The First Morning on Board
p. 11-17
At half past eight, the sun shines down from the sky on the Isle of Wight. Spithead comes into sight while comically round towers, plump and stocky like pudding, lay sleepily in the water and protect the harbor entrance. They are painted like a chessboard, and behind the black panels you can see the mouths of cannons aimed upwards, but they only fire at noon, or perhaps more often if the king is crowned. The first white yachts hunt from the Solent back and forth into the canal. Over there we see Ryde, a tiny harbor with cute little houses, looking as if they had been taken out of a box. The dreadnought on the Portsmouth side is an elaborate, ugly plaything out in the distance, sitting like a plank of wood.
We stop at Cowes, and out of the forest on the shore, a slender and delicate tower raises up near the water. It’s a house, with a terrace gliding out into the sunshine, a green lawn in front of it, gleaming windows, dark green ivy on the windows and stretching up to the point of the tower, everything bright and cheerful. A couple of hazy dots travel between the lawn and the building.
I stand on the promenade deck, from where I can look down to steerage, and with my good binoculars I can observe the wonderful summer morning over on the manor.
Down in steerage, the throng is in full motion. All the assorted colors of the world hurry about the women’s skirts, headscarves, slippers and the children’s clothing.
Back at the castle, two figures emerge, dressed in white, a gentleman and a lady. They carry with them something which is red and swings: a sun-umbrella that the man carries with him. They walk here and there until they stand around lazily by the lawn. There are about a hundred steps from the terrace to the beach.
Below in steerage, some order is coming into the crowd, quietly. I’m sensing a feeling of oppression. The people are moving to the sides, and below me, below the promenade deck where I’m standing, men and women, old and young, walk one at a time out of a door, tickets in hand, which they hold out to the ship’s officer. They never hold the tickets very far out, as if they want to say: Enough! Read it from here! But there’s something in their gestures which stirs me, something timid which is begging for forgiveness. People like us would never hold a ticket like the people down there.
Over at Wight, I spot a small, merry fleck dancing under the ivied castle: a tiny, blond girl, next to a light-haired sheepdog springing out. The young lady turns to the lawn, the woman and the child run towards each other, the great white spot bends down to the little white spot, and for a moment they form one white spot. Then the woman and the child go arm in arm down to the beach, where the man is waiting for them. The collie is already there, almost by the water. On the terrace, two new figures appear in front of the gleaming windows; the breakfast is over. The sun is so bright over the lawn.
Down below, Mr. X. Y. from A. (from above I can read the names on the tickets quite well) walks out of the gangway. He and his family, an old scrawny woman and a small blond girl, cling tightly to each other, walking in step and holding hands. The man, elderly and thick in well-worn clothes, holds up his ticket -- He passes.
I can’t see the castle anymore. For awhile yet, I can still see the tower over the trees and the light strip of lawn, and then we’re gone.
Below, one after the other, people step through the gangway tickets in hand and stand there relieved on the deck, where the sun illuminates the colors over and over again. --
In steerage, an infectious disease can spread with disastrous speed, so the people in steerage must be daily subjected to examination on board. The hygienic facilities are excellent, giving no one any reason to feel sorry or shed a tear. But the day before yesterday, I saw something in Bremen which I will not soon forget. The man from North German Lloyd took me through the train station into the Emigration Department, and over there I saw what I want to tell you. In a large room, day after day, three doctors in lab coats stand in front of a sort of barrier. They have a table with containers of carbolic acid next to them, and in their hands they hold these steel instruments, which at best I can say look like nail files, I can find no better comparison. Three long rows of people walk up to the barrier, men and women holding children by the arm. They come up to the doctor with the shirtsleeves on their right arms rolled up.
With the sharp end of the steel instrument, the doctors scratch the arms held before them, arms which are trembling or brave, anemic or muscular. Then the doctor flips the instrument, lifts it up to the person’s eye, turns inside-out the left then the right eyelid, dips the “nail file” into the bowl and then the line steps forward and so on and so forth. It all flies quickly before them -- One -- Two -- Three -- Four -- At the fourth, disinfection.
