Free The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin Page A

out of the ship’s beams.
    The captain, one of those seamen who combined only a little school-learning with much worldly wisdom, kept his nerve under these uncomfortable circumstances and he did not lose it even when one afternoon – it might have been just off Dover – Frieda, a well-built girl from Saint Pauli with a bad reputation and a cigarette in her mouth, appeared on the boat’s stern. Undoubtedly there were people on board who knew where she had previously been stowed; what’s more, these people were clear on the measures that were to be taken were they to receive instructions from above to remove the excess passenger.
    From this point onwards, the nightly business was even more worth seeing. But it would not have been 1919 if politics had not been added to the list of on-board divertissements. There were voices which proclaimed that this expedition was to mark the start of a new life in a new world; others saw in it the long yearned-for instant when the reckoning with the rulers would finally be settled. Unmistakably, a harsher wind was blowing. It was soon discovered whence it came: it was a certain Schwinning, a tall chap of limp posture who wore his red hair parted and of whom nothing was known, except that he had travelled as a cabin attendant on various shipping routes and that he was well versed in the trade secrets of the Finnish bootleggers.
    Initially he had kept to himself, but now one encountered him at every turn. Whoever listened to him had to concede that they were dealing with a shrewd agitator. And who did not listen in when he embroiled someone or other in a loud, contentious conversation at the ‘bar’, such that his voice drowned out the sound of the phonograph record, or when, in the ‘ring’, he provided precise, entirely unsolicited information about the fighter’s party affiliation. Thus, while the crowd gave in to the on-board amusements, he worked relentlessly on their politicisation, until finally his efforts were rewarded when he was appointed chairman of the sailors’ council during a nocturnal plenary meeting.
    As they entered the Panama Canal, the elections gained momentum. There was a lot to vote for: a house commission, a control committee, an on-board secretariat, a political tribunal. In short, a magnificent apparatus was set up, without causing even the slightest clash with the ship’s command. However, within the revolutionary leadership disagreements arose all the more often; these disagreements were all the more vexatious given that – upon close examination – everyone belonged to the leadership. Whoever had no position could expect one from the next commission’s meeting, and so not a day passed without difficulties to resolve, votes to count, resolutions to carry. But when the action committee finally detailed its plans for a surprise attack – at exactly eleven o’clock on the night after the next, the high command was to be overpowered and the ship was to be rerouted on a westerly course bound for the Galapagos – The Mascot had, unbeknownst to all, already passed beyond Callao. Later on these bearings would turn out to have been falsified. ‘Later’ – that means the following morning – forty-eight hours before the planned, carefully prepared mutiny, when the four-mastship docked at the quay of Antofagasta, as if nothing had happened.
    With that my friend stopped. The second watch came to an end. We stepped into the chart room, where some cocoa waited for us in deep stone cups. I was silent, attempting to make sense of what I had just heard. But the radio operator, who was about to take his first sip, suddenly paused and looked at me over the edge of his cup. ‘Leave it be,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know what was going on at the time either. But when I ran into Schwinning some three months later in the administration building in Hamburg with a fat Virginia between his