B·特拉文

B. Traven (German: [ˈbeː ˈtʁaːvn̩]) 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, and where he died under the name B. Traven.

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. 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 Rolf Recknagel and in detail by Karl Guthke, 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. 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 26, 1969, in his home in Mexico City. Shortly thereafter, 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. During the same year, it published Traven's first novel, Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cotton-Pickers), which appeared in installments in June and July. 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, 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.