Crossing the Line: Wilhelmine Germany, Maritime Manhood, and Violence South of the Equator

In the decades around 1900, Wilhelmine Germany sought to recast itself as a seafaring nation in its quest for world power status.  This endeavor extended beyond a new battle fleet construction program and naval arms race with Britain.  The rapidly expanding merchant fleet also came to reflect Germany’s “place in the sun.”  Germans began to view the maritime community as an extension of the nation and its empire on and over the seas.  Within this context, state authorities and the public scrutinized traditional maritime practices, including rites of passage, as never before.  Using consular records, court documents, and newspaper accounts, this paper examines how an equator-crossing ceremony provoked national concern about maritime manhood on the eve of the First World War.      

For a moment in April 1913 scandal at sea gripped the German courts, press, and parliament.  An equator-crossing ceremony aboard the Nereide, a German merchant freighter bound for Chile, had turned violently sexual.  Events aboard the ship placed the customs of maritime manhood on trial in full public view.  The Nereide case illustrates how the performance of masculinity, sexuality, and violence shaped competing notions of belonging and difference at sea around 1900.  Traditionally, the pain and humiliation of line-crossing rituals had signified a novice’s passage into the transnational community of deep-sea sailors.  For scandalized Wilhelmine Germans, however, these rites seemed to threaten gendered categories of national belonging.  Moreover, in the tense international atmosphere on the eve of World War I, sexual violence aboard a German merchant ship was not a simple criminal matter, but rather an embarrassment that tarnished Germany’s reputation as a leading maritime nation.  In the light of public scrutiny, events aboard the Nereide emphasized mariners’ fundamental alterity, even as it provoked new calls to reform them into reliable German men.