Schlimbach Prize
The Schlimbach Prize was awarded by the Kiel Yacht Club (KYC) to outstanding sailors in recognition of special achievements in memory of the Kiel sailor Ludwig Schlimbach (born September 18, 1876, Munich, † January 13, 1949) . The aim of the award was to promote German high-sea sailing.
history
The Schlimbach Prize was the highest German award in high seas sailing . The trophy is the so-called crown compass from 1937, a compass that can be read "from below" and which is mounted under a silver crown instead of hanging from the cabin ceiling . It was awarded to Ludwig Schlimbach in November 1937 by the “Marine City” of Kiel for special services.
After Schlimbach's death in 1949, the Crown Compass was donated as an honorary prize in accordance with his legacy and was first awarded in 1953. Schlimbach wrote the following:
“The“ Crown Compass ”dedicated to me by the City of Kiel goes to the Yacht Club of Germany as the“ Schlimbach Memorial Prize ”and is to be awarded annually to the yacht sailor (leader of the yacht) who last year - always counting from the date of my death - the has covered the largest distance under sail (without using the engine) in the North Sea, Atlantic, Mediterranean and beyond. Canal, Baltic Sea and river cruise do not count. "
Already for the first award in 1953, the award criteria laid down in the legacy were fundamentally changed: It was not the ocean sailor with the objectively longest voyage that should be awarded, but the one who had subjectively achieved the “most outstanding seafaring achievement”. For Schlimbach, however, the successful completion of the longest voyage was implicit evidence of outstanding seamanship. For him it was inconceivable that a “longest journey” could be successfully completed with inadequate seamanship. The rededication was made to counteract a mere record hunt. This goal seemed to many to be hardly compatible with Schlimbach's life and foundation goal of helping German deep sea sailing to gain more respect.
As a result, performances in the context of regattas were generally not taken into account, since regattas per se were declared unseaman because the decisions of the ship's command could also have reasons other than nautical motives.
Furthermore, solo trips / single-handed sailing were refused. This happened both for political reasons (sailing should be presented as a sport of courageous German men's teams) as well as for social (an egoist in a boat, where so many would like to sail with you) and nautical reasons (conscious taking of risks with a team would not give). With this attitude, too, the jury of the Schlimbach Prize shaped the character of German sailing after the war until today. The fact that Schlimbach's most famous achievement was a one-handed Atlantic crossing was ignored. Only when the performance of single-handed sailors began to be perceived with increasing admiration did this exclusion criterion slowly weaken.
The jury also reserved the right to judge the selection of the vehicle used according to nautical criteria, i.e. not the boat itself, but the fact that it was selected for this voyage. This did not exclude trips on outdated "soul sellers", but on new boats. The objective of the jury was embellished with the following logic: Anyone who plans and carries out their trip with a vehicle or vehicle type that is not expressly considered to be tried and tested and safe is acting grossly negligent and thus unseaman and can therefore in no way be honored as an outstanding seaman. The same was true for the equipment. This means that all pioneers of technical development in sailing were de facto excluded from the award. This concerned trips in which a spinnaker , an automatic steering system or electrical navigation device was used, trips with plastic boats, boats with a split lateral plan , so-called short keelers , where the rudder is not attached to the trailing edge of the keel, and especially trips with multihull boats . An expression of this attitude was the jury's refusal to award the prize at all in 1970, as the only candidate was disqualified several times despite a highly regarded and outstanding seafaring performance: He was female (Ingeborg von Heister, Wilfried Erdmann's mother-in-law ) and sailed with one hand a trimaran . The traditional jury-friendly reporting in the trade press ( Die Yacht ) triggered a veritable religious war among the audience, at the end of which the main loser was the reputation of the Schlimbach Prize.
Far too late and too half-heartedly, an assessment under the aspect of technical traditionalism took a back seat and could never be conveyed credibly. While more and more successful trips did not meet the formal and ideological criteria of the jury, the importance of the prize in the public decreased noticeably, as the public could identify less and less with the honored and their achievements.
