The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.
If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.
The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art.
As discussed extensively in the German context by writers such as H. J. Schulz in German Socialist Literature 1860-1914; in the American context by Barbara Foley in Radical Representations, Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941; and in the Soviet context by Regine Robin in Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, the debates about proletarian literature and, by extension, proletarian culture, are bound by a tension of integration versus revolution. At one extreme, proletarian literature should help workers be upwardly mobile, to become literate, thereby enabling them to take possession of some small part of what they do not yet own: bourgeois art and literature. At the other extreme, proletarian literature is transitional—a necessary part of the proletarian’s way out of capitalism.
Novels popular with the working-class readers were often dime novels or “penny dreadfuls,” easily consumable but saturated with bourgeois ideology. Indeed, Traven’s own novels were often sold in vending machines or kiosks in German train stations. For the writer of revolutionary, or proletarian, novels, the problem was how to strike a balance between entertainment, description of proletarian reality, summation of capitalist totality, and education for proletarians or potential proletarians—that is, either bringing a worker to class consciousness or helping the already class-conscious along the path toward communism or socialism. This aspiration resulted in a number of forms, all of which were borrowed from bourgeois literature and adapted to the above needs. Granville Hicks lists four main types of proletarian novels: the complex novel, the collective novel, the dramatic novel, and the biographical novel. Barbara Foley lists three main types: the proletarian fictional autobiography; the proletarian Bildungsroman; the proletarian social novel; and, overlapping with Granville, the collective novel. Michael Denning, in “The Novelists’ International,” notes the “master plot” of Soviet socialist realism; the production novel, “with its heroic militants”; the strike novel; and the tenement novel, both common outside of the Soviet Union. The collective novel is probably the form most particular to revolutionary or proletarian literature, as it intended to replace the individual hero with a collective protagonist, and thereby depict the fate of an entire class. Büchergilde Gutenberg and the novels of B. Traven—all of them best-selling adventure novels in some form or other— were a significant part of this interwar concern with proletarian culture and literature.
If you think that the adventure genre is an unlikely place to situate the concerns of proletarian culture, it helps to think of the notion of “the frontier.” What we find in Traven’s novels, Der Schatz der Sierra Madre included, is the intersection of capital, labor, and indigeneity. These three terms make up the frontier, which we may rebrand as the “edge zone” of capitalism, from Margaret Cohen’s term in The Novel and the Sea. It is the place where capital, ever mobile and expansionary, draws in labor and confronts native populations. This is the Africa of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is the California of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. And it is the Mexico of all but two of Traven’s novels.
In his early novels, The Cotton Pickers, The Bridge in the Jungle, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s Mexico is seen through the lens of mostly white, male protagonists. These men seem to have no past; they are broke, destitute, homeless, and always on the search for work—the latter of which then structures the narrative of these books. Gales in The Cotton Pickers bounces from cotton picker to oil rig worker, to baker, to cattle driver. He later reappears in The Bridge in the Jungle, hunting alligators hidden deep in the jungle. The two main protagonists of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dobbs and Curtain, find themselves broke in Tampico and, soured by the precarity of oil rig work, decide to team up with an older man, Howard, and go in search of gold. In Traven’s later work, most notably the Mahogany Series, he turns to the plight of what he called the “proletarian Indians”: indigenous men (it is always about men in Traven’s work) coerced into peonage to work in mahogany logging camps, deep in the Lacandon jungle. In both cases, however, Traven recapitulates many of the tropes of the adventure novel and, in the case of the Mahogany Series, the adventure novel’s progeny, the Bildungsroman.
The fates of Traven’s characters are all determined by the socio-economic coordinates of the frontier, and this dynamic is particularly striking in The Cotton Pickers. Gales finds himself among an international and interracial cast of characters: American blacks, Mexican mestizos, indigenous Mexicans, and a variety of Europeans all competing for work at various sites of value extraction in Mexico. It’s worth noting that Gales, as a white man, is discouraged from picking cotton; it is work for the “Indian” or the Blacks. When, having no choice, Gales takes a job doing just that, he is paid more than the non-whites. This, we are given to understand, is how the white owner of the cotton farm reconciles the fact that one of his own race must pick cotton to live. Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.
