KOHELETIAN SPATIOTEMPORAL SENSIBILITY IN JOACHIM RINGELNATZ’S GEHEIMES KINDER-VERWIRR-BUCH

This article explicates the theistic dimension of the popular poet Joachim Ringelnatz's poetology through a spatio-temporal analysis of Geheimes Kinder-Verwirr-Buch (Secret Children's Confusing Book, 1931). In criticism and literary scholarship, Ringelnatz has often been criticized for his alleged superficiality and triviality. The analysis demonstrates how Ringelnatz's seemingly trivial preoccupation with profane everyday life and his supposedly naive delight in quotidian banalities manifests his specific, chronosensible and topophilic faith, which is rooted in the propaedeutics of the biblical wisdom book Ecclesiastes. Contrary to the alleged superficiality, his poems reveal a theological depth: echoing the preacher Kohelet, Ringelnatz emphasizes the spatial, microcosmic smallness of the reader within the macrocosm created by God, as well as their passive situatedness within the negative, earthly, and profane temporality that inevitably leads to suffering and death. Ringelnatz not only shares with Kohelet a heightened sensitivity to temporal existence and its consequent evaluation as afflictive, but also assimilates Kohelet's suggested response to this existential suffering - a call for attentiveness to the (un)ordinary spatiality of profane everydayness and consequent religious joy in the sensual pleasures mediated by space as a gift from God. While Ringelnatz's affinity for bodily profanity, which contradicts the conventional Christian sublimation of corporeality, overshadowed the distinctly Christian tonality of his work, this affinity for (through Ringelnatz's lens) God-manifesting bodily existence turns out to be consonant with the Koheletian inclinations of his subjective faith. Like Kohelet, Ringelnatz strives for the consecration of the profane everydayness. His popularity thus potentially stems not only from his distinctive humor but also from his empathetic addressing of the universal existential issue of being in time.