This blog posts on Mondays. Fifth Mondays, when they happen to arrive, are for the newsletter. Herewith the latest posts covering Texas Books, workshop posts, Q & As, selected other posts and news, plus cyberflanerie.
Ignacio Solares, one of Mexico’s most outstanding literary writers, appears in English translation by Yours Truly in the fabulous new issue #72 of Gargoyle. Edited by poet Richard Peabody, Gargoyle is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s most enduring and prestigious literary magazines. Check it out! Solares’ short story is entitled “The Orders” (“Las instrucciones”). My thanks to Ignacio Solares for the honor, to Richard Peabody for accepting it and bringing it forth, and to Nita Congress for her eagle-eyed copyediting. (My previous translation of Solares’ work, the short story “Victoriano’s Deliriums,” appeared in The Lampeter Review #11.)
The cover of Gargoyle #72, which includes my translation of a short story by Ignacio Solares, features spoken word poet Salena Godden.
By the way, if you don’t subscribe to Madam Mayo blog but would like to receive my very occasionally emailed newsletter (via Mad Mimi, my email letter service) just send me an email at cmmayo (at) cmmayo.com and I’ll add you to my mailing list.
MARFA MONDAYS PODCASTING PROJECT Ongoing! I’ve let the Marfa Mondays podcast sit for a while as I am working on the (related) book, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. That said, I’m almost…almost… done with podcast #22, which is an unusually wide-ranging interview recorded in Sanderson, a remote town that also happens to be the cactus capital of Texas. Podcasts 1 – 21 are all available to listen for free online here.
COOL STUFF ON MY RADAR ( = CYBERFLANERIE = ) The brilliantly brilliant Edward Tufteis offering his course on video. I took his in-person workshop twice, that’s how big a fan I am. I wish everyone else would take it, too, for then our world could be a little less fruit-loopy.
My amigo the esteemed playwright and literary translator Geoff Hargreaves has a most promising new novel out from Floricanto Press, The Collector and the Blind Girl
Poet Patricia Dubrava shares a beauty on her blog, Holding the Light: “Hearing the Canadas”
Cal Newport on “Beethoven and the Gifts of Silence.” Newport has a new podcast by the way, which is ultra-fabulous. Newport’s new book, A World Without Email, is a zinger of clarity. More about that anon.
Allison Rietta
Allison Rietta, artist, designer, yoga teacher, sound healer, and founder of “Avreya” offers a new series of digital books on contemplative practice that each, I am honored to say, include a writing exercise by Yours Truly. (These writing exercises are from my “Giant Golden Buddha & 364 More Free 5 Minute Writing Exercises” which you can access here.) Rietta’s digital books are so refreshingly lovely, and filled with wise and practical ideas for anyone seeking to improve the quality of their health and creative life. Here’s her introduction:
A series of five Contemplative Practice books based on the elements of nature: air, earth, fire, space and water. Each book is designed specifically to enhance that particular element and offers holistic, contemplative practices that include yoga asanas, pranayama, meditation, creative writing and visual art.
What’s in each book: Warm up and yoga asana-s (postures) Pranayama – a breath technique Meditation practice Creative writing prompt Art journaling prompt Practice pairings – Just as pairing food dishes with wine enhances the dining experience, this book offers pairings designed to complement each element such as, music, crystals, essential oils and mantras.
The books are designed to help yoga practitioners cultivate a personal home practice. The practices offered in these books may be done sequentially or separately.
Visit Allison Rietta here and find her new books here.
My amigo poet, playwright, literary translator and writing reacher Zack Rogow was interviewed by Jeffrey Mishove for New Thinking Allowed on “Surrealism and Spontaneity”: A most informative and charming video.
Anne Elise Urrutia’s Pechakucha on her grandfather Dr. Aureliano Urrutia’s “Miraflores”—something very special in San Antonio, Texas history.
This is the time of year for cooking, and with the pandemic, that means even more cooking. My partners in this endeavor, otherwise employed as my writing assistants, communicate by means of dagger-looks which I, by long experience, know to translate as “Gimme me the ham!” and then again, “Gimme the ham!” And then: “Gimme the ham!” Thank goodness for podcasts!
My go-to podcast for the past week has been Cal Newport’s “Deep Questions.” He’s the Joyce Carol Oates of best-sellerdom, that is, to say, how in thundernation does he manage to do so much (and be a tenured professor of computer science)? He tries to explain it in his podcast! As I stir soup and chop the potatoes (…and, as commanded, distribute tiny bites of ham…) I find his podcast strangely soothing.
“Traven hid his identity for many reasons, and became famous for the mystery of his identity… But people were mainly interested in his identity because of the quality of his works. He wrote 15 books and innumerable short stories, has sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages in more than 500 editions.” —Timothy Heyman
Last Monday this blog posted “Traven’s Triumph,” the English original of Timothy Heyman’s essay which was first published in Spanish in Mexico’s leading literary magazine, Letras Libres, in 2019, the 50th anniversary of Traven’s death. This week follows up with a Q & A with Heyman, who lives in Mexico City, where he co-administers the B. Traven literary archive together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman.
Official bio: Timothy Heyman is co-manager of the B. Traven Estate with his wife Malú Montes de Oca Luján de Heyman, stepdaughter of B. Traven. He has degrees from Oxford (in Greek and Roman language, literature, philosophy and history, with a specialization in indo-european philology) and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in Management, with a specialization in finance and information technology). In 2013 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire(CBE) for his contributions to philanthropic and financial relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico.
Tim Heyman, co-manager with his wife Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman of the B. Traven Estate, delivers his keynote speech about B. Traven’s origins. For more about this historic 2019 conference at the Mexican Embassy in Berlin, click here. Photo by C.M. Mayo.
C.M. MAYO: Which is the first of the many works by Traven that you read, and what did you think of it?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The first Traven work I read was TheTreasure of the Sierra Madre just after marrying Malú, his stepdaughter, in 1981. The main reason was that I had heard of it. I had seen the movie and enjoyed it, but knew nothing about Traven’s biography, partly because at that time there were no satisfactory biographies in English. The only good one, by Karl Guthke, was published in English in 1991, 22 years after Traven’s death in 1969. My misty watercoloured memory is that it was a well told cowboy tale with a Chaucerian touch. As a still somewhat bookish Englishman, I had never read a Western novel, but only seen Western movies. I could not help comparing it with Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” and considered it very well constructed with a very ingenious final twist, in many ways more interesting than Chaucer.
