Joachim Ringelnatz

Joachim Ringelnatz is the pen name of the German author and painter Hans Bötticher (7 August 1883, Wurzen, Saxony – 17 November 1934, Berlin). His pen name Ringelnatz is usually explained as a dialect expression for an animal, possibly a variant of Ringelnatter, German for Grass Snake or more probably the seahorse for winding ("ringeln") its tail around objects. Seahorse is called Ringelnass (nass = wet) by mariners to whom he felt belonging. He was a sailor in his youth and spent the First World War in the Navy on a minesweeper. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a Kabarettist, i.e., a kind of satirical stand-up comedian. He is best known for his wry poems, often using word play and sometimes bordering on nonsense poetry. Some of these are similar to Christian Morgenstern's, but often more satirical in tone and occasionally subversive. His most popular creation is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu with his drunken antics and disdain for authority. In his final thirteen years Ringelnatz was also a dedicated and prolific visual artist; the bulk of his art seems to have gone missing during World War II, but over 200 paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his work was exhibited at the Akademie der Künste along with that of his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Ringelnatz also illustrated his own novel called "...liner Roma..." (1923), the title of which is a doubly truncated "Berliner Roman" (Berlin novel), for "Berlin novels usually have no decent beginning and no proper ending." ("Berliner Romane haben meist keinen ordentlichen Anfang und kein rechtes Ende.") In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi government as a "degenerate artist".