DEATH OF A GERMAN SEAMAN
21
He had one idiosyncrasy-a passion for stuffing his poclcets with news-
papers in various languages-which none of us could quite make out. We
all knew, of course, that Shorty could read nothing but German.
When
we would get tired of teasing him about LizzIe, the little prostitute whom
he picked up on the Hamburg water-front and with whom every one of
us claimed to have slept, we would begin with the newspapers.
"Shorty," I would say, "what's the good news in the Paris Le
Matin?"
Invariably he would produce the paper, spread it on the table and
say: "Here, you vont to read?"
In a moment everyone would become interested to find out what
the Frenchies had to say.
2. Slim-
This was my last
Hans for three years.
March, 1933.
A group of us, stranded American seamen, were sitting at the sea-
men's quarters of the American consulate, waiting for a chance to ship
back to the States.
It was a beautiful, typically' Hamburg, day in March.
Spring was
already in the air. From the fifth floor of the consulate where the Con-
sul's window faced the fashionable
A lsterdam strasse,
one could see the
thawing
A Ister
lalce. In the basement, howe'v~r-the seamen'5 quart~rs-
where we had been waiting for days, it was as usual darlc and dense with
smoke. I say days! Some; of us had been waiting there for months. We
had lost all hope of ever getting out of that hole. Shipping was getting
worse and worse.
Those were uneventful days for us. There was little we could do
during the day except smoke, brood, or chew the rag. But in the evening
we would go down to
St. Pauli,
parade the brightly lit
Grosse Freiheit,
and finish up the evening with a girl at the
Indra.
Next day we would
amuse ourselves by relating to each other our previous night's experience.
It happened on the fifth of March.
I remember the date because on
that day everyone in Hamburg was excited about the forthcoming elec-
tions of a new Reichskanzler.
Outwardly Hamburg was calm and peace-
ful. It was, however, a superficial calmness., The atmosphere was tense.
Everyone was expecting trouble.
Slim, who had just quit a job as an oiler on one of the United States
Lines' boats, was relating with much gusto how he threw a prostitute
trip on the
City of Baltimore
and I had not seen
I met him again in Hamburg in the month of
