Joachim Ringelnatz, an artist with many faces

Joachim Ringelnatz is the pen name of the German author and painter Hans Bötticher (1883-1934, Berlin). A sailor in his youth, he spent the First World War in the Imperial Navy. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a Kabarettist, i.e., a satirical stand-up comedian. He is best known for his poems, often close to nonsense poetry. Some of these are akin to the work of his fellow poet Christian Morgenstern, but more satirical in tone. His most popular creation is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu.

Behind a striking physiognomy that "invited to caricature" stood a serious artist with a double talent, because in his final thirteen years he was a prolific visual artist as well. Most of his art seems to have disappeared during World War II, but many paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his work was exhibited 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."

In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi government as a "degenerate artist" and his books burned. Extremely poor, he died of tuberculosis in his Berlin flat.