Hapag

In 1847 a group of Hamburg ship owners came together to form a shipping line, christening it the Hamburg-Amerikanische- Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag), a name that not quite fifty years later was officially changed to the Hamburg-Amerika Linie.

At its inception the Hapag adopted the motto Mein Feld ist die Welt (My Field Is the World), but, in fact, its business was restricted to the North Atlantic. The company’s first forty years were in no way remarkable, and by 1886 it ranked only twenty-second in tonnage among Europe’s international maritime carriers. In that same year, the Hapag acquired the Carr Line, a small Hamburg firm involved in the emigration traffic. As part of the merger, the head of the Carr Line’s passenger division, a young man named Albert Ballin, took over that function for the Hapag.

Ballin proved to be one of imperial Germany’s most remarkable businessmen, and it was he who transformed the Hapag into what became in 1899 the world’s largest steamship line, the year in which Ballin became its managing director. In the 1880s he had built the line’s first large combination passenger/freight ships (Schnelldampfer) and instituted tropical cruises in winter when the transatlantic trade fell off. As managing director, a post that Ballin held with a certain autocratic reserve toward his employees, he expanded freight services to numerous ports in North and South America. Ballin also made sure that the Hapag built passenger ships that had no equal in elegance in their first-class accommodations, and to guarantee success on this point he hired the celebrated hotelier Cesar Ritz as a consultant. Ballin was no less attentive to the profitable steerage trade, once a virtual monopoly of British lines, and the Hapag multiplied its steerage traffic by providing emigrants with clean, inexpensive quarters and treating them in a humane manner that was conspicuously absent among his competitors.

The Hapag swiftly became the preferred line for all strata of transatlantic passage.

Early in the twentieth century Ballin’s Hapag began to live up to its motto by entering into an active, and eventually profitable, trade with the Orient. China was the first area of the firm’s involvement, but later an active trade with the Persian Gulf was instituted. This not only dealt in sugar, for which there was a limitless market in the Near East, but also with Muslim pilgrims eager to make their way to Mecca. Hapag ships en route to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific regularly called at Jidda, from which the overland trip to Mecca could be made, and Ballin consulted experts at the University of Hamburg for advice on cuisine, accommodations, and even colors for his ships to be painted that would appeal to these religious passengers. So extensive was the line’s Asian network that in 1905, not long after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, it won a profitable contract to supply coal to Tsar Nicholas II’s fleet as it made its way from St. Petersburg around the world toward its fatal encounter in the Sea of Japan with the Japanese navy.

The progress made by the Hapag in almost every one of its ventures was accomplished at the expense of British lines, which had grown complacent with the virtual monopoly they had enjoyed all over the world before Ballin took command in Hamburg. Although Ballin himself wanted to have cordial relations with his competitors and worked for a friendly diplomatic relationship and a reduction in the rivalry between the British and German war fleets, the British regarded him as a menace. A London newspaper wrote in 1914 that “if our claim to rule the waves is threatened, this threat comes not from the German dreadnoughts but from Herr Ballin.”

Hamburg-Amerika Linie poster, ca. 1930. (Swim Ink

2, LLC/Corbis)

Ballin was horrified when, in August 1914, Germany and Great Britain went to war.

Hapag ships that found themselves in foreign ports were unable to make it back to Germany because of the British blockade, and some 4,000 employees of the line stationed abroad were interned. Workers in Hamburg had little to do, and ships lying in German ports at the outbreak of hostilities were in some cases mothballed, in others commandeered by the German navy. One of these, the Kiinigin Luise (Queen Luise), was the first German merchantman to be sunk in the war when on August 5, 1914, she was attacked by the Royal Navy while laying mines near the mouth of the Thames. The war was a disaster for the Hapag. Although Ballin succeeded in persuading the German government to award the line a subsidy to cover a portion of its

expenses, he was unable to persuade Berlin to allow him to sell or charter Hapag ships abroad. So the great armada over which Ballin once had so ably presided now rusted at anchor. “My life’s work lies in shreds,” he declared before the war was a month old. Depressed and in poor health, Ballin died on November 9, 1918, a death widely believed to be a suicide.

The postwar history of the Hapag was brave but unhappy. A new fleet of passenger liners, smaller and less elegant than their imperial predecessors, were built, the first being the Albert Ballin. Freight service to the four corners of the world was also resumed, but without the success enjoyed before 1914. Under the Third Reich the Hapag lost its independence to Hitler, who saw to it that his regime became the line’s principal stockholder. The disastrous conclusion of World War II destroyed almost everything bearing the line’s ensign. After 1945 the company again began the work of reconstruction, but with service limited to freight. This was a highly competitive and difficult market, and in 1970, in an effort to improve its position, the Hapag merged with its ancient rival in Bremen, the North German Lloyd, to found the Hapag-Lloyd Aktienge- sellschaft. The Lloyd had a few passenger ships, but the chief business of the new combination was freight.

Even before the merger, the two lines had entered into a joint container freight venture. In later years an air charter service and a tourist bureau were added. The Hapag-Lloyd was sufficiently successful to become a takeover objective, and in 1998 Preussag AG bought a controlling interest in the company, with the remaining shares purchased four years later by Preussag’s corporate successor, TUI (Touristik Union International). The Hapag-Lloyd name has been retained, with its headquarters located on the Ballindamm in the heart of Hamburg. A marble bust of Albert Ballin appropriately graces the lobby.

Lamar Cecil

Hapag

More on the topic Hapag: