Of Flying Dutchmen and Wandering Jews

There is no shortage of gruesome images in the popular traditions and musical adaptations of the legend of the “Flying Dutchman”. The black ghost ship of a captain condemned to an endless voyage breaks through clouds and fog with blood-red sails or rises up from the waves. Sometimes flames ignite at the top of the mast. It sails as fast as an arrow, almost flying, braving squalls; oncoming ships approach and sails silently through them like a ghost. In some versions of the legend, skeletons with sou'westers on deck are reported, serving the cursed captain, who stands at the helm in a black coat and with flowing hair. According to older tradition, the name “Flying Dutchman” refers to the haunted ship, later to its cursed captain. Through a pact with the devil, a sacrilegious challenge to God or murder, it is condemned to wander endlessly across the world's oceans. As ghostly as his ship appeared, it disappears again, dissolving in the mist or sinking into the waves. The sailors who see it are overcome with grey, for it heralds disaster, accident or even shipwreck.

The origin of this legend cannot be determined. It is likely that various traditional events were condensed into a story, which was then spun out into a legend. There are indeed mirages of distant ships and wrecks drifting without a rudder. St. Elmo's fire can also be observed during thunderstorms as a ghostly electrical charge on the tops of masts. The legendary experiences of the explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries when they sailed around the storm-torn Cape of Good Hope may also have played a role. Many reports of the “Flying Dutchman” are set in the Cape region.

Only love brings salvation

It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the written tradition of the seaman's yarn that was widespread on the North and Baltic Seas, which provided a distraction on sailing ships when they were idle during calm periods, began to be recorded. Heinrich Heine, for example, who stayed on Norderney several times and was interested in the local folk tradition there, first mentioned the “Flying Dutchman” in his “Travel Pictures” of 1826, then in more detail in 1834 in “From the Memoirs of Mr. von Schnabelewopski”. The captain of the haunted ship, who tempted God by attempting to sail around a dangerous cape despite a raging storm, is said to “wander around the sea” until the end of time. However, he can find redemption if he “finds the faithfulness of a woman”, i.e. love. Every seven years he is allowed to go to a country and look for such love. After “time immemorial” he actually does receive it. A woman swears her loyalty to him until death and seals this by throwing herself off a cliff to her death when the Dutchman rejects her so as not to drag her into his disastrous life. This sacrifice of love frees him from the curse of not being able to die. His ship sinks into the sea and drags him down with it.

Heine's report then provided the material for Wagner's opera “The Flying Dutchman” of 1843, in which the faithful lover and the redeemed Dutchman float up to heaven in a transfigured embrace at the end. Frederick Marryat's novel “The Phantom Ship” of 1839 was also effective. Here the Dutchman is cursed to immortality because of a blasphemous oath and is redeemed by the Dutchman's son, who brings him a cross relic during a dangerous sea voyage. When the father kisses it, he is redeemed and sinks with his ship and his son, who has sacrificed himself for love, both kneeling and embracing, their hands raised to heaven. A figure related to the Dutchman is the old sailor in the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1798. The “Ancient Mariner” himself reports how he was condemned to “life in death” by his crime, namely the killing of an albatross that had previously guided his ship out of the ice of the Antarctic. This spell was also broken by love, by the love for the brightly colored shimmering sea creatures, which now, with remorse, “flowed into his heart.” Echoes of the legend of the “Flying Dutchman” can still be found in the 20th century, for example in a 1911 poem by Georg Heym.

Cain: archetype of restlessness

In his poem “Les Paysans au bord de la mer” from 1854, Victor Hugo refers to the relationship between this “desolate pirate of infinity” and Cain, the archetype of those condemned to restlessness and restlessness. Folk tradition knows them in numerous forms: the Eternal Wagoner who chased his draft horses to death, the Wild Hunter who sacrilegiously pursued his game into a church, the Eternal Blüser who could not resist stalking eels with his spear in the light of the Blüse fire even on Good Friday. All of them are denied forever as punishment for death. Heine and Wagner make the connection between the “Flying Dutchman” and Ahasuerus, the endlessly wandering Jew, a legend that has been known since the 7th century but first appeared in a book in 1602 and then became widely known. The shoemaker Ahasver is said to have cursed Jesus and chased him away when he tried to lean against his house on the way to the place of execution. Jesus then said to him: “I will stand and rest / but you must go.” In French, the person condemned in this way is called “Juif errant”, emphasizing the restless wandering, in German “Ewiger Jew”, emphasizing the painful endlessness, a term that became an anti-Semitic code.

The reference to the torments of an endlessness and thus to the meaning of death, which makes the limited life a unique challenge, is the depth of these myths and legends. In contrast to the dream of an unlimited extension of life, the state of denied death is described here as something horrific. The Dutchman in Heine complains how he “has to endure the most unheard of suffering on the immeasurable watery desert, how his body is nothing more than a coffin of flesh in which his soul is bored, how life pushes him away and death also rejects him.” In Wagner's opera, after another seven years of aimless wandering have passed, he sighs: “No grave anywhere!” Never death! This is the dread command of damnation.” And in Heym it is said of him: “The mask of a dead eternity / Has frozen his face with emptiness.” The death clock ticks incessantly in a monotonous rhythm in the background of a now irrelevant repetition of the same old thing. There is no longer an unusual moment to which one could say: “Stay a while, you are so beautiful.”

The hell of always going on like this

A comparable horror would be to live on endlessly as a digitalized self in a constantly renewable storage medium, as the transhumanists strive for. The self, which is equated with the brain structure, is then to be read out and transferred through a process known as “mind uploading” as neurotechnology progresses, in order to replace the imperfect biological carrier medium of the brain, known as “wetware,” with hardware. What remains is a disembodied self, connected to a robot, to which the outside world is presented as a simulation. The idle, meaningless repetition in such a de-sensualized, technically prepared world, which is fortunately pure fiction, would be unbearable because everything would dissolve into insignificance, as Karl Rahner makes clear: “Time becomes madness if it cannot complete itself.” Being able to carry on forever would be the hell of empty meaninglessness. No moment would have any weight, because everything could be postponed and pushed off into the empty later that will never be missing. Nothing could escape a challenge, and everything would then disappear into the emptiness of absolute weightlessness.” In contrast, in the time allotted to us, every moment has its weight, each moment has its meaning of testing, and above all, the uniqueness of true love resists endless repetition. Therefore, in myths and legends, love, even to the point of self-sacrifice, is the key to the salvation of the restless and unquiet. Once they have experienced love, the spell of denied death, which condemns them to experience the same thing over and over again, is lifted.

And it is not only the denial of death that is painfully experienced by the characters who are driven in an endlessly stretching time, but also the denial of eternity, for without the transition of death they cannot pass from the earthly, temporal unrest into the fullness of the timeless presence of a home in the beyond. There is much to suggest that as belief in a final home waned, the image of the eternally restless and unquiet was perceived as a reflection of one's own existential lostness. It is no coincidence that the first written version and the numerous versions of the legend of the “Flying Dutchman” as well as the widespread use of the figure of the “Juif errant” in French popular novels coincided with the rise of positivism and secularization. If in their spiritual environment all hope of the afterlife is extinguished by the denial of God, no consolation can be found even with Nietzschean pathos of “loyalty to the earth”, because in the soul trapped in this world there smolders “an unsatisfiable longing that pushes beyond everything that can be achieved and does not allow the boat of life to come to rest” (Manfred Frank). Or as Augustine prays in his “Confessions”: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”