Tag: Karl May

The Treasure in the Silver Lake

Der Schatz im Silbersee” is a well-known German novel (mainly read by children and young adults) about American Indians, or rather what a German, namely Karl May, thought frontier life in the US was like at the time. He lived in the second part of the 19th century, so for him the stories were contemporary and he wrote as if he had been there, often making himself the protagonist of the stories. He was a proliferate writer, even today he is one of the most read German authors, and very popular movies have been made of his stories with regular reruns on German TV, particularly during Christmas and Easter holidays. The stories also spawned theatre festivals and a whole outdoor theatre where nothing but Karl May stories are staged in summer. The movies were mainly filmed in the Plitvice area of Croatia but the Mummelsee in the Northern Black Forest – wouldn’t that be a poster lake for anything called the Silver Lake?

Water, Water Everywhere

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Treasure of the the Silver Lake

The title is the title of novel by Karl May (Der Schatz im Silbersee) which generations of Germans have read in their youth. It was the first one of a series centering around two main characters, the German born traveller Old Shatterhand and the “noble savage” Winnetou, an Apache chief. When the story was turned into a movie in the early 1960s it was filmed in Yugoslavia, in the area around the Plitvice Lakes. A holiday there is for many Germans a holiday with their childhood fantasies.

Linked to A Photo a Week: Vacation memories.