Gdynia Maritime University GMU

Professor Rummel began his lecture by addressing those gathered in Polish in the following words:

 

Esteemed Rector of Gdynia Maritime University,
Esteemed Rector of Hochschule Bremerhaven,
Distinguished Members of the Academic Senate and Committee for the Award of a doctorate honoris causa,
Honourable representatives of the academic and political communities,
My dear Polish and German friends with whom I had the honour of working,
My dear family,
Ladies and Gentlemen.

 

I am grateful that we can all gather here today for this memorable and beautiful celebration of the award of my honorary doctorate. This is a very special and unforgettable moment for me.

It is a great honour for me to receive the academic distinction you are presenting me with today. 

It is also an exceptional day for your University. In my person, you are honouring the first non-Polish academic teacher and demonstrating the importance of the international orientation of Gdynia Maritime University.

Let me tell you from the bottom of my heart:

Thank you very much!

As you must have noticed, my command of your beautiful Polish language is really not sufficient to address you properly in free speech - so please understand that I am continuing in the lingua franca, both of the global academic community and the seafaring world.

In the letter of Rektor Prof. Adam Weintritt which was read out to me by Komendant Waldemar Frankiewicz in a solemn form in the saloon of Dar Młodzieży during her stay in Bremerhaven in June this year, two reasons were mentioned for conferring the title of 'Doctor Honoris Causa' to me:

"[...] your [...] contribution to the development of cooperation between Gdynia Maritime University and Hochschule Bremerhaven"  -  and 

"[…] your [...] achievements in the development of methods and tools for the teaching of marine communication in English."

Let me take up these two aspects and extend them in my short address today:

 

Ad primam: THE  COOPERATION

It was in July 1977, in  my first years as lecturer for Nautical English, when the Dar Pomorza under the command of  Capt. Tadeusz Olechnowicz called at Bremen for the first time after the war. This was the beginning of our relations because there and then two different concepts for the training of young seafarers met.

Here the pride of Poland that still upheld the ' sail-training before the mast'  as an essential educational part for her future ship's officers, in other words, her impressive sail training ship the Dar Pomorza, the former Princess Eitel Friedrich of the German Sail Training Ships Association, after WW I the French Colbert and from 1930 on the successor of the famous 'Lwów', that 100 years ago, in 1923, as the first ship under the again established Polish white and red colours had crossed the equator.

There the pride of the 'Hochschule für Nautik', the world-wide first shiphandling simulator - still totally analogue and mechanically driven. Germany had given up the 'training before the mast' following the tragic loss of nearly 100 young students of navigation aboard the 'Pamir' in her disasterous capzising and sinking off the Westafrican coast in 1957 and as a substitute had initiated shiphandling simulator training, following the US air simulator example.

That encounter of two different training philosophies laid the foundation stone for our later formal cooperation:

Poland, better Wyższa Szkoła Morska w Gdyni, offered practical training aboard her training ships Dar Pomorza, Horyzont and Zenith, whereas we in Germany at the Hochschule für Nautik offered the shiphandling simulator training and the first container seminars.

Rather unbelievably, in those peak years of the Cold War, back in 1978, it was the then newly founded youngest German University of Applied Sciences, Hochschule Bremerhaven, which was the fourth academic institution of the Federal Republic of Germany to enter into formal relations with a Polish academic institution now 45 years ago on the 12^th June, when our then Rektors, Prof. Daniel Duda and the late Prof. Hermann Solbrig signed the respective documents that had had to undergo meticulous inspection and scrutiny by our national authorities.

This was possible only because of the first initiative by the Polish episcopate in their letter in 1965 where they had  stretched out their hands to their German counterparts and the German people, writing  "We forgive and ask for forgiveness" „Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie". And because on the 7^th December 1970, 25 years after the terror and disaster of the Second World War, after all its atrocities and tragedies, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy Brandt, fell on his knees at the memorial for the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and in this way symbolically initiated a new phase between Poland and Germany, the 'Neue Ostpolitik'. Thus, the two universities joined a future-oriented development which gained more and more momentum, culminating on the 1^st of May 2004 when Poland became a full member of the European Union.

