B. Traven - The Mystery of B. Traven's Biography - B. Traven's Agents & BT-Mitteilungen

B. Traven's Agents & BT-Mitteilungen

Esperanza López Mateos had been cooperating with B. Traven since at least 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, later the 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) appeared as the copyright holder of his books. 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 and 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, or shorter BT-Bulletins), 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 offered by 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 from the age of 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.