A Year In the Life

Today we drove to Bremerhaven to visit the coolest museum, Deutsches Auswanderhaus.  

Bremerhaven is the port town off the North Sea where a bunch of German people sailed from when they left Germany for the New World in the years between about 1800 to 1950.  Deutsches Auswanderhaus is the museum that commemorates what that experience was like and why people left.  

 

It is super interesting, because when you get your ticket, they give you a name of an actual emigrant and a little card that you can swipe throughout the museum to see what your person's actual experience was at that stage of their trip.  The museum takes you through the whole journey, and at the end you can find out what happened to your person once they reached the New World - America in most cases, although Luke's guy ended up in Argentina.  

 

We all got totally attached to our people, and I was particularly sad to learn that my woman died about a year after she finally arrived in Texas in 1856.  Lukie's guy was Jewish, the son of a famous opera director and opera singer.  He left after the Nazis took power in 1936 and his parents could no longer work in Germany.  He was 18 when he arrived in Argentina, but he had to start school in the 6th grade because he didn't speak Spanish.  His dad convinced him to take up an instrument so he could go to a musical conservatory instead, so he picked up the oboe.  He ended up being a pretty famous oboist (is that a word?).

We watched a film at the end where they interviewed German people who had left to start a new life in America.  It was kind of sad, because many of them talked about how Germany is no longer their home and they prefer their life in America.  I was pretty surprised to see that shown in Germany - doesn't it hurt Germany's feelings?

After spending the day at the museum, we drove to Hamburg.  That night, we found a Christmas market and had a lovely evening wandering the streets of Hamburg.