B. Traven sent his works, himself or through his representatives, for publication from Mexico to Europe by post and gave a Mexican post office box as his return address. The copyright holder named in his books was "B. Traven, Tamaulipas, Mexico". Neither the European nor the American publishers of the writer ever met him personally, or at least the people with whom they negotiated the publication and later also the filming of his books always maintained they were only Traven's literary agents, the identity of the writer himself was to be kept secret. This reluctance to give any information about his life was explained by B. Traven in the words which were to become one of his best-known quotations:
The creative person should have no other biography than his works.
Although the popularity of the writer was still rising (the German Brockhaus Enzyklopädie devoted him an article as early as 1934, B. Traven remained a mysterious figure. Literary critics, journalists and others were trying to discover the author's identity and were proposing more or less credible, sometimes fantastic hypotheses.
Ret Marut hypothesis
The author of the first hypothesis concerning B. Traven's identity was the German journalist, writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam, who conjectured that the person who hides behind the pseudonym was the former actor and journalist Ret Marut. Marut, whose date and place of birth are unknown, performed on stage in Essen, Suhl, Crimmitschau, Berlin, Danzig and Düsseldorf before the First World War; from time to time, he also directed plays and wrote articles on theatre subjects. After the outbreak of the war, in 1915, he declared to the German authorities that he was an American citizen. He also became politically engaged: in 1917 he started to publish the periodical
Der Ziegelbrenner (
The Brick Burner) with a clearly anarchistic profile (its last issue appeared in 1921). After the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich in 1917, Ret Marut declared his support for the new authorities and was appointed director of the press division of the Central Council of the Soviet Republic and member of the Soviet Government propaganda committee. It was then in Munich that he met Erich Mühsam, who became his friend. Later, when B. Traven's first novels appeared, Mühsam compared their style and content with Marut's works which were known to him and came to the conclusion that they must have been written by one and the same person. Ret Marut himself was arrested after the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic on 1st May 1919 and sentenced to death but managed to escape from prison and avoid execution, later he vanished into the blue. If B. Traven is identical with Ret Marut, these events may explain why the writer always claimed to be American and denied any connections with Germany — in the German Reich, a warrant was out for Ret Marut's arrest since 1919.
Rolf Recknagel, an East German literary scholar, came to very similar conclusions as Erich Mühsam after the Second World War. In 1966, he published his Traven's biography, in which he claimed that the books signed with pen name B. Traven (including the post-war ones) had been written by Ret Marut. At present, this hypothesis is accepted by many "Travenologists".
Otto Feige hypothesis
The Ret Marut hypothesis did not explain how the former actor and anarchist got to Mexico; it did not provide any information about his early life either. In the late 1970s, two BBC journalists, Will Wyatt and Robert Robinson, decided to investigate this matter. The results of their research were published in a documentary broadcast by the BBC on 19 December 1978 and in Wyatt's book
The Secret of the Sierra Madre, which appeared in 1980. The journalists got access to Ret Marut's files in the United States Department of State and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where they discovered that Marut was trying to get from Europe via Britain to Canada in 1923, but was turned back from that country and was finally arrested and imprisoned as a foreigner without a residence permit in Brixton Prison, London on 30 November 1923. Interrogated by the British police, Marut testified that his real name was Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige and that he had been born in Schwiebus in Germany (modern day ?wiebodzin in Poland) on 23 February 1882.
Wyatt and Robinson did research in the Polish archives and confirmed the authenticity of these facts: both the date and place of birth and the Christian names of Feige's parents agreed with Marut's testimony. What is more, Otto Feige's father was a potter, which would correspond with the title of the periodical "Der Ziegelbrenner" ("The Brick Burner") published by Marut. The British journalists also found out that after his apprenticeship and National Service in the German army around 1904/1905 Otto Feige disappeared leaving no trace of himself.
Ret Marut stayed in Brixton prison till 15 February 1924. After his release in the spring of 1924, he went to the US consulate in London and asked for confirmation of his American citizenship. He claimed that he had been born in San Francisco in 1882, signed on a ship when he was ten and had been travelling around the world since then, but now wanted to settle down and get his life in order. Incidentally, Marut had also applied for US citizenship earlier, when he lived in Germany. He filed altogether three applications at that time, claiming that he had been born San Francisco on 25 February 1882 to parents William Marut and Helena Marut née Ottarent. Naturally, the consulate officials did not take this story seriously, especially as they also received the other version of Marut's biography from the London police, that about his birth in Schwiebus, which he had presented during the interrogation. In the opinion of Wyatt and Robinson, the version presented by Marut to the police is true — B. Traven was born as Otto Feige in Schwiebus (modern day ?wiebodzin) and only later changed his name to Ret Marut.