C.M. MAYO:Which is your favorite of all the Traven novels, and why?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: This is a very difficult question for me, owing to my personal involvement. Malú lived with Traven from an early age, and her mother Rosa Elena Luján (Chelena) was his only wife (she married Traven in 1957, having begun to work as his translator in 1953). I have therefore been steeped in Traven’s life and work for a long time. More recently, when there was the first ever Traven exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 2016, I understood better the dimension of his life and work (looking at the show as an outsider). I became even more interested in him and realized I was in a unique position to study him, both because I know something about German culture (including the language) and because I have privileged access to his Estate.
Like many, I was intrigued by the “mystery” and began by piecing together his life from his work, and his work from his life. I have come up with what might be considered an original synthesis of proofs of the identity he revealed to Esperanza Lopez Mateos, his translator, and the cousin of his best friend in Mexico, the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. I believe that there is strong evidence of Figueroa’s revelation that he was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), one of the most important businessmen during the era of Kaiser Wilhelm. Rathenau founded the first and most important electricity conglomerate, AEG, in Germany in 1888. His legitimate son, Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) succeeded him as head of AEG and became Foreign Minister of Germany in 1922, the most successful Jew in German political history, until his assassination in June of that year by a group of antisemitic far right activists, a seminal event that was considered the beginning of the Holocaust in Germany. This provenance would make Traven a member of the one of the most important families in Germany and could also shed important light on his work.
Traven hid his identity for many reasons, and became famous for the mystery of his identity, all of which I analyze in an article that was published in Letras Libres, a leading Mexican literary magazine, in 2019 to commemorate the 50thanniversary of his death in 1969. But people were mainly interested in his identity because of the quality of his works. He wrote 15 books and innumerable short stories, has sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages in more than 500 editions. More than 8 novels have been turned into movies or TV series, mainly in three languages, English, German and Spanish.
As I have explored his life and work more deeply, I have come to the conclusion that Traven is a genius. Extraordinarily versatile in word and deed, he was larger than life, and did not only deal with different subjects, but different genres, beginning with short stories, moving to novels, and then in the latter part of his life to the relatively new art form of the cinema, which was emerging in Germany in the 1920s when he was still living there. Not coincidentally, the epicenter of quality cinema transferred from Berlin to Hollywood, dominated by Central European emigrés, in the early 1930s, at a time when he was living not too far away in Mexico.
In response to your original question, if we think of creative people who we call “geniuses” it becomes difficult to choose a favorite. What is your favorite work by Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, or Picasso? In any art form, most geniuses’ work is divided either by genre or by period. In the case of Shakespeare, therefore, it might be more sensible to ask which is your favorite comedy, tragedy or sonnet. In the case of painters or composers, maybe we should ask which period you prefer, Beethoven’s first two symphonies (his first period), his middle symphonies (3 to 8), or his last, glorious one (9): idem for Mozart, or Picasso.
Traven is different from the geniuses I have mentioned above in terms of his development in time and space. When he was Ret Marut in Germany (1882-1923), he was an actor, director, and sometime writer of short stories, plays and novels, then became a political activist and producer of an anarchist magazine. That was temporally almost exactly the first half of his life. When he became B. Traven (1924-1969), and burst on to the literary scene in Germany, he was a fully-fledged writer, having been shocked into fusing his personal experience with his pent-up literary genius.
I consider the best (i.e., my favorite) works by B. Traven to be The Death Ship (published 1926), The Cotton Pickers (1926), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,and the six books of the Mahogany cycle (1930-1940).
The Death Ship is clearly autobiographical and tracks his voyage from Germany to Mexico. But it elevates the personal story to a discussion of identity in the modern world: the lack of the papers necessary to move from one country to another, the power of the state over the individual through petty bureaucracy, the plight of migrants who are victims of both bureaucrats and employers, the general theme of exploitation of the lower classes by unscrupulous employers. The reality and metaphor of the merchant marine is an extreme example of the riskiness of life and employment, as the hero is subject to the arbitrariness not only of countries and companies, but also of the climate. The book has a hero, Gerald Gales (beginning the constant use of the storm metaphor) and a plot, the hero’s journey to a destination, which is made deliberately ambiguous. The narration is spiced with humor, satire and savage criticism of the way the world is organized. Although in the end, apparently, the protagonist survives an extraordinary shipwreck, described in tremendous, realistic detail in the book’s climax, through its overall theme and tone, it could be considered a tragedy.
The Cotton Pickers is also autobiographical, about what happens to the hero when he arrives in Mexico. A hobo, a vagabond, he tries his hand at everything, whatever he can, in and around the town of Tampico, a magnet for many people from around the world because of its oil boom. The book describes how he tries five jobs: cotton picker, oilfield roustabout, cattle driver, baker and waiter. The skills required for each job are described in minute detail as is the socioeconomic reality of each job and the worker’s relationship with his boss, who typically exploits him. The humor, satire and social criticism remain, but because of the subtle irony of its ending this book could be considered a comedy.
Taking the two books together, if The Death Ship is Traven’s Iliad, The Cotton Pickers is his Odyssey.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on rereading, is more than a Western novel with a Chaucerian twist. It is an extension of The Cotton Pickers, with a vagabond hero, not autobiographical, but also set initially in Tampico. Having tried everything, he decides on gold prospecting, forms a group of three to start a business (a mine) in the middle of nowhere. Fraught with peril due to inclement conditions and the ubiquity of Mexican bandidos, the group find the gold, mine it, hide their trove, bring it down from the mountain in spite of the bandits, then lose everything. A classic novel, it became a classic movie.
