'' daily, in which B. Traven's first short story and his first novel were published (front page of the first issue of the newspaper from 1876) 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 Gerald Gales (in Traven's other works his name is Gerald Gale or 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. An anarchist element of rebellion often lies at the centre of the novel's action. The hero's rejection of his degrading living conditions frequently serves as motive, and broad emphasis is placed upon the efforts of the oppressed to liberate themselves. Apart from that, there are virtually no political programmes in Traven's books; his clearest manifesto may be the general anarchist demand "
¡Tierra y Libertad!" in the Jungle Novels. Professional politicians, including ones who sympathize with the left, are usually shown in a negative light, if shown at all. Despite this, Traven's books are
par excellence political works. Although the author does not offer any positive programme, he always indicates the cause of suffering of his heroes. This source of suffering, deprivation, poverty and death is for him capitalism, personified in the deliberations of the hero of
The Death Ship as
Caesar Augustus Capitalismus. In his presentation of oppression and exploitation, Traven did not limit himself to the criticism of capitalism; in the centre of his interest there were racist persecutions of Mexican Indians. These motifs, mainly visible in the Jungle Novels, were unusual in the 1930s. Most leftist intellectuals, despite their negative attitude to European and
American imperialism, did not know about or were not interested in persecution of natives in Africa, Asia or South America. It has been argued that Traven deserves credit for drawing public attention to these questions, long before
anti-colonial movements and
civil rights movement in the United States. == Identity ==