Yitzhak Rabin: Destination: The Future Hamburg’s BallinStadt – the last stop for European emigrants to the U.S.

Destination: The Future Hamburg’s BallinStadt – the last stop for European emigrants to the U.S. – By Klaus Grimberg

From 1850 to 1934, five million Europeans abandoned their countries, leaving through Hamburg’s port. The majority of them went to the United States. A new museum in Hamburg documents the final hours of these emigrants’ time at BallinStadt. It even shows the complete passenger manifests in the exhibit – as well as on the Internet.

Very early in her life, the Jewish girl from Vilnius, Lithuania, realized that the Tsarist Russian Empire was divided into two. “We Jews weren’t allowed to buy property anywhere in Russia or to settle down as merchants,” she is reported to have said. Her greatest wish was to attend school. Then came the terrible year of 1881 – after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II – when there were pogroms against the Jewish population all over the country. “One morning, father was gone,” she added. “We cried because we thought that Russian soldiers had gotten him.”

What the girl didn’t know is that her father had fled – to America. Several months later, she received a letter from New York saying her father was doing well and had found work. And after just one year, he sent tickets to his family for passage on a ship to the New World.

“After an excruciating crossing on the Vandalia, we reached New York in summer 1882,” she is reported to have said. “Our happiness was indescribable. Just three days after my arrival, I went to school for the first time ever. It was the most beautiful and the proudest day of my life.”

About five million people left as emigrants from Hamburg’s port between 1850 and 1934. For a majority of them, the United States was the top destination – they wanted to start a new life. That included, for example, the liberal journalists from southern Germany, after Germany’s unsuccessful revolution of 1848, who searched for freedom of expression on the other side of the Atlantic. It was the peasant laborer from Hesse, who wanted to start his own farm in Maryland in 1865. It was also the servant girl from Hamburg, who simply allowed herself to be talked into an adventure in New York by a girlfriend in 1874.

Five million emigrants, five million destinies. And yet all of them had one thing in common – whether they left their homelands due to economic, political or religious reasons, they boarded the ship for passage into the future in Hamburg.

The history of this emigration is being memorialized in a recently opened museum in the Elbe metropolis – the BallinStadt. To this end, not far from the city center, in the Veddel quarter, three barracks from the emigrant city formerly located there have been rebuilt true to the originals.

The Hamburg-American Parcel Incorporated (Hapag), under its general director, Albert Ballin, opened the quarters in 1901. All ship passengers were welcome. Papers were examined once again, luggage was disinfected and passengers were medically checked. Until the day of departure, emigrants remained in the compound, which through 1907, was built up into a small city. It had simple but comfortable accommodations, central bathrooms and separate kitchens and dining rooms for Jews and Christians, as well as a synagogue and a church.

The halls for the emigrants took over the functions of the notably smaller barracks that since 1892 had stood directly next to the American wharf on the harbor. Its capacities were quickly overwhelmed. With both of the facilities, Hapag was reacting to the immediate needs of its customers. In the days before their journey, the emigrants wanted cheap and secure accommodations in Hamburg.

In earlier decades, the port quarter was a dangerous place for emigrants, many of whom were from Eastern and southeastern Europe. Many a person gave their last dollar to dubious smugglers or were forced to pay completely exorbitant prices for terrible accommodations.

Compared to Bremen, where procedures for emigrants had been regulated by ordinances quite early on, Hamburg had an extremely terrible reputation. That is one reason why it wasn’t until 1891 that more people left Europe by way of the Elbe River instead of the Weser. At this time, emigrants had long since become a lucrative business where northern German Lloyd from Bremen and Hamburg’s Hapag were competitors.

At the turn of the previous century, passage across the Atlantic had become a comparably “comfortable” journey for even the simplest of passengers. The modern steamships plowed through the ocean to New York in nine days, and after 1900, in six to seven days. In the newly created third class, there were individual beds for every passenger in large dormitories, and enough bathrooms for all.

How different it was than 50 years before when emigrants traveled for 40 to 50 days, jammed together in the middle decks of large sailing ships. These people had to endure stuffy, stinking confines below deck, as well as terrible hunger, illnesses and wretched hygienic conditions. Even into the 1890s, the crossing was downright torture for the majority of those making it.

The new museum presents all of these chapters of emigrant history vividly and effectively. Along with classic exhibits such as travel accessories and ship inventories, documents and photos, visitors are especially struck by the personal testimonies of the emigrants themselves. At the entry and exit points, talking dolls (including the girl from Vilnius) speak of their departure for the New World. In addition, there are a large number of letters, diary entries and remembrances, some of which are read at listening points and are complemented by film footage.

An interactive feature at various stations throughout the museum allows students and visitors to learn about the various stages of emigration, discovering many of the roadblocks along the way. One of the barracks is dedicated to the general history of emigration, and a second presents the everyday life of emigrants in BallinStadt.

The museum also has the complete passenger manifests from 1850 to 1934, the largest collection of its kind in the world. Working over many years, the employees of Hamburg’s city archive painstakingly copied these lists into an Internet database. In one of the museum’s wings, they have installed a family research area where every visitor can search for their ancestors who left the European continent through Hamburg. With this project, BallinStadt continues to act as a bridge between the Old and New Worlds to this day.

The city of Hamburg spent about €12 million ($16.4 million) for the new museum and the surrounding park and boat berths, and one-third of the money was donated by sponsors. With this overdue place of remembrance, the Elbe metropolis has erected a collective memorial to the five million emigrants who left their old lives behind.

And with Ballin, they are honoring an important city son. Through his personal deeds, this Jewish businessman and ship owner helped minimize the incalculable risk for emigrants. As a confidant of German Emperor Wilhelm II, he later tried to dissuade the leader from pursuing an arms race with England and, in the end, from joining the First World War. In the final days of the war in 1918, when he saw his life’s work destroyed, Ballin took his own life by poisoning himself.

The partially rebuilt BallinStadt is also a place to think about migration today. After all, more than 50 percent of the residents in the Veddel district of the city are immigrant families from all over the world. These people didn’t choose America but have tried to find a new home in Germany.

The United States began regulating immigration from 1921 through legislation. Immigration was not reduced because of it. The famous migration researcher Klaus J. Bade sums it up nicely: “’Homo migrans’ have been around as long as homo sapiens.”

– Klaus Grimberg is a Berlin-based journalist.