Let me just add two episodes of those early years: one to demonstrate our readiness to take risks and the other to illustrate the everyday humiliations of the time.

As mentioned, the Polish teachers and students alike were very interested in our shiphandling simulator, we on the other hand in the practical training on board. So in this context, a Polish training ship called at Lübeck, where, against all rules and regulations, a bus with our students waited for them. Our students illegally went on board the Polish ship and sailed for a week of practical exercises into the Baltic. The buses left again for Bremen, this time with Polish students who were accommodated during their one-week simulator course at Hochschule für Nautik aboard the 'Schulschiff Deutschland'. All returned to Lübeck, exchanged, and nobody had noticed the swindle. You cannot imagine how risky and daring that was.

The other episode happened at the German - Polish border. Prof. Alfred Harms and myself had been waiting at the locked iron border gate at   Kołbaskowo for a good hour when a young GDR border guard showed up with keys, asked us for our passports and visa and peering various times at Prof. Harms, who as usual was wearing his Basque beret, addressed him in a sharp military tone, "This is not your passport, you cannot go through!" When Prof. Harms kindly asked back, "Why? I have travelled with this passport for years and this early morning entered the GDR in Marienborn", the rude response was: "Take off your bloody cap so that I can verify you!"

In spite of such incidents, the cooperation flourished from its very beginning. A distinction of various phases of different levels can be made in terms of performance, intensity and problems inherent. Phases that were controlled to a large extent by international politics and also the rectorates of  our two universities.

The first and preliminary phase of informal contacts, of sounding the terrain and orientation, was characterised by an intensive exchange of letters, telex-messages and information. After 1978, with the formal co-operation contract finally signed, real exchange activities, exclusively of officials and lecturers, were launched for the first time.

During the Solidarnosz movement in summer 1981, after the first encouraging years, a more intensive plan for the co-operation was envisaged under the first freely elected Polish Rektor, late Prof. Kostecki. Yet the events of December 13^th endangered everything, when Martial Law was declared in Poland and all communication with the West completely cut off. At the very same time, the decision reached by the Senate of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen to terminate the nautical education at Bremerhaven and to concentrate it at the Hochschule für Nautik in Bremen posed a further threat to the cooperation. How could Hochschule Bremerhaven – without the nautical training – be a viable counterpart for a Maritime University? At the height of Martial Law in July 1982, the Rektors, late Prof. Rymarsz and Prof. van Dieken, took the opportunity of hoisting the flag on board Dar Mlodziezy in Gdansk on July 4^th – the American Independence Day! – to re-establish contacts. Only the adventurous decision of Prof. van Dieken to travel to Poland under unimaginable circumstances made this possible. It was also he who successfully integrated the new Bremerhaven courses, Transport Management and Systems Analysis into the cooperation.

This way, the earlier level of cooperation could be reached again, intensified and expanded. Joint research projects, joint publications and the long-term contract employment of the Polish professors, Dr. Czuchra, Dr. Kluj, and the late Dr. Michałowski, over years in Bremerhaven, were added to the long established exchange of lecturers. The formal result of this development was the "First Annex to the Agreement of Cooperation" signed on the occasion of the 10 years anniversary in Bremerhaven. The central criteria now became teaching, applied research and development.

Within this framework, the co-operation entered into another phase which once again was determined by international politics: the collapse of the GDR, the reunification of Germany, the road to freedom for Poland, the unexpected end of the Soviet Empire and its related systems of the Eastern Block. Out of a sudden, domestic problems became predominant, the re-organisation and re-structuring of public and university life alike absorbed all energies and endangered our cooperation. Even more, during this phase of reduced engagement also many staff members that had engaged in the cooperation retired, public finance and budgets were cut. Nevertheless, a respectable level of co-operation was maintained.