The issue of translation with Traven’s work is a complicated one. The Death Ship (and perhaps others), for example, was first written in English and then revised by Traven into German. It appeared as Das Totenschiff, Traven’s first published novel, in 1926. In 1934, an English translation by Eric Sutton was published by Chatto & Windus, and later that same year, Traven published his own English language version with Knopf, perhaps revised from his German revision of the original English draft.
By contrast, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was written in German, and was first translated into English by Basil Creighton in 1934. (Creighton also translated into English Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel [Grand Hotel], another instance of popular interwar fiction adapted into a successful film.) But, in 1935, after the Nazis had taken control of Germany and Traven’s books were burned and banned, he turned to America as a potential audience. After signing a contract with Alfred A. Knopf, Traven delivered an English-language edition of Treasure to Bernard Smith—a revision of the German edition. As reported by Edward N. Treverton in his bibliography of Traven’s work, this English manuscript was supposedly so riddled with “German syntax, vocabulary, and literal translations of German idioms” that Smith had to rework about twenty-five percent of it.
Traven’s possible bilingualism—this messy and constant back and forth between German and English editions—has only complicated the question of Traven’s identity, which has been examined ad nauseum elsewhere. Karl Gunthke’s B. Traven, Biographie eines Rätsels, published in English as B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends is probably the most thorough biography. Heidi Zogbaum’s B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico offers a useful consideration of the relation between Traven’s explorations of Mexico and the development of his fiction. Das B. Traven Buch (The B. Traven Book), an anthology, provides a panoply of historical, biographical, and critical material on Mexico, Traven, and his work. In terms of translation, what is most interesting about Traven’s biography and self-mythologizing is that it provokes a consideration of the space in which sentence style, culture, and the adventure form meet.
On the level of the sentence, Traven’s English feels very much like his German: terse, masculine, and wry. Simply put, his German feels like the American English of John Steinbeck, Jack London, Ernest Hemmingway, and, perhaps, Raymond Chandler: shortish and declarative. It is as if these archetypal Americans had adopted a German-speaking child, and this child grew up translating their prose into German. One of the reasons Traven’s German gives off this sensibility, I think, is that his sentences are built like those in American English: subject, verb, object. Word order is much more flexible in German than it is in English; the simple sentence: “Dobbs handed the gold to him,” for example, might be written as: “Ihm reichte Dobbs das Gold,” which would literally translate to “To him handed Dobbs the gold.” This type of sentence, which can feel “backwards” to an English ear, is common in German prose. Kurt Tucholsky, a big fan of Traven’s work, commented wittily that, like his characters, Traven was a victim of his class. The evidence? “This proletarian [Traven] can’t write correct German!” But it’s not that Traven’s German is incorrect; its syntax just doesn’t feel very German.
The English version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre does not differ substantially from its German forebear. There are, however, some minor but notable differences in the English. I offer two examples from Traven’s own edition. The novel opens with the homeless and penniless Dobbs sitting on a bench in Tampico, Mexico.
Just then he was looking for a solution to that age-old problem which makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things. He worked his mind to answer the question: How can I get some money right now?
The German is slightly different:
Die Gedanken, die Dobbs beschäftitgen, waren dieselben, die so vielen Menschen beschäftitgen. Es war die Frage: Wie komme ich zu Geld?
If I were going for a straight translation of Traven’s German, I’d formulate something like: “The thoughts that concerned Dobbs were the same ones that concerned so many people. It was the question: How do I get money?” To my ear the German is more philosophical, whereas the English is more urgent, concrete. It’s the addition of “makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things” and “right now” that gives the English an almost desperate urgency, tying money to a sort of mental oblivion. And there is also the oddly constructed “He worked his mind to answer the question,” which, aside from feeling clunky, depicts mental labor as part of the predicament of being unemployed. Do these differences in the text point to perceived cultural differences between the German reader in 1927 and the American reader in 1935?
