Playing saxophone in a large dance band for 610 marks a month at the Alkazar was more than I had ever dared to dream. I was getting paid—by prevailing standards extremely well—for something I would have gladly done for nothing.
The job consisted of playing two two-hour shows, including two dance sessions, from four to six and from eight to ten, with two hours’ intermission. This meant that, except for two weekly morning rehearsals, I could indulge myself sleeping late, then watching the rest of the city work while I strolled about town like a man of leisure. Another fringe benefit of my new lifestyle was the ready access it provided me to the leggiest chorus line appearing on a Hamburg stage at that time. Since most of the young ladies were from out of town and lived scattered over St. Pauli in cheap rooming houses, the job of keeping them happy and contented while away from home fell largely to the band, a responsibility which all of us assumed with the utmost dedication.
It was gratifying for me to note that my skin color, which for so long I had regarded as my major liability, had almost overnight turned into an asset. During my previous, mostly clandestine, encounters with German girls, I rarely could escape the feeling of being used as forbidden fruit—quite willingly, I admit, but used nevertheless. Now I had the new, ego-bolstering experience of being pursued openly and unabashedly because, as far as the fräuleins of the immediate postwar period were concerned, black was definitely in.
Thanks to my new high-profile position as saxophonist in one of Hamburg’s most popular nightspots, I was reunited with many of my old cronies from war and prewar days who happened to be in the audience and recognized me. Of all the reunions, however, none was as memorable and heartrending as one that occurred during a Sunday matinee. As I passed the bar during intermission, I heard an oddly familiar female voice call my name. When I turned around, I looked at a tall, beautiful redhead who turned out to be none other than Gretchen Jahn. In the nearly two years since I had last seen her, her face had become even more beautiful than I remembered, but I also detected a certain hardness around her mouth and eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “What are you doing here?” I asked, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say.
Gretchen replied that she was with her mother and took me to their table. Mrs. Jahn seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “My, have you matured!” she exclaimed, while reminding me that she hadn’t seen me since those memorable July days in 1943 when most of Hamburg went up in flames.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask Gretchen and so many things I wanted to tell her, but I felt inhibited by Mrs. Jahn’s presence. The same seemed to be true for Gretchen. Sensing our discomfort, Mrs. Jahn suggested that she would catch an early train back to her home in the suburbs so Gretchen and I could talk after the show about the good old days in the Stückenstrasse.
After the matinee and a hasty goodbye from Mrs. Jahn, we went to the bar to bring each other up to date. Seeing Gretchen again stirred up all the old, long-pent-up feelings I had once felt for the girl who was my first love and with whom I had shared my first tender feelings for the opposite sex. Without taking our eyes off each other, we compared notes on what had transformed the young boy Mrs. Jahn used to know into the mature young man, and what had put that certain hardness around Gretchen’s eyes and mouth.
“Guess what?” Gretchen prepared me for a surprise. She then told me that she, too, was in show business, as the assistant of a magician who, as part of his act, would saw her in half, then put her ostensibly severed torso back together again. I didn’t press her for a more detailed explanation of her relationship with him, but it seemed obvious that he was more to her than just her boss.
I recalled the last time we said goodbye and her insistence on hanging on to her virginity until she was at least twenty-one. Gretchen confirmed that she was no longer a virgin. I didn’t know whether I should be glad or sad about her revelation. On the one hand, I felt relief because a big obstacle had been removed. At the same time, I was deeply disappointed and hurt. As if she had read my thoughts, she suddenly said, “No matter what has happened or what will happen, you will always be the first man I ever loved.”
The bar was about to close and I offered to walk her home, which, she explained, was just a few blocks away. When we had reached the building where Gretchen rented a small room in a second-floor flat, she told me what I longed to hear, namely that I was welcome to come upstairs. Throughout the night, we both tried hard to rekindle the old magic that we felt when, barely fourteen years old, we exchanged our first kiss. But to no avail. We conceded with some sadness that there was nothing we could do to bring back the magic because our innocence, along with our adolescence, was irretrievably gone.