The hypothesis that B. Traven is identical with Ret Marut and Otto Feige is accepted by many scholars, but it is also often rejected as improbable. Tapio Helen points out that the adoption of such a version of the writer's biography would be very difficult to reconcile with many Americanisms present in his works and the general spirit of American culture pervading them — these must be proof of at least a long life of the writer in the American environment, which was not the case in Feige's or Marut's biography. On the other hand, if Marut was not identical with Otto Feige, it is difficult to explain how he knew the details of his birth so well, including his mother's maiden name.
The Otto Feige hypothesis was also rejected by Karl S. Guthke, who believed that Marut's version about his birth in San Francisco was nearer the truth even though Guthke agreed with the opinion that Marut fantasized in his biography to some extent..
Arrival in Mexico
After his release from the London prison, Ret Marut supposedly got from Europe to Mexico. The circumstances of this journey are not clear either. According to Rosa Elena Luján, the widow of Hal Croves, who is identified with B. Traven by many scholars (see below), her husband signed on a "death ship" after his release from prison and sailed to Norway, from there on board another "death ship" to Africa and, finally, on board a Dutch ship, reached Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 1924. He allegedly utilized his experiences from these voyages later in the novel
The Death Ship. These allegations are partly supported by documents. Marut's name is on the list of the crew members of the Norwegian ship Hegre, which sailed from London to the Canary Islands on 19 April 1924; the name is, however, crossed out on this list, which could imply that Marut did not take part in the voyage in the end.
In the early 1920s, Mexico was a place where many American
wobblies with extreme left views sought shelter; they also moved to this country fleeing conscription when the United States joined the First World War in 1917. One of the leading activists in these circles was Linn A.A. Gale. As early as 1917, when he still lived in New York City, he started publishing the periodical
GALE's International Monthly for Revolutionary Communism, which began appearing again in Mexico City in October 1918. In 1918, the Mexican section of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Industrial Workers of the World was also established. This was certainly a favourable environment for an anarchist and fugitive from Europe, and Gale's name could have been the inspiration for the literary figure of Gerald Gale, the hero of many novels by B. Traven, including
The Cotton Pickers (first published as
Der Wobbly) and
The Death Ship. From Traven's preserved notes, it appears that he also had to work in difficult conditions as a day labourer on cotton plantations and oil fields.
However, these are only conjectures. It is not known for sure whether it was Ret Marut who, having arrived in Mexico (if he got there at all), assumed the pen name B. Traven, under which he started publishing his books. Tapio Helen points at the enormous contrast between the previous life experience of Marut, a coffeehouse intellectual from Central Europe, and the content of his novels and short stories, characterized by their in-depth knowledge of Mexican and Indian cultures, seafaring themes, problems of itinerant workers, political agitators and social activists of all descriptions, pervaded with many Americanisms and a thorough knowledge of American culture to boot.
A solution to this riddle was proposed by the Swiss researcher Max Schmid, who put forward the so-called
Erlebnisträger ("experience carrier") hypothesis in a series of eight articles published in the Zurich daily
Tages-Anzeiger at the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964. According to this hypothesis (which was published by Schmid under the pseudonym Gerard Gale, being the surname of one of the main heroes in B. Traven's novels), Marut arrived from Europe to Mexico around 1922/1923 and met an American tramp (someone who was similar to Gerard Gale) who wrote stories about his experiences. Marut obtained these manuscripts from him (probably by trickery), translated them into German, added some elements of his own anarchist views and sent them, pretending that they were his own, to the German publisher.
Schmid's hypothesis has both its adherents and opponents, at present its verification seems to be impossible. Anyway, B. Traven's (Ret Marut's) life in Mexico was as mysterious as his fate in Europe.
