Vietnam War

The Vietnam War functions in the book as a historical marker with sharply different consequences: it belongs to the commercial boom that shipping companies recognized too late, while the separate account of Soldier-Norbert’s service in Indochina shows how war could persist as personal trauma long after military deployment ended. The text does not identify his Indochina service as service in the Vietnam War; the two references occupy distinct biographical and economic contexts.

The War and the Shipping Boom

Gerhard Leyendieker describes the Korean War and Vietnam War as part of the “golden years” of shipping. In his retrospective account, the industry failed to recognize promptly that this prosperity had ended. Rather than scrapping older ships as profits declined, owners made the opposite choice. Selling second-hand freighters to developing countries then helped create competition from operators able to offer lower freight rates, taking cargo away from the original owners.

This history appears within a wider reckoning over the shipping business. WH 2 identifies freight dumping in the North Atlantic as especially damaging to medium-sized and small shipping companies, and says that appreciation of the exchange rate also imposed heavy costs. The Vietnam War is therefore not presented as a direct cause of the later crisis; it marks the end of a profitable period whose delayed recognition and subsequent business decisions compounded the industry’s difficulties.

Indochina and Soldier-Norbert’s Past

The book gives a separate account of Soldier-Norbert, whose nickname derives from his service in the SS. Captured in April 1945, he moved from captivity into the French Foreign Legion, which was recruiting among German prisoners of war. He served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953. The account places this deployment in the aftermath of the Second World War, but does not equate it with the book’s later reference to the Vietnam War.

After leaving the Legion, Soldier-Norbert never regained a stable footing. He repeatedly lost work as a dockworker, night watchman, or laborer, usually because of drinking. A few weeks before the scene in the bar, he had begun working for the rubbish collection service and was drinking somewhat less because of the early starts. Yet he injured his ankle with an aluminum cane to obtain sick leave, allowing himself a week to drink heavily. The episode makes the persistence of his wartime past visible not as a recovered chapter but as one element in a life marked by unstable work and alcohol dependence.

War Remembered as Trauma

At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Soldier-Norbert’s recollections emerge through a long account of a comrade whose legs were repeatedly broken, whose calves wasted away, and who was nevertheless sent back to the front. Norbert describes the man’s death in graphic terms, then falls silent mid-sentence and sinks into a vacant delirium. The narrative says that his wartime experiences have been indelibly burned into him and are consuming him from within.

The contrast between these passages matters: the shipping discussion treats war as a period in an economic cycle, remembered through profits, tonnage, and freight rates; Norbert’s account gives it the intimate scale of a damaged body and a memory that cannot be left behind. Together, the references show how the book places historical conflict in both public calculations and private aftermath, without collapsing those different experiences into a single story.