Ellis Island: the prequel

If the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York Harbor tells the story of arrivals, the museum in Bremerhaven tells the story at the opposite end of the experience: the departure, not just to the United States but to Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Australia as well. But why a museum just now, so many years after large-scale European emigration to North America stopped?

The question is all the more pertinent because Bremerhaven is not the only German city to have the idea of an emigration museum, though it is the first in Germany, and in Europe as a whole, to open one. In Hamburg also, two hours by train from here and the other major German point of departure for the "unknown world," another emigration museum is planned for 2007.

From the NY Times, in an article which also mentions

. . . Albert Ballin, almost unknown in the United States, but a major figure in the peopling of North America. Mr. Ballin was a Jew who took over his father's ticket-booking business and built up an island in the middle of the Elbe River intended to provide transit services to emigrants, especially those from the East.

Eventually, Mr. Ballin became the general director of HAPAG, now called Hapag-Lloyd, which remains one of Europe's biggest shipping companies.

The complex Mr. Ballin built on Veddel Island in Hamburg, now an area of warehouses and itself a neighborhood for recent Turkish and other immigrants to Germany, once contained some 30 buildings, including dormitories, a hospital, a bathhouse, churches and a synagogue, most of which have been demolished.

For more about the history of this complex, see the BallinStadt website. The Wikipedia entry for Ballin pays more attention to other aspects of his life.

Posted by David on September 4, 2005 9:09 PM