Özet:

While the popularity of Karl May’s adventure novels and the forum of the Karl-May-Gesellschaft have inspired a wide range of professional and non-professional research on the narratives of this probably most read German writer of the 19th century, scientific approaches to the vaste œuvre of W. O. von Horn (i.e. Friedrich Wilhelm Philipp Oertel, 1798-1867) have mainly focused on the historical and cultural background, less on the literary technique of his writing. But it is only by combining a thorough analysis of an author’s (and readership’s) setting as undertaken by the methods of Cultural Anthropology and the philological sharpness provided by genuine Literary Studies practice that a real understanding of these texts can be achieved. To strengthen the latter aspect will also help to overcome the prejudice claiming that so-called trivial literature does not participate in specific literary discourses and just follows its didactic or entertaining intentions. The following article focuses on novellas whose setting is the South Africa of the 1830s with its prevailing conflict between the British and the Boers. It is this conflict that W. O. von Horn and Karl May exploit in a totally different way: While the vicar of a small Hunsrück town wants to teach his readers a lesson in humanity and tolerance by letting his protagonists undergo exactly the required development, the managing editor of a bourgoise magazine wants to provide kind of an armchair participation in the colonial adventure of the newly founded Kaiserreich.