The oilprince
The oilprince. An adventure from the United States of North America by Karl May is an early Wild West - story of Karl May .
This story is not a forerunner of the famous youth novel The Oil Prince , but belongs to the series of early adventure stories by Karl May.
Text history
The adventure first appeared in the magazine Frohe Stunden in 1877 . This was the only publication of this version during May's lifetime.
In 1971 the Karl May Society published the volume Frohe Stunden as a private print in the series Erstdrucke Karl Mays in facsimile editions , which also contained a reprint of Der Oelprinz .
In 1978, Manfred Pawlak Verlag Herrsching published the anthology In the Far West as a bound edition. This contains the text under the title The Oil Prince in a modernized version.
The Pawlak volume was reissued in 1983 as a paperback and a licensed edition of the same set in 1992 in the Leipzig commission and wholesale book trade.
In the anthology Powers of Nature published by Hartmut Mechtel . Adventure stories (Verlag Das Neue Berlin 1988) the text also bears the title Der Ölprinz .
In 1982 Siegfried Augustin and Walter Hansen published the Karl May anthology Winnetou and the black stag in the Albrecht Knaus publishing house. This contains the first-person narration under the misleading title The Fire of the Oil Valley . This was soon followed by a licensed edition of the volume for Bertelsmann Lesering (1982) and a paperback edition by Heyne (1984). In 1996 Augustin and Hansen published the Karl May edition of the Nymphenburger Verlag , in the so-called Red Series , the anthology Tödliches Feuer , which in a different order contains the same stories as Winnetou and the black stag .
In the 1990s Weltbild Verlag published the anthology Old Firehand in the Weltbild Collector Edition series . The Winnetou stories , who u. a. contains the text Der Oelprinz in a modernized form.
In 2000 the first print was published again in the reprint volume Frohe Stunden of the Karl May Society.
As part of the Collected Works , the story was published in 2003 in Volume 84 The Bowie Pater .
content
The first-person narrator rides with Sam Hawkens to Young Kanawha, a small river with a petroleum relocation run by Josias Alberts. There they actually meet the “Prince of Oil” Josias Alberts, who gets into an argument with Hawkens and wants to buy the narrator's horse “for reconciliation”. The request is rejected and the shopkeeper then refuses to sell the items he needs for fear of Josias Alberts. Sam Hawkens and the first-person narrator put a “block” around the store and prevent all potential customers from entering. This blockage is maintained into the night.
Then there is an explosion in the oil field and the entire valley is on fire. The first-person narrator pulls a nearby young woman onto his horse and flees with Sam Hawkens at the last minute. They reach the safe heights and discover that they have saved Albert's daughter. He survived the inferno but lost all property.
Old Firehand and The Oil Prince
Although May rewrote a substantial part of the story, he also used motifs from the story Old Firehand (1875) , which is partly set in New Venango. There is a cross reference to it:
- I knew this terrible phenomenon because I had seen it in all its horror in the Venango area [...]
In that earlier published story but is apparently on the Oelprinz referred -Text; there the corresponding place is:
- I knew this terrible phenomenon; because I had seen it in all its horror in Kanawhathale [...]
particularities
- The first-person narrator rides a Mustang named Arrow , which he received as a gift, and has a henry neck. Sam Hawkens has a badly ruffled mare named Mary .
- From 1894 onwards, a considerably modified version of the story appeared in various anthologies under the title Der Brand des Ölthals . During the reworking - in all likelihood by someone else's hand - the first-person narrator became a man named Bill Harry (who has a henry neck!), And the narrative perspective changed to the third person. Otherwise the text has been retained almost verbatim.
- The original version - revised by Karl May himself - became the last part of the longer text Three carde monte .
Audio book
A free audio book version of this text was published by LibriVox in 2010.
Remarks
- ↑ S. Augustin: Introduction . 2000, p. 22.
- ↑ http://www.karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Josias_Alberts
- ↑ http://www.karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/New_Venango
- ↑ Karl May: The Oil Prince. In: Karl Mays Werke , p. 6298 (cf. KMW-I.7-52: 11, p. 174).
- ↑ Karl May: Old Firehand. In: Karl Mays Werke , p. 5995 (cf. KMW-I.7-22: 8, p. 124).
- ↑ http://www.karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Der_Brand_des_Ölthals
- ↑ http://www.karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Bill_Harry
- ↑ http://www.karl-may-wiki.de/index.php/Three_carde_monte
literature
- Rudolf Benda: The original oil brandy. [About a catastrophe that May could have served as a model.] In: Mitteilungen der Karl-May-Gesellschaft No. 31/1977, p. 29 f. ( Online version )
- Siegfried Augustin: Introduction . In: Karl May. Happy hours. Entertainment papers for everyone. Reprint of the Karl May Society , Hamburg 2000, pp. 7–36.
Web links
- The original text online on the Karl May Society website .
- The entry in the book database .
- The audio book at LibriVox .