Summary Fugitive ship K. E. Porter
K. E. Porter
The Fool Ship
August 1931 The German passenger ship Vera sails from the Mexican port of Veracruz, which in mid-September is due to arrive in Bremerhaven. From the torn by the political passions of Mexico, the ship follows to Germany, where national socialism raises its head. The diverse passenger community – Germans, Swiss, Spanish, Cubans, Americans – together constitute a section of modern society on the eve of the great upheavals, and portraits of these typical representatives of mankind differ in psychological accuracy, to which the ruthlessness of the cartoonist is added.
At first life on the ship goes in the usual way: passengers get acquainted, exchange ritual cues. But gradually in the speeches of some of them, eloquent phrases begin to slip, behind which there is still not officially formalized, the ideology of totalitarianism existing at the everyday level, trying to make itself known, to be inscribed on banners and stories of believers
Similarly, Herr Rieber, the publisher of the women’s magazine, argues. He intends to educate ladies’ minds with articles about the most important problems of our time. He boasts that he has already agreed with one luminary about a highly scientific treatise on the necessity of destroying cripples and other inferior people. When Lizzie, who is flirting with him, asks how to help the unfortunate inhabitants of the lower deck, where the Spaniards are traveling day laborers, he answers: “Drive into a large oven and start up gas” than plunges his interlocutor into paroxysms of laughter.
Even before the Nazis came to power,
When it turns out that the German Freytag’s wife is Jewish, the steamboat beau monde unanimously drives out the defiler of his race from his ranks. He is put in one table with merchant Levental, who supplies religious objects to Catholic churches. The Jew Leventhal, in turn, pours scorn on Freytag and especially his absent wife – married a “goya” and defiled the purity of his race.
On the steamship, commanded by Captain Thiele, a prototype of the great Reich is established. So far, to the point of open terror, it does not happen, but the steamship majority, including the ship’s ideologist, the profoundly fool Professor Gutten, psychologically has already adopted a “new order”. Only the Fuhrer is needed. In those who want to get suffering from indigestion and a sense of unfulfilled opportunities Captain Thiele. He watches an American gangster film and dreams of power: “He secretly reveled in this picture.” Lawlessness, bloodthirsty madness flares up again and again, at any hour, in any unknown place – it and on the card is not found – but always among people who by law can and must be killed, and always he, Captain Thiele, at the center of events, commands and controls everything. ” The modest charm of fascism captivates not only the heroes that have not taken place, such as Herr Ribert and Captain Thiele. Quiet, meek creatures find considerable comfort in the idea of the power of racial or class choice. The completely nice Frau Schmitt, suffering from the vulgar Herr Ribert and sympathizing with Freytag after the expulsion of the latter from the “pure” society, suddenly becomes self-confident, determined to continue to defend her rights from now on in the struggle with circumstances: “Frau Schmitt’s soul rejoiced, a warm wave washed her a sense of blood relationship with a great and glorious race: let it itself be the smallest, most insignificant of all, but how many advantages it has! “
Most of the characters are torn from their habitual pale life, lacking solid roots. Frau Schmitt carries the body of her deceased husband to her homeland, where she has not been for a long time. The director of the German school in Mexico, Gutten returns to Germany, although there is full uncertainty awaiting him there. Change Mexico to Switzerland, the former owner of the hotel Lutz with his wife and daughter of eighteen. Many do not know what is the heat of the home, others, on the contrary, suffocate in its suffocating atmosphere (Karl Baumgartner, a lawyer, is a hopeless drunkard, and his wife is pissed at the whole world). These wandering atoms, according to the laws of social chemistry, are fully capable of merging into a totalitarian mass.
Mass totalitarian movements, Porter reminisces a long-standing sociological truth, arise when the inert middle passes treatment from above and from below-imbued with ideas that the intellectual elite develops, is charged with the energy of the declassed elements. When the intellectual and criminal work in unison, a single impulse is born. The respectable Porter bourgeois are shocked by the baser instincts of the Spanish dancers, they are outraged when those hurricanes pass through the Tenerife shops, expropriating everything that lies badly, and then involve passengers in a fraudulent lottery, playing the stolen goods. But the moralists from the first and second classes do not even suspect that there are far stronger ties between them and the “dancers” than it might seem. The criminal immorality of the dancers only shades the secret shamelessness of the Ribers and Thiele,
Writing out a gloomy collective portrait of the future loyal subjects of the Fuhrer, Porter does not discount representatives of other nations. The love between Americans Jenny Brown and David Scott is dying, dying in the struggle of self-love. Jenny, by the way, was too fond of fighting for the rights of those to whom she had the most distant relationship, and the constant discontent and anger of the artist David is a dangerous symptom of creative insolvency.
Porter’s heroes have excelled in the science of hatred. The Aryans hate Jews, Jews in the person of the merchant Leventhal – the Aryans. Young Johann hates his uncle Willibald Graff, a dying preacher, whom he cares like a nurse for fear of being left without inheritance. Engineer Danny of Texas is convinced that Negroes are lower-order beings, and his thoughts are focused on money, women and hygiene. It seems to be an intelligent and kind Mrs. Tredwell who dreams about not being pestered by others and not bothered by her idiotic problems. She despises Lizzie Spekenkenker, but quietly tells her the family secret of Freitag, which he told her at the moment of revelation. And during a party with dancing and a lottery, Mrs. Treadwell, pouring herself alone, is terribly beating up the unlucky Danny, chasing a Spanish dancer and making a mistake with the door.
Swede Hansen seems to be a radical. “Kill the enemies, not friends,” he shouted to the passengers who were hovering from the lower deck. He dismisses angry remarks about modern society – and seems to be on the case, but Freytag noted in this oil trader “a property inherent in almost all people: their abstract reasoning and generalizations, the thirst for justice, the hatred of tyranny… too often only a mask, a screen, and behind it lies some personal insult, very far from philosophical abstractions, which they seem to care about. “
A fire of mutual hatred blazes on the ship, hiding behind the need to observe decency and follow instructions. Polite and prudent the ship’s treasurer, who has been wanting to kill everyone who has to smile and bow to him for many years. The maid, who was ordered to bring a bowl of broth to the dog Guttenov, is indignant. The old bulldog was thrown overboard by the mischievous children of the Spanish dancers, but the ardent-basque saved him – at the cost of his own life, an act puzzling passengers of the first and second classes. An angry monologue of a maid – “The rich man’s dog is given a meat-filled bouillon, and the broth is cooked from the bones of the poor” – interrupts the corridor boy: “For me let both, the dog and the fireman-drown, and you, the old fool.” .. “Well, and the holiday on the ship becomes a real battle, when under the influence of alcohol and general excitement the inhabitants turn into barbarians. Mrs. Treadwell straightens Danny, Hansen breaks the bottle against Riber’s head, which always irritated him. There is a war of all with all…
However, after the evening bacchanalia, life on the ship again enters the usual course, and soon the ship enters the port of destination. To the sounds of “Tannenbaum” passengers without extra words go to land. Ahead of the unknown.
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