Bruno Traven Exhibition

“The creative person should have no other biography than his works.”

“Ordinary people can never fall over the walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the walls.”

“I wonder what goes on night and day beneath the surface of a cemetery.”
― B. Traven, The Death Ship

B. Traven was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), which was adapted for the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 1948.

Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. Most agree that Traven was Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist, who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are many good reasons (see below) to believe that Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin in Poland.

B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism, reflecting the socialist and anarchist sympathies of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship from 1926,The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927 (filmed in 1948 by John Huston), and the so-called "Jungle Novels," also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany).

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