As we said goodbye, Gretchen told me that she was shortly going on the road with her magician boss. We both felt instinctively that we would never see each other again and that the great love story of Hans-Jürgen and Gretchen had come to an end.
YANKEE WERNER
One night, my fellow bandsmen and I were treated to a strange spectacle. We had just settled down on the bandstand when a waiter ushered an immense black fellow who bore an uncanny resemblance to Louis Armstrong toward a reserved ringside table directly below us. He was wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a U.S. Army field jacket. After waving at me and flashing a wide fraternal grin, he reached into one of the pockets and extracted a sandwich of the most generous proportions, the likes of which I had never seen before. Seemingly oblivious to the people around him, he proceeded to dig his large, snow-white teeth into the delicacy, which, followed by hundreds of covetous eyes, disappeared from view in a matter of seconds. After that, he produced another sandwich of similar proportions from another pocket and, to the envy of the hungry Germans around him, repeated the procedure. Next, his seemingly inexhaustible pockets yielded half a carton of Camels, from which he extracted a pack and, in turn, a cigarette.
By this time my colleagues could stand it no longer. “I’ll bet he’ll let you have a pack if you ask him,” one of them suggested, obviously expecting to benefit from such a move on my part. The thought had already crossed my mind. So at intermission, I made my way to the stranger’s table.
“I’m Mickey,” I introduced myself. “Are you an American Gl?”
“Naw,” he replied, “I’m merchant marine. Smitty’s the name. How come you’re playing in a Kraut band?”
I told him that I was sort of a Kraut myself since my mother was German and Germany was my home.
“I’m from Mobile, Alabama,” he informed me. Smitty told me he had just come from New York on the Appleton Victory and expected to be in port for two or three days.
Lighting another cigarette, he wanted to know whether I smoked. I thought he’d never ask.
“You bet,” I replied, trying out an American phrase I had learned only a few days before. He handed me the near-full pack and told me to keep it. “Musta been rough livin’ here during the war,” he surmised.
“It still is,” I told him, “especially when it comes to getting enough food and cigarettes. Cigarettes are so scarce, you can buy anything you want with them, and,” I added suggestively, “I mean anything.”
Smitty looked at me incredulously. Then, with a sly wink, he repeated, “Anything?”
Handing me another pack of cigarettes, he asked me to do him a favor. “Do you know the tall blonde in the chorus line?”
“I know all the girls in the chorus line,” I bragged. “Her name is Gerda; she’s the lead dancer.”
I didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking—or I thought was taking—since I knew that Gerda was not that kind of a girl.
“Ask her if she minds joining us here at the table and having a picture taken with me.”
“That’s no problem,” I assured him with great relief, a bit ashamed for having jumped to the wrong conclusion. I then walked over to Gerda at the bar.
“How’d you like to earn a few cigarettes in a hurry?” I asked her. “All you have to do is have your pictu
re taken with a friend of mine,” I explained.
Smitty was happy as a lark when Gerda consented not only to pose with him, but to do so cheek-to-cheek and with both arms wrapped around him. Within minutes, the roving camera girl had captured this touching scene for posterity—as well as, no doubt, for Smitty’s envious homeboys back in Jim Crow Alabama. For our “trouble,” Gerda and I received our own souvenir snapshots and a pack of Camels each, which brought my loot for the evening to the equivalent of one week’s pay.
On a sudden impulse of generosity, I tossed one pack up to my colleagues on the bandstand. Most of them had watched me “operate” and had been eagerly awaiting my return. Before I joined them to resume work, Smitty thanked me for taking care of him and told me that, in return, he would “fix me up” if I came to visit him aboard his ship the next morning. “Just catch the WSA launch and get off when you get to the Appleton Victory,” he told me. “When you come aboard, ask for Smitty, the messman.”
