Steamship Nationalism

Ocean Liners and National Identity in Imperial Germany and the Atlantic World

Mark A. Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032236506
• eBook ISBN: 9780429648335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Steamship Nationalism is a cultural, social, and political history of the S.S. Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck. Transatlantic passenger steamships launched by the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) between 1912 and 1914, they do not enjoy the international fame of their British counterparts, most notably the Titanic. Yet the Imperator -class liners were the largest, most luxurious passenger vessels built before the First World War. In keeping with the often-overlooked history of its merchant marine as a whole, they reveal much about Imperial Germany in its national and international dimensions. As products of business decisions shaped by global dynamics and the imperatives of international travel, immigration, and trade, HAPAG's giant liners bear witness to Germany's involvement in the processes of globalization prior to 1914. Yet this book focuses not on their physical, but on their cultural construction in a variety of contemporaneous media, including the press and advertising, on both sides of the Atlantic. At home, they were presented to the public as symbolic of the nation's achievements and ambitions in ways that emphasize the complex nature of German national identity at the time. Abroad, they were often construed as floating national monuments and, as such, facilitated important encounters with Germany, both virtual and real, for the populations of Britain and America. Their overseas reception highlights the multi-faceted image of the European superpower that was constructed in the Anglo-American world in these years. More generally, it is a pointed indicator of the complex relationship between Britain, the United States, and Imperial Germany.

1 “My field is the world”

HAPAG, Hamburg, Germany, and the globe

I

Mein Feld ist die Welt. This was the motto HAPAG adopted at the height of its success under the leadership of Albert Ballin, managing director of the company from 1899 until his death in 1918. Passers-by read it over the main entrance to the company’s headquarters in Hamburg; it appeared on advertising produced for the German, European, British, and North American public; was carved on sculptural reliefs adorning the interiors of HAPAG liners; and decorated the menus, passenger lists, and other ephemera presented to those who travelled aboard them. But this proud assertion – My Field is the World – found its most dramatic and pugnacious expression on the figurehead that dominated the Imperator’s prow. This was the two-ton, bronze figure of an eagle boasting a wing span of fifty-two feet. With head stretched out before it, beak open in a menacing cry, wings splayed and swept back, and heavily articulated feathers emphasizing a muscular form, it was the epitome of a predatory creature. On its head, the giant bird wore a small crown and, with its massive talons, grasped a comparatively small globe encircled by a banner bearing HAPAG’s motto. Eighteen rays emanated from the globe which, along with the creature’s massive wings, bound the ensemble to the Imperator’s stem. It is hardly surprising that this martial beast, designed by the Berlin sculptor Bernhard Kruse, provoked considerable commentary, both positive and negative, on both sides of the Atlantic.¹

Figure 1.1 The Imperator’s figurehead.

Source: Bain Collection, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

On the 150th anniversary of the company’s founding, HAPAG looked back on the Imperator’s launch as the actual and symbolic highpoint of its history before 1914.² However its motto was received, few would challenge the fact that Germany’s pre-eminent shipping line could legitimately make this claim when the liner departed on its maiden voyage to New York in 1913. By that time, HAPAG was one of the nation’s greatest industrial enterprises and the largest shipping company in the world. It is best described as a “worldwide transport concern” offering an array of freight and passenger services to destinations around the globe.³ A history published by the company in 1907 offers an impressive portrait. Its pages present the image of a pioneering, complex, highly organized, thoroughly modern, future-oriented, and incredibly successful transportation and industrial enterprise of enormous dimensions and far-reaching influence. Moreover, HAPAG described itself as playing a major role in the economic and industrial development of Germany and the entire Atlantic world. The company also claimed that its endeavours constituted a significant share of the Empire’s world-power status and it was proud of the fact that it opened Germany to the world, and the world to Germans. It is difficult not to be impressed by HAPAG’s global reach after only fifty years of operation. A partial list of the destinations to which its vessels steamed in 1914 includes Halifax, Montreal, Baltimore, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, Togo, Djibouti, Aden, Calcutta, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama. The company also offered leisure cruises to northern Europe, around the Mediterranean, to the Near East, and to the West Indies.⁴

When launched in May 1912, the Imperator was christened with an address by Hamburg’s mayor. Giving succinct expression to opinion published in the popular press, Johann Heinrich Burchard celebrated the liner as symbolic of HAPAG’s history and successes; of the industriousness and prosperity of Hamburg, its home port; of German achievements in engineering, economics, culture, and even politics; and of Germany’s commitment to international communication and exchange. The details of Burchard’s address are closely analysed in chapter three. But the following pages take their prompt from Hamburg’s mayor: they sketch the historical facts, circumstances, and developments that he felt the Imperator symbolized and embodied. In this way, the chapter provides necessary context for understanding the multi-faceted symbolic importance that the trio of liners assumed in Germany and the Atlantic world.