The six Mahogany books are not autobiographical. They describe with extraordinary empathy the conditions in and around the Monterías, logging camps, in the state of Chiapas, where Traven (having been on an expedition to Chiapas in 1926) returned to the southernmost state of Mexico and spent most of his time there in the 1930s. Before reading them, it might seem difficult to imagine how Traven could write 6 books, apparently on the same subject: the exploitation of Indian workers in the Monterias (Carreta; Government; March to the Montería; Trozas; Rebellion of the Hanged; General from the Jungle). But each book focuses on a different aspect, normally with a different hero or heroine, although there is some overlap. Carreta on the oxcart drivers and on how they drive the oxcarts to the Monteria, Government on how the state, the towns, and the monterias are managed and how the workers are treated, March to the Monteria on how and why workers are recruited and how they are literally driven to the Monterias, Trozas on how the logs are moved from the monterias to the river, then down the river to their port of embarkation to be taken to world markets, Rebellion of the Hanged on how the workers eventually get their revenge on their bosses, and General from the Jungle on how they march back to civilization led by a natural general from among their number and defeat their bosses’ enablers, taking over haciendas and towns. Meanwhile, there are links through several characters between the different books, arriving at a climax with the last two books when the workers take over. The series forms an epic masterpiece.
C.M. MAYO: Which do you think is Traven’s most underappreciated novel?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN:The Cotton Pickers, for the reasons implicitly provided in the previous section.
C.M. MAYO:Have there been any notable and particular challenges in bringing his works from German into English? (Did he write all of his novels originally in German?)
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Traven originally wrote his novels in German, for the German public. His first novel, The Cotton Pickers (Der Wobbly in German), was originally serialized in Vorwärts, the newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1925. It was published the following year 1926 as a book, as was The Death Ship by the Büchergilder Gutenberg. Büchergilder was a publishing house and book club set up in August 1924 by the Educational Society of German Book Printers (Bildungsverband der deutschen Buchdrucker). In the words of Guthke his biographer, “Büchergilde not only ‘made’ Traven – Traven also made the Büchergilde.” Büchergilde gained its greatest visibility in the literary world as the publisher of B. Traven. By the end of the 1920s 100,000 copies of The Death Ship were in print and by 1936the total circulation of Traven’s works in German alone was half a million, covering the German, Austrian and Swiss markets. This was considered an extraordinary success, not least because Traven’s books were not typical “adventure” stories but had social and political content.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the German market dried up, because Traven’s books were banned and Büchergilder was forced to emigrate to Switzerland. Traven had already considered the US in 1929 and signed a deal with Doubleday for the rights to the US and British markets not only for the books but also significantly for film and theater. After various disagreements, mainly about marketing strategy where he preferred anonymity and did not want to be “hawked like cigarettes, car tires, toilet soap, toothpaste, and the latest mattresses,” he bought back the rights from Doubleday. Then, in 1933, he was discovered by Alfred A. Knopf and reached an agreement with him to publish his books in English. There is an extraordinary exchange of letters between Knopf and Traven in our archive which demonstrates that Traven was not an easy author to deal with, as he set the conditions of their collaboration.
Traven translated his own books into English. He was lucky to have Bernard Smith as his skilled and sympathetic editor at Knopf, and Traven gave Knopf permission that Smith could edit his books if grammatical, syntactic or orthographic changes had to be made. Smith considered the text so Germanic that he had to “treat” at least 25 percent of the text. Meanwhile, Traven in order to preserve his anonymity (as not German) insisted that his books be stated as being “the English originals.” Meanwhile it is clear from the English texts that Traven’s mother tongue was not English, although he spoke it well, adding strength to my view that his mother was a native English speaker (Gabriel Figueroa stated that his biological mother was an Irish actress, Helen Mareck).
C.M. MAYO: The new editions of B. Travens’ novels just out with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, did these involve new translations from the German? Can you talk about this in any detail?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Two books were recently published as ebooks by Farrar Straus this July 2020, the first ever ebooks in English, as part of our agreement to make all his works available in English as ebooks over the next 18 months: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Aslan Norval, his last novel (1960). Treasure was also published as a Picador paperback. Treasure is the original Traven translation edited by Smith for Knopf in the 1930s. We are excited that Farrar Straus decided, as part of the package, to publish Aslan for the first time ever in English, fifty years after Traven’s death: imagine “discovering” today an unpublished novel by George Orwell, or Ernest Hemingway! It was translated by Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau, Professor of German at the University of North Carolina.
C.M. MAYO:Of all Traven’s novels, which one do you think best stands the test of time– and has the chance to be read into the deep future?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The novels which I mention (above) as my favorites.
C.M. MAYO:Do you think Aslan Norval will stand the test of time?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: The book is unlike any of the other novels written by Traven. It is neither about the oppressed or unemployed white men, as the case with Cotton Pickers, Death Ship and Treasure (written in the 1920s), or the Mahogany cycle about oppressed indigenous people in Southern Mexico (written in the 1930s). It is about a young, rich, American girl in her twenties with experience in Hollywood (married to an older man), who wants to build a canal across the United States and hires an engineer, a Korean War veteran, to help her. The ambiance is very US 1950s, when Traven wrote the book and it is a wry satirical commentary on US capitalism, politics and foreign policy at the time. It is a 50s period piece, somewhere between a Cary Grant comedy, and a film noir. Traven became friendly with Bogart on the set of Treasure in 1947 and, quite possibly, might have imagined casting his wife Lauren Bacall (who was also on the set) in an Aslan movie. I enjoyed it and found it particularly interesting as it is autobiographical and reminiscent of Traven’s first unpublished book, The Torch of the Prince written in German under his earlier pseudonym Ret Marut, about an engineer who wants to build a railway in Vietnam, set in 1900, the time when Marut travelled in the Far East. Coming back to your original question, 3 months after publication, it is probably too early to say whether it will stand the test of time among the reading public in general.
