Page 26 - Willi Distel Diary

End of the Wilhelmshaven chapter: dismissal terms, lodgings with Frau Stoll, and the naval harbour, c. 1925

Translated from Willi's German.

...refusing to work, be dismissed for a certain eight days. Closing time was eight o'clock, but in the letter three o'clock had been agreed. The sufficient ground, the suspicion, would then no longer be mentioned. I now lay on the street for fourteen days before taking up the post in Bremen. I had secured that position, before giving notice, by presenting myself in person. For eight days I now stayed on with my excellent landlady Frau Stoll and her foster-daughter Lina. In all that time I was at home with these people. We played games and amused ourselves. I also got my brother Adolf the position, though I still saw him as rather distant. The boss too had a daughter, with whom I could have gone out. The staff were: two gentlemen and two ladies, and Herr... Of amusements I saw as good as none; all the more, then, did I gaze at the splendid naval harbour, the warships and the North Sea. In the former Imperial shipyard lay the nearly finished cruiser. The journeymen's hostel was quite pleasant.

Interesting facts

Versailles naval limits. After WWI the Treaty of Versailles capped Germany's navy at a handful of small, ageing ships, so the warships he watched belonged to the modest Weimar-era Reichsmarine.
The Imperial Shipyard. The 'former Imperial shipyard' was the Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven, the state yard that had built warships for the Kaiser's navy and carried on as a naval dockyard after 1918.
The cruiser Emden. In these years the yard completed the light cruiser Emden, commissioned in 1925 and the first large warship Germany built after the war - which fits the nearly finished cruiser he describes.