help

I guess no one answered the question since you can find the answer very easily at the German wikipedia.de-site. However, if you do not understand German, this will be of little help...

So I will try to tell you in English. The names Old Surehand and Old Shatterhand are supposed to be the English translation of Indian war-names with which some native Americans chose to honour those two fellows for their extraordinary abilities both as warriors and scouts - or "westmen"/"Westmänner", as Karl May would have called them. He used the term "westmen" as a similar to both "scout" or "backwood people", referring to people who would have no problem making their living even in the wilderness of the old west. (May had probably picked up the term "westman" from a translation of George Ruxton "Life in the far west", which he knew pretty well.) He also believed that the prefix "Old" was not necessarily used to describe the age of a person, but could also refer to his reliabilty and his tested skills as a "westman" (scout). Actually, he had picked up the prefix "Old" from the character "Old Rube" in Mayne Reid's novel "The scalphunters".

Old Shatterhand is usually referred to as Karl May's own "alter ego", since most of his novels are told in first-person from the perspective of Old Shatterhand. May imagined this Old Shatterhand - or himself - to have been a young intellectual, "Dr. Karl May" from Germany who had studied Foreign languages and religion and had come to America to seek first hand experience. Usually going by the name of "Charly" or "Mr. Charles", he then worked for a railway company where he met the old scout (or "Westman") Sam Hawkens (another character inspired by Mayne Reid's "Old Rube" from "Scalphunters", while the cinematic interpretation by Ralf Wolter is of course inspired by Gabby Hayes and Al St. John's character "Fuzzy" who, after WWII had become extremely popular both in Germany and Italy - note that Leone used lot of "Fuzzy"-characters too, and even named his villains after Fuzzy's companions "Billy Carson" and "Marshall Cheyenne"!). Sam Hawkens taught the young greenhorn Charly how to hunt mustangs and buffalo and gave him the nickname "Old Shatterhand" which later became his war name among the native Americans. Soon, young "Old Shatterhand" killed a Grizzly bear who had intruded the railway's working camp. During the struggle over who had actually struck the final blow, an old white friend of the negotiating Mescaleros Apaches nearby was killed. Winnetou's father Intschu Tschuna, the Mescalero chief, declared war both on the railway and everyone working for it, includig the scout Sam Hawkens and Old Shatterhand. Only after fighting for his life and saving both Intschu Tschuna and Winnetou, Old Shatterhand could finally win both Winnetou's friendship and the love of his sister Nscho Tschi. The planned marriage between Old Shatterhand and Nscho Tschi never took place because Intschu Tschuna and Nscho Tschi were killed by the white bandit Santer. Old Shatterhand however could persuade Winnetou not to seek vengeance and bloodshed from all white people but instead go with him to hunt down the only actual murderer of his sister, Santer. (They succeeded however only after Winnetou's death in "Winnetou III", the novel.)

Since Karl May had never originally planned to make the many different first-person-heros going either by the name of Charly, Charles, Old Shatterhand or no name at all to be actually one and the same person, the background stories vary from novel to novel. In the end, the editors from the “Karl-May-Verlag” decided to rewrite all of them according to Karl May’s last and most popular Old-Shatterhand-background stories in “Winnetou I”.