C.M. MAYO:Having handled his vast correspondence, what is your sense of Traven as a creative entrepreneur?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Traven was an entrepreneur in many ways. In Germany, he first appears under the name of Ret Marut as an actor, based mainly around Cologne and Düsseldorf but also with a travelling theater company. He also appears to have done some directing. When he settled in Düsseldorf with an important theater company from 1913 to 1915, he was closely involved in the formation of a theater school. At the museum of that theater I personally examined the prospectus he wrote for the school, specifying the school’s curriculum, what was required of the teachers, and who could be the donors. He was clearly involved in the design of the cover of the prospectus. After the beginning of WWI, he moved in 1915 from Düsseldorf to Munich, and became more involved in political activism, having become a declared anarchist. He started an anarchist magazine Der Ziegelbrenner which he started publishing from his Munich apartment in Clemensstrasse 84 in 1917. Following his escape from the death sentence in Munich on May 1, 1919, he continued publishing it when he went underground until 1921. As publisher, he was responsible not only for the content which he wrote entirely himself, but also for design, printing, distribution and finance.
When Traven arrived in Mexico in 1924, he earned a living in the ways described in The Cotton Pickers. Meanwhile, he already began to write short stories, some of which were published in Vorwärts before the serialization of The Cotton Pickers. After establishing his publishing relationship with Büchergilder in 1925, he is continually interested in the sales of the books and even initiates methods of interesting his readers in Mexico, by offering prizes consisting of Mexican artefacts such as necklaces and dolls, which he mentions in his letters to the publishers. We have some of these objects in the Traven archive.
The Doubleday deal struck in 1929 (mentioned above) shows that Traven was already careful not only to grant literary rights, but also rights to movie and theater versions. In his correspondence during the 1930s interest is shown in adapting his works to these media. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Traven realized that he could not rely only on the US market. Coincidentally he was approached by Esperanza Lopez Mateos, who had read one of his books in English, and wanted to translate him into Spanish. His initial misgivings were overcome when she sent him a translation into Spanish of The Bridge in the Jungle. He liked it so much that it was his first authorized translation into Spanish and published in Mexico in 1941. Esperanza then became his official translator and translated most of his books from English into Spanish, until her death in 1951.
Traven had for a long time wanted to make films out of his novels and Esperanza introduced him to her cousin Gabriel Figueroa, the most important Mexican cinematographer until that time, and it was through Figueroa that Traven made the contacts in Hollywood that led to the making of the movie in 1947 by John Huston of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, John’s own father, which won 3 Oscars in 1948.
“it was through Figueroa that Traven made the contacts in Hollywood that led to the making of the movie in 1947 by John Huston of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart and… which won 3 Oscars in 1948.
Following that breakthrough year, Traven was able to realize his dream of turning several more of his works into movies as filmscripts, in both English, German and Spanish. His most important German movie was of The Death Ship (1959) starring Horst Buchholz and Elke Sommer directed by Georg Tressler, long considered a cult masterpiece. His most important movie in Spanish was Macario (1960), which was the first Mexican movie ever to be nominated for the Oscar for best movie made in a foreign language. Details of the negotiations for these movies are in the archive.
During the 1950s, Traven complemented the various entrepreneurial skills he had already shown, producing material, adapting it to different genres, expanding into different markets, translating into different languages, surviving changes of publishers, representatives and translators, by beginning a proactive marketing campaign for his works with the publication of the BTNews in English and BTMitteilungen in German, that regularly informed the public about his works.
C.M. MAYO:Traven really must be considered a Mexican novelist. Can you talk a little about his attitudes towards and feelings about his adopted country?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: Having been German as Ret Marut until he arrived in Mexico in 1924, Traven officially obtained papers as a Mexican citizen in 1951. So technically he was both a German and Mexican writer. If we were to take his beliefs into account as expressed in The Death Ship, he did not believe in nationalities or nationalisms, but would probably have considered himself a “universal” writer, or global in today’s terms.
Meanwhile, it is clear from his life and his writings that he loved Mexico. He liked it, first of all, as a place. He had acquired an affinity for the tropics as in his seafaring days as a very young man (until 1907) he had travelled by boat to the Far East. From his first unpublished novel The Torch of the Prince (Die Fackel des Furstens) it is likely that he spent quite a long time in Vietnam. He continued to eat with chopsticks when he made a home with Malú’s family from 1957 until his death in 1969. After living in Tampico in the 1920s, Traven spent most of the 1930s in Chiapas. As Mexico City filled up with emigrés from Europe in the late 1930s and during WWII Traven bought a property in Acapulco (Parque Cachú) and spent most of the 1940s there. He returned to live in Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s.
“He loved Mexico… After living in Tampico in the 1920s, Traven spent most of the 1930s in Chiapas. As Mexico City filled up with emigrés from Europe in the late 1930s and during WWII Traven bought a property in Acapulco (Parque Cachú) and spent most of the 1940s there. He returned to live in Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s.”
It is clear that Traven formed an enduring affection for the Mexican people, and showed uncommon empathy for their lives and feelings, as demonstrated in his novels, the most touching being Bridge in the Jungle and Macario, with the extraordinary healing scene in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also particularly memorable.
Traven was notoriously a recluse. But shortly after arriving in Tampico in 1924, he had gone to Mexico City in 1926 and studied Mexican culture at the UNAM, Mexico’s national university, and made several friendships there and in the city. We know that his friends in the 1920s included Edward Weston, the photographer, along with Weston’s girlfriend, Tina Modotti, and the two of them taught him photography: we had a collection of Modotti photos in the Traven Estate which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This enabled him to be the official photographer of the UNAM expedition to Chiapas in 1926, and to produce his own excellent photographs (we have more than 1,000 negatives in our archive). His enduring interest in technology (supporting my belief about his parentage) is attested by his fascination with flying (he took flying lessons in the early 1930s in the US, and we have an airplane manual of that period in our archive). Through Chelena, he was friendly with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as well as David and Angelica Siqueiros and other intellectuals such as the playwright Rodolfo Usigli. Through Esperanza Lopez Mateos he became close to her brother Adolfo, who was President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964, and had a direct telephone to the presidency installed in Traven’s house. Through Gabriel Figueroa, her cousin, he was friendly with many members of the Mexican film community.
