 In a popular but very questionable account, a German circus acrobat named Otto Witte claimed he had been briefly mistaken for the new King of Albania at the time of that country's separation from the Ottoman Empire, and that he was crowned and reigned a few days.However, the date of this claim (1913), and the lack of any evidence to back it up, suggest that Witte made up his story after seeing the first film version of the novel.Author Salman Rushdie cited "The Prisoner of Zenda" in the epigraph to "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", the novel he wrote while living in hiding in the late 1980s.