Captain Nicole Langosch has become the first German woman to command a cruiseship, but she is far from the first with master's papers.
Langosch set out for Hamburg on the 71,300-gt, 2,050-berth AIDAsol (built 2011). She will command the vessel into 2019, starting with a Norwegian voyage.
The Leer graduate, a former containership cadet and Women's International Shipping & Trading Association member, is a 10-year AIDA Cruises veteran, deputy captain since 2013, and one of 14 female officers with AIDA today.
Although its cruise industry may be catching up late, Germany was one of the earliest countries to give a woman command of a merchant ship.
The Soviet Union was the first, putting Anna Shchetinin, of Vladivostok, in command of a just-purchased ship in Hamburg in 1935, which she sailed to the Russian Far East aged 27.
In 1939, Canadian Molly Kool, whose Dutch-born father owned a small fleet of coastal freighters, became North America's first female captain.
Next came Germany's pioneer, the unstoppable Annaliese Teetz.
In 1941, the former Hamburg schoolteacher was kicked out of the German merchant marine on the orders of Adolf Hitler, but protested the dictator's decision and won reinstatement. By 1944, she had taken her first merchant marine command on the coaster Nord 128, running munitions and supplies to the German army in Norway and winning an Iron Cross.
The post-war German maritime unions proved a harder sell than Hitler. But, after a 10-year struggle, she again commanded civilian vessels for shipowners including Emil Offen from 1955 to 1968, when she resumed schoolteaching until her retirement. Teetz drowned in the Elbe in 1992 at the age of 81, when she paddled her kayak between two passing ships and capsized in their combined wake.
