Pirates – myths and facts

After the market / Saturday, 2 August / 12.30 pm

Sea and beach robbery are as old as seafaring and maritime trade, and their protagonists appear as buccaneers, pirates, privateers, privateers, corsairs, flibustiers and buccaneers in literary tales and depictions in the visual arts, are up to mischief in films and comics and adorn the labels of rum bottles. At the same time, pirate attacks at sea are still taking place, and increasingly so, especially off the West African coast, in the Horn of Africa and in the Strait of Malacca. There were and are certain social causes for all of this that need to be tracked down.

From the nineteenth century onwards, a romantic pirate myth developed, which was fuelled above all by a special cliché of the ‘golden age of piracy’ in the Caribbean between 1670 and 1720, embodied by a figure with a wooden leg, a hook instead of a severed hand, an eye patch and a tricorn hat with a skull and crossbones emblem. However, this iconic figure, as the central figure of a widely marketed hype today, only stands for a narrow segment of the phenomenon of ‘piracy’, which should actually be thought of in much broader terms.

Rainer Beuthel introduces the topic, reads from texts from world literature and, in the second part of the event, shows examples of illustrations from the visual arts from antiquity to the present day.

The audience can expect Nora Blumenau as a special musical guest…