ARCHIVE
All personal belongings, manuscripts, photographs and their negatives by the author B. Traven, who wrote in different periods of his life under the names of Ret Marut, Hal Croves and Traven Torsvan Croves, also known as Bruno Traven, among others, are owned by Maria Eugenia Montes de Oca Luján and Irene Pomar Montes de Oca.
BELONGINGS
Traven’s surviving possessions refuse to behave like relics. His typewriter (a 1934 Underwood) typed revolutionary pamphlets and Hollywood contracts in equal measure. The leather satchel carried through the Bavarian Soviet Republic later held manuscript pages smudged with Chiapas mud. Each object is a palimpsest—the ‘B. Traven’ stamped on his rifle contradicts the ‘Hal Croves’ on his fishing license. To study these artifacts isn’t to uncover his identity, but to witness the performance of disappearance in real time.DOCUMENTS
The documents in the B. Traven Archive provide a clear indication of the various stages of Traven’s life. On his Munich ID he says he was born Ret Marut in San Francisco in 1882, and at the end of his life, his death certificate says that he was born Traven Torsvan Croves. For Traven, identity was not about papers, it was about his work. The names and dates in the other documents in the archive should be interpreted with this in mind.