allin-Stadt is a new concept and public-private partnership project that has
been accessible to the public since July, 2007. It consists in part of
an emigration museum
at the site of the previous emigration halls and quarantine
station that were removed in stages some time ago, beginning in 1938.
Hamburg used to be one of the leading European emigration ports.
The actual site is located at Hamburg-Veddel (just about a 45–60-minute walk from the street in which I was born and raised), a small island
between the larger island of Wilhelmsburg and Hamburg proper (or more precisely
the part of town called Rotenburgsort). Beginning in 1900, this was where
persons wishing to emigrate used to be registered and then quarantined for
up to 14 days before boarding ocean liners bound for the “New World.”
The fenced-off Emigrants’ Halls (Auswandererhallen)
compound included accommodation, dining and bathing facilities, churches
and synagogues — approximately 30 buildings in all.
immigrants disembarking at New York
City’s Ellis Island (Courtesy Wikimedia
It was primarily here that at that time the emigrating ancestors of
most European Americans spent their last days on European soil, many of those
bound for Canada, Latin America and Australia, too. This includes most emigrants
from Eastern and Central Europe (though many of them also sailed from Cuxhaven,
Bremerhaven and the then Austro-Hungarian-ruled port of Triest). Most would-be
emigrants arrived in Hamburg by train and were then sent straight to the
Emigrants’ Halls for processing. The majority of those that were cleared
for their respective voyages were later processed and often quarantined again
at New York City’s Ellis Island facilities. Thereafter, the fulfilled dreams
of many began with life in crowded, unsanitary tenements and unspeakable
working conditions in sweatshops, as is particularly eloquently described
in American Yiddish literature of that time.
The Ballin-Stadt project runs parallel with an exhibition about Hamburg
as an emigration port at the Museum for Hamburg History (Museum für Hamburgische
Geschichte) which holds most passenger lists and offers ancestry research
The project is being sponsored by the container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd
whose predecessor HAPAG (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft)
used to handle and regulate emigrants’ processing and transport.
Ballin-Stadt (Ballin-Town) is named after Albert Ballin (1857–1918), director
of the shipping company Hamburg-America Line and the person credited with
the invention of cruise ships. Erection of the Emigrants’ Halls and their
facilities was largely due to his initiative.
Although Ballin made an enormous success of himself, helped many Europeans
realize their dreams for a better life, and was friends with Emperor Wilhelm
II, he was never accepted among Hamburg’s old- and new-money “aristocrats”
due to being a descendant of humble Jewish second-hand clothing merchants
that had immigrated from Denmark. Virtually all of his accolades are posthumous,
which includes naming a “posh” Hamburg street (Ballindamm) and this commemorative
compound after him. However, he was stripped of several of these accolades
during Germany’s fascist era (1933–1945).