Bob:

The morning dawned gray, gloomy, and looking a lot like rain, so we hustled over to the Lidl store on Appelhof 1 right after breakfast to buy some of the rain gear that was on sale that morning. I bought a rain shell, rain paints, and rain-proof poncho, and Monika also picked up one of the ponchos since they packed into a nice pouch complete with a waistband so that we could easily carry them. The total was 39.93 Euro, relatively cheap, And it turned out to be in the nick of time as a thunderstorm broke over us just as we came out of the store.

The rain suddenly started to come down in buckets, but I was cozy and dry in my new, bright blue rain shell as we slogged through the puddles over to the bus stop. We used our Hamburg passes to take the bus and train in to Hauptbahnhof and then another train South a bit to Veddel, an island located in the middle of the Elbe River and the harbor that runs through Hamburg. At the Veddeler Bogen we found our goal for the day, a museum devoted to emigration to America (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) from Europe in general and Germany in particular.

Monika:

Bob:

The Ballinstadt (Ballin's City) Emigration Museum was set up in reconstructed halls such as had sheltered the emigrants from the 1890s until the mid-1930s. The history of immigration given there, however, covered emigration from Europe to the Western Hemisphere from 1800 to the present day. It was particularly nice that every single exhibit had the information both in German and English, since I am noticeably faster in reading English. I thought the exhibits did a very good job of summarizing the different trends in emigration such as the emigration in the early 1800s from southern Germany due to economic conditions, the emigration of the persecuted revolutionaries after the failed 1848 revolutions, the emigration of persecuted Jewish folks from Russia and eastern Europe in the late 1800s, and so forth. Some trends surprised me, such as the fact the the earliest emigrants were poor farm laborers who emigrated to avoid their harsh living conditions and subsistence wages, while emigrants in the late 1800s tended to be more the skilled laborers and professionals. The other surprise was the young men who emigrated to America to avoid conscription into the local military, particularly during times of war where the very real possibility was that they would be used as cannon fodder. But since they were technically deserters, leaving their homeland (e.g. Germany, Russia, Poland) was fraught with difficulty.

The different threads of emigration were exemplified by some human figures with period clothes and possessions that we found both at the entrance of the first exhibit hall and the exit of the second exhibit hall. The station next to each figure was equipped with old-fashioned telephone earpieces, and when we picked them up we heard the story of that particular person given in either German or English. At the beginning of the museum, the stories for each of those characters took us just to the crossing to America and their initial impressions of their new homeland. At the end of the museum we were given "the rest of the story", to use Paul Harvey's phrase, which kind of closed the circle as to what had happened to that person after another 10-15 years, by which time they were generally firmly established in the U.S. in one way or another.

Some of the details of of the emigration process, such as the repeated medical inspections, I had read about before, particularly in the open-air museum in the old Eastern Germany during Wanderung 2. There I had also learned that the Prussian authorities at that time were only too happy to let "liberals" emigrate as from their point of view they were getting rid of trouble-makers. That museum had also documented the truly grueling working conditions of farm laborers, weavers, and other types of workers that motivated them to escape to America where they imagined things would be much easier.

Monika:

Bob:

At the end of the first exhibit hall, a walkway led to a small courtyard which had a small building shaped like a ship standing in a shallow pool of water. Inside the "ship" we found a small theater that was playing Charley Chaplin's "The Immigrant" an old silent black-and-white film that documented first the sea journey across the Atlantic and then Chaplin's attempt to have a meal at a restaurant in New York. Some of the scenes were amazing, especially the ones where the ship is rolling and the plates of soup are sliding from one person to the other across the table. Each person would take a spoonful of soup just as it slid up to him, and the timing was exquisite. I was impressed partly because I knew this had be be done "real time" rather than by using any computer graphics or special effects that dominate modern films.

However, in the second exhibit hall in Veddel I learned one critical piece of information: that if the emigrant was not accepted at the destination, the shipping company was responsible for the entire cost of of repatriating the person to their home country. No wonder they were so careful to inspect the people who left the ports such as Hamburg and Bremen in Germany, and Antwerp in Belgium. Curiously enough, the single most common contagious disease that caused rejection was what I translated as being eye-inflammations! Things like tuberculosis that I would have thought to be fairly common, were in fact quite rare. But besides contagious diseases, it turns out that some professions were unacceptable for immigration, in particular being either a pimp or a prostitute was sufficient reason for rejection. Who knew?

Monika:

Bob:

I must admit I was moved by a chart that showed the emigration from Germany to the U.S. over the decades from 1800 to 2000. That is probably dry as dust to most people, but one of those counted in the 1960 decade data was, of course, Monika. She took the road less traveled, to use Robert Frost's phrase, and that to me has made all the difference in the world. Without her my life, not to mention my sons' lives, would have been altogether different.

What with reading every word of every display, listening to all the vignettes, and having lunch in between, we finally staggered out of the museum at three in the afternoon. We hadn't really walked that far at all (normal people would breeze through that museum in at most an hour or so), but just standing and reading for hours on end had made my legs start to ache, so we decided not to walk around downtown Hamburg but rather head slowly back to Heinke and Gustl's place.

Monika:

Bob:

When we got there, we had a quick Kaffeetrinken, the German equivalent of English teatime but with coffee rather than tea as the beverage. Heinke had made a really good plum cake, along the lines of a cherry cobbler but with plums with the bottom instead of cherries. When we described our experience seeing Chaplin in "The Immigrant", Heinke recalled that she had recorded Chaplin in "Modern Times" and proceeded to play it for us.

We watched Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" before dinner, and I was just amazed at the physical artistry with which he used his body and gestures in that silent film. The German version, of course, used German subtitles, but they fit right in underneath the English explanation pages of the film, so they were very unobtrusive. In fact, by watching it with my German relatives I came to realize how well a silent film can communicate across cultures because of the way it is carefully crafted to communicate meaning without words. Films that rely on a soundtrack with words to convey meaning, in contrast, must be either dubbed or subtitled to be comprehensible to a cross-cultural audience. Maybe we should go back to making silent films? "Modern Times" was not really completely silent, however, because they had recorded an instrumental sound track to go with the action and, in one place where Chaplin was singing some nonsense song, they appeared to have his voice on the soundtrack. The misadventures of the little tramp with things like working on an assembly line, accidentally becoming involved in a communist demonstration, and working (unsuccessfully) at a shipyard were just hilarious.

Monika: