A paradise for sailors

PAUL MORAND

About 1904, shortly before the Entente Cordiale, the German Kaiser had the intention of forming an alliance with France. He sent the German imperial yacht for the French Prime Minister, M. Waldeck Rousseau, showed him Kiel and Hamburg, and explained to him that Germany henceforth had to be considered a world power.

"What did you think of the Kaiser?" the Prime Minister was asked on his return to France.

"A very astute man," he answered, "really quite amiable, but a little . . . provincial."

The same is true of Hamburg. This port imagines that it is another New York, but it is not. It is provincial, and that is its charm. Hamburg has all the characteristics of a good bourgeois of the North. Its low-lying Hanseatic sea-front is flattened between a Flemish sky and a Holland sea. Its pleasures are coarse, its manners plebian and industrious. Moreover, New York has prospered while the prosperity of Hamburg was swallowed up in the great cataclysm of the war.

Hamburg no longer wears its handsome gold admiral's uniform, cut by a smart London tailor. It is dressed in mufti, like a captain disembarked from a long voyage, who is a little older, a little more corpulent, but nevertheless still in robust health.

The war ruined, drained, crushed Hamburg. Today it is coming back. It is no longer the artificial forcing-house of that vain and impatient gardener, the Kaiser. It is a normal, solid, organic growth. The inflation which enriched the German state, permitted it to enrich in turn its municipalities and commonalties.

Hamburg in two years has been able to reconstruct all its tramway lines, renovate its autobuses, transform its lighting system. Everything is new: the magnificent gift that Germany, sole beneficiary of the war, (now that she is freed of the burden of a fleet and an army) made to her children. The port is as tidy as a house-wife's cupboard. Asiatic Wharf, African Wharf, American Wharf. Lumber port, coal port, glittering in the sun; port for petroleum, refined almost on the docks. Grain elevators, like temple pillars, threaded by electric cables. Extended arms of cranes. Full warehouses. Smoking factories. Maritime docks. The Bremen is at sea on the Atlantic, where she smashed the old record of the Mauretania. Her sister-ship the Europa, 46,000 tons, lies in dock. The stern is round, scooped out. The Hamburg-Amerika rides anchor in three colours: black hulls, white superstructure, yellow smokestacks. The Kaiser, a white boat for Heligoland, the Hansa-Linie, with the iron cross on its smokestacks. I spent an hour and a half reviewing them in a fast motor boat. From here first sailed the Leviathan and the Majestic, the two largest ships afloat.

At the Atlantic Hotel, everything invites departure, if only on a wharf pacquet-boat. Through the stained windows of the dining room one sees the Alster, the Nautical Club, the sails, a landscape of bricks, dotted with emerald green bell-towers, varnished by the morning light like a little Dutch Master of the seventeenth century. One hears all languages spoken, noticeably Spanish. On the other side of the bridge, the Ethnographical museum alone is an invitation to adventure. All the ship models of the world, from the canoes of the Presique Gulf, in plaited rushes, which recall the straw harks of the Algonquins,—to submarines; from pirogues which borrowed their pointed forms and blue-grey colour from the sharks, —to junks like piquant tropical fishes.

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One dines in Hamburg in the summer by the water, in cabarets on the Elbe or in the Uhlenhorster Fährhaus.

In the neighboring fields naked young girls from the Frobenius dance school, who belong to the good bourgeoisie of Hamburg, gambol in the sun, dad in nothing but garlands of northern spring flowers. Athletes bring their muscles into play as they hurdle white bars, and among all this whiteness, is the other whiteness of sea-gulls and sails.

"What a pretty setting for a romance!" I exclaimed to one of these younger generation Germans. She was a bronzed, athletic, slim little woman, and she drank only water.

"There are no more romances in Germany," she replied with a steely glance that reminded me of Brigitte | Helm.

"Why is that?"