Traven Torsvan hypothesis
Most researchers identify B. Traven with the person named Berick Traven Torsvan, who lived in Mexico at least since 1924. It is known that he rented a wooden house north of Tampico in 1924, where he often stayed and worked till 1931. Later, since 1930, he lived for 20 years in a house with a small restaurant on the outskirts of Acapulco, from which he set off on his travels to Mexico. As early as 1926, Torsvan took part as a photographer in an archeological expedition to the state of Chiapas led by Enrique Juan Palacios; one of the few photographs showing probably B. Traven, wearing a pith helmet, which is reproduced at the beginning of this article, was taken during that expedition. He also travelled to Chiapas as well as to other regions of Mexico later, probably gathering materials for his books. He showed a lively interest in Mexican culture and history, taking part in summer courses of the Spanish and Mayan languages, history of Latin American literature and history of Mexico at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the years 1927 and 1928.
In 1930 Torsvan received a foreigner's identification card as the North American engineer Traven Torsvan (in many sources, there also appears another first name of his: Berick or Berwick). It is known that B. Traven himself always claimed to be American. In 1933, the writer sent the English manuscripts of his three novels —
The Death Ship,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and
The Bridge in the Jungle — to the New York City publishing house Alfred A. Knopf for publication, claiming that these were the original versions of the novels and that the earlier published German versions were only their translations.
The Death Ship was published by Knopf in 1934, it was soon followed by other Traven's books which appeared in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, the comparison of the German and English versions of these books shows significant differences between them. The English texts are usually longer, in both versions there are also fragments which are missing in the other language. The problem is made even more obscure by the fact that Traven's books published in English are full of Germanisms whereas those published in German full of Anglicisms.
B. Traven's works also enjoyed a soaring popularity in Mexico itself. The person who contributed to this was Esperanza López Mateos, the sister of Adolfo López Mateos, the later President of Mexico, who translated eight books by Traven into Spanish since 1941 and in subsequent years was his representative in contacts with publishers and the real owner of the copyright — she was to take care of it to transfer it later to his brothers.
The filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Hal Croves hypothesis
The commercial success of the novel
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, whose English edition was published by Knopf in 1935, induced the Hollywood Warner Bros. company to buy the film rights of the book in 1941. The company intended to entrust the director John Huston with its filming; however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused an interruption in the work on the film, which was renewed already after the war.
In 1946, Huston arranged to meet B. Traven at the Bamer hotel in Mexico City to discuss the details of the filming. However, instead of the writer, an unknown man turned up at the hotel and introduced himself as Hal Croves, a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio, and showed an alleged power of attorney from B. Traven, in which the writer authorized him to decide on everything in connection with the filming of the novel on his behalf. Croves, instead of the writer, was also present at the next meeting in Acapulco and later, as a technical advisor, all the time on location during the shooting of the film in Mexico in 1947. As early as then, this mysterious behaviour of the writer and his alleged agent made a great number of the crew members believe that Hal Croves was B. Traven himself in disguise. When the film became a big box office success after its premiere on 23 January 1948 and later won three Academy Awards, a real Traven fever broke out in the United States. This excitement was partly fuelled by the producer Warner Bros. itself; American newspapers wrote at length about a mysterious author who took part incognito in the filming of the film based on his own book.
Many biographers of B. Traven repeat the thesis that the director John Huston was also convinced that Hal Croves was B. Traven. This statement is not true. Huston denied identifying Hal Croves with Traven as early as 1948. Huston also brought the matter up in his autobiography, published in 1980, where he wrote that he had been considering first that Croves might be Traven, but after an observation of his behaviour he had come to the conclusion that this was not the case. However, according to Huston, Hal Croves played a double game during the shooting of
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Asked by the crew members if he was Traven, he always denied, but he did so in such a way that his interlocutors came to the conclusion that he and B. Traven were one and the same person.
The "exposure" and vanishing of Torsvan
The media publicity which accompanied the premiere of
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the aura of mystery surrounding the author of the literary original of the film (rumour had it that the
Life magazine set a reward of 5,000 dollar for finding the real B. Traven) induced a Mexican journalist named Luis Spota to try to find Hal Croves, who disappeared after the end of the shooting of the film in the summer of 1947. Thanks to information obtained from the Bank of Mexico, in July 1948, Spota found a man who lived under the name of Traven Torsvan near Acapulco. He formally ran an inn there; however, his shabby joint did not have many customers; Torsvan himself was a recluse, called
El Gringo by his neighbours, which would confirm his American nationality. Investigating in official archives, Spota discovered that Torsvan had received a foreigner's identification card in Mexico in 1930 and a Mexican ID card in 1942; in both documents the date and place of birth was 5 March 1890 in Chicago. According to official records, Torsvan arrived in Mexico from the United States, crossing the border in Ciudad Juárez in 1914. Using partly dishonest methods (Spota bribed the postman who livered letters to Torsvan), the journalist found out that Torsvan received royalties to the name of B. Traven from Josef Wieder in Zurich; on his desk, he also found a book package from the American writer Upton Sinclair, which was addressed to B. Traven c/o Esperanza López Mateos. When Spota asked Torsvan directly whether he, Hal Croves and B. Traven are one and the same person, he denied this angrily; however, in the opinion of the journalist, he got confused in his explanations and finally admitted indirectly being the writer.