And eventually from the mid-nineties on another phase of consolidation and expansion was possible. New fields for cooperation were opened up, entire syllabi exported and implemented in Gdynia. The degree course in Operational Process Engineering (BVT), one of the most popular extra-mural courses, offered diploma degrees for Polish graduants with the supplement "according to the statutory requirements of Hochschule Bremerhaven". A joint Double Diploma Course in Operational Plant Engineering was drafted, developed and run very successfully for the first time in Gdynia. Students from Akademia Morska were matriculated at Bremerhaven for modules of their Polish logistics course. Our universities became partners in the SOKRATES, later the ERASMUS and ERASMUS+ scheme. This way, the former bipolar cooperation expanded into a European network of universities and scientific centres with the new millennium. The European University Charter was accepted and laid ground for a new sphere and perspective of cooperation. Similarly, the "Second Annex to the Agreement of Cooperation", signed on June 7^th, 2003 during the silver Jubilee celebrations, defined this European dimension and underlined the growing importance of the international transfer of technology in its section 2.

Let me here add another episode which shows how far our mutual understanding had grown. When in 2003 Rektor Prof. Stockemer prepared for the 25th anniversary celebrations and knew that Dar Mlodziezy would come to Bremerhaven and as so often provide stage and scene for the celebrations, he also managed to arrange with the Polish Consul General in Hamburg that she would be the polling station for the Polish citizens in the State of Bremen to cast their vote for or against Poland's entry into the European Union - and Rektor Prof. Cwilewicz was the first one to drop his vote into the ballot box aboard.

In this way our universities joined successfully a development which gained more and more momentum culminating in Poland's becoming a full member of the European Union. Even the most daring optimists in 1978 could not have foreseen that such a dream might come true in their lifetimes. What a change in the span of one generation!

For the next two decades, the co-operation of our universities, now incorporated into the European vision, was well equipped for a future characterised by an evermore intense globalisation due to world-wide communication and networking. Especially in times where the opportunity of instantaneous interaction with any partner, at any point, anywhere, anytime was at hand, the results and fruits of our long and intensive partnership proved to be a fundamental asset for our two universities. Our cooperation therefore was and in future will be directed and targeted towards new ideas, innovative  activities and further successful developments like actually offshore windenergy and artificial intelligence.

Let me therefore here and today express our sincere gratitude for those 45 years which we have been sharing with you in an always more intensive and exemplary academic cooperation. This conjoint part of our history has at all times been exemplary, paving at the same time the way for the reconciliation and the mutual understanding of our two neighbouring nations after very tragic chapters of their histories.

Particularly grateful I am personally that from the very beginning in 1978 to this day, i.e. for more than half of my lifetime, I was allowed to take part and engage in our work of bringing and keeping our academic institutions and people together.

My great and firm hope is that the momentum of the past 45 years will be strong enough to carry us and our cooperation successfully through the years ahead, now with a younger and different generation in the lead.

My sincere wish but also conviction is that in five years' time we will cooperate still actively and then can celebrate our golden jubilee of 50 years of intensive and uninterrupted cooperation.

 

Ad secundam: MARINE COMMUNICATION

For a linguist like myself, ESP, i.e. English for Special Purposes, has been a rewarding playground from my early university years on. When I was eventually appointed lecturer at the Navigational College of Bremen in 1972, the nautical ESP variety became my fascinating major focus of teaching and research.

For centuries, English was a communication tool of minor importance. Already in the 14th century the 'Black Book of the Admiralty', later from 1817 on 'Marryat's Code', finally after 1901 the International Code of Signals allowed for a  safe and unequivocal communication through flag or later morse signals without the use of voice communication. Language command was often useful in ports but not an indispensable requisite for safety and in distress cases. This changed dramatically after the Second World War with the introduction of  VHF-communication in the maritime industry when out of a sudden real language and understanding on both sides, for sender and receiver, mattered. Now everybody could speak to the counterpart but sadly enough could not understand the spoken response if it was not in his mothertongue - and who aboard commanded English at that time!

That was one of the rare moments of history inviting for a radical change - in this case a change towards an easy global communication. And due to the still not superseded work in creating a global language  by your advanced thinking and great  Polish visionaire Zamenhof -  in his Esperanto - an easily learnable global communicative means was at hand,  which at the same time would have avoided the language imperialism of native speakers which has been experienced in the past and present. But as it is so often the case, we missed this chance!