“We know that his friends in the 1920s included Edward Weston, the photographer, along with Weston’s girlfriend, Tina Modotti, and the two of them taught him photography“
Finally, when Traven married Chelena, Malú’s mother, in 1957, he considered her two daughters, Rosa Elena (Chele) and Malú as his own, and they considered him their father. He underscored his stormy life by constantly referring to storms, not just in The Death Ship, his first important novel, but also when he formed a publishing company in 1943 with Esperanza Lopez Mateos, to be called Tempestad (storm). As if to stress his final tranquility he referred to his final home as a ship, he was the “skipper,” Rosa Elena was “first” (mate), Chele “second” and Malú “third,”
In an unpublished letter to Malú who was studying in Paris, written in 1967, he sums up his life:
“My dear Malú. Again you’ll have to put up with these crow’s feet which I’ve to use in communicating with you because as I told you before I don’t want to molest that old machine which has been so very faithful for many years, now on the high seas, now in the very midst of dense jungle, now with heavy rainstorms pouring down on the poor thing, that’s so very tired of hard work during so many years.”
In the same letter, referring to Malu’s travels in Europe, he says
“There is nothing like Mexico. If you didn’t know it before, you know it now.”
C.M. MAYO:Are there plans you can share for the Traven archive?
TIMOTHY HEYMAN: We plan to use the archive for at least the next two years to be able to write the definitive biography that he deserves and perhaps turn it into a movie or a TV series. Meanwhile we are exploring alternatives for the Traven archive in the three obvious countries: Mexico, Germany and the United States. Our decision about which institution should house the archive will depend on several factors: capability for storage and conservation, ability and interest to conduct continuing research into his life and work, ability to provide access and encourage interest in his life and work among the broadest possible public.
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> Learn more about B. Traven and his works at the official B. Traven website www.btraven.com
When asked if I publish guest blogs, in recent years my answer has invariably been, “not any more.” But why have your own blog if you can’t make an exception? (Or two!) And an exceptional exception this Monday’s post is. Dear writerly reader, it is a tremendous honor for me to share Timothy Heyman’s essay “Traven’s Triumph” with you, for it imparts watershed news about one of the most important writers of the twentieth century– one who happened to have been Mexican, and originally– the long-standing mystery solved– German, the illegitimate son of an immensely wealthy Jewish industrialist, and the half-brother of the Weimar government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.
There are a multitude of theories about B. Traven’s true identity, however, consider this source: Timothy Heyman, together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, administers B. Traven’s literary estate.
Most people today will have heard of B. Traven because of his novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was made into John Huston’s classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart. But Traven was the author of multiple best-selling novels, many still cult-classics and in-print in multiple languages. Find out more at the official B. Traven website, www.btraven.com.
TRAVEN’S TRIUMPH by Timothy Heyman
This essay was originally published in Spanish in Letras Libres
B. Traven
Of German origin and naturalized Mexican, B. Traven was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. He has been called the German “George Orwell” for his combination of the novelist’s art and moral, social and political engagement. He wrote fifteen novels and innumerable stories and has sold more than thirty million copies, so far five hundred editions in more than thirty languages. No less popular have been film and television adaptations of his work. Some are already classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) which won 3 Oscars, Macario (1960), which was the first Mexican film to be nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, and Das Totenschiff (1959), a cult classic in Germany. Other films such as La Rosa Blanca, Días de otoño and Canasta de cuentos mexicanos are considered outstanding examples of the first golden age of Mexican cinema in the 1950s-60s.
Traven used many pseudonyms, using the argument that “the creative person should have no other biography than his works.” The year 2019 includes two Traven anniversaries: on March 26, 2019, it was fifty years since his death and, on May 1, one hundred years since he escaped a death sentence in Munich for having participated in 1919 in the government of the Bavarian Council Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik). My wife Malú, Traven’s stepdaughter, and I are using the opportunity of this double anniversary to reveal his parentage, with the desire that current and future generations focus more on his books than his family. This revelation could also contribute to a deeper understanding of his sources of inspiration and a greater appreciation for his work.
The Son of Emil Rathenau
On December 13, 1990, Gabriel Figueroa, one of the most important Mexican cinematographers of the 20th century, revealed for the first time to Ange-Dominique Bouzet, a journalist of the French newspaper Libération, that the real name of Traven was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau.
This version was also recorded in Figueroa’s Memoirs, which were published in 2005, eight years after his death. After his interview with Libération, Figueroa tried first to call Rosa Elena (Chelena) Luján, widow of Traven and mother of my wife Malú, to inform her of his revelation, but he was unable to reach her. Later he met with Malú and me at a Christmas party in Mexico City, and he told us about his revelation to Liberation. In his Memoirs, Figueroa recalls a comment from me that my father’s stepfather (Robert Pohl) had worked for AEG, the German electricity company founded by Emil Rathenau. Gabriel also writes that the day after the party he visited Malú in our apartment. Malú remembers the visit well.
Despite its importance, the Traven-Rathenau connection has not been picked up by the many people who have analyzed his life and work, called “Travenologists.” Both Karl S. Guthke, Harvard professor and author of the best and most complete biography of Traven (B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends) and the scholar Jasmina Jäckel de Aldana ventilated the possibility in the 1990s, but neither of them took it further.
This lack of interest can be explained in several ways. Travenologists have attributed various fathers to Traven, from Kaiser Wilhelm II to a North German brickmaker called Feige. A skeptic might believe that the connection with Rathenau was just another smokescreen from Traven, who used more than 10 pseudonyms, with several different identity documents. In relation to the whole parentage issue, it has not helped that one of the prominent people who thought that Traven was son of the Kaiser was Gerd Heidemann, famous for discovering the fake Hitler diaries.
Meanwhile, many non-Mexican Travenologists are unaware of the Mexican environment, or the relationship that Traven maintained with Figueroa and Esperanza López Mateos, Figueroa’s cousin, translator and literary agent of Traven between 1941 and 1951 and sister of Adolfo López Mateos, subsequently President of Mexico (1958-1964). Malú knew Figueroa very well, to the extent that she considered him a member of the family: she was still a child when in 1951 Esperanza died at the relatively young age of 44 years. Many Mexican Travenologists do not know Germany and prefer to focus on Traven’s life in Mexico.
After the death of Traven in 1969, Chelena confirmed that her Mexican husband was the same person as the writer, actor and journalist Ret Marut in Germany, because Traven had authorized it. For many Travenologists, that statement was sufficient. However, also following the instructions of Traven, Chelena took the ultimate secret, Marut / Traven’s parentage, with her to the grave (she died in 2009).
