From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
On the German Baltic coast, not only are seawater-polluting LNG terminals being built to accommodate environmentally harmful American fracking gas, but every now and then useful things are also being done.
In the Hanseatic city of Stralsund, the original three-masted barque “Gorch Fock,” now only a museum ship, is currently undergoing extensive restoration at a cost of ten million euros to at least keep it floatable. The ship, which was commissioned in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, was lifted by the Soviets in the Strelasund after the end of the war and confiscated as reparations. It last sailed under the Ukrainian flag before a club managed to bring the completely run-down tall ship back to Germany.
Because the ship sailed under the Russian name “Tovarich” (Comrade) during the Cold War and thus seemed lost forever, the Federal Republic of Germany rebuilt the “Gorch Fock” in 1958, so that today there are two sailing ships under the same name. However, only the second “Gorch Fock” is still operational.
Another, identically constructed German sailing ship – the “Horst Wessel”, named after an SA storm leader and built in Hamburg in just one hundred days in 1936 – was seized in 1946 by the Americans. They “won” the 295-foot, three-masted “Nazi Vessel” in a sort of prize lottery against the Brits and the Soviets but needed some German crew members to get the ship from Bremerhaven across the Atlantic to Orangeburg, New York.
“Horst Wessel” is now called “Eagle” and serves as a training cutter for the US Coast Guard. At least, unlike Ukraine, the Americans have taken care of the ship and kept it immaculately maintained.
The Wind of Change 