My eyes watered as I stared at my reflection through my rearview mirror. “Eight, nine, ten, and done. Now switch to your other nostril and do the same thing,” said the CVS employee outside my car window. I anxiously put the nasal swab into the included tube, put it in the drive-thru vacuum machine, and sent it away. My trip, made possible by the Stanley A. Hamel Travelling fellowship fund, began here. When my COVID test came back negative the night before my flight, I was good to go.
The first leg of my journey took me to the port city of Hamburg, Germany. BallinStadt was a former immigration station located on Veddel Island. The museum is housed in three buildings that were formerly accommodation halls. In this museum, I saw for the first time a trope that would continuously repeat itself throughout all of the museums I visited: a boarding ramp that would lead into a ship, inside which would be another museum exhibition. I found this phenomenological experience interesting, as it showed the importance of the act of “crossing a threshold” in these museums’ portrayal of movement.  BallinStadt gave me a general understanding of what was to come. Their exhibits were peculiar, and I took my time examining every single placard as I was often the only one in each exhibit. At the end of BallinStadt was a “selfie corner,” where a placard recommended I take a selfie, so I complied and stood in front of a bubble-gum pink Statue of Liberty standing on an island of squares with the Ellis Island questions printed on them.
Next, I went to a museum that proudly displays its “Voted EU’s Best Museum in 2019” designation in the front lobby: the German Emigration Center. After missing about 6 different trains to get to Bremerhaven (no joke—I missed SIX different trains and at one point found myself sitting on the bare floor of some station in the German countryside eating a dry baguette I got from a freakishly large supermarket in an abandoned plaza complex), I finally made it to the port city of Bremerhaven.
This museum was by far the most immersive. In an act that would only be repeated in one other museum, the cashier at the front desk gave me a passport and the identity of a German emigrant whose story I would be following throughout my experience. Additionally, every “room” (they were often sets of rooms connected) had a “participant survey,” where you could give your answers to questions they asked, such as “How should school books portray Christopher Columbus’s legacy?” At the end of this museum, all of the answers to these questions were compiled and put on a huge screen. I was disheartened by many of the answers I saw, but thought it was really, really interesting.  ​ After Bremen, I found myself on the narrow streets of Dublin, Ireland at the Irish Emigration Museum. Here, too, I was given a fake “passport” that I would carry with me throughout the entire museum, stamping them (myself) to make sure I made it through each exhibition. This one was interesting, and they had an entire exhibit dedicated to providing reasons for emigration.
I eventually ended up in Gdansk, Poland and then took the train to the port city of Gdynia. At the Emigration Museum, I witnessed what would become my favorite room of all the museums I visited: the potato room. The walls were lined with potatoes, and this room paid homage to the industrialization possibilities that were unlocked due to the caloric density of this new-world food compared to European grain.
Across from the potato room and tucked into a small corner that was overlooked by almost everyone in the exhibition room with me was a placard entitled “Land Hunger.” I discovered that land became increasingly subdivided and difficult to subsist on, encouraging emigration to the U.S.
I began this project with the stated goal of understanding how museums portrayed emigration, focusing specifically on how they presented the “whys” of emigration from Europe to the United States. When I had initially set out to study this specific thing, it made enough sense in my mind: these museums were specifically emigration museums, so of course they would elaborate on the reasons why people left and provide in-depth exhibits that expanded on this. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and only a few museums spent more than a wall explaining this.
Instead, the museums focused on the broader context of emigration and there were a few peculiarities that brought me pause throughout my journey to museums around various countries.
The first peculiarity I only realized after having returned from Europe and into my family’s car: Not once did I enter a passenger automobile in Europe. Yes, I took the bus, but most of my travel was by train or conveniently located electric scooters peppered in designated zones throughout the metropole. I