A special chapter is dealing with Wilfried Erdmann after his mother-in-law was refused the award in 1970. After his non-stop one-hand circumnavigation of the world, he refused to fully disclose his log book, as he also kept it as his personal diary. As a result, he was excluded from the award. In 2000/2001 Erdmann made another non-stop, one-handed circumnavigation of the world, this time in the opposite direction against the prevailing wind direction, making him the only person who made two non-stop one-handed circumnavigations in both directions with the same boat. This time the jury made the offer to award him the prize, but he refused because he had achieved everything for himself and no longer needed any prizes.
The awarding of the crown compass has been suspended since 2004 because the Kieler Yacht Club perceives blurring dividing lines between sport and commerce and regards the increasing number of offshore regattas as an obstacle to choosing the winner. In addition, there were fewer and fewer high-quality applications, as the prestige of the prize had suffered greatly as a result of the controversial award decisions mentioned above. The crown compass is in the so-called silver treasure of the Kiel Yacht Club.
The reason that the award has ended is certainly also due to the fact that, despite a large number of trips according to the criteria contrary to the foundation in 1953 and 1996, it is hardly possible to find suitable candidates and a change in the spirit of the founder towards an award for the most remarkable achievement in Germany Offshore sailing is categorically rejected.
Since the Schlimbach Prize was discontinued, the Golden Compass of the sailing comradeship "The Coat of Arms of Bremen" and the Trans-Ocean Prize of the Cuxhaven- based Trans-Ocean Association have been the highest awards to be given in Germany for ocean- going sailors.
Award winners
- 1953 Rolf Schmidt
- 1954 Rolf Schmidt
- 1955 Klaus Hegewisch
- 1956 Hans Dienst
- 1957 Kurt Fischer
- 1958 Wolfgang Grün
- 1959 Claus Schröder
- 1960 Klaas Hinrich Pflüger
- 1961 Mike Sparenborg
- 1962 Peter Gottwald
- 1963 Heinz A. Krüger
- 1964 Meno Sellschopp
- 1965 Wolfram Aurin
- 1966 Wilhelm Stoess
- 1967 Ernst-Jürgen Koch (circumnavigation)
- 1968 Uwe Ernst
- 1969 Erich Koppen
- 1970 no award
- 1971 Jens Hinzpeter
- 1972 Ekhart Hahn
- 1973 Götz Schreiber (first German yacht sailor around Cape Horn )
- 1974 Reinhard Laucht Skipper: Peter von Danzig (1936)
- 1975 Günther Hormann
- 1976 Götz-Anders Nietzsch
- 1977 Werner Wommelsdorf
- 1978 Dieter Markworth
- 1979 Joachim Schult
- 1980 Herbert Gieseking
- 1981 Harm-Hinrich Rotermund
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- 1982 Heide and Erich Wilts
- 1983 Rainer Persch
- 1984 Detlef Martens (one-handed circumnavigation)
- 1985 Reimer Böttger (Around South America)
- 1986 Martin Güldner
- 1987 Sigmund Zander
- 1988 Christian Masilge
- 1989 Dietrich Petersen
- 1990 Gudrun Calligaro (one-handed circumnavigation)
- 1991 Wolfgang Quix
- 1992 Christian Woge
- 1993 Christoph Bauch
- 1994 Dieter Wassermann
- 1995 Rudolf Olma
- 1996 no award
- 1997 Hans-Jürgen Trautmann
- 1998 no award
- 1999 no award
- 2000 Jochen Orgelmann
- 2001 Wolfgang Quix
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Georg Lauritzen: Ludwig Schlimbach - Memory Chronicle . 1959. Quoted from Hans Blöss: Citizens of the Oceans and Seas , Volume 1: Before the mast . Verlag Christian Blöss, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-93437-801-8 , p. 81ff.
- ^ A b Matthias Beilken: Schlimbach Prize to Wolfgang Quix. In: Yacht Online. February 20, 2002, accessed October 8, 2019 .
- ↑ Kieler Yacht Club: Schlimbach's legacy is fulfilled. In: www.detlef-martens.com. Retrieved October 8, 2019 .