Immer eine Handbreit Wasser unterm Federkiel: Joachim Ringelnatz und die Seefahrt

Abstract

What made the author Joachim Ringelnatz go to sea? The man who invented the famous sailor Kuttel Daddeldu was not »shanghaied« into it, like many another cabin boy of his generation, i.e. lured on board a ship under false pretences by unscrupulous recruiters. Ringelnatz, who was born in 1883, shared a dream with many other boys his age: the dream of freedom and travel to faraway places. At the age of eleven he played with tin marines, collected souvenirs that his uncle - a captain who sailed the seven seas - used to send him, and devoured novels about overseas countries. Against the wishes of his family, Ringelnatz became a sailor. As a cabin boy on the ELLI, a barque of Oldersum, he sailed to Central America. Life on board was adventurous, tough, but above all humiliating, and he soon abandoned the idea. The diary account of this voyage, however, was one of his first literary publications. He survived World War I as the commander of a minesweeper in the estuary of the Elbe. Having become famous on european cabaret stages dressed in a sailor costume during the Roaring Twenties, he confessed, not without a hint of coquettishness: "I'm not your honest old sailor," but unmistakable traces of tar and salt water run through his work, whether prose, poetry, drama or painting. It was as a sailor that Joachim Ringelnatz wrote and performed his way into German cultural history. This contribution traces the maritime aspects of the life and work of this "seagoing Saxon," and discusses the references to seafaring, the navy and the sailor’s life in the context of the epoch between the German Reich and the decline of the Weimar Republic.