Spota published the results of his investigations in a long article in the newspaper
Mañana on 7 August 1948. In reply to this, Torsvan published a denial in the newspaper
Hoy on 14 August. Soon after that, Torsvan disappeared, like Hal Croves earlier. The only information about him from later years was that he received Mexican citizenship on 3 September 1951.
B. Traven's agents. BT-Mitteilungen
The already mentioned Esperanza López Mateos had been cooperating with B. Traven at least since 1941 when she translated his first novel
The Bridge in the Jungle into Spanish (later she also translated seven other novels of his). Esperanza, the sister of Adolfo López Mateos, the later President of Mexico, played an increasingly important role in Traven's life. For example, in 1947, she went to Europe to represent him in contacts with his publishers; finally, in 1948, her name (along with Josef Wieder from Zurich) first appeared as the copyright holder in his books. Josef Wieder, as an employee of the Büchergilde Gutenberg book club, had already been cooperating with the writer since 1933. In that year, the Berlin based book club Büchergilde Gutenberg, which had been publishing Traven's books so far, was closed by the Nazis after Adolf Hitler took power. Traven's books were forbidden in Nazi Germany between 1933-1945, and the author transferred the publication rights to the branch of Büchergilde in Zurich, Switzerland, where the publishers also emigrated. In 1939, the author decided to end his cooperation with Büchergilde Gutenberg; since then, his representative was Josef Wieder, a former employee of the book club, who, however, never met the writer personally. Esperanza López Mateos died, committing suicide, in 1951; her successor was Rosa Elena Luján, Hal Croves' future wife.
In January 1951, Josef Wieder and Esperanza López Mateos, and after her death Rosa Elena Luján, started publishing hectographically the periodical
BT-Mitteilungen (meaning in free translation
Announcements about B. Traven's Life), which promoted Traven's books and appeared till Wieder's death in 1960. According to Tapio Helen, the periodical used partly vulgar methods, often publishing obvious falsehoods, for example about the reward set by the
Life magazine when it was already known that the reward was only a marketing trick. In June 1952,
BT-Mitteilungen published Traven's "genuine" biography, in which it claimed that the writer had been born in the Midwestern United States to an immigrant family from Scandinavia, that he had never gone to school, had had to make his living since he was seven and had come to Mexico as a ship boy on board a Dutch steamer when he was ten. The editors also repeated the thesis that B. Traven's books were originally written in English and only later translated into German by a Swiss translator.
The return of Hal Croves
In the meantime, Hal Croves, who temporarily disappeared after shooting the film
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, appeared on the literary scene in Acapulco again. He acted as a writer and the alleged representative of B. Traven, on behalf of whom he negotiated the publication and filming of his books with publishers and film producers. Rosa Elena Luján became Croves' secretary in 1952, both got married in San Antonio, Texas, on 16 May 1957. After the wedding, they moved to Mexico City, where they ran the Literary Agency R.E. Luján. Following Josef Wieder's death in 1960, Rosa was the only copyright holder for Traven's books.
In October 1959, Hal Croves and Rosa Elena Luján visited Germany to take part in the premiere of the film
The Death Ship based on Traven's novel. During the visit reporters tried to induce Croves to admit being Traven, but in vain. Such attempts ended without success also in the 1960s. Many journalists tried to get to Croves' home in Mexico City; but only very few were admitted to him by Rosa, who guarded the privacy of her already very aged, half blind and half deaf husband; the articles and interviews with Croves always had to be authorized by his wife. Asked by journalists if he was Traven, Croves always denied or answered evasively, repeating Traven's sentence from the 1920s that the work and not the man should count.
Hal Croves' death. The riddle solved?
