and as his business agent. In 1966, he gave a rare interview to the Mexican magazine Siempre!, where he discussed his identity and ancestry. Traven stated that he had been born in the United States to Scandinavian parents, not German ones, and that he had lived in Germany in the past, where the Third Reich had banned his books and confiscated his German earnings. He also said that his business name was Hal Croves. Traven died on March 23, 1969, in his home in Mexico City from renal cancer. Shortly after his widow Elena Luján revealed, as instructed by Traven, that he had used the names Traven Torsvan, B. Traven and Hal Croves. A notarized identity statement confirmed the facts. Luján stated he also used the name Ret Marut.
Works
The writer with the pen name B. Traven appeared on the German literary scene in 1925, when the Berlin daily Vorwärts, the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, published the first short story signed with this pseudonym on February 28. Soon, it published Traven's first novel, Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton-Pickers), which appeared in installments in June and July of the same year. The expanded book edition was published in May 1926 by the Berlin-based Buchmeister publishing house, which was owned by the left-leaning trade-unions-affiliated book sales club Büchergilde Gutenberg.The title of the first book edition was Der Wobbly, a common name for members of the industrial unionist Industrial Workers of the World; in later editions the original title Die Baumwollpflücker was restored. In the book, Traven introduced for the first time the figure of Gerard Gales, an American sailor who looks for a job in different occupations in Mexico, often consorting with suspicious characters and witnessing capitalistic exploitation, nevertheless not losing his will to fight and striving to draw joy from life.
In April of the same year (1926), Büchergilde Gutenberg, which was Traven's publishing house until 1939, published Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship). The main character of the novel is also Gerard Gales, a sailor who, having lost his documents, virtually forfeits his identity, the right to normal life and a home country and, consequently, is forced to work as a stoker's helper in extremely difficult conditions on board a "death ship" (or coffin ship), which sails on suspicious voyages around the European and African coasts. The novel is an accusation of the greed of capitalist employers and bureaucracy of officials who deport Gale from the countries where he seeks refuge. In the light of findings by Traven's biographers, The Death Ship may be regarded as a novel with autobiographical elements. Assuming that B. Traven is identical with the revolutionary Ret Marut, there is a clear parallel between the fate of Gales and the life of the writer himself, devoid of his home country, who might have been forced to work in a boiler room of a steamer on a voyage from Europe to Mexico.
Traven's best known novel is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, published first in German in 1927 as Der Schatz der Sierra Madre. The book is again set in Mexico, where its main characters are a group of American adventurers and gold seekers. In 1948 the book was filmed under the same title (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) by the Hollywood director John Huston. The film, starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, was a great critical success, and in 1949 it won three Academy Awards.
The figure of Gerard Gales returned in Traven's next book, The Bridge in the Jungle (Die Brücke im Dschungel), which was serialized in Vorwärts in 1927 and published in an extended book form in 1929. In the novel, Traven first dealt in detail with the question of the First Nations in South and North America and the conflicting values and traditions between white settler cultures and indigenous cultures throughout the Americas; these themes detailing the problems of colonization dominated what became known as the Jungle Novels published in the 1930s.
The 1930s are mainly the period in which Traven wrote and published the Jungle Novels – a series of six novels consisting of The Carreta (Der Karren, 1931), Government (Regierung, 1931), March to the Monteria (Der Marsch ins Reich der Caoba, 1933), Trozas (Die Troza, 1936), The Rebellion of the Hanged (Die Rebellion der Gehenkten, 1936), and General from the Jungle (Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel, with a Swedish translation published in 1939 and the German original in 1940). The novels describe the life of indigenous Mexicans in the state of Chiapas in the early 20th century who are forced to work under inhumane conditions at clearing mahogany in labour camps (monterias) in the jungle; the working and living conditions lead to a rebellion and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
Traven's last novel, published in 1960, was Aslan Norval, the story of an American millionairess who is married to an aging businessman and at the same time in love with a young man; she intends to build a canal running across the United States as an alternative for the nuclear arms race and space race. The subject and the language of the novel, which were completely different from the writer's other works, resulted in its rejection for a long time by publishers who doubted Traven's authorship; the novel was accused of being "trivial" and "pornographic". The book was only accepted for publication after its thorough stylistic editing by Johannes Schönherr, who adapted its language to the "Traven style".
Apart from his twelve novels, B. Traven authored many short stories, some of which remain unpublished. Besides the already mentioned Macario, the writer adapted the Mexican legend about The Creation of the Sun and the Moon (Sonnen-Schöpfung, with a Czech translation published in 1934 and the German original in 1936). The first collection of Traven's short stories, entitled Der Busch, appeared in 1928; its second, enlarged edition was published in 1930. From the 1940s onwards many of his short stories also appeared in magazines and anthologies in different languages.
Having been trained in photography by Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, in 1926 Traven was hired as the photographer for an expedition to Chiapas led by Enrique Palacios of the UNM (Mexican National University) with the purpose of exterminating the locust which plagued the crops of the communities living in the state. After the expedition ended in August, 1926, Traven chose to stay in the state and returned to the state several times in successive years, to study and write about its people. The result was an anthropological book about Chiapas, Land of Springtime (Land des Frühlings) published in 1928 by Büchergilder with 64 photos and captions produced by the author. The book consolidated his pivot from Europe related problems of governance, identity, bureaucracy and capitalism, to the condemnation of the oppression of Mexico's indigenous people. The six jungle novels were the result of his decision to communicate his beliefs and ideals through fiction, just as he had used the Death Ship to express his views on injustice, inequality, capitalism and oppression in the developed world.
Themes B. Traven's major writings are classified as adventure novels with proletarian themes.