This is the vaccination and the Trachoma examination which each steerage passenger is subjected to. I don’t know how many people are fixed up for their trip over the course of an hour. I also never thought to count how many passed me by during the two minutes I was watching. I know only that I gagged a little in my throat and took off, stumbling out of this Dante’s hell into the open.
But there’s really no cause to get worked up over notions of hell and that sort of thing. The large shipping company has caught onto the business-like way of doing things in the States, and I should actually be happy that the people here are protected from a detour into sickness and death. But the whole affair with the tickets bothers me. I hope I won’t be hardened to feelings of this sort.
And besides, if you really look at the daily life of these hundred thousands, comparing their life on board to their life beforehand, you can honestly say that they have every reason to feel happy about their strange and lucky fortunes.
Now that I’ve looked down from the promenade deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great down onto the liberated throng beneath me, down onto this bustle, which moves about strangely, comically and en masse, like a microcosm, like the life in a piece of cheese under the microscope, I can now correct an old dusty idea that has been laying around my brain for years.
In the train stations of Silesian Oderbeg, in the evening, emigrants lay on beds in fourth-class waiting rooms under pale gaslight, sleeping a short and interrupted sleep in damp clothing from the day before, constantly in thrall to their underfed bodies. At half past three in Berlin, in the train station of the Berlin Zoological Garden, when one of the emigrant trains drifts slowly by -- how can I describe the expression on those faces, staring out of the windows at us, the fully dressed, the inquisitive people who stand back on the platform, rocking back and forth on our feet!
Now that I’m watching from the promenade deck, everything takes on a different face. What sorts of dreams are coming true down there! They have a week to look forward to, where they will not have to work to feed their bodies, not twelve hours, not ten hours, no hours at all! There will be a week in their lives, where they can sleep out in the good air and on clean beds, one bed for each person, where they will experience the joys of showers and single-occupancy water closets, where they will get to eat truly divine meat every day and are allowed to feel the daylight from sunrise to sunset over their heads, without having to sweat or work their hands. A week, where they will get to experience something which has nothing to do with the dreary misery of their surrounding lives! Where else could the poor have such an untroubled week? (Maybe in prison.) Here in steerage, they experience a week that will shine over their dreary souls as a hope, a new part of the world rising before their eyes!
On the inside of the promenade deck railing, a sign advises us against throwing the steerage passengers any money, fruit or similar items. Do they really have to spell it out in black and white to you honored fellow first-class travelers? I wish I could step over to one of the gentlemen here and begin throwing money, fruit and similar items down to the people below. I’d probably get a few jabs in my first-class nose, by God, and be in danger of being thrown overboard!
For today and five days afterward, we’re allowed to call these poor people the people in the depths. You can’t really say they’ve been torn from their native soil, because who today still has his native soil underneath him? What do you call it today: soil? The small farmer has to work for his massive landlord or go underneath the gravedigger. In the same way, the small tradesman must sell off the honored tools handed down to him from his earliest ancestors and put on a “tear-proof” factory worker’s uniform. As for the small, calculating man in his moldy suburban business, his front window is boarded up and so is everything he sold to the people on his street. Now he tidies up, according to artistic principles, the front windows of the warehouses which have made him an assistant into his old age. So which of these people would cry over living his life on a ship, torn away from his self and his home? Even if this homeland were so wonderful as an Upper Hungarian castle or as shabby and pitiful as a shoemaker’s workshop in a dirty little street in Czernowitz?
The feeling of happiness in these people down below is only really half true, if you think about the entire situation when looking down to steerage from the promenade deck. In the Emigrant Department someone said to me: If the people in this room were forced to wait a few days longer on account of some delay, they’d become nervous and restless and disturbed. They have clean beds and good baths and good air, they are catered to at the expense of the company, they have meat and other good things to eat all day, and still they are nervous and disturbed. Why is that? These meager laborer’s brains probably don’t have much more room for the idea of freedom. All for the worse!