Hans Henny Jahnn is one of the great unknown writers of German literature. His most important work is the unfinished trilogy River without Banks (Fluß ohne Ufer), now seen as a major twentieth century novel and which has even been placed alongside Proust’s A la récherche du temps perdu.

The Ship is the first part of this trilogy. While it shows traces of Jahnn’s involvement with Expressionism, it is still more traditional than the later parts of the trilogy, especially the middle part, the Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn (Notes of G.A.H.), with its more complicated narrative structure and heavy use of interior monologue.

Jahnn was the son of a ship’s carpenter, grandson of a shipbuilder while he himself had a great passion for music and restored Baroque church organs for a living. He was in fact involved in various unusual sexual and religious explorations. After a rapid political and moral disillusionment from his experiences in World War One, Jahnn got himself released from the military on medical grounds and went to Norway for the rest of the war.

Formally, The Ship follows the structure of the traditional crime novel. It is set in the claustrophobic environment of the ship of the title. Gustave is on the ship as a stowaway, to be near to his fiancee Ellena, the captain’s daughter. It transpires that the captain himself does not know about the content of the coffin-shaped crates in the cargo hold. Even before the departure, an unexplained fight breaks out so that some of the crew are dismissed as a consequence. There is the ominous figure of the supercargo, whose motives are completely unclear. He seems to know the secrets of this labyrinthine and mysterious ship and also be informed about the content of the cargo. All this secrecy spurs rumours in the close-knit community of the ship, and in his quest to find out more, Gustave too becomes entangled in a web of deceit, conjecture and panicky curiosity. When finally Ellena vanishes, the crew of the ship mutinies. After a while, Ellena is assumed to be dead, but what happened to her is never resolved.

The novel is sometimes reminiscent of Conrad’s amazing Heart of Darkness with its search for the unknown and its half-expected horrors awaiting the travellers. A prevailing feeling of obscurity and uncertainty permeates the novel. We are never quite clear if the obscurity results from the complexity of the plot or the general unfathomability of the human soul...

‘He had measured the various rooms on the ship by pacing them off, so as to be able to box them into the wooden hull according to a plan. He had almost succeeded in impressing on his mind their distribution and arrangement on the ship. The sealed hold, that forbidden ground, lay like a surveyable solid, sometimes above, sometimes under, sometimes beside him. It lost the mysterious attraction of the unknown once Gustave found out that it was limited and could be surrounded from the outside.

Then, suddenly, the blinding light of the supercargo’s lantern was in front of him, the single eye of a dragon guarding his treasure, and at once Gustave was sobered and discouraged. He wasn’t even able to put up a fainthearted defense; he was defeated. [...] The lantern — it could have been the shipowner or Alfred Tutein, but it wasn’t — it was the supercargo. No doubt about that. But from now on Gustave felt that he was being watched, even into the farthest corners, even if he went around on tiptoe [...] It was as if he were being pursued by erratic, pernicious powers.’ p157