Günter Eich, Unter Wasser
After Büchner’s
Leonce und Lena, I once again chose a play (though this time with marionettes) in Günter Eich’s
Unter Wasser (Under Water); however, it was not my intention to stage the text typographically. Instead, I intentionally kept the text and illustrations separate from one another. Only occasionally are there short citations from the text on the illustrated pages, but they pop up more like the speech bubbles in comics. 21 double spreads in the book provide a stage for the illustrations. Here you can see why the book has such a narrow, tall format: on the one hand, it reinforces the impression of being deep down at the bottom of the ocean, and on the other it provides room for the long threads (printed with brass rules) from which the marionettes are hung. Eich’s play does in fact take place under water.
Elias Johnson, a sailor, drowned during the Battle of Trafalgar. Now he is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, trying to write his memoirs. He lives with
Friederike, a mermaid. He is visited by an angel who believes he is
Abimelech, from the Old Testament. The angel commands him to build the ark, saying that his neighbor Noah was chosen by accident. Other figures that appear in the course of the play are: a
squid,
Agnes
Bernauer (condemned for witchcraft and drowned in the Danube in 1435),
a swarm of fish, an
old crab, a
sea serpent, a
shark,
fish and oceanic creatures of all kinds, and a
huckster. For the illustrations I mainly used original wood engravings, thanks to my former Professor Hans Peter Willberg (they were made around the turn of the 19th century to illustrate a tool catalogue). Hans Peter had given me a large part of his wood engraving collection. Combined with brass rules, linocuts and chicken feathers (for the wings of the angel), they form the material that makes up the illustrations. The book is printed on handmade blue Japanese paper, which was a challenge to print on because it is relatively thin and uneven. But the result justified all my efforts. Even the finest lines of the wood engravings could be printed satisfactorily on the rough paper, with adequate inking. The bookbinding, also required a special approach. Ines created a suitable paper-over-board binding, covered with a dark-blue version of the handmade Japanese paper.
112 pages, handmade Japanese paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, paper-over-board with title labels, 11.5 x 30 cm,
100 numbered and signed copies. Lahnstein 1990.