Gorch Fock (author)
Johann Wilhelm Kinau (22 August 1880 – 31 May 1916), best known as Gorch Fock, was a German writer who also used the names Jakob Holst and Giorgio Focco. He grew up on the Elbe island of Finkenwerder as the son of a fisherman and later worked as an accountant while publishing poetry in Low German from 1904. His most famous book is the 1913 novel Seefahrt ist Not!, about the lives of deep-sea fishermen from his homeland.
Kinau married Rosa Elisabeth Reich in 1908, and they had three children. In World War I he first served in the army, seeing action in Serbia, Russia and Verdun. In 1916 he joined the German Navy as a lookout on the light cruiser SMS Wiesbaden and died when the ship was sunk in the Battle of Jutland. His body was found on the Swedish coast and he was buried on Stensholmen in Bohuslän in 1920.
It’s said he carried a sealed box with his poem Letzter Wunsch that foretold his death. His name lives on in German seafaring culture: two training ships were named Gorch Fock, and a Hamburg street section is called Gorch-Fock-Wall.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:43 (CET).