Malú and I do not know anyone who has taken the trouble to follow up Figueroa’s revelation in the nineties. In our investigation, we have reviewed the biographies, documents and personal effects that are part of the the “B. Traven Estate” in our Mexico City home. Our research includes publicly available information on the Rathenau family in books and articles and a visit to the New York headquarters of the Leo Baeck Institute, the center dedicated to the investigation of the history of German-speaking Jews.
Traven and Emil Rathenau
For various reasons, we are convinced that Figueroa’s version is correct. It is very unlikely that Figueroa, who did not speak German and did not know the country well, would have heard of Emil Rathenau and his importance in Germany, or of AEG––with the almost correct spelling of the company (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft)––if it were not through Esperanza López Mateos, who revealed to him the information about Traven. Esperanza, in a letter to her family, referred to Traven as “Mauricio.” She was also illegitimate, and this was possibly the basis of her close friendship with Traven, as evidenced by their copious correspondence in our archive. Until he hired Chelena Luján as her translator in 1953 and married her in 1957, Traven ́s closest friends in Mexico were Esperanza López Mateos and Gabriel Figueroa.
The life of Emil Rathenau (1838-1915) provides other clues. His father’s name was Moses Rathenau, but he later changed it to Moritz, the German translation of the Hebrew Moshe. In honor of his father, Emil’s full name was Emil Moritz Rathenau. He called neither of his two legitimate sons Moritz after him: the first, born in 1867, was called Walther and the other, born in 1871, Erich. In 1883 he had a daughter, whom he named Edith. It is possible that, due to its obvious “Jewishness” Emil chose not to call any of his legitimate children “Moritz.”
Until 1878, Emil Rathenau, engineer and entrepreneur, had tried many businesses. But none really paid off until in 1881 he attended the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris and it occurred to him to acquire the rights to Edison’s patents. In 1883 he founded the Deutsche Edison Gesellschaft and four years later he converted it into AEG. In 1903, with the support of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Rathenau through AEG formed together with Siemens & Halske (owned by his rival Werner von Siemens) a wireless communication subsidiary, Telefunken Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie (Telefunken). He went on to become one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in Wilhelmine Germany.
The birth of Traven, possibly in 1882 (one of the birthdates produced by the author himself in at least two identity documents) would have coincided with the creation of the Deutsche Edison. Probably, Emil had gained even more confidence as an assimilated Jew and changed his mind when an illegitimate child (i.e., Traven) appeared. That’s why he chose to call him Moritz.
Walther Rathenau’s letters to his mother imply that, in 1883, a year after the birth of Traven, she was not happy in her relationship with Emil. Like many others of his social and economic status, Emil liked the theater, its surroundings and its women. Figueroa said that Traven’s mother was an Irish actress, Helen Mareck, which would explain his mastery of English at an early age, as well as his affinity for the theater.
Traven and Walther Rathenau
One of the reasons why Traven hid his parentage was that he knew it. He knew who his relatives were and lived with one or both for a period. Walther, Traven’s half-brother, studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy and became an engineer like his father. When Emil Rathenau died in 1915, Walther succeeded him as president of AEG. In World War I he was commissioned to set up a Department of Raw Materials for the German government, and after WWI in 1921 he became Minister of Reconstruction and in 1922 Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, the most important political post ever held by a German Jew. He was assassinated on June 24, 1922 by an anti-Semitic extreme rightist group.
The success of his half-brother could have motivated Traven, at a young age, but in activities very different from Walther’s, specifically in theater and anarchist activism. In Mexico, Traven called himself “engineer” Traven Torsvan, like his father and half-brother. In several of his books, the hero is an engineer. Traven’s first unpublished novel, written in 1914, which we have in our archives under the title of Die Fackel des Fürsten, was written (under the pseudonym Ret Marut), its hero was an engineer and it was about a major engineering project in Vietnam. His last novel, published in German in 1960, was entitled Aslan Norval, and its heroine champions a major engineering project in the US.
After starting his career as an actor and theater director, Traven (under the pseudonym Ret Marut) became interested in politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as his half-brother. Walther was considered a renaissance man of his time, for his interest in philosophy and the arts, and his literary activities. He embraced capitalism, but tried to sweeten it, in a Bismarckian way, with the social safety net and philanthropy. Traven / Marut went in another direction, towards a version of Max Stirner’s idealistic anarchism, or a more extreme form of “universalism”, to summarize a paragraph of Isaac Deutscher in his essay “The Non-Jewish Jew” (1968):
“They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”
Walther Rathenau published stories under the pseudonym W. Hartenau. He also wrote about the situation of “non-Jewish Jews” in Germany and the issue of assimilation. He was a friend of Maximilian Harden, a non-Jewish Jew who changed his name from Felix Ernest Witkowski. Harden began his career as a member of an acting company and founded a magazine, Die Zukunft, for which Walther contributed some articles. An interesting model for Traven, who used a pseudonym, Ret Marut, was also an actor and founded in 1917 in Munich an anarchist magazine, Der Ziegelbrenner. In this publication, Traven describes in detail how, having participated in the Räterepublik of Bavaria, he escaped the death sentence on May 1, 1919. After that escape he continued to live underground, mainly in Germany, until 1923 and the following year he arrived in Mexico.
Traven appears for the first time in 1907, as an actor under the name of Ret Marut. There are several reasons why he chose a pseudonym. The main one is that he knew he was an illegitimate child, and had a dual identity, a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother: a book on the Räterepublik of 1919 published in Munich in 1968, which is part of our Traven archive, says that Ret Marut self-identified himself as “Aryan-Jew.” Jews were increasingly assimilated, but they were tired of being identified as such, especially as anti-Semitism persisted.
At that time, it was common for people in theater and politics to use alternative names: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were pseudonyms. Furthermore, actors and writers were accustomed to playing with their identity or creating different names, and there is no doubt that for an anarchist like Traven any system, with names, passports and identities, was anathema.
A final consideration is that, as an anarchist, Traven did not want it to be known that he was related to a rich family, as it would have undermined his credibility (although he did insinuate in Der Ziegelbrenner that he had private means). Similarly, Emil Rathenau probably preferred to keep the relationship secret, both for familial and political reasons.
