Joachim Ringelnatz’s “Liner Roma” as a modernist recontextualization of Nikolai Gogol’s “Rome”

Abstract

The article contributes to the scholarly discourse on “Liner Roma” (1924), the urban novella of a highly popular yet scholarly marginalized German poet and writer Joachim Ringelnatz (1883–1934). While its autobiographical contexts and its compositional inventiveness have already been a subject of inquiry, its intertextual relationship to the past remains unexplored. The article argues that Ringelnatz’s dialogic engagement with Nikolai Gogol’s “Rome” (1842) and its description of a modern Paris and traditional Rome is of a constitutive importance to the Ringelnatz’s own description of a metropolitan Berlin. Ringelnatz follows Gogol by accentuating analogic phenomena within the time-space of urban modernity. Like Gogol’s Paris, Ringelnatz’s Berlin is also a secular, temporarily fast-fleeting space of a fragmentary multiplicity which disintegrates the syncretic religious “wholeness”. Nonetheless, while Gogol describes the secular Paris through negative spatial two-dimensionality, and only the antithetical “eternal” and sacral Rome receives representation in a positive spatial three-dimensionality, Ringelnatz ascribes positive three-dimensionality to the secular Berlin and therewith, in accordance with the modernity-encouraging tendencies of his period, emancipates the space of urban progress.