Steamship Nationalism by Mark A. Russell

Author:Mark A. Russell [Mark A. Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

VI

The ceremonies and speeches that marked the launch of the Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck staged social harmony and political consensus just as did those made at the launch of warships. Furthermore, reporting in the liberal and conservative press sometimes spoke of unanimous enthusiasm for the Imperator-class liners. It seems reasonable to assume that the various constituencies to which Hamburg’s mayors addressed their remarks – HAPAG, Hamburg’s commercial middle classes, the German bourgeoisie, and the Imperial monarchy – could look favourably on the speeches, and the vessels themselves, as reflecting their role and achievements in the German Empire. And yet, just as Germany was socially fractured, so enthusiasm for the Imperator-class liners was far from unanimous. As Corey Ross has emphasized, what Germans heard in public addresses, or read in the popular media, was mediated by class, locality, gender, and cultural milieu.176 It should be no surprise that this extended to the Imperator.

Some critics were embarrassed by the outpouring of nationalist rhetoric that surrounded the liner. As we saw in chapter two, the Imperator ran aground in the Elbe on 22 April 1913 while on route to its sea trials. Perturbed by the excitement this caused, the German naval officer and journalist Count Ernst von Reventlow spoke of “the absurd tendency to make of the launch of the Imperator a national triumph.” In his opinion, boasting about the liner before its sea trials was “unwise” and undignified.177 Other criticism was more profound and questioned what it was that the Imperator actually symbolized. Lamar Cecil has argued that, to the Prussian aristocracy, HAPAG’s liners were “only the effete and sensuous emblems of a decaying empire.”178 To be sure, there were those among the aristocracy and middle classes who thought that the Imperator was the embodiment of all the evils wrought by political, social, and cultural transformation.179 Others felt it “appeared as a typical manifestation of the new Germany, with its huckstering, and obtrusive manners, more a snobbism than a symbol of German competence.”180 In chapter four, we will analyse the opinions of a group of middle-class intellectuals who thought the Imperator’s interior decoration was disappointingly unrepresentative of the advanced state of modern German art and design.181

More challenging to reconstruct are the opinions that circulated among the social constituency that was conspicuously absent from the speeches made at the launch of all three liners: the working classes and, more specifically, that “army of semi-skilled manual workers housed in the poorly plumbed, under-heated ‘rent-barracks’ of Hamburg’s proletarian quarters.”182 In photographs taken of the vessels while under construction, the men whose hands actually built them are often absent. As noted in the previous chapter, many of these images are eerily devoid of any indication of physical labour and even any human presence; the Imperator-class liners seem to rise on the stocks of their own accord and without human agency. When workers appear, they often seem to be employed by the photographer as staffage for the purpose of emphasizing the enormity of the vessel on which they labour.

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