"To have romance you must have a moral crisis. The soul of modern Germany has been virilized by sports and war, and the cellars of its subconscious cleaned out by the psychoanalysts. The modern age is here. There is no longer any room for sentimental conflicts. From now on men and women will love each other without prejudice and without despair!"

"1830-1930," I cried. "Shades of Charlotte and Werther, where are you?"

". . . besides," she added, "since nothing is prohibited, or considered wieked or abnormal between the sexes, there is no more material for the romancers. Germany is a literary desert."

"There is nothing left," I concluded, "but the vampire of Diisseldorf, providing that the local police do not seize her, or that a Hollywood magnate doesn't sign her up before she is thrown out of Europe."

It is night, the San Pauli hour, in Hamburg. Like rivulets swelling an estuary, waves of swarthy sailors, red necks sticking above blue sweaters, flow into the Grosse Freiheit—the street of Great Liberty—marvelous name! These lonely lads invade all the cabarets. (When a ship docks at Cuxhaven the maisons specifies send the captain and the crew letters of welcome.) Next to bicycles, sailors on shore-leave prefer horses. The cabarets are therefore also hippodromes. Instead of a dance floor among the tables, there is a riding-ring with ammoniated saw-dust. Old nags jog around, to the clank of clashing stirrup-irons, the leader ridden by a groggy woman in a pink chemise, while the orchestra plays the Zauberflote. I ask to see the women's boxingmatches, in a setting representing a ship's deck. They have been suppressed. "You should have seen Hamburg in

1925!", some one says to me. "There is nothing so extraordinary nowadays as the cabinets particuliers where the lady attendants used to wear bathing trunks." (Everywhere, in my life, if I believed people, I have arrived too late. In reality, I am nearly aHvays in time.)

Every country is represented here. See the sign-boards: New China, with its vertical lettering, the Honolulu Café, the Old Cape Horn. There, by buying a round for the orchestra, you have the right to conduct it yourself. As it was a little late, and as my friends and I had done a number of night places already, we forgot we were the victors in the haunts of the vanquished, and one of us, maestro impromptu, mounted the bandstand, baton in band, to conduct the Marseillaise. In Berlin a few days before we had heard a room go wild taking up the chorus of Madelon! We did not intend to create a scandal, but after the first bars, a whistle shrilled out, then two, then a hundred. If the whistle in America is a sign of enthusiasm, it is not the same in Hamburg,—quite the contrary! Chairs hurtled through the air. The band-stand was rushed, it leaned to. and gently sagged; while at the sound of the national anthem, my friend who had been standing, plunged below, like the captain of a ship sunk by the enemy. We would have felt more secure among the wild beasts of Hagenbeck's circus. There, at least a wide ditch would have separated us from the lion's maw. We beat a retreat, and took refuge in a cellar, where whole families were tossing off grogs of rum,—the favourite drink of the seadogs—and intoning Gregorian chants. Then to the Bar Intime, where the ladies of the orchestra wore their shifts, and sailor caps. Above each table, Japanese parasols; each booth resembles a shooting gallery at a fair. Flags of all nations (except France); posters of navigation companies. But Marseilles, Shanghai, San Francisco, and Rotterdam cannot compete with Hamburg. For those who live on terra firma, these pleasures are insignificant, but for sailors Hamburg is the port of sprees, spending, and amusement on starboard and port. Long nights in hammocks, vigils under the oil lamps, watches in bad weather on the bridge, dogdays in the boiler rooms, the silence of submarine submersions, the rat-trap death that awaits them during naval combats, toil on the windlass, oaths before empty nets, death at the antipodes, drowning among the sharks, —all are forgotten among so many brass-bands, mirrors, shiny nickels, pretty, plump women, coloured liqueurs, silks, candies, and drinking songs.

Beyond the city everything grows obscure. Suddenly the lights of San Pauli go out. Imperceptibly the street becomes sinister, provincial. A schupo patrols the frontier, the boundary of the free city of Hamburg. On the other side of the sentry post begins Altona, Prussia. Behind me, the street of Great Liberty is but a dying glow. . . .