Page 09 - Willi Distel Diary

Willi's first journeyman post at Frankenthal in the Palatinate (1923): the journey there and first impressions of the shop and household

Translated from Willi's German.

II. Journeyman position. Frankenthal (Palatinate). After finishing my apprenticeship I spent a fortnight at home and set about looking for a permanent post, which I duly managed to secure for 1 May. Herr Grosse in Frankenthal, in the Palatinate, had taken me on. I left at midnight on 31 April on the Basel to Frankfurt express, bound for Mannheim. I reached Mannheim at five in the morning and at once took the electric tram to Ludwigshafen, and from there the local railway carried me the rest of the way to my destination. By eight in the morning I had already presented myself and gone straight to work at the shop. It was a small business with a clientele of business people, and I settled into the work fairly quickly. My boss was a man heavily weighed down by worry and by his trade, but he was very kind and thought highly of me. His wife, a small and falsely friendly lady, was the creeping house-devil. Their only son, aged eighteen, had worked his way downward from being a student, through the hairdressing trade, to being an ordinary factory hand. He was a frivolous, bad, and thievishly inclined colleague. I shared a room with him and, despite his parents' efforts to bring us together, I could not be a comrade to him. A trifle brought us...

Interesting facts

Becoming a journeyman. Now qualified, Willi takes his first paid post as a Geselle (journeyman) away from home - the customary next step after apprenticeship, in which a young tradesman moved to a new town to broaden his experience under a different master.
Crossing to the Rhine plain. His overnight journey ran from the Black Forest down to the flat, industrial Rhine valley. Ludwigshafen and Mannheim sit facing each other across the Rhine; Frankenthal lies just beyond Ludwigshafen, on the Palatinate (western) bank.
Trams and local lines. The 'electric' Willi caught in Mannheim was an electric tram, and the small local railway then carried him the last stretch to Frankenthal - the dense web of trams and branch lines that knitted the Rhine-Neckar towns together in the 1920s.
Into the occupied zone. Frankenthal lay in the Palatinate, which was under French military occupation after the First World War. The hardships this brought - and 1923's hyperinflation - erupt into the story on the very next page.