As far as the lawsuits and the events which led up to them are concerned, Karl May, of course, cannot be expected to relate them in an objective manner. After he had resigned his job at H.G. Münchmeyer's publishing company in 1877, he wrote for other publishers and got married in 1880. From 1882 on, we find him working for Münchmeyer again, writing those novels which were to become the reason for his first lawsuit. According to Karl May, Münchmeyer was on the verge of bankruptcy and begged May to save him with his gift for writing bestselling novels. But the truth might have been rather different. Karl May admits himself that the other publisher, he had mainly been working for, did not pay him much: "The royalties I received from Pustet were (...) so insignificant that I cannot bring myself to naming the amount." Having to support a wife, one can easily imagine that May was the one who was in need of some cash. Furthermore, I have read elsewhere that Münchmeyer had payed May an advance of 500 marks, a fact which May fails to mention in his autobiography. And then there are Karl May's allegations that Münchmeyer, or rather one of employees, had spiced up those novels with indecent passages. Though it is likely that some abridgment had taken place, the claim that those novels were completely rewritten from morally impeccable stories into immoral trash are surely an exaggeration. For almost twenty years after their original publication, nobody seemed to be offended by these so-called "indecent novels". Only after Münchmeyer's widow had sold the rights to these novels, which she did not even own, and was therefore sued by Karl May, articles started appearing in the newspapers denouncing theses novels as highly immoral. These articles were not just designed to destroy Karl May's reputation and thereby ruin his chances in the pending lawsuits, they also increased the demand for the illegally printed copies of these novels. Perhaps, Karl May saw no other way to escape this trap than to pretend that his novels had been altered, and perhaps, his memory of them had also changed, regarding them as closer to his later works than they really were. At any rate, a proof, one way or the other, would be impossible. The original manuscripts had been destroyed, and those who allegedly rewrote these novels were already dead when the lawsuit started.