He is paid off on a Monday morning at the Seemannsamt on Admiralitätstrasse with a full voyage’s wages in his pocket, and he is broke by the first week of July. This is the part of the journal that a family history would normally leave out.
He does not leave it out. He writes the whole thing down — the pawnshop, the park bench, the two weeks without a warm meal, going to the consul to beg for papers. He records the exact amount he was offered for a camera that wasn’t his and the exact amount he took for it instead.
I have thought about why a man keeps that record. The best answer I have is that he did not yet know how the story ended, and he was not writing it for anybody.
None waiting
First morning ashore. He is the only steward aboard, so he serves breakfast before he can leave — which is the sort of detail he reports without comment throughout.
Our first stop was the Seamen’s Headquarters on Admiralitätstrasse, where we were paid off. From there, together with Adolph Sutro — having peeled off from my two new shipboard friends — we asked around for the American Consulate and made our way there. We found it without much trouble, introduced ourselves, and asked after mail. None waiting. Disappointed doesn’t begin to cover it.
Second time in five weeks. Montevideo, no letters. Hamburg, none waiting.
Disappointed doesn’t begin to cover it. That is as close as he comes, in a hundred pages, to saying he is homesick.
And then, three sentences later, the mood turns completely, because they go and get lunch.
We stepped into the first respectable-looking place we found, and a pretty Kellnerin came to wait on us — pleasant, as they all seem to be here. Her first glance my way was to spot a smudge of soot on my cheek, and without a moment’s hesitation her hands were on my face, brushing it clean. Then we ate, and her company made the meal taste twice as good.
He has been at sea for four months. A stranger touched his face to clean it and he wrote it down.
Four marks a week each, coffee and rolls in the morning included, bedding extra — which he notes they hadn’t bargained for. Two beds and a couch for three men.
Schaarsteinweg runs through the Neustadt, a few minutes’ walk from the harbor. For a paid-off steward with a voyage’s wages, it was affordable. Nine days later it would not be.
Erna
A day trip out to Wedel. It goes wrong in a way he is honest about, which is to say he tells you he was extremely drunk and then tells you he can’t remember the rest of it firsthand.
A fair quantity of beer went down along the way, and by the time we arrived I was in an extremely jolly state, being inducted into the local customs of the place. As usual, I took up with the Kellnerin. A few more beers and I was perfectly happy — until her sweetheart stepped in. He took an instant dislike to me, and I noticed it right away. When he made a slurring remark and shoved my lady friend aside, that didn’t sit well with me at all. After a thorough drubbing, the intruder was glad to make his exit.
“After a thorough drubbing” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence and he does not say in which direction.
After that I went back to the beer, and didn’t fully come to my senses until the next morning. What follows is pieced together from what I was told: we all ended up at a Schützenfest, where the young man I’d tangled with had rounded up some friends to finish the job. At one of the arcades I was confronted, my money fast running out.
That’s when the Kellnerin — who’d followed along, worried something like this might happen — stepped in and took charge. I was bundled into a carriage and taken to her home.
She followed him across town because she thought this would happen. She was right. She got him out.
The next morning I woke in a handsome room, clearly a lady’s chamber, and slowly coming to my senses, noticed a note on the chair beside the bed.
He copies the note out in full. It is the only document in the entire journal he thought worth preserving word for word — not the ship’s articles, not a single letter from home, not the menu of any meal he ever served. This.
Left on the chair · Wedel · 24 June 1908
I stepped in on your behalf. You are not a bad man, I know it. You are a brave one. What money you have left, you’ll find on the table. I wish I could have reached you sooner. Goodbye for good.
Erna.
P.S. I really do care for you, because you are so brave, and I cannot bear to see a brave man treated badly.
She counted his money, left it where he’d find it, told him he was a good man, and ended it before he was awake to argue.
Goodbye for good. She knew exactly what this was. He was a foreign sailor on a beach week with a ship to catch.
It was around this time that my companions, alarmed at how things were going, more or less deserted me. They advised me to leave the Kellnerin’s business alone, that it was none of mine. I told them they could go to the devil, and threw them my keys.
He never mentions her again. Not in Berlin, not in the pawnshop weeks, not once aboard the Setos. The only trace is that he carried her note far enough to copy it into a notebook that ended up in a garage in Washington State a hundred and eighteen years later.
Six hours from Hamburg
Berlin is five days of a young man with money spending it, and he is completely unembarrassed about it, which I find I like.
The first order of business in Berlin was to sample the celebrated Berliner Weisse — served in a bowl you could nearly take a swim in. It had a slightly sour, almost salty taste, but was very good.
By nine we were out taking in the sights, the most interesting of which was the changing of the guard at the Kaiser’s Schloss, along with the military concert that followed around one o’clock. The rest of the day we spent in the beer gardens, drinking and making merry with the local girls, who turn out here blue-eyed, blonde, and altogether lovely.
