April 2 - Bahrenfeld and the Hamburg Harbor

Another bright sunny day! The daffodils, tulips, and little blue flowers in the garden were all blooming gloriously. Hurrah!

Lois had decided she would like to see Monika’s old neighborhood in the morning, and since the weather was good we wanted to try the harbor boat tour in the afternoon. We bought a Gruppenkarte (Group ticket) on the bus down to the Reinbek station for 7 Euro that was good for groups of up to 5 people for the entire day. Switching at Hauptbahnhof, we rode the S-Bahns out to Bahrenfeld and started our walking tour there.

>Monika’s old house at Friedrich Ebert Hof was just down the street from the Barhrenfeld station, and I was happy to see that the rose bushes planted by her mother around 20 years ago were still going strong. The first leaves were coming out and they looked healthy enough to have a good crop of roses later in the summer. Mammie would have been pleased, I’m sure. From the old apartment we continued on to the Kreuzkirche (Cross Church), which is literally shaped like a cross. The copper roofing on the sides and steeple had aged to a pleasant verdigris color, and I clearly remembered the vivid mosaic over the church doors.

We continued on from the church to the cemetery where Monika’s parents were buried and watered the flowers that Heinke and Gustl had planted there a couple weeks ago. Monika mentioned that the azalea bush and something that looked like a small leaf rhododendron were planted by her mother over 30 years ago after her father was buried there. Lois felt OK with more walking, so we walked thru a playground crowded with children and their parents to the bluff overlooking the Elbe. Working our way down the bluff we joined the street at the bottom and walked downstream to Ovelgoenne where we had lunch in one of the museum ships moored at the dock.

After lunch we took advantage of the fact that the Hamburg mass transportation network includes commuter ships that run up and down the Elbe, taking one of them upstream to the St. Pauli dock. Just as we arrived at the dock a harbor tour was getting ready to leave on the other side, so we paid our 9 Euro each and hopped on board. The one hour tour started off with the boat working its way back thru the fleets to the Speicher Street, and I finally found out the difference between a canal and a fleet. A fleet, it seems, has flowing water in it while a canal has stagnant water. Hamburg has flowing water because the fleets are fed by the Alster and Elbe rivers and have a general downstream flow to them. Venice, in contrast is in a lagoon and has canals because there is no natural flow the water—if you ever get to Venice you will definitely notice the difference! As for me, I prefer flowing water thank you very much.

From the fleet we crossed over to the southern shore of the Elbe, which is a very long harbor area. We worked our way back thru the fleets on the other side thru some tidal gates accompanied by other tour boats. This led us into some of the older areas of the harbor where we saw some old cranes that were being sold for 1 Euro each. The only catch, of course, was that whoever buys one has to dismantle and remove it from the harbor, which will probably cost thousands! (Such a deal.) An oil refinery and a liquefied natural gas facility were also on that side of the harbor and, not surprisingly, smoking was absolutely prohibited.

As we returned to deeper water we passed the major part of the harbor that handles freight. This part is now dedicated to the automated loading and unloading of the container ships as all freight seems to be currently shipped in containers. We found out that all containers are made to the same dimensions and differ only in that some are 40 feet long and some are 20 feet long. That makes them supremely easy to stack, and handle from the ships to the trains, trucks or the small inland barges that carry containers inland to places like Berlin.

On our way back out to the Elbe we passed the Blohm + Voss shipyards, which is the last remaining shipyard in Hamburg. They were constructing a couple of new ships using completely covered dockyards and doing remodeling and repair of other ships in floating dry docks. They were remodeling a German navy frigate and a cruise ship, among others, but our guide said the employment in the yards was down to about 1,500 people compared to around 20,000 in the 50s.

We returned along the river past the fish market building in Altona that had some really nice stained glass panels. We also saw the curious elevator building for the Elbe River tunnel and the moored square riggers like the Rychmer Ryckmers and the Mir, the Russian training ship. Passing by at water level gave us a rather different perspective on the ships; they looked much larger when you see them up close.

