Queuing up to leave

A museum about emigration has not only been teaching German schoolchildren about 19th-century hardships in Germany, but has also perked up a working-class town on Germany’s coast.

“The emigration centre was one of the first big attractions in the new Bremerhaven harbour area in 2005,” says the port town’s head of tourism. Raymond Kiesbye.

Germany has perennial debates about whether it should let immigrants in though most appear sympathetic to the current plight of Syrian migrants and refugees. But the DAH Emigration Museum reminds Germans of what many did not know: 170 years ago, vast numbers of Germans were queuing up to get out.

The centre offers the city a unique selling point as far as tourism goes, attracting visitors from distant German states.

They can also see a Museum of Climate, the German Sailing Museum, a zoo, a functioning ocean port and the Weser river shoreline. Until the attractions were built, Bremerhaven was an ugly, run-down port that struggled to attract more affluent people to live there.

Of the average of around 200,000 visitors a year, five per cent come from abroad, primarily from the United States, Switzerland and France.

The centre scores points by showing the visitor the insides of a passenger sailing ship or the humiliating cages in the waiting area at New York’s Ellis Island, tableaux recreating what tens of thousands of old-time Germans experienced on their way to new lives abroad.

Once gone, the emigrants were largely forgotten, but their descendants sometimes return. At the museum, such visitors can even do research on their own relatives in the centre’s extensive archive, although much of the same material is also accessible online.

Some people coming to the museum even stumble upon kin or emigre forbears by accident.

“It’s always very emotional then,” says director Simone Eick. “These are wonderful moments.”

Museum visitors vary in their reaction to the exhibits, she says. Many people are moved by the subject and by the exhibition.

“The word that comes up most often is goosebumps,” she says. While touring the Emigration Centre every visitor follows the path taken by a fictitious emigrant. So with every ticket, one is almost buying into a 19th-century biography.

The city of Hamburg has a similar museum of emigration.

Since 2012, the Bremerhaven center has not only focused on the millions who left Germany in the 19th century for the United States, Canada, Argentina or Australia in search of a better life.

The building that originally opened in 2005 has been expanded and now the centre has extended its educational mission to show how life was for the German emigrants after they reached their destinations and integrated into foreign societies.

The new expansion has also opened up a view into the lives of people who have immigrated to Germany since the 1950s from Italy, Portugal or Turkey.

“Germany has for centuries been a land of immigrants and emigrants,” says Eick.

The museum recorded its two millionth visit in June. Each one walks the exhibits on average for 3.5 hours, a long time compared to other museums. Visitors have included artists and performers, and even two German presidents.

The museum is located at a quay at which ships actually used to set sail for the Americas.

In the years to come, Eick sees renovations in the exhibitions on emigration, but important changes will come on the immigration side as well.

 A planned project will inform children about how they can get along better with foreign arrivals.

“Fear of foreigners will be transformed into curiosity,” she predicts. There will also be a learning station on the subject of Christianity and Islam.