Optimistic Christian Verticals and Destructive Secular Horizontals in Joachim Ringelnatz’s and Ödön von Horváth’s Experimental Fairy Tales
Optimistic Christian Verticals and Destructive Secular Horizontals in Joachim Ringelnatz’s and Ödön von Horváth’s Experimental Fairy Tales

Summary/Abstract: This article contributes to the discourse on experimental interwar fairy tales as a subgenre that undermines the anachronistic fairy-tale conventions to a selective negation or recontextualization in accordance with a contemporaneous cultural crisis. The contribution consists of demonstrating how fairy tales provide popular interwar religious authors with a platform to parallel the critical mirroring of their secular contemporaneous society with an articulation of a Christian, humanist optimism. A spatially focused comparison of Ödön von Horváth’s cycle of fairy tales Sportmärchen (1924–1926, published posthumously in 1972), and Joachim Ringelnatz’s Nervosipopel: Elf Angelegenheiten (1924) distinguishes the vertical and horizontal textual spaces to demonstrate that both authors reflect their metaphysically uprooted society through a negation of the genre's characteristic orientation toward harmonic equilibriums on a horizontal spatial axis. However, by overlaying destructive horizontals with antinomic, transcendence-signifying Christian verticals, the tales also articulate a modality of nearness to God, even in the secular world. This symbolic and positive vertical motion correlates with preserving the genre's characteristic idealization of a child.

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