Introduction On Racism Epigraphs A History of the Pulps A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Glossary and Character Taxonomy Breakdown by Country of Origin Bibliography Table of Contents The Best of the Encyclopedia
Class, Hein. Hein Class was created by “Paul Pitt,” the pseudonym of the German author Paul Oskar Erttmann, and appeared in Hein Class #1-158 (1936-1937, 1939-1941).
Hein Class was the Nazi-approved replacement for John Kling. Class is a sailor in the German navy who finds adventure wherever his ship puts into port. He fights Yellow Peril Buddhist stranglers (on a few occasions), leopard-worshipers in the Congo, crocodile-god-worshipers, mummy smugglers, “Devil Dwarfs,” "Satan's Dance Hall," "The Masked Man," "The Deadly Glance of Cabana," "the White Demon," "the Golden Throne of the Jivaros," an African Jungle Hero named N’gui, a Chinese Lupin named Leng Yok, vicious American and Chinese South Sea Adventurers, and an English Femme Fatale named Rita.
Class appears in stories with titles like “The White Devil,” “The Golden Dagger of Singapore,” and “The Theft of the Buddha.”
* I'm including the Hein Class stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of the ideasplosions within them. Hein Class was, as stated, a Nazi government-approved heftroman. So the range of villains (and allies) are limited by Nazi ideology, and the stories have a degree of antisemitism and racism within them. However, within those limitations Erttmann and the other Hein Class authors did a good job of making each issue of the heftroman imaginative, with vivid villains and great pulpy adventure. Hein Class is in many ways the last gasp of the once-great heftromane ideasplosions, and it was cancelled in 1941 in part because of wartime paper shortages and in part because the Nazis were hostile to too much imagination, which the Hein Class writers had in abundance.
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