Gerhard Leyendieker

Gerhard Leyendieker is a senior Hamburg shipping figure whose authority rests on both institutional standing and an insistence on being the dominant man in any room. His speeches move between genuine analysis of the shipping crisis, prejudice against Japan, and self-satisfied public performance. When WH 2 secures Leyendieker’s agreement to rehabilitate WH 1, that authority becomes the instrument of a reconciliation that Leyendieker imagines as generous but WH 1 experiences as an affront.

Identity and Public Standing

At a meeting of the Vereinigung Hamburger Schiffsmakler und Schiffsagenten at Süllberg, Leyendieker appears before an audience of executives to deliver one of his notorious speeches. He is a former captain-shipowner and chairs both the Hamburg Rotary Club and the Patriotic Society. The setting offers a remarkable view over the Elbe, but the audience’s attention is drawn less to the address than to the speaker himself. Leyendieker has gained weight with startling speed after a lifetime of carefully watching his figure; his belly hangs over his low waistband like a water-filled sack. The contrast makes visible a loss of control in the very man who had treated his body and his authority as things to be kept firmly in hand.

His manner reinforces that impression of command. Leyendieker wants, especially among other executives, to be the chief among chiefs. He combs a hand through his slicked-back white hair and holds the floor as if the gathering were an audience gathered for him personally. The novel places his cultivated authority beside a body that has abruptly become difficult to master, exposing the gap between the image he presents and the physical decline others cannot help noticing.

Economic Diagnosis and Prejudice

Leyendieker’s account of the shipping downturn contains concrete economic arguments. He says that each percentage point of currency appreciation costs the industry 25 million Deutsche Marks since the exchange rate was released, while insisting that this part of the problem is a matter for politicians. He also turns criticism inward: the industry missed the import boom, he argues, and chaotic freight-rate dumping in the North Atlantic is lethal to medium-sized and, above all, small shipping companies. His warning is not simply that competitors are strong; it is that owners’ own decisions and the market’s disorder have exposed the weaker firms.

He traces some of that disorder to earlier choices. The end of the prosperous years associated with the Korean War and Vietnam War, he argues, was recognized too late. Rather than scrap older ships as profits accumulated, owners did the opposite, while selling second-hand freighters to developing countries. Those vessels could then compete for cargo by offering rates that undercut their original owners. Japan’s role in the boom also complicates Leyendieker’s tendency to blame Japanese competitors for the crisis: the country’s expanding steel industry had absorbed nearly half of all charter tonnage, while American shipping capacity was largely tied up by the Vietnam War. Tramp shipowners responded by committing still more new tonnage, which reached the market after Japanese steel managers had sharply reduced their expectations.

Despite this account of an industry-wide cycle of demand, investment, and oversupply, Leyendieker uses a derogatory collective term for Asians and reserves a still more insulting slur for private conversation. He treats Japanese people as the principal culprits in whatever crisis he is warning about. His racism narrows a complex explanation into a familiar target, even as his own economic narrative describes how shifting demand and decisions by shipowners helped produce the glut. He closes one address on developing countries by noting that agricultural yields had doubled or tripled since the beginning of the 1970s and that additional shipments were consequently less necessary. His final joke wishes, in effect, for a bad harvest: an attempt to turn economic injury into a punchline.

The Campaign to Rehabilitate WH 1

WH 2’s effort to restore his father’s standing has been under way for nearly a year. With the shipping business facing bankruptcy, he wants an official, unanimous act of absolution before WH 1’s life ends. Leyendieker is the last decision-maker he needs to bring over. Born in 1895, the same year as WH 1, Leyendieker went to the same school as his old associate. The two were once friends, then competitors, and eventually nothing to one another in Leyendieker’s estimation. WH 1, for his part, hates him with all the force he can muster.

At the meeting, Leyendieker is in conversation with Bertram Theissen, the head of Hapag Lloyd. The two men detest one another, yet perform a falsely hearty exchange, shouting as if their hostility were an elaborate joke. WH 2 waits behind them for Leyendieker to address him. Theissen has already had so much to drink that he gives way and leaves; only then does WH 2 get his opportunity. Leyendieker agrees to the rehabilitation, presenting forgiveness as a moral principle and himself as a magnanimous, aged judge of peace. He says that it is time to bury the hatchet and that every offense is eventually atoned for. The arrangement is that he will personally deliver the news at WH 1’s forthcoming eightieth birthday. Having made the decision, Leyendieker turns away and leaves WH 2 standing, still performing the role of the man who decides when others may speak.

The Birthday Address and Its Reversal

WH 1 knows nothing of the planned rehabilitation until the birthday gathering itself. The prominent guests, including the senator for the interior, take him by surprise. WH 2 has arranged to tell him at five minutes to twelve, leaving no time for him to object. When WH 1 sees Leyendieker again after a quarter of a century, his expression registers no welcome: he does not want reconciliation, feel honored, or feel grateful. What Leyendieker has prepared as a redeeming public gesture lands as a slap in the face. WH 1 has settled so deeply into hatred and thoughts of revenge that the ceremony cannot transform him, even if he wished it could.

The scene is set in almost 30-degree heat, with the sun breaking into glittering fragments on the river. At noon Leyendieker makes his way to the microphone, already exhausted by the short walk. Sweating heavily, flushed and struggling to remain upright, he clings to the lectern and inflates himself for another of his three standardized speeches. His established ceremonial manner now appears almost grotesque against the heat and his physical strain.

The address opens with the Port of Hamburg: its difficult approach up the Elbe and the problems large ships face with the tide are offset, Leyendieker says, by its infrastructure and connections to the hinterland. He moves from the obligations of the Hanseatic merchant tradition to globalization, recalls the construction of the first container terminal at Burchardkai, and mentions that Aristotle Onassis had a tanker built in Hamburg in the 1950s. He pads the presentation with weary jokes, including jokes about the difficulty of understanding women. Only then does he turn to the birthday guest’s supposed life’s work. Because there is little to report about WH 1’s postwar years, the speech appears to reach toward his role during the Nazi era without squarely naming what the occasion asks the audience to forgive. Leyendieker ends, as usual, with a joke, then holds WH 1’s hand for too long, too ceremoniously and too warmly. The handshake is not intimacy: in the narration, it becomes another gesture of mastery.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The afternoon passes without a public disruption. The senator leaves quickly, while Leyendieker drinks himself into a state far removed from the commanding speaker of a few hours earlier. He ends up swaying in a corner of the garden, drooling and barely able to get to a taxi with WH 2’s help. By around five o’clock the gathering has dispersed. His physical collapse does not undo the ceremony, but it strips away the composure and authority on which his public role depends.

Leyendieker’s part in WH 1’s rehabilitation turns on a mismatch between formal forgiveness and personal reconciliation. He can authorize a public act, offer a familiar language of pardon, and stage himself as the generous peacemaker; he cannot make WH 1 receive the gesture as mercy. The old rivalry remains legible beneath the ceremony, and Leyendieker’s long-standing need to occupy the superior position persists even in the act of declaring the quarrel finished. His speeches likewise combine real economic detail with scapegoating and ritualized jokes. Across both the shipping meeting and the birthday, command is something he performs before an audience—and a performance cannot guarantee either understanding or forgiveness.