Villa Shatterhand
His house with its furniture, library and study.
Villa_Shatterhand.jpg: --Immanuel Giel 10:42, 22 September 2005 (UTC) derivative work: Regi51 (talk) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Jbergner — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Erich Braun — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jbergner — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because his effect on the German imagination of the non-European world was enormous: successive generations first read about the American West and the Arab and Ottoman East in his books. His Oriental series in particular moves through Egypt, the Levant, Kurdistan and Arabia, written from library sources with wide imagination and many errors. A visit explains how whole stereotypes about our regions took shape in European popular culture.
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Karl May is by some distance Germany's best-selling author — more than two hundred million copies of his novels have sold — and this is his house at Radebeul north-west of Dresden, where he lived his last years until his death in 1912. It is now two museums in one garden. The curious thing about him is that he wrote most of his adventures without visiting where they were set: the American West novels with Winnetou the Apache chief and Old Shatterhand, and an Oriental series ranging across the desert, the Levant and the Ottoman Empire, were all composed from maps and books in the study of this house. He did not travel to America until his final years, and went east only once, in 1899. The museum has two parts: Villa Shatterhand, his own house with its furniture, library and writing room, and Villa Bärenfett, a log cabin in the garden holding a large ethnographic collection on Native American peoples assembled by Patty Frank. Access from Dresden is about twenty minutes by S-Bahn and a short walk.
His house with its furniture, library and study.
A log cabin holding a Native American collection.
Karl-May-Strasse 5, 01445 Radebeul