However, after a number of tragic losses of human life in shipping due to a total failure in voice communication, the Maritime Safety Committee of IMCO  (The International Maritime Consultative Organisation in  London) agreed, at its twenty-seventh session in 1973 that "where language difficulties arise a common language should be used for navigational purposes, and that language should be English". In consequence, the Standard Marine Navigational Vocabulary (SMNV) was developed, adopted in 1977, amended in 1985, and substituted later by the more comprehensive Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP).

For us teachers of Nautical English, this meant and demanded a completely new approach. A set of standardized language items, in linguistic terms, a restricted code, had not only to be taught but also their composition for certain situational safety relevant phrases automated. In this context, the language laboratory drills that had revolutionized language teaching, from a grammar-translation based approach to a communicative one, were the preferable method. Our first lab in Bremerhaven in the seventies was tape-driven, ten years later substituted by cassette desks and in 1997 one of the first computer assisted language laboratories as a teaching support tool and a selfstudy learning centre was installed.

In Bremerhaven we were immediately aware that it was not only sufficient to integrate the IMCO Standard into the syllabi of our regular diploma courses but saw the need to develop special extra-mural one week training seminars for active masters of the merchant fleet and tug captains. Within the framework of our first cooperational teachers' visits to Wyższa Szkoła Morska, I was also asked to run such courses in a modified form in Gdynia.

In the advent of computerisation the old idea of non-verbal communication through signals was the starting point for a new idea developed at the IMLA MET-conference in Amsterdam in 1981 by Prof. Luzer from Rijeka University and myself  which ended in the state funded binational project COMCOM'83  (Computerized Communication '83). The idea was to speak into your VHF set  in your mother tongue and to convert this input into a number-code  based on the SMNV standard which the computer then would

convert and output as a voice pattern in any other preprogrammed language. In this respect, it was already a rather similar approach to the translation systems based on artificial intelligence of today. In the end the idea worked perfectly on the computer under laboratory conditions, it failed however in simulated onboard situational distress trials since at that time all voice recognition systems were 'his master's voice' learning systems that could not cope with the changes of language pitch and pronunciation when speaking under stress, let alone the enormous noise levels on the bridge in such a situation. So in the end, our progressive idea did not materialise.

However, the rapid progress of recent years in computerisation, digitalisation and particularly application of artificial intelligence is leading the way to systems that will make marine communication as reliable and easy as it is the case already today with the electronic aids to navigation and the electronic chart. Sooner or later we will find the situation come true where ship to ship and shore to ship communication will unequivocally and at all times be possible in the respective mothertongues of sender and receiver.

In the near future, this development will be a real challenge for the teachers of languages and in particular for those of maritime communication, because all teaching that was until now focused on standardized, safety oriented  voice communication will be made redundant. Yet nevertheless it will be like in Zoom meetings, the real personal interaction that creates the atmosphere between humans remains reserved to the direct speech, to exchange and interaction. In this respect, this is my firm conviction, a good command of a global language will always matter and the tuition of such a language, which e.g. navigators can and should use in many situations aboard and in harbours at any time, will still remain an important contributor to the formation and education of qualified young seagoing officers.

Additionally, I forsee and therefore advocate for another unavoidable major change. This will concern the formation of language teachers and linguists alike and will be similar to the past development in logistics, where disciplines that for long were isolatedly seen: like sea, road, rail or air transport on one hand side and production, material-flow, storage, and consumers' demands on the other, had to be merged and stratified for a more general concept, and where their individual independent status had to be renounced. In this case I would suggest  a combination of a linguist's approach as basis, plus a rather considerable input of computer, systems analizing and digitalizing sciences that definitely must include artificial intelligence to be the recipe for any  future development.

However, what in any case will have to be thrown overboard and totally differently designed is the form and are the methods of examining since with the advent and prevalence of artificial intelligence the conventional forms of examinations have become absolutely obsolete.

So it is in maritime communication as it is in our cooperation; there has never been stillstand, we always had to be and have been open to changes and new challenges. To meet them, we need engaged and active people. I am sure we will always find them  -  for a bright future.

 

VIVANT! CRESCANT! FLOREANT!

UNIWERSYTET MORSKI W GDYNI

ATQUE

HOCHSCHULE BREMERHAVEN!

AD MULTOS ANNOS!