A page later, Dobbs is observing the brisk business the bootblacks—all of them natives—are enjoying. Compared to Dobbs, we are told, the bootblacks are capitalists, because they own their means of production. We learn that Dobbs would do just about anything for money, but even if he could afford his own bootblack gear, he could not do it; doing so would cross a racial line that would prevent him from ever being employed by a white again. A white person may beg and humiliate himself before other whites—in fact Dobbs does just that—but he may not shine shoes in the street.
Even if Dobbs had had three pesos to buy the outfit, bookblacking was out, for he could not be a bootblack here among the natives. No white has ever tried to run around her shouting: “Shine, mister?” He would rather die.
This passage is as good a demonstration as any of how Traven constellates capital, labor, and indigeneity in the space of the frontier. Capital has always elaborated upon and perpetrated racial hierarchies, and Traven’s depiction of it isn’t especially provocative. What is striking, however, is the “Shine, mister?” It sounds very much like a black racial stereotype projected onto the indigenous Mexican—and it is absent from the German edition:
Selbst wenn Dobbs die drei Pesos gehabt hätte, Schuputzer hätte er nicht werden können. Nicht hier zwischen den Eingeborenen. Es hat noch nie ein Weißer versucht, Schuhe auf der Straße zu putzen, hier nicht.
The first two sentences are rendered faithfully in the English translation/revision, but the third sentence in the German would read, simply: “No white has ever tried to polish shoes on the street here.” There is no “Shine, mister” and no “He would rather die.” The German passage restricts itself to a concern about existing racial hierarchies and their relation to the question: “How do I get money?” Like all whites, especially of his era, Dobbs is certainly deeply entangled in racist ideas, and indeed there is textual evidence of this in both versions of the novel, but in the German passage above, the reason given for not shining shoes is that it would destroy any chances of getting “white” work, and therefore, we can safely assume, higher paying work, in the future. There is a delicate and established social code that Dobbs must negotiate if he wants to get, and continue getting, money. The English version, by contrast, projects an American racial hierarchy onto the Mexican and dramatizes the white reaction to it. It is unclear whether this racial shift in the English version is Traven’s doing or that of his editor at Knopf, and so it is difficult to speculate on what role Traven’s own biography may have played in such editorial choices. Certainly, a translation can, intentionally or not, manifest whole ideologies of the target language or the target audience.
What I think is most compelling, however, is the subtle way the passage shifts from an interest in social relations constituted by economic value, to an emotional concern regarding the racialized character of those same relations. The result is to reduce Traven’s concern with the way capitalism structures race, which is to say, the way capitalism takes up existing social formulations and structures them according to its needs. The English translation (or revision) not only effaces the priority given to class that permeates Traven’s work, it subordinates it to an uncritical description of anti-Black racism, itself standing in for a perceived anti-indigenous racism.
This tension between race and class, prompted here by a translation, registers a whole tradition of scholarship, from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983), to Vivek Chibber’s recent The Class Matrix (2022). This tension, when taken up by Traven himself, is most pointed in his penultimate work, the Mahogany Series (1931–1937), which depicts indigenous debt peonage in Chiapas and the uprising of indigenous workers in mahogany logging camps, deep in the Lacandon jungle. In depicting an indigenous uprising, Traven had intended to provoke German workers to organize and respond to the rise of fascism, and as such, the series simultaneously depicts the character of indigenous proletarianization and its relation to existing proletarians in a more industrialized country. It links periphery to center by way of labor, and is a good example of how Traven, who considered himself nationless, not only wrote between languages, but between races, cultures, and levels of economic development. What unifies his work, in the end, is a notion of the international proletarian, and the shared desire for revolution.
Josh Todarello is a writer, editor, scholar and, currently, visiting assistant professor of German at Wabash College. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.