Potsdam Historical

In the years before the First World War, Holland America Line carried not only Dutch emigrants but a substantial number of German emigrants and German businessmen. The Rotterdam-New York route was the main Atlantic artery for much of Central Europe, and HAL had cultivated the German trade carefully. Naming a ship Potsdam — after the Prussian royal city near Berlin, the seat of Hohenzollern power — was a commercial statement as much as anything else: this line serves German passengers too, and takes their world seriously.

The SS Potsdam was one of the larger ships in the early HAL fleet. She was built around the turn of the twentieth century, when the line was growing from a collection of small iron steamships into something that could reasonably call itself a major transatlantic operator. She served on the Rotterdam-New York route through the years before the war, carrying the mixed traffic of the era: emigrants going one direction, businessmen and tourists going both.

August 1914 changed the meaning of every German name on every ship. By the time the war was over, the name Potsdam on a Dutch vessel carried a weight it hadn't carried when she was launched. The world had been remade around the names people chose before they knew what those names would mean. That is the condition of all names given before history arrives. The ship had no control over what the city became.

— In the Wake editorial

He had been a clockmaker's apprentice and then a clockmaker. He left Berlin in the spring of 1903 because his employer had gone out of business and his brother-in-law had written from Cincinnati to say there was a German neighborhood and a watch repair shop that needed someone who knew mechanisms. My grandfather knew mechanisms. He packed a toolkit that weighed more than his clothes and crossed to Rotterdam by train.

He sailed on the Potsdam — which he found funny, having just left the country the ship was named for. He told the story in the way that German immigrants of that era told stories: dryly, with a short moral at the end. The moral in this case was that you could leave a country and still find its name on the ship taking you away from it. He considered this either a sign of the world's essential smallness or a joke at his expense. He was never quite sure which.

He arrived in Cincinnati in early 1903 and worked in the watch shop for thirty-one years. He went back to Berlin once, in 1922, to see his mother. The city was unrecognizable from what he remembered — the inflation, the mood, the faces. He came home to Cincinnati on a different ship and did not go back again. The Potsdam he had sailed on in 1903 was long retired. He said that was probably for the best. Some ships, he said, are better remembered as the ship you took once, before everything changed.

— Else K., Cincinnati, writing about her grandfather, 1974