Steuerbord-Backbord!

“Steuerbord-Backbord!” is Tampon-Günter’s catchphrase at the Zum Goldenen Handschuh bar, born from a stunt with two alcohol-soaked tampons and repeated whenever he reasserts his reputation for toughness. The words name the colors of the tampons as nautical directions—green for starboard, red for port—but their force in the bar comes less from navigation than from the spectacle, confidence, and ritual they gather around themselves.

Origin as a barroom performance

Tampon-Günter is introduced through a reputation that makes his performance seem of a piece with the man. A deep-sea fisherman in the North Sea, he is said to withstand almost anything: in January 1969 he went overboard and survived for nearly five hours in water just above freezing. He can take on a dozen men, sense a change in the weather, and smell out shoals of fish. He visits the bar only four or five times a year and favors peppermint schnapps and cherry liqueur. These details establish the measure against which the room reads his later display: his toughness is not merely an act invented for the bar, but a quality already attached to him there.

Herbert sets out the drinks. Günter takes two tampons from his coat, dips one into the peppermint schnapps and the other into the cherry liqueur, and lets each soak. He draws them out, looks at them with pleasure, and sucks first on the green one, then on the red, thoroughly draining them. He then hangs the green tampon from his right ear and the red from his left, as if they were jewelry, and announces the refrain with a broad grin. The words follow directly from the colors: green means starboard, red means port. The phrase is at once an explanation of the arrangement and a boast about the look he has made for himself.

The performance is deliberately sustained rather than passed off as a single joke. Once the tampons hang from his ears, “Steuerbord-Backbord!” is all anyone can get out of him. It is his idea, his joke, and his chosen refrain; he keeps returning to it. He sits peacefully at the bar, weighing 140 kilos, while the others enjoy the spectacle. Herbert laughs too, but the narration stresses that he has an exceptional respect for Günter. The scene therefore holds amusement and deference together: the stunt could make another man ridiculous, but Günter’s established strength and self-possession change how it is received.

What WH 3 sees

WH 3 has no knowledge of the story behind the phrase or of the fisherman’s reputation. He sees a man two metres and two centimetres tall, sitting like a Viking with tampons dangling from his ears. The image exceeds even the strange possibilities WH 3 has tried to imagine. His distance from the in-group is important: the refrain that Günter treats as his own familiar joke reaches WH 3 first as an incomprehensible, startling sight. The phrase does not explain the scene to him; it marks the scene as something the newcomer has not yet learned how to read.

That distance begins to change through repetition. After Soldaten-Norbert talks about the bar’s patrons as people who have spent twenty or thirty years waiting, growing first grey, then brown, then black, Günter’s refrain cuts across the bleak description. The words return without a new explanation of the tampons or the original joke. For WH 3, the recurrence supplies recognition: he has encountered this expression before, and the reader is reminded that it belongs to Günter rather than to Norbert’s speech about lives worn down by waiting. The refrain interrupts the conversation, but it does not answer Norbert or resolve the misery he describes.

Repetition and the test of toughness

The phrase returns again during another barroom spectacle. A woman asks for a drink, takes a thin bone—probably a chicken bone—from her clothing, breaks it, chews the smaller piece, spits fragments onto the floor, and makes fluting, gurgling sounds with occasional growls. No one reacts. Günter’s refrain follows, now familiar enough for WH 3 to think of it as something already known. That expectation is immediately overturned: Günter pours beer into one of four oversized glass ashtrays on the counter, already full of cigarette ends and other debris, and orders Herbert to rinse it properly. Herbert knows what is coming. Günter lifts the ashtray and drinks its contents in one go.

Afterward Günter shudders and says that it felt good. Herbert grins; the narration explains that Günter sometimes has to prove to himself and the others that he is still the toughest. He is figured as the dominant animal in the group—the leader of the pack, the old elephant—and the phrase follows this display once more. Its recurrence now accompanies a concrete act of endurance rather than merely the colored tampons. The two episodes are not identical: the first makes a private visual joke into a public performance, while the later one turns an ashtray full of beer and cigarette ends into another test of what Günter can stomach. In both, the refrain helps make the act recognizably his.

Meaning within the bar

For WH 3, the second display produces alarm rather than simple amusement. He wonders how much of this capacity to endure might be present in everyone, whether anyone could bear the bar for longer than a day or two, and whether he himself would become like its regulars if he stayed long enough. His response gives the repeated phrase a significance beyond its comic origin: it is one sound within a place where the boundary between endurance and degradation troubles him. The story does not turn the refrain into an explicit answer to those questions. Instead, its return links Günter’s proud performance to WH 3’s growing unease about what prolonged exposure to the bar might do.

The words retain their plain nautical color-code, but in use they become a signature: a cue that Günter is present, a joke he insists on owning, and a refrain heard alongside increasingly extreme demonstrations of toughness. The first time, WH 3 cannot have imagined the sight; later, he recognizes the phrase before the ashtray stunt raises the stakes. That movement from astonishment to recognition is the expression’s small narrative arc. Its humor depends on an absurd pairing of nautical precision with a deliberately undignified adornment, while its repetition lets the bar’s performances become familiar without making them less unsettling.