A concise account of HAPAG’s history from its modest beginnings in 1847 through to the Imperator’s launch provides the chapter’s framework. During the first fifty years of its existence, the company was primarily a North Atlantic shipping line. Nonetheless, the history of such a large enterprise is incredibly complex, as is the history of German merchant shipping in general.⁵ It can also be abstruse for non-specialists when recounted from the perspective of business history, or seen through the complicated dynamics of HAPAG’s relations with other domestic and foreign shipping lines. The following pages concentrate on essential facts and figures to highlight HAPAG’s place and role in the development of Germany’s merchant and passenger shipping on the Atlantic before 1914. The shipping industry made a vital contribution to the development of the global economy. In fact, “our world could not function without the complex system of maritime transport sustaining international and regional trade.”⁶ What the following pages emphasize is that HAPAG’s evolution was part of, and helped propel the international revolution in transportation, communications, and information technologies that drove globalization. It also played a major role in creating an integrated world market in the decades from 1850 to 1914.

This chronological narrative is punctuated and enriched by an examination of the local, national, and international contexts in which HAPAG operated, and the structural forces that shaped its development. The chapter provides a concise portrait of the particular environment in which the company was founded and headquartered: the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. It also offers an assessment of HAPAG’s relationship with the German government to demonstrate how its growth and success was facilitated by the Empire and its ambition to become a major maritime power. In addition, the following pages provide a succinct introduction to the ways in which the company, in keeping with much of the enterprise of its home port, engaged with the world beyond Germany’s borders and was shaped by global dynamics. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was “an era of worldwide interaction and exchange.”⁷ The chapter emphasizes that HAPAG’s passenger and cargo business was but one facet of a German economy increasingly oriented towards global markets and shaped by international commerce; situates the company’s role in the phenomenon of transatlantic and global travel and migration; and highlights the stake that it had in Germany’s colonial expansion after 1884. In so doing, emphasis is placed on the fact that, from the 1880s, the development of German society “must be interpreted in the context of the globalization processes” that were ongoing at the time.⁸ German history unfolded in an international context and HAPAG was an organization that connected the local and the global. Along with much of Germany’s merchant marine, it was at the leading edge of the nation’s global engagement, a fact often overlooked in studies of this phenomenon.⁹ Seeing HAPAG in all these interconnected contexts enriches an understanding of the numerous instances in which the Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck were construed as national monuments at home and abroad. It also highlights the extent to which they were positioned and able to function as such.

It has been said that the liners were Albert Ballin’s Geisteskinder, or brainchildren.¹⁰ At the very least, he was a major driving force behind their construction and played a significant role in their design. More importantly, during his lifetime and in the century since his death, journalists, biographers, and historians have often treated Ballin and HAPAG as virtually synonymous. In 1918, Hamburg’s Social Democratic newspaper, the Hamburger Echo, declared that to write Ballin’s biography was to write “the history of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie and German maritime imperialism.”¹¹ As he was the subject of considerable press interest in Germany, Britain, and America, Ballin returns time and again in subsequent chapters. But in the pages that immediately follow, his role in developing HAPAG’s strategy, and driving its dramatic growth from the 1890s, is sketched in terms of his overall motivations and goals. Was he a patriot who put the interests of Germany’s merchant marine ahead of those of HAPAG, or a ruthless businessman who waged commercial warfare to the point of endangering the financial well-being of his own firm? Was he responsible for stoking international tensions in the years before the outbreak of the First World War, or did he recognize the danger of the Anglo-German antagonism and seek to mitigate it? These are the questions that continue to inform thinking about Ballin’s life and work.

Finally, the chapter turns to the most important aspect of HAPAG’s global enterprise: the services it offered to the United States and especially its passenger service to New York. While the company operated a complex network of services on the Atlantic, none were as literally and symbolically important as its trunk line to New York. This was what the Imperator-class liners were meant to serve and particular attention is paid to HAPAG’s contribution to the development of the modern transatlantic liner. More importantly, the decision to construct a trio of giant new liners is set within the international competition, especially with Britain, to commission not the fastest, but the largest and most luxurious passenger steamers the world had yet seen.

II

The Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft was founded on 27 May 1847 by a group of Hamburg ship owners and merchants ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. “My field is the world”: HAPAG, Hamburg, Germany, and the globe
• 2. “One of the greatest marvels devised by the human spirit”: The transnational career, image, and appeal of the Imperator-class liners
• 3. Picturing the Imperator: Making and debating seagoing monuments in Germany’s popular culture
• 4. Swimming symbols of German art and design? Aby Warburg, Karl Scheffler, and German modernism at sea
• 5. Outdoing Britain at what it did best? The Imperator-class liners in the context of Anglo-German relations
• 6. Masterpieces “Made in Germany”: The Imperator and Vaterland as ambassadors to the United States
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index