Howaldtswerft Shipyard

Howaldtswerft Shipyard is more than the setting for a workplace memorial: its overwhelming machinery seems to act on its own, consuming and transforming everything around it. At a ceremony for Kurt Ahlers, killed in an accident the previous week, the yard’s violence becomes inseparable from Fiete Honka’s impaired attention and private resentment.

Industrial Setting

The shipyard is defined by sound and motion. Pneumatic hammers, pistons, pile drivers, belts, and hydraulic pumps merge into a roar that fills the space up to the sky. Hundreds of machines move at such speed that their motors seem close to bursting; wheels turn, metal strikes metal, and some blows are so forceful that they produce, momentarily, a silence of their own.

The yard is figured as an enormous creature that appears to work without human help. It draws ships in, presses them empty, and eventually spits them out again. Its pipes and lines carry materials over great distances, while its industrial processes deform whatever comes into contact with them. The description makes the shipyard’s power physical: steel vibrates under its force, and so do the people who work there.

Kurt Ahlers’s Memorial

At four o’clock, a memorial is held at the shipyard for Kurt Ahlers, a colleague who died the previous week. The scene places an act of collective mourning inside the very workplace whose machinery has made death part of its recent history. The sky has opened; the lowering sun reflects off the water so brightly that Fiete shades his eyes with one hand, while the ships appear as silhouettes drawn into the glare.

Fiete has not fully understood how Ahlers died. Ahlers fell somewhere in the machinery and became trapped; his internal organs were crushed. Fiete attributes his difficulty concentrating to an alcohol-fogged stupor. Even at the ceremony, his thoughts turn not to sympathy but to the hope that Ahlers suffered, a reaction that sharply separates his private response from the memorial’s public purpose.

Fiete and the Yard’s Violence

Fiete’s bitterness has a specific history. Ahlers had disliked him from the beginning and once slapped him over his limp handshake. Fiete remembers offering a hand without squeezing, despite the strength of his own hands; to the other person, he thought, it felt like holding a dead but still warm animal. He interprets Ahlers’s death as punishment, turning an industrial accident into a private reckoning.

Yet the ceremony also places Fiete among his colleagues, hands folded and eyes fixed on the ground as though he wanted to bore into the earth with his gaze. The contrast between this outward posture and his inward wish for Ahlers’s suffering captures the yard’s bleak human atmosphere. The machinery makes bodies vibrate and can crush them; the memorial gathers the survivors without resolving the resentments they carry. In this scene, Howaldtswerft Shipyard is both a workplace and a force that exposes how little protection its workers have from physical danger or from one another’s hostility.