Selected passengers are invited to dine each night at the captain's table. There, some are amused and others offended by the anti-Semitic rants of a German businessman named Rieber who – though married – begins an affair with Lizzi. The Jewish Lowenthal is not invited and is seated at a side table with a dwarf named Glocken, and the two bond over their sense of social exclusion. Later a passenger named Freytag is shocked to find himself blackballed from the Captain's Table when Rieber learns Freytag's wife is Jewish and after an angry public outburst he too is re-seated at the side table. Here Lowenthal counsels tactical accommodation to the Nazi views of Rieber saying "Germany has been good for the Jews and the Jews have been good for Germany ... Anyway what are they going to do, kill us all?"