Who is Joachim Ringelnatz?

Joachim Ringelnatz is the pseudonym 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 a breath of fresh air for an animal, possibly a variant of Ringelnatter, German for Grass Snake or more probably the seahorse for winding (“ringeln”) its tail all but objects. Seahorse is called Ringelnass (nass = wet) by mariners to whom he felt belonging. He was a sailor in his teens 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 behave and sometimes bordering upon nonsense poetry. Some of these are same to Christian Morgenstern’s, but often more satirical in broadcast and occasionally subversive. His most popular establishment is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu with his drunken antics and disdain for authority.

In his complete thirteen years Ringelnatz was moreover a dedicated and prolific visual artist; the bulk of his art seems to have in the look of missing during World War II, but on summit of 200 paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his fake was exhibited at the Akademie der Künste along similar to that of his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Ringelnatz in addition to 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 introduction and no proper ending.” (“Berliner Romane haben meist keinen ordentlichen Anfang und kein rechtes Ende.”)

In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi giving out as a “degenerate artist”.

His widow Leonharda Pieper married Julius Gescher after Ringelnatz’s death, and their son Norbert managed Ringelnatz’s legacy and put together a collection. Norbert after that donated the heap to the Joachim Ringelnatz Museum in Cuxhaven in 2019

Posthumously

Electronic Edition

Most of Ringelnatz’s paintings were directionless during the Second World War; one of them at the Kunsthaus Zürich is not upon display. The Ringelnatz-Museum in Cuxhaven, managed by the Ringelnatz-Stiftung (see below) shows many of his paintings. Most came from private owners, whose paintings survived World War II.