On the day, 26 March 1969, the famous reclusive anarchist and working class novelist B Traven died. He is best known for writing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which later became an Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart.
As a young sailor, known as Ret Marut, he took part in the German revolution in 1919, before being sentenced to death and escaping to London. There, he was arrested and interrogated, gave several false names, and tried to seek refuge in the US, claiming to be a US citizen whose documents were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
This was unsuccessful, and he eventually moved to Mexico. There he wrote texts including The Cotton Pickers, about Mexican migrant labourers, and The Death Ship, about a sailor stranded in Europe after World War I, when all of a sudden strict national borders began to be erected. Meanwhile, back in Germany, his books were burned by the Nazis after their takeover, and they declared him a “disgrace to Germany”.
When the film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began shooting, executives asked Traven to be a paid advisor on set. He declined and instead sent his literary agent, Hal Croves, in his stead. It much later transpired that Croves was in fact Traven himself.
Some journalists managed to track him down but he always denied everything, and it was only after his death that researchers managed to piece together who he was. While it is firmly established that he was the same person as Marut, another pseudonym, his true identity is still disputed. The most likely possibility is that he was born Otto Feige in Swiebodzin, now Poland, in 1882.
He is remembered as a great author of working class literature, but he acknowledged the shortcomings of merely writing. While masquerading as Croves, Traven once said: “Life is worth more than any book one can write”.
Sources, more information and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9848/b-traven-dies https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2238333583018446/?type=3
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