Traven and Ret Marut
Ret Marut was the main pseudonym Traven used during his German period, and it is similar to another name he used, Richard Maurhut. It is not difficult to see both names as anagrams of Moritz Rathenau. Marut has several etymological ramifications. It means “storm” in Sanskrit. When Traven founded a publishing company in Mexico with Esperanza López Mateos in 1943, he had no hesitation in calling it Ediciones Tempestad (“storm” in Spanish). The storm was a reality in Traven’s life and a frequent metaphor in his books. He even uses it in an unpublished letter to Malú when she was a girl. Traum is an anagram of Marut, and easily becomes Traven in Indo-European philology.
The change of Ret Marut (Moritz Rathenau) to B. Traven has a curious symmetry. In the first half of his life his last name Marut came from his first name Moritz and in the second half he used it as an anagram of his original surname, “Rathenau” becoming “Traven,” u becoming v, and a and h removed. The presence in his name of the letter “B.” reflects the second part of his life, an explanation he gave personally to Malú: he tirelessly corrected fictitious first names assigned to him beginning with the letter B. (such as “Bruno”). When Traven produced a document that he was born in San Francisco in 1882, he invented a name for his American mother: Helene Ottarrent. The first name is practically the same as that of his mother, Helen, and Ottarrent is another anagram of Rathenau (with O instead of u, adding 2 ts, and 1r, and removing the h). Malú mentions that, at the time when she and her sister Rosa Elena were growing up with him, Traven frequently enjoyed playing word games with them.
The Traven estate contains a selection of the things that his friends sent him from Germany. There is a booklet about Harden, his half-brother’s friend, and a technical book about the telephone published in the United States in 1904, a year after Emil Rathenau formed Telefunken with Siemens. There is a piece of paper where Traven practices different orthographic permutations of the name Cahn, a Jewish surname (Cahn is an important name in the family tree of Mathilde Nachman, wife of Emil). In the middle of Der Ziegelbrenner, there is a curious box advertisement with a reference to “St. Moritz “(an ironic canonization of himself); it is the only ad that includes an address in the middle of the text, in any of the editions of the magazine.
Many of the people in Ret Marut’s circle were non-Jewish Jews, among them: Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer (grandfather of Mike Nichols), Erich Mühsam, all participants in the Bavarian Räterepublik. It is an interesting fact that Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, two paradigms of non-Jewish Jews, were born in the lower Rhineland, a border area next to France, which fits Deutscher’s paradigm. Marut’s career as an actor, director and anarchist began to flourish in the Rhineland (Essen and Düsseldorf).
After Traven’s death, the first visit that Chelena made to Germany was to donate to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne the collection of the lithographs of Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (also from Cologne) that Traven had in Mexico City. Other emblematic non-Jewish Jews were strong fans of Traven, including Albert Einstein (who publicly stated that Traven was his favorite author) and Bruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983.
Mexico: at peace with Chelena
Traven’s life was marked by several traumas, which were the root of his desire to hide his parentage until his death, according to Chelena Luján. In chronological order: his illegitimacy, his Judaism, his sentence and escape in 1919 and the 1922 murder of Walther Rathenau. This reinforced his conviction that Germany would be condemned to fascism and determined his decision to leave Europe. Some historians call this crime the beginning of the Holocaust, and it is interesting that Genius, the recent television series about Einstein, begins with the assassination of Rathenau, who was a friend of the physicist.
The murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 was also important. The idea that hit men of a totalitarian regime could reach Mexico must have reinforced his decision to maintain his anonymity and spend most of his time in Chiapas and Acapulco, far from the German expatriate community, infiltrated by Nazis, in Mexico City. The premature death of Esperanza López Mateos in 1951 also had a strong impact.
The stormy years place the last years of Traven’s life with Chelena Luján, Rosa Elena and Malú Montes de Oca Luján from 1957 to 1969 on the Calle Mississippi in stark contrast: the calm after the storm. He could focus on publicizing his work (the BTNews and Traven newsletters BT Mitteilungen ), including returning to Germany for the first time for the premiere in 1959 of the film version of Das Totenschiff . He could turn his works into films, getting involved in every detail, returning to the beginning of his career as an actor and director of the Rhineland. Through his life and work, he had resolved his ambivalences (illegitimacy-identity, Jewish-non-Jewish, German-Mexican, individual-family, politics-literature) and could die happy.
Ironically, after the extraordinary entrepreneurial success of his father Emil Rathenau and the political success of his half-brother Walther Rathenau, the longest living and most famous member of the family (through his extraordinary life and work) was Moritz Rathenau, B. Traven. Traven is also probably the only member of the Bavarian Räterepublik to have survived to old age. Both achievements were the result of his ability to convert anonymity into an art form. Traven’s triumph.
Timothy Heyman is co-manager of the B. Traven Estate with his wife Malú Montes de Oca Luján de Heyman, stepdaughter of B. Traven. He has degrees from Oxford (in Greek and Roman language, literature, philosophy and history, with a specialization in indo-european philology) and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in Management, with a specialization in finance and information technology). In 2013 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire(CBE) for his contributions to philanthropic and financial relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico.
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Podcast
Marfa Mondays Podcast #22, an interview with Bill Smith in Sanderson, Cactus Capital of Texas, is alllllllllllmost ready. I’m working at a snail’s pace this summer, transcribing notes on my wanderings around the Permian Basin. Meanwhile, listen in anytime to the 21 other Marfa Mondays podcasts here.
Blog Posts
Selected Madam Mayo posts since the previous newsletter:
Women Writing the West doing a Real World thing back in the time of BC (before corona)…. sigh… Note my book of poetry, Meteor, second row back from front, far left. Book PR…. WAHHHH
Originally to be held this October in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the annual Women Writing the West conference has gone virtual. As originally scheduled, but now via Zoom, I’ll be teaching a break-out workshop on powerful yet often overlooked poetic techniques for novelists and writers of creative nonfiction.
