B. Traven - The Mystery of B. Traven's Biography

The Mystery of B. Traven's Biography

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.

The non-vanity and non-ambition claimed by Traven was no humble gesture, Jan-Christoph Hauschild writes: "By deleting his former names Feige and Marut, he extinguished his hitherto existences and created a new one, including a suitable story of personal descent. Traven knew that values like credibility and authenticity were effective criteria in the literary matters he dealt with and that he needed to consider them. Above all, his performance was self-fulfilment, and after that the creation of an artist. Even as Ret Marut he played parts on stage but also in the stalls and in real life, so he equipped and coloured them with adequate and fascinating stories of personal descent till they became a spleeny mixture of self-discovery, self-invention, performance and masquerade. It seems indisputable that Traven’s hide-and-seek manners became progressively obsessive; although we have to consider that self-presentation is irrevocable. This turned into a trap because he was no longer able to expose his true vita without appearing as a show-off."

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.