He explained that the launch was a small motor boat that at hourly intervals ferried U.S. seamen between their ships and shore free of charge. I hadn’t the vaguest idea where I had to catch the boat or what he meant by wanting to “fix me up,” but I was eager to take him up on his offer. Setting foot on an American ship, I felt, was the next best thing to setting foot on American soil. “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” I promised, and he responded that he’d be looking for me.
Except for a few field trips with my class during my early school years, I had never been in Hamburg’s vast harbor, the largest in Germany. Consequently, it took me a while the next morning until I had found my way to the wharf near St. Pauli’s famous Landungsbrücken (landing bridges) where a large sign proclaimed:
* * *
WAR SHIPPING ADMINISTRATION (WSA) LAUNCH.
ADMISSION RESTRICTED TO
UNITED STATES MERCHANT MARINE PERSONNEL!
* * *
Despite my limited English, I had no problem figuring out that German landlubbers like me were not welcome. But rather than about my mission, which was to get fixed up by Smitty, I decided to take a chance and meet the challenge head on. There were about a dozen men already waiting for the launch. One covetous look at their new-looking American clothes convinced me that they were Amis, as Germans were fond of calling Americans. Careful not to arouse their suspicion, I boldly mingled with the group as if I belonged, while intensely scrutinizing each man from the corners of my eyes. They behaved exactly the way Amis behaved in the American movies I had seen before the war. Some were smoking cigarettes, while others were chewing gum like ruminating cattle; some did both simultaneously. Except for one man in a navy topcoat and gold-braided white naval officer’s hat, the men were dressed in various civilian attires that ranged from suits with huge shoulders, wide-brimmed hats, and colorful geometric-patterned neckties to casual sportswear and khakis. To me, a kid who had only one shabby suit to his name, the group on the landing looked like a male fashion show. Self-conscious, I looked down at my crude-looking “sport shoes” with the home-made “crepe” soles and at the drab-looking, nondescript pants and jacket I was wearing. They were so threadbare and shiny from frequent pressing that on closer inspection one could see the skin of my elbows and knees peeping through. But nobody seemed to pay any particular attention to me or my clothing, or so I thought. Just as I started to feel a bit less apprehensive, a cocky young fellow with what I thought was an all-American face headed straight toward me. He was dressed in a khaki shirt and pants, white socks, and a pair of loafers, and his blond hair was carefully combed into a pompadour in the front and a duck’s tail in the back. Before I could figure out what he might want from me, the young fellow said “Hi,” and after offering me a cigarette from a freshly opened pack, asked me where I was going. “The Appleton Victory,” I replied, hoping against hope that he was from another ship.
I had tried to keep our conversation to a minimum so as not to give myself away as a German, but to no avail.
“Where’re you from?” he pried.
Before I had a chance to answer, the man in the naval officer’s uniform turned to him for a light. After the all-American had lighted the officer’s cigarette, the two got into a conversation and for the time being I was off the hook.
“Where’re you from?” the officer turned the tables on my interrogator.
“New Jork,” the all-American replied.
“New Jork? Where’s that?”
Suddenly, the all-American lost his cockiness and for a moment looked quite helpless as he repeated that he was from “New Jork City in the state of New Jork.”
“You mean New York,” the officer corrected him.
“Yeah, New York, New Jork, whatever.”
The officer didn’t belabor the point, but I had followed the exchange between the two with increasing interest. It occurred to me that anybody who couldn’t pronounce the name of his own hometown correctly wasn’t necessarily from where he said he was from.
