24 May: A Tale of Two Museums

Next destination was a drive south to the Ballinstadt Emigration Museum. Albert Ballin, a Hamburg shipping magnate, invented the concept of the cruise ship, with the purpose-built Prinzessin Victoria Luise in 1899. (The sleek white ship in the photo).His HAPAG shipping line was for a time the biggest in the world.

He also turned Hamburg into “ the emigration centre of the world”. He set up a complex of emigration halls which were home to five million emigrants from all over Europe, seeking new lives in the US, Canada, Australia and even New Zealand (the Bohemian settlement at Puhoi). Rich, successful, favoured by Kaiser Wilhelm II, his empire crumbled with the onset of the First World War, which he had tried hard to avert.

His world-leading facility was taken over by the German Goverment as a military hospital, his emigration business dried up. In November 1918 his three crack liners Vaterland, Bismarck and Imperator were seized as war reparations (renamed Leviathan, Majestic, and Berengaria). Hearing that his friend and benefactor Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated, Ballin took an overdose of sleeping pills.

Three of the immigration halls have been rebuilt since the 1960s as the Ballinstadt Emigration Museum.
They show how thousands of people were fed, housed, organised, health checked, had the necessary papers organized, and were shipped to their destinations.

Memoirs from the people themselves tell what it was like. There are also displays on post-war emigration (Marie-Thérèse was comparing her own family experience as Dutch immigrants in the 1950’s) and
immigration worldwide (see the Banksy).

I was very taken with the gift shop’s souvenir soft toy, a fetching rat of great charm, but Neil drew the line and I sadly had to leave Ratty behind.

Next we drove north almost to Kiel, to the Schleswig-Holstein Open Air Museum at Molfsee. Here are 40 hectares of meadows, gardens, dikes and over 70 historic buildings, farms and mills typical of the region.

We missed the live activities that happen on the weekends, but the buildings, some over 200 years old, showed what daily life was like in a typical Schleswig-Holstein village.

There were also sobering exhibits on the plight of the desperate refugees who fled westward from the advancing Russian Army in the last bitter months of 1945.

Many thanks to our hostess for driving us far beyond the usual Hamburg city tourist sites for these unique experiences.Read more