Karl May’s stories of the Old West have sold millions of copies. Illustration by Ralph Steadman

The northern German town of Bad Segeberg is renowned for two things: a vast cave visited each winter by twenty-two thousand bats, and an annual Karl May Festival visited each summer by three hundred thousand people. Karl May (pronounced “my”) is an adventure writer from the late nineteenth century whom most Americans have never heard of but whose stories of the American West are to this day better known to Germans than the works of Thomas Mann. His books have sold more than a hundred million copies. Though May never visited the American West, he told everyone that he had, and he wore a necklace of bear teeth, as if in proof. All his life, he was a confabulator, even when it was of no benefit to him.

May’s most beloved characters are a noble Apache leader named Winnetou and his blood brother, Old Shatterhand, a German immigrant to the United States. The good friends feature in fifteen of May’s eighty-odd works and are central in a series of films from the nineteen-sixties which were so successful that they are said, with only some exaggeration, to have saved the West German film industry. Most Germans can hum the theme music. In 2002, in a copyright case before the German Federal High Court, it was held that Winnetou was no longer a mere character in a novel; he had become “the name for a certain human type, that of the noble Indian chief.”

In the summer, you can ride a diesel “steam” train from Bad Segeberg’s central square to the Karl May Festspiele grounds, which are up near the Kalkberg, the steep hill that was once home to the town’s castle. There are faux log cabins labelled Pony Express, Sheriff’s Office, Barber Shop, Saloon. One sign reads, in English, “Cold Drinks, Hot Food, and Pretty Girls.” You can buy a buffalo burger, hang out in a tepee, and watch children play at panning for gold. Antique handcuffs and at least five kinds of toy gun are for sale, as are tomahawks, feathered headdresses, and all of Karl May’s novels and stories, most of which are available in at least seven editions, including green-covered volumes from the century-old Karl May Verlag—a press that prints only books by and about Karl May.

In a vast outdoor amphitheatre atop the bat cave, seven times a week, one finds the festival’s central attraction: the staging of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand stories. In addition to handsome and often bare-chested actors, the spectaculars feature live horses, live chickens, gunfights, flaming-spear fights, and tumbling from roofs. There are thousands of children in the audience, many in face paint and feathers—most come as Indians, though a small number dress up as cowboys—and many with parents and grandparents who attended as children. Not to have fun at the festival—a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts, with all five senses attended to—would require a real dedication to joylessness.

Europeans have long been fascinated by Indians. In 1616, Pocahontas, the “princess of the Indians,” was brought to England and invited to visit the court of King James I. At Whitehall Palace, she saw a performance of Ben Jonson’s masque “The Vision of Delight,” in which Harmony, Grace, and Laughter greeted Spring; Europe watched Pocahontas watch. Travelling expositions of “natives” existed even earlier. In sixteenth-century France, the city of Rouen honored the newly crowned King Henry II with a re-creation of a jungle landscape, displaying three hundred Brazilian Indians. Or, rather, fifty Brazilian Indians and two hundred and fifty naked local peasants, painted brown and adorned with stone jewelry. Indians also crossed the ocean in stories. By the mid-nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales” were best-sellers in Europe as well as in America. Franz Schubert is said to have expressed the wish, on his deathbed, to live long enough for the next installment of Cooper’s series. European colonialism, it has been observed, involved not only the decimation of native populations but also the veneration, adumbrated by fantasy, of their cultures and special powers.

By Karl May’s time—most of the Winnetou novels are from the eighteen-nineties—easier transport made travelling pseudo-ethnographic shows, often put on at zoos, much more common. “They were a popular entertainment, almost like opera,” Eric Ames, a professor of German history at the University of Washington, told me. “But the shows staked their appeal on claims of authenticity; a native woman breast-feeding was a major act.” At the same time, people came to see what they already knew through books; if an Indian show didn’t fit the image people already had of Indians, which was largely based on Cooper’s work, it tended to fail. “There was a show of Bella Coola Indians travelling at the same time as a Sioux Indian show,” Ames said. “The Bella Coola were from British Columbia and looked very different physically. Scientists loved it. But commercially the Bella Coola show was a complete flop.”

When Buffalo Bill Cody went to Munich in 1890 with his Wild West show—which featured two hundred cowboys and Indians, Sioux Ghost Dance performances, and reënactments of the battle of Little Bighorn with “the people who were there!”—hopeful attendees camped out overnight to get tickets. King Ludwig attended. The arena, which seated five thousand, sold out for each of the eighteen shows. The shows were advertised in the same sorts of magazines in which Karl May was serially publishing his tales of Kara Ben Nemsi, an adventurer-at-large in the Ottoman Empire. The Winnetou and Old Shatterhand stories followed shortly thereafter.

May was born in Saxony, in 1842, the fifth of fourteen children of a poor weaver. In later life, he claimed that he had been blind until age six, when he was mysteriously cured; the story has a typically May-like ring of both truth and falsehood. He was certainly underfed. When May’s family came into a tiny inheritance, his father decided to become a pigeon dealer. His first investment was in two pairs of expensive “blue-striped” pigeons, whose feathers, he learned too late, had been glued on. His next was a pigeon that turned out to be blind from old age.

In his teens, May was kicked out of school for stealing candles; his autobiography claims that he merely wanted to give his sister scraps of candle wax as a Christmas present. He was later fired from a teaching job for stealing a pocket watch. May spent six weeks in jail, his reputation further damaged by rumors of an affair with a married woman.

During a four-year jail term in his twenties—for stealing furs—May ran the prison library, where he read a lot of Baedeker. Though he did not write stories, he did write a list of synopses of stories he might one day write. Finally, in his thirties, May actually wrote. There were further incarcerations for petty crimes, but he managed to make a modest living writing pulp fiction—crime stories and romances and tales of travel. He also wooed and married a girl, Emma Pollmer, whose grandfather didn’t approve of the lowly Saxon suitor, so she ran away to Dresden to join him. May often wrote under a pseudonym, which enabled him to publish (and get paid for) the same story under different titles, in different magazines. In 1893, when he was fifty-one, he published his first Winnetou and Old Shatterhand novel; this was his late, big break. But, by that time, his marriage was falling apart, he was having a hard time getting royalties from earlier works, and his health was deteriorating. Soon, he was attacked in the press for having written for Catholic magazines as a Protestant, for having obfuscated his criminal past, and for having lied about where he had and hadn’t travelled. May never escaped financial and reputational distress, even after becoming rich and famous. His money went to lawyers and his last years went to proclaiming his honesty.