At that point—precisely at noon—the ear-shattering blast of a foghorn sounded and a motorboat, the Stars and Stripes flying from its stern, approached the shore. With additional blasts from its foghorn, the launch pulled alongside and before it had made contact with the wharf, a young fellow with a thick rope jumped off and skillfully tied the vessel to a massive steel bollard. Acting nonchalant, as if I had spent my entire life at sea, I followed the men as they jumped into the launch. I had feared that there would be some kind of ID check and had wondered whether I would get by if I told them that I was the guest of Smitty, the messman, from the Appleton Victory. Fortunately, nobody seemed to care, and after a few minutes of waiting for additional passengers, the launch turned around and headed for the middle of the Elbe, past the bombed-out shipyards of Blohm & Voss and Deutsche Werft. The famous shipyards that once had teemed with the hustle and bustle of thousands of workers and had made Hamburg one of the biggest ship-building centers on the European continent were eerily silent, their cranes and steel structures a tangled, rusting mess.
Soon I was again accosted by the all-American, who, as far as I was concerned, was becoming a regular pest. When he offered me another cigarette, I upgraded his status by a notch or two. “You’re not a merchant seaman?” he resumed his interrogation.
“That’s right,” I admitted. “This is my first time in port. I’m visiting a friend on the Appleton Victory.”
“That’s where I am going, too; I have friends on the Appleton Victory also,” the all-American confided.
Within a few minutes of comparing notes, I learned that his name was Werner, that he lived with his German mother and a younger brother in St. Pauli, and that his father, whom he hadn’t seen since the beginning of the war, was chief purser for an American line. Although Werner had been born near Berlin, he said he had lived for a couple of years with his mother and brother in Rutherford, New Jersey, and in New York City before the war. He also confided that on the waterfront, everybody called him Yankee Werner because of his American pedigree. In the past few months, he said, he had visited many American ships, and that each visit had paid off handsomely.
Reciprocating his candor, I told him about my origins. Werner advised me not to mention my Liberian background to anyone aboard ship and instead say that my father was an American. “All you have to tell them is that you and your mother got stuck here in Germany because of the war, and you’ve got it made,” he counseled. Although I had yet to grasp the full meaning of that little Americanism, “got it made,” I took Werner’s advice and, in doing so—without realizing it at the time—altered the course of my life in a most decisive way.
Werner explained to me that the Appleton Victory was one of three American ships in port and the launch’s first stop. “There she is.” He pointed toward a distant black freighter with a white-and-yellow superstructure and a massive yellow stack. As the launch approached the ship, the latter’s proportions grew rapidly until it towered over us like an enormous mountain cliff hanging over a nutshell
. As we circled the giant, I could see its enormous blade partially exposed above the waterline. This, Werner explained, indicated that the ship’s unloading was almost completed.
I had been wondering by what means we were supposed to get aboard. When the truth dawned on me, I became horrified and silently cursed Smitty for having gotten me into this mess. The only way to get aboard the Appleton Victory, I realized, was to climb what seemed like a mile of rope ladder with wooden rungs that was dangling overboard and swaying back and forth in the wind. To make matters still worse, the launch was bobbing wildly up and down beneath the ladder, requiring any climber to time his ascent to within a second when the ladder and launch came within a few feet of each other. Besides Werner and me, there were three seamen who had indicated they wanted to get off at the Appleton Victory. Werner, who had noticed my apprehension, told me not to worry. “Just hold on tight and don’t look down,” he advised. For a moment I felt like telling the launch skipper that I had changed my mind and that I was staying on, but then I recalled the voice of Herr Wriede, my old Nazi principal, shouting at me, “Kein Mut! Feigling! Step aside to make room for the boys with guts!” Suddenly, my fear was gone, and before I knew it, I had leaped into the air, grabbed the ladder, and was climbing and climbing while looking neither up nor down. After what seemed to me like an eternity, I reached the top and flung myself over the railing and on deck. Werner and the three other seamen followed shortly.
“Hope you’ll make out. Be seeing you,” said Werner before disappearing through a door.
“What do you want?” a man in soiled khakis and a matching gold-braided hat demanded to know.
“I’m looking for Smitty,” I told him as instructed.
“Smitty!” the soiled one hollered. “Somebody to see you!”
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