The entire so-called "Karl-May-persecution" has been constructed based on lies. The first one of these lies is, that I was an author for the youth and had written my traveller's tales for immature, young people. Most of these tales have been published by the "Deutscher Hausschatz", which as surely never been a magazine for boys. And every honest eye will instantly see, when glancing at the volumes which were published later, that they can only be understood my mentally grown-up persons. With this, all accusations of me allegedly "corrupting the youth" lose their basis. The fact that, nevertheless, young people are reading my books and even enjoy them very much, still would not prove that I had targeted them at them, but rather that a youthful soul is finding in them, what others are depriving it of. A second lie is that I was fibbing in these traveller's tales of mine. Whoever says so surely does not even suspect what a bad testimony he is giving to his own intelligence. After all, it only takes the analytic powers of an eighth-grader to realize that all of my narratives only have their roots in real live, but otherwise extend upwards into regions which are not so commonplace. Every reader who understands me knows that I describe countries and peoples which, up to this day, exist almost exclusively in fairy-tales, but have to move, by and by, into the realm of absolute reality for us. When I envision and describe as reality what is still a fairy-tale to others, only for ignorant or malicious people, this can be a reason to maintain that I was fibbing. In the past, nobody would have thought of judging me in this insulting manner. Whoever had not understood me would not have said more than that I had a very extensive imagination. Only after the biggest of all lies which exist about me had been spread, this is the lie that I had written "abysmally indecent trashy novels", they dared to talk to me in such a tone. This untrue statement has its source with a bookseller of colportage, who had an interest in spreading it around, in order to make as much money as possible by exploiting my name. In the person of Mr. Cardauns, who used to be the editor in chief of the newspaper called "Kölnische Volkszeitung" at that time, this lie found the man who, by means of his publications, did more than much to further its distribution and even took it on himself to produce "evidence" that the indecencies in question could be the product of nobody else's but my pen. Quite naturally, the true, irrefutable proof would only have been possible by presenting the original manuscripts, I had written. All other evidence could only be based on intentional deception or self-delusion and finally had come out as a bombastic illusion.