The Captain let us off and then backed out a bit and spun the boat around to return to his mooring while we walked over to the Cap San Diego for our museum-of-the-day. The Cap San Diego turned out to be a general purpose freighter built in 1962 and still in running condition. The special exhibit that was in the cargo hold was “A suitcase full of Hope” concerning the emigration from Germany and eastern Europe to the U.S. from the early 1800s to about 1920. It was a great exhibition and a fascinating story of how and why people left their homes to start over in the New World.

In fact, there were three distinct forms of separation caused by the immigration process. The first was the normal sad but hopeful departure of part of a family to the U.S. The second was called Kalte Scheidung (Cold Separation) and involved either the husband or the wife emigrating to the U.S. while the other partner stayed behind. The separation served as a de facto divorce at a time when real divorce was simply not an option. As an example they showed a mother with 7 children who had emigrated to the U.S. with 5 of the children while leaving 2 behind with the father. The puzzling thing was that the children who stayed with the father were the oldest daughter (about 12-14 by the look of her) and the second youngest child, a boy of only 3 or4, I estimated. Why those children stayed and the other five left with the mother was not explained, and I was curious how the mother and children did in America.

The third, and in my opinion most traumatic, form of separation was the separation of family members at any of the three medical screenings. These took place at the border of Germany, right before embarkation onto the ship, and finally at Ellis Island in the U.S. Apparently cases where parents were suddenly separated from their children due to the screening were quite common, and I wondered what would happen next. Say the parent passed the screening and the child didn’t, would the parent just trot off to America and send the child back to live with relatives back in the old hometown? Or say the child passed and the parent didn’t—would the parent left someone else adopt the child on the spot and take it to America or rather take the child back home? To be faced with such a momentous decision at the inspection station would just be horrendous, I thought, and I could not even imagine what I would have done in such a circumstance.

This medical screenings were instituted and paid for by the steamship companies providing passage for the emigrants. The screenings prevented a recurrence of epidemics like a cholera outbreak that killed 10,000 immigrants in Hamburg in the 1890s. The shipping companies also took the lead in building better living quarters on shore, food, and so forth to ensure at least the survival of the immigrants. By using photos of these facilities in their advertisements in Eastern Europe, the Hamburg steamship lines had captured the majority of the emigration traffic. This is certainly one case where the profit motive created an enlightened form of self-interest that helped the emigrants as well as the steamship companies like the Hamburg-America Line. The emigrants were so densely packed that altho they paid far less than the upper deck passengers, they were in fact the economic basis of the company—the company president admitted he would go broke in a matter of weeks without the emigration business.

When we poked around the rest of the ship, I was fascinated by the huge nine-cylinder engine that spanned at least 3 decks in the lower part of the stern. This thing was a turbo-charged, compression-ignition two-stroke engine, according to the description, and I admit I was puzzled by the nine (really, really big) cylinders. Why a straight-9 design for this? The engine was also directly connected to the propellers, so to change from forward to reverse they had to stop the engine, change the camshaft for running in reverse, rev up the engine with compressed air, and then finally inject the fuel oil to get it started running in reverse! I couldn’t even imagine trying to dock a ship with a setup as awkward as that. It was also fun to climb up to the bridge and get the Captain’s view of the front of the ship.

From Cap San Diego we took the S-Bahns back to Reinbek and had dinner. One interesting piece of news on the evening TV was that renewable power currently provides 8% of Germany’s power and they plan to increase the support for development of more renewable power. Last year I had read about the 8.8 cents per kilowatt-hour subsidized rate for wind generators, and I wondered what support was planned in the future. The report included tapes of what I think were bio-mass and photo-voltaic power sources, which I inferred were included in this plan as well. The stated goal was to increase the proportion of renewable power to 20% of total power by 2010, and given what I had seen with the mushrooming fields of windmills on Wanderung 2, they just might make that goal.