Port of Hamburg, Heinz Kunert, Customs officer

Joerg Otto Meier

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Heinz Kunert
Customs officer, 56 years
March 1995

»We’re all seamen here, of course. And they’re
mainly a good-natured breed.«

Excerpt: I like to tell the following story to explain the seaman’s mentality: I was in the People’s Republic of China before, during and after the cultural revolution. Now just imagine, there’s a guard from the Chinese People’s Army standing at the gangway and that’s where you have to hand in your discharge book. You can’t go into town until you’ve done that, and you have to be back on board on the dot of midnight. There was a bloke on our ship called Magdalinski, but we always used to call him Kurt Holsten because he drank so much Holsten beer. But there was naturally no Holsten to be had in Shanghai, just Shanghai beer. He’d probably had a skin full of that, because before he went back on board, he pulled the guard’s cap down over both ears.

Now, the guard still had his discharge book and knew who he was. I’d just gone to bed when we were all woken up and had to go into the mess-room. The guard pointed at Kurt Holsten and he was arrested and sentenced the next day to a 3000 fine and three weeks jail, starting immediately. As we went to Tringtau and Tientsin after Shanghai, he caught up with us later. But that’s about 3000 kilometres. He had to go via Peking and two army blokes accompanied him. When he got back to us, he said: That might be 3000 down the drain, but who else gets a chance to travel right through China these days? I just couldn’t resist, so now I have to work to make up the 3000. So there’s no way they can give me the sack.

Yes, that’s a seaman’s mentality. He says, I have to make the best of whatever hand I’m dealt. The captain paid the 3000, but he took it straight out of Kurt’s wages, because the captain was just about all-powerful. And that hasn’t changed much to this day. ...