Then, at the station, waiting for a shipmate who never shows up, he does something small that turns into the best social night of the trip.
While there, I noticed an elderly woman struggling to get a basket down from a cab and, being American, lent a hand. She thanked me kindly. Not long after, I was approached by a striking young woman, perhaps twenty-two, who asked if I wasn’t an American. I tipped my hat and admitted I had that honor.
Being American, lent a hand. He genuinely believes helping with the basket is a national characteristic, and he says so in a journal nobody was going to read.
They talk. She is waiting on a friend arriving aboard the Augusta Victoria. He walks her back to the St. Annie Hotel, where she is staying with her mother — a Mrs. and Miss Billington — and the evening turns into all of it.
We celebrated properly, and by the night’s end the young lady and I had become fast friends — good enough friends that neither of us gave a thought to sleep.
He makes a date with her for the following week. He does not keep it.
A date was made with the young lady for the following week, though I never kept it, the thinness of my purse being mostly to blame, whatever my pride might have preferred to think.
That is a twenty-four-year-old catching himself mid-excuse and writing down the correction. He stood her up because he was out of money, and he wants the record to show he knows that’s the actual reason.
It happens again four days later with the Dechow daughters — a fine evening, dancing and singing, a promise to come back, and we never kept that promise either, for much the same reason as before.
On the first of July the whole thing gets one sentence:
It had by now become absolutely necessary to draw in our horns.
The ledger
What follows is the most precisely accounted passage in the journal. He remembers every figure.
The Kodak, which had bought us such a good time, had to go. It belonged to Otto and had cost 350 marks. We took it to a pawnbroker, who wouldn’t even look at it long enough to make an offer. We tried a camera shop next — American cameras apparently held no value in the dealer’s eyes, who offered us somewhere between 18 and 45 marks, when we’d hoped for at least 40. Disappointment all around. In the end, we sold it to someone on the street for twenty marks, and went to see Adolph Sutro.
Three hundred and fifty marks, sold on a street for twenty. And it was Otto’s camera, not his.
Then note the very next thing he does with the money.
From that same money I redeemed my watch, which I’d pawned and which had stopped working — not a good sign given my situation — along with eight marks to reclaim a scarf pin already in hock.
He buys back a watch that doesn’t run. He notes, drily, that this is not a good sign. Then he buys back a scarf pin, which is not a tool and not a necessity and is the one thing in the list that is purely about looking like somebody.
Six marks left between two men.
Many trips back to the pawnbroker followed, with nothing to show for it. The watch went again, and my ring too, along with an older one, and then my own clothing, a picture frame, and whatever else could be spared.
The order things went
He lists them in sequence, and the sequence is the story:
1. Otto’s Kodak — 350 marks new, sold for 20
2. The watch — redeemed, then pawned again
3. The scarf pin — 8 marks to reclaim
4. His ring
5. An older ring
6. His own clothing
7. A picture frame
8. Whatever else could be spared
Tools and clothes before keepsakes. The picture frame near the end. And whatever was in the frame is not mentioned, then or ever.
Two weeks without a warm meal
The entry that covers this is short. It is the shortest passage in the journal relative to how much time it covers, and I think that is deliberate.
Then came the business of tightening the belt to quiet the hunger — two weeks without a single warm meal. A daily walk to the seamen’s employment bureau turned up nothing. Room rent came due, and a night on a park bench was the result, rain and all.
Then a chance came up to go aboard the Setos, but the papers I needed weren’t in hand, and the chance slipped away. I went to the consul and begged for papers, and armed with those, the next day I finally got taken on as mess steward — on that very same ship, a Kosmos boat. At last, something for the hunger, and for my own peace of mind besides.
Fourteen days, no warm food. A walk every morning to an employment office that has nothing. Rent due, no money, a night outside in the rain. A ship comes up and he can’t take it because his papers are wrong.
He uses the word begged. He is describing himself, and it is the only time in the journal he describes himself that way.
At last, something for the hunger, and for my own peace of mind besides.
Three months earlier he was standing on a bridge in the southern Pacific at midnight drinking coffee and thinking the waves looked like mountains. Six weeks earlier he was in a hotel in Berlin so grand he wrote down what the bows and courtesies were like.
Now he is twenty-four, hungry, sleeping outdoors in a country he was raised to speak the language of but has never lived in, walking to an office every morning that says no.
And in the middle of that stretch, on a page written aboard ship a few weeks later, he wrote this, about Germany, with no apparent irony at all:
That an American is well regarded in Germany becomes clearer by the day. He’s given more latitude, shown more courtesy, not just by the public but aboard ship too — it’s practically a point of pride for the crew to have an American among them.
He was broke and homeless in Hamburg for the better part of a month, and what he took away from the experience was that they liked him.
I do not know what to do with that except report it.