Hal Croves died in Mexico City on 26 March 1969. On the same day, his wife announced at a press conference that her husband's real name was Traven Torsvan Croves, that he had been born in Chicago on 3 May 1890 of the Norwegian father Burton Torsvan and mother Dorothy Croves of Anglos-Saxon descent and the had also been using the pseudonyms B. Traven and Hal Croves in his life. She read this information from her husband's will, which had been drawn up by him three weeks before his death (on 4 March). Traven Torsvan Croves was also the name on the writer's official death certificate; his ashes, following cremation, were scattered from an airplane above the jungle of the Chiapas state.
This seemed the final solution to the riddle of the writer's biography — B. Traven turned out, as he always claimed himself, to be an American, not the German Ret Marut. However, the solution was only seeming. Some time after Croves' death, his widow gave another press announcement in which she claimed that her husband had authorized her to reveal the whole truth about his life, also the facts that he had left unsaid in his will. The journalists heard that Croves had also been a German revolutionary named Ret Marut in his youth, which reconciled both the adherents of the theory of the Americanness and the proponents of the hypothesis about the Germanness of the writer. Rosa Elena Luján gave more information about these facts in her interview for the
International Herald Tribune on 8 April 1969, where she claimed that her husband's parents had emigrated from the United States to Germany some time after their son's birth. In Germany, her husband published the successful novel
The Death Ship, following which he went to Mexico for the first time, but returned to Germany to edit an anti-war magazine in the country "threatened by the emerging Nazi movement". He was sentenced to death, but managed to escape and went to Mexico again. This interview raises serious doubts first of all because of mixed chronology —
The Death Ship first appeared in 1926, not before the First World War.
On the other hand, the hypothesis of B. Traven's Germanness seems to be confirmed by Hal Croves' extensive archive, to which his widow granted access to researchers sporadically until her death in 2009. Rolf Recknagel conducted his research in it in 1976, and Karl Guthke in 1982. These materials contain, among other documents, train tickets and banknotes from different East-Central European countries, possibly keepsakes Ret Marut retained after his escape from Germany after the failed revolution in Bavaria in 1919. A very interesting document is a small notebook with entries in the English language. The first entry is from 11 July 1924, and on 26 July the following significant sentence appeared in the notebook: "The Bavarian of Munich is dead". The writer might have started this diary on his arrival in Mexico from Europe, and the above note could have expressed his willingness to cut himself from his European past and start a new existence as B. Traven.
Other hypotheses
The above hypotheses, identifying B. Traven with Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, Ret Marut and possibly Otto Feige, are not the only ones concerning the writer's identity which have been appearing since the mid 1920s. Some of them are relatively well-founded; others are quite fantastic and incredible. Some of the most common hypotheses, apart from the already mentioned, are presented below:
- B. Traven was German; however, he did not come from Schwiebus but from northern Germany, the region between Hamburg and Lübeck. It is possible to conclude this on the basis of a preserved cassette, recorded by his stepdaughter Malú Montes de Oca (Rosa Luján's daughter), on which he sings two songs in Low German, a dialect of the German language, with some language features which are typical of this region. Torsvan is a relatively common name in this area, through which also the River Trave runs. In the neighbourhood there are also such places as Traventhal, Travenhorst and Travemünde (Lübeck's borough) — big ferry harbour on the Baltic Sea.
- B. Traven was an illegitimate son the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Such a hypothesis was presented by Gerd Heidemann, a reporter from Stern magazine, who claimed that he had obtained this information from Rosa Luján, Hal Croves' wife. Later, however, the journalist distanced himself from this hypothesis. Heidemann himself compromised himself through his complicity in the falsification of Hitler's diaries in the 1980s.
- B. Traven was, in fact, the American writer Jack London, who only faked his suicide and then moved to Mexico and continued writing his books.
- B. Traven was the pseudonym of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who went to Mexico in 1913 to take part in the Mexican Revolution and disappeared there without a trace.
- B. Traven was the pseudonym of Adolfo López Mateos, the President of Mexico in the years 1958-1964. The source of this rumour was probably the fact that Esperanza López Mateos, Adolfo's sister, was Traven's representative in his contacts with publishers and a translator of his books into Spanish. Some even claimed that the books published under the pen name B. Traven were written by Esperanza herself.
- The pseudonym B. Traven was used by August Bibelje, a former customs officer from Hamburg, gold prospector and adventurer. This hypothesis was also presented — and rejected — by the journalist Gerd Heidemann. According to Heidemann, Ret Marut met Bibelje after his arrival in Mexico and used his experiences in such novels as The Cotton Pickers, The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, Bibelje himself returned to Europe later and died during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