Saturday, October 17, 2020 9:10-10:10 8:00 – 9:00 AM (Colorado time) POETIC TECHNIQUES TO POWER UP YOUR FICTION & NONFICTION C.M. MAYO
For writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction (whether biography, nature writing, or memoir), award-winning poet and writer C.M. Mayo’s workshop gives you a toolkit of specific poetic techniques you can apply immediately to make your writing more vivid and engaging for your readers.
Using handouts, first we’ll cover specificity with reference to the senses, a technique, basic as it may be, that many writers tend to underutilize. Then, in supersonic fashion, we’ll zoom over alliteration; use of imagery; repetition; listing; diction drops and spikes; synesthesia; and crucially, how to work with rhythm and sound to reinforce meaning.
The goal is for your writing to take an immediate step up.
P.S. You can find my book of poetry, Meteor, on amazon.com, et al.
For those of you writerly readers who happen to be translators, or who might fancy to dip a toe in such waters, there’s still time to register for the conference, if you feel so moved. I can tell you that I have always found the ALTA conferences well worthwhile– old friends, new friends, everyone is friendly and encouraging, there are magazine and book editors, scads of thought-provoking panels, and readings galore of translations from an untold number of languages. (My own thing is Spanish, always amply represented in ALTA.) The most fun of all is the traditional “Declamation,” at the end. Thanks to the covid, rather than meeting for a weekend in Tucson, Arizona, this will be ALTA’s first ever virtual conference, spread out over three weeks. You can view the conference schedule here.
Lady Evelyn Gray is just one of the many, many richly illustrated posts on the history of figure skating over at Ryan Stevens’ excellent Skate Blog. Tip of the sombrero to A. for this link.
“Viktor Schauberger: Comprehend and Copy Nature,” a documentary film.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of B. Traven’s best-known novels. It was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
The postcard from the B. Traven conference in the Mexican Embassy in Berlin. My translation: “It is not I who am important, but my work.”Reverse side of the postcard with schedule and participants.
Herewith, a few more photos:
Susana Garduño, director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Germany, interviews B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman.
Tim Heyman, co-director with his wife Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman of the B. Traven Estate, delivers his keynote speech about B. Traven’s origins.
Third from left is Adriana Haro-Luviano de Rall, UNAM-Alemania; second from right is Andreas Rosenfelder, Chief Cultural Editor, Welt.
The following day another conference was held in Brecht-Haus (the former home of Berthold Brecht) in East Berlin.
As I was leaving Berlin, a friend gave me a copy of this beautiful and unusual and highly detailed German language graphic biography of B. Traven, Portrait eines Beruhmten Unbekannten (Portrait of a Famous Unknown):
Something I happened upon a ways south of Berlin thereafter. My translati0n: “Reality is for those who cannot abide their dreams.”
My esteemed amigo Bruce Berger’sA Desert Harvest, just out from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, is sublime– and wickedly funny. Stay tuned for a Q & A.
Highly recommended also by my writing assistant. He claims this book tastes cactusy.
The brilliant Patricia Dubrava has translated the also brilliant Agustín Cadena’s flash fiction “Black Magic” in Lunch Ticket.
The Kindle edition of Mikel Miller’s mind-boogie anthology of English-language writing about Mexico (which includes something of mine), Mexico: Sunlight and Shadows, is on-sale for a ridiculous 99 cents.
Writerly Tools Nerd Alert: Moose Designs is Kickstarting their second iteration of the private workstation bag. If you have to work on your laptop on a crowded plane or train, this is a sanity-saver. (I have no relationship with Moose Designs; I am simply a delighted customer– I have their first version of the workstation bag. More about writerly tools here and here and here.)
Grace Cavalieri included my book Meteor in her review of poetry for Washington Independent Books: July 2019 Exemplars.
“Especially memorable in this candid energetic book is a sequence of poems (Section ll) ‘Davy & Me.’ They capture the mysterious rapture of comradeship that’s seldom been described better.”
Fave German Lesson, German with Jenny and Snoopy and Minou:
B. Traven, the naturalized Mexican who wrote in German and English, was an internationally best-selling novelist many of whose works were made into into movies, most famously The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. In Mexico he remains immensely respected: recently, decades after his death, his life and works were celebrated with a splashy, crowd-pleasing show at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. But who was B. Traven? Where did he come from? Why, really, did he come to Mexico? And why was he so reclusive, and so fond of pseudonyms?
Many a member of the literary cognoscenti will tell you that the B. stood for Bruno. Not so. Ret Marut? Not so. Was he Prussian, Bavarian, Norwegian, American? Any number of claims and theories have been put forth over the years, one or more of which you can ever and always find, depending on who last logged in to edit that Maoist mashup otherwise known as Wikipedia.
In this month’s Letras Libres, 50 years after his death in Mexico City, B. Traven’s true identity has been revealed, and this time by someone whose closeness to the subject and research are flat-out impossible to beat: Timothy Heyman, who together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, administers Traven’s literary estate.
Because Traven had wanted it this way, after he died in Mexico City in 1969, his widow claimed that he was the German actor and journalist Ret Marut. But in fact Ret Marut was only another disguise.
Traven’s close friend the cinematographer Gabriel Figuera once claimed Traven was Moritz Rathenau, but for Traven’s biographers, that bit of intelligence seems to have been either overlooked or treated as nothing more than a wisp of a rumor among others. However, Timothy Heyman reveals, B. Traven / Ret Marut was Moritz Rathenau. And more: Moritz Rathenau was the illegitimate son of none other than Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), one of Germany’s richest Jewish industrialists, founder of AEG. His mother was Irish actress Helen Mareck. For his political activities in the violent tumult of post World War I Germany, as Ret Marut, he was condemned to death in 1919, and escaped to remain undercover in Germany. In 1922 his half-brother Walther Rathenau, then Minister of Foreign Relations, was assassinated by an extreme rightwing antisemitic group– an event some historians identify as the beginning of the Holocaust. The following year, as “B. Traven,”– B. for “Plan B”–Moritz Rathenau escaped what would in another decade become Nazi Germany, and– long story short– he lived a long life as an international literary star in wildly productive seclusion in Mexico.
Timothy Heyman’s article with all the details appears in the current issue of Mexico’s most prestigious magazine, Letras Libres.
