March 24 - The Toy Museum and the History Museum

Our first order of business was to reserve a car for most of the two weeks Lois would visit us in order to give us more flexibility to see things. Detlef had offered to help us search for a cheap rental car, so we took the S-Bahn and subway (U-Bahn) to his office to do an Internet search. While we were at it, I shot off the next installment of the journal to some of my kith and kin, and checked for anything new but there was nothing, not even Spam. We finally booked an auto, hoping it wasn’t too small for the 3 of us, and let Detlef get back to work while we crossed a canal to nearby Antique Toy Museum.

The Antique Toy Museum appeared like nothing so much as an attic in some old 1800s house with all kinds of ancient toys piled randomly in each room. The disadvantages of this approach were that there was no development of coherent themes and also no documentation of the age or construction of each toy. But there were also advantages. The toys looked like they were in a natural environment, a messy child’s room for example, and we could see them “up close and personal” rather than have them behind glass walls. The manager allowed flash photography, which made photography a whole lot easier, and I enjoyed taking pictures of old electric trains and cars, but also some unusual toys like a Ferris Wheel type of thing and a model steam engine that appeared functional.

The most curious thing I found, however, was a children’s book from 1934 entitled “Familiekunde und Rassenbiologie” that roughly translates as “Family knowledge and racial biology”. It started mundanely enough with presentations of family trees, but then it introduced Mendellian genetics and started in discussing the different races. This book shows that the Nazi party was indoctrinating children with the racial theories that were one basis of anti-Semitism already in 1934. I really wish I could have purchased that book or the adult versions I have also come across. The author was Professor Doctor Jakob Graf and it is very important, I think, to see exactly how science was perverted to justify genocide and mass murders of different kinds of minorities—we must make very sure it doesn’t happen again. I know I’ve been scared by talking to dyed-in-the-wool eugenicists who really want to sterilize folks to stop “bad genes” from spreading—somehow it always seems that the eugenicists personally have “good genes” and should be allowed to breed, of course. I would give them a lot more credence if some of them would admit to having bad genes and would have themselves sterilized, but I’ve never heard of that happening.

Well, we still had some energy after that, so we walked along the harbor section of the Elbe on our way over to the Hamburg Museum fuer Geschichte (Hamburg History Museum) for the afternoon. The harbor had a Russian square-rigged sailing ship named “Mir” from St. Petersburg that was used by the Russian navy to train their midshipmen, I think. They said they spent the winter in Hamburg to have an ice-free port, which St. Petersburg certainly is not! Another beautiful square-rigger was the Rickman Rickers, a perfectly preserved example of trade sailing ships based in Hamburg in the 1800s. It and the Cap San Diego, an example of an freighter used in the 1960s, were owned by the Hamburg History Museum and had historical displays in them.

In addition to the traditional sailing ships, the harbor always seemed to have tugboats running all over the place and the little harbor touring ships nosing around to give the tourists an up close and personal view of the ships from the waterside. I find that it’s really fun just to sit up on the side of the dock and watch ships move around, but maybe that’s just my affinity for watching other people work! Still, the harbor and the area around it are well worth a look if you are ever visiting Hamburg—just remember not to buy a drink for any of those pretty girls on the Reeperbahn because it will cost you as much as $100 a pop! We found out in the history museum that the name Reeperbahn comes from the rope walks that were used to manually make hemp ropes and cables during the 1800s, but currently the Reeperbahn is a rather famous, or perhaps infamous, red light district adjoining the harbor.

When we finally arrived at the Hamburg History Museum, I found it was one of these big, 4-story buildings that had a large number of exhibits and displays. Much to my relief almost everything was in English and German, which made it far easier on me to read things quickly rather than having to puzzle it out. Some exhibits, like the clothes from the 1700s, were something my sister Lois would probably be fascinated by but I could just breeze thru them. But other exhibits concerning the history of Hamburg as a port and facts about the era of sailing ships did absorb me for a couple of hours. They had great exhibits on making rope, sails, and caulking the planks on a deck. They even had the demonstration model that showed an upper deck canon and rigging from the U.S.S. Constitution. It was intriguing to examine because you could see all the details of how things were arranged and rigged at a glance, much more easily than in the ship itself, but I had to wonder how in the world this model had ever ended up in Hamburg, Germany!

