[Kölnische Zeitung (Conservative Daily, English occupied territory), January 18] KIEL: THEN AND NOW

BY W. SCHULZE

KIEL, early in January. AT last we have the winter solstice behind us, and may look forward to the cheerful prospect of growing warmth. Such a prospect is something precious to a soul cast down by the coal famine. What soul in Kiel is not thus depressed? In our whole house at home we have only one diminutive iron stove, which constantly looks illhumored and frosty because it is so poorly fed with coal substitutes. As to real coal, we wonder if it still exists. There are rumors of some in Kiel, but it is so well concealed that it might almost be non-existent. It lies at the bottom of the harbor. Optimists for we have such people, fortunately, even in this era of tears say, with all seriousness, that Kiel has really a little submarine colliery district at it doors. This lies around the old coal hulks of the former Imperial Navy. In transshipping coal there year in and year out for so long a period, many a sack of the now costly black jewels found their way accidently to the bottom of the harbor, and in spite of the general war scarcity the fish have not eaten it up. So coal is down there. And people are trying to get it-inventive persons eagerly trying various devices. Kiel, therefore, has a new profession, that of coal fishing. It is a trade that supports men; for a trifle of a hundredweight of coal will sell for from twenty-four to twenty-six marks if you get it. It is generally reported that the prospective product has been bought up for a long period to come. At least we have this latest gift of the sea - or, if you prefer that way of looking at it, the last present which

the old navy is making to its home

town.

That is about the only thing left to Kiel from the navy: as a naval base the city is a back number. Nowhere else does the ruin of the Old Order impress itself with such painful clearness on the vision. Naval officers and sailors who once thronged our streets have almost completely disappeared. Business houses which formerly were, nearly without exception, suppliers in one way or another to the navywhere did you find a sign at that time that did not have the words, 'Purveyor to His Majesty's Ships'? have acquired another and, I might say, a civilian aspect. And then the harbor! The picture stabs one's heart. All the steel-clad leviathans, Germany's proud sea defenders, have disappeared. The busy going and coming of boats and launches has ceased. Even the buoys are deserted. The gulls keep flitting here and there, feeling keenly the change in their fortunes, for the vessels which used to feed them so abundantly have gone, and no substitute has come. The surface of the harbor is like a desert, frightfully empty. Only the 'graveyard,' a district set apart before the war for old ships taken out of service, is still well occupied. There lie the ancient, brave veterans long past their fighting age, which have been left us. They look shabby and rough. We can put them back into service if we have money; and may make pleasure trips in them, if that gives us pleasure. The winter sun glistens on the cold blue waters of the Fiord. The icy sea stretches far beyond, the gloomy coast frames the picture. It is a picture of the grave of Germany's sea glory, and we avert our gaze from it whenever possible.

A few weeks ago there was a temporary revival of activity, and the harbor took on new signs of life.

When the Baltic blockade was suddenly proclaimed, merchant vessels from all parts of its western waters scurried to the protection of Kiel harbor. Little vessels flocked around the buoys like sheep fleeing in panic from a wolf. The navy thus gave shelter, with its harbor at least, to the sister merchant marine. That was all it could do: our armed might had crumbled to the dust. Will it ever revive to protect our ocean commerce?

Over there on the eastern shores of the harbor lie the mighty works of the former Imperial Navy Yard and the Germania Shipbuilding Company. They used to be of interest as a picture of highly organized industry. Never stopping, radiating activity day and night, with the clang and clatter of hammers and thunder of machinery, they were the birthplace of many of our great war vessels and our submarines. But now? Silence - almost almost the silence of the grave! Wearily, drop by drop, little streams of labor for a brief period each day trickle about the vast premises. An observer hardly notes them; and what he sees does not bring comfort to his heart. A few men are employed breaking up our submarines. The same hammers that forged them now crush them to fragments. A slight beginning, how ever, has been made toward new construction. A few days ago the Germania Yards launched the ore carrier "Saya," the first of four sister vessels built on contract for the Krupp firm. This steamer is one of the first, possibly the very first, merchant vessel whose keel was laid and whose construction was finished after the end of the war. We hope that other Kiel yards will soon be busy. The city must transfer its interest as speedily as possible from the navy to the merchant marine. Its future depends upon the success with which it accomplishes this, else its

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ruin impends with the abolition of our navy. For what small remnants of our so-called new naval establishment still exist will have their principal base at Wilhelmshaven. Naturally this question of the future employment of the harbor is occupying the attention of the municipal authorities. Their purpose is to make Kiel a great transshipping port for Baltic trade. In this connection they advocate making their city a free port.

The authorities are also seeking other compensation for what Kiel has lost. There is the 'Kiel Week,' that annual sporting event of international interest to which the Imperial Court formerly added exceptional brilliance. Unforgettable and vivid as a picture the memory of the last Kiel Week, in June, 1914, rises before my eyes — our mighty gray war vessels in the harbor, and just beyond them the black colossi of the English squadron which was on a 'friendly and neighborly' visit to the 'cousin-nation.' The German battleships needed to fear no comparison with these of Britain. With proud satisfaction even an expert eye could compare our gray giants with the British black leviathans. How everything shone with neatness! How radiant the festive garb of the vessels and their crews! And above them all the black, white, and red flag. 'We'll defend it with our lives,' was the saying then. Farther on down the Fiord were the white sails of the speeding yachts which had come from far and wide for the competition. Through the streets, and in the gardens, and on the steamers were joyous, happy men. There were strangers with alert, interested, admiring eyes. That was Kiel. That was what the people of the city with proud glances called 'our Kiel' and 'our Fiord.' It is now a dream, nothing but a dream, and to awaken from it is torment.

WITHIN limits most people could say what special form of writing they prefer. Even the most just literary judgment may be subject to preferences for one kind of greatness over another kind. If the great book which is the subject of this article has in some way just missed people's preferences, that and nothing else may account for the neglect of it. It is possible that many of those even who are alert for treasure have an unconscious preference for finding it elsewhere than in a story about a whale-hunt. This much-ignored book is Moby Dick, written in 1851 by Herman Melville, and it is the story of the hunting of whales in general and of a white whale in particular.

Though it tells with scientific accuracy of every part of the whale and every detail of its capture, it is a work of wonderful and wild imagination. His whale is real, like Blake's tiger, but in thinking of it he occasionally loses hold of reality as we know it as Blake's imagination also flies loose from his sinewy tiger to infinity. Her man Melville has that rarest quality, rare even in genius, of wildness, imagination escaping out of bounds. But the whale is the cause this natural object, and its order, and the truth that we know of it, and its laws, are the occasion of his wildness.

There may be people who do not love such an occasion for imagination. There are all those, one must always remember, who like to find imagination, for instance, in fairies, fantasies,

trees with living limbs, imps, gnomes, etc. If they can enter by that easy open door, how should they expect that a whale, its measurements, its blubber, its oil, its lashless eyes, its riddled brow, and harpoons and ropes and buckets are the way to imagination? Preferences will range people into two groups in this regard. One group requires that imagination shall begin in facts, and in its wildest flights shall still owe an acknowledgment to fact, and requires, too, to believe that truth is at the other unseen end of that imagining. The other group distrusts reality or the natural object even for a start, and would not wait to measure a whale, but hastens after a fairy whom fancy can make as large or as small as it likes. Or, since terms of fact, such as color, must be used in description, then mere profusion is supposed to lend fancy. The fairy's robe may be of many colors, there is no reason why one should be excluded.

Is that profusion imagination? — or will imagination not rather spring from some great restriction, such as the whiteness of this whale whiteness

which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood?' Fairies have no starting place in valuable reality, and, what is worse, no ultimate reality to arrive at. Fairies begin and end in themselves. The very freedom allowed to fancy in that world of fairy (or faerie as believers like it written) is somehow fatal to its interest; it has the deadly

freedom of being utterly outside truth.

But it is of facts and figures that the imagination in Moby Dick is made. The story is of a whaling voyage in the Pequod, under Captain Ahab, who has already lost a leg to the white whale known as Moby Dick. As the captain, that blighted, implacable man with his pointed ivory leg, his moody passion, and his wild musings, becomes gradually known to his crew, they discover that they are not following the ordinary course and running the ordinary risks of a normal whaling voyage, but are taking part in a ceaseless hunt for the white whale, sacrificing the normal profits of whaling, multiplying the usual risks, defying every adversity of weather or superstitious symbol, in order that the maddened captain may bring a doom of revenge upon the white whale. 'I'd strike the sun if it insulted me,' he says.

The ship scours the seas, one vast empty ocean after another for to Captain Ahab that sea is empty which does not hold the white whale. Tidings of Moby Dick are sometimes heard when the Pequod speaks another lonely whale ship; he has been seen, perhaps, last year in another sea, and every rumor of him tells of his havoc among boats and men. To say here what doom falls might be to impair for the reader the terrors of that search and of the encounter at last when a hump like a snow-hill and a vast milky forehead of involved wrinkles are seen sliding through a sea that is like a noon meadow for calmness.

In proceeding now to the extensive quotations which are the object of this article, it will be necessary only to give a general description of the process of whaling, summarized from the book itself, in order that the subject may be clear. Perhaps that praise had better not be too much obtruded which might be of a kind to provoke conten

tion, for it chances that to the present writer Herman Melville satisfies not only every udgment but every inmost preference; so that it seems as if no greatness that has ever been surpasses his greatness.

Nantucket is the island from which the whaling vessels put off on their three, four, or five years' voyage. It is a 'mere hillock, an elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.' The Nantucketers are sea hermits, overrunning the watery world:

Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires, other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.

For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows, so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

On board are the captain, three mates, three harpooners, and sailors. From the time of the captain's old encounter with Moby Dick, when in whirling eddies of sinking oars and men he had desperately seized a short line-knife and struck at the whale, 'blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale,' and Moby Dick, 'suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, had reaped away Ahab's