Franz Kandolf

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Franz Kandolf (born November 6, 1886 in Munich ; † June 19, 1949 ibid) was a Catholic clergyman and employee of the Karl May publishing house .

Worked for the Karl May publishing house

Together with the owner of the Karl May publishing house at the time, Euchar Albrecht Schmid , Kandolf carried out some profound adaptations of Karl May's works in order to adapt them to the presumed readers' tastes. These edits (some of which have been reversed in more recent editions) are considered unauthorized by many May readers and researchers and rejected contrary to May's intentions. (Changes with a Catholic-religious or - until 1945 - racist-nationalist tendency are particularly controversial.) The easily readable text versions of Schmid and Kandolf probably contributed to the continued success of May's works.

This also applies to a complete novel that Kandolf contributed to the corpus of May's works. He wrote the continuation of the Karl May novel Am Jenseits (Vol. 25 of the collected works in Karl May Verlag) under the title In Mekka . The work was published in 1923 and is today volume 50 of the collected works in Karl May Verlag. Besides the first two volumes of the travel story Im Reiche des Silber Löwen, Am Jenseits was the only novel in May that left numerous storylines open, and can therefore be regarded as one of his few unfinished novels.

Franz Kandolf then succeeded in answering all open questions satisfactorily. At the same time, he met both the writing style and the tension as well as the atmosphere of the underlying book in his work. The intricate threads of the plot come together in the forbidden city of Mecca for non-Muslims . The well-known fictional characters Kara Ben Nemsi , Hajji Halef Omar , Kara Ben Halef and Omar Ben Sadek bring everything to a good end.

Kandolf intended to complete the work Marah Durimeh , which Karl May had announced in 1896 but never published , but did not get around to it.

literature

  • Volker Krischel: Franz Kandolf's novel "In Mekka". A first approximation . Special issues of the Karl May Society, No. 39, 1983. Text as page scans

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kandolf, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Catholic clergyman and employee of the Karl May publishing house
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1949
Place of death Munich