The top floor of the museum has a really big model train layout that simulated the train station of Harburg, Germany (which lies across the Elbe River from Hamburg) circa 1950. They announced a presentation at 3 p.m. and we hustled up the stairs to see it. The layout is, in fact, quite extensive, consisting of over a kilometer of track in a roughly 20 foot by 50 foot room. The control tower for this layout is in an island in the center of the room that is surrounded by at least 7-10 spurs of tracks. The operator had each train pull thru the Harburg station, stop for a minute while we admired it and he gave its vital statistics (weight, power, top speed, number produced), and then pull away again around a corner. In essence, this was like one of those fashion shows where the models strut down a runway, stand and pose there for a second while their dress is described and admired by all, and then strut back off the runway, except that the models here were model trains! I particularly enjoyed a propeller driven high-speed train that looked like an old passenger plane minus the wings. It was briefly tried out as an experiment during the 1930s but it failed to achieve sustained high speeds due to the limitations of the track bed and it failed to be economical because it only carried 28 passengers. Some of the other trains that were presented were intimately familiar to me because that we still being used by the regional train systems and we had been riding on them!

Another well-done section of the museum contained a well down video concerning the immigration of 40 million Europeans to the U.S. from 1600 to 1920. About 8 million were Germans trying to find land or political freedom (see also Wanderung 2), and their difficulties on the ships from Hamburg and Bremen to the U.S. were horrendous and vividly described. Also, I found out that exactly 3 percent of the immigrants leaving from those ports died enroute, so taking this journey was not without real risks. The British ships sailing out of Liverpool offered lower-cost competition for the trip, but at a high price in safety and poorer traveling conditions. That alternative route required a cross-channel trip followed by a train across England to Liverpool where the immigrants embarked for America, so it was awkward. More importantly it was also far more deadly with an average death rate of 10% of the immigrants! The video remarked that while the Germans instituted rules for better conditions in these ships, the English either didn’t have any standards for the living conditions below decks or they just ignored them! But the film also emphasized how immigrants who made it to the U.S. were so happy to be free to make something of themselves and be their own masters. The video ended by discussing how quickly the Germans assimilated into the U.S. political and economic system.

We were finally chased out of the museum (without finishing it!) at 5 p.m. on the dot, so we walked along a series of parks that leads to the old flower garden area called Planten und Blomen (Plattdeutsch for Plants and Flowers). I have clear memories back in 1973 of being enchanted by the water organ playing jets of colored water choreographed to music. The flower beds were being planted but the water hadn’t been added to all the ponds yet, so I didn’t get a chance to see the organ play again (too bad!). Nevertheless we saw daffodils, violets, and azaleas blooming and it should be just glorious later in the year. We also found our old friend, trans-European trail “X”, actually ran right thru the park, so if you ever take that trail from north to south thru Germany you will definitely see Planten und Blomen on the way!

While we were walking in the park it was slowly getting dark and suddenly I saw a wall just outside the garden area with barbed wire and some plaques outside it that forcefully brought back the ultimate effects of the racist thinking promulgated by the Nazis. The plaques documented the murder in 1943 of dissenters and Jews in the prison just beyond the wall. Two women, in particular, were beheaded with a guillotine, which I thought was just barbaric. Four clergymen were also executed, apparently just for opposing the Nazi regime. This was another example of facing the Nazi history rather than whitewashing it which I found refreshing and so different to Japan’s continued resistance to admitting culpability for atrocities like the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and so forth.

We continued meandering thru the park as the sun set, which it does rather slowly that far to the north. We admired the flowers that were already blooming.

Checking the time, we hurried on to the Dammtor station, where we boarded a train to Aumuehle at 6:00 sharp. I figured that even if we left a bit before 6 we would be fine because our CC Karten were good again at 6 p.m. and I thought it would take the controllers a minute or so to flip out their badges and ask to see our tickets. Boy was I wrong! I hadn’t counted on the typical German efficiency. The police were in fact on the same wagon about three seats behind us and they flipped open their badges and started checking everyone right as we left the station! It reminded me of Bill Cosby’s “200 mph” sketch where he thinks the policemen climb out of the trunk of his car as soon as he starts speeding. By my watch we were checked about 15 seconds after the hour, and I was glad this was Germany because if their watch had disagreed with my watch by more than 15 seconds, I would have been facing a 40-50 Euro fine (as would Monika!). We could relax after that and even caught the 236 bus at the Reinbek station, which saved us a trudge back up the hill to the house.

We had rolls plus meat and cheese for a light dinner while I build a smoky fire and we watched pairs ice-skating on Euro Sport Live cable channel. I wasn’t sure if I was just fighting waterlogged, rotted wood or if the chimney had clogged up due to a steady diet of evening fires, but it surely was disconcerting to watch smoke curl up out of the fireplace in front of the TV set. In our house in the U.S., every smoke detector in the house would have been screeching at us, but smoke alarms didn’t seem in common use in Germany, possibly because with the masonry houses they were perceived as unnecessary