In the spring of 1926 the fledgling Socialist publishing house Büchergilde Gutenberg in Berlin dramatically enlivened the literary scene by bringing out, within a few weeks of each other, two novels, Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship) and Der Wobbly (The Wobbly) — one about the life of an American sailor aboard a dilapidated freighter destined to be scuttled in an insurance fraud scheme, the other about the adventures of an American hobo in the hinterland of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on the Gulf of Mexico. The name of their author, B. Traven, was unknown, except to readers of the Socialist daily Vorwärts, where, since February 1925, three vignettes of Mexican life and history had been published and the first part of Der Wobbly had been serialized that summer as Die Baumwollpflücker (The Cottonpickers). The author didn't remain unknown for long. Like a bracing breeze from nowhere, the two novels, especially Das Totenschiff, had an immediate and powerful impact far beyond the membership of the trade-union oriented book club that Die Büchergilde served. By the time Traven died in Mexico City in 1969, his books were selling by the millions, in many languages. As early as 1950, American college students could learn intermediate German from a textbook containing parts of Das Totenschiff; from 1971 on, they could study advanced Spanish from a textbook edition of Traven's Macario, and by the end of the century, at least one of Traven's stories, “Assembly Line,” first published in the second edition of Der Busch (The Bush) in 1930 as “Der Großindustrielle,” was required reading in some American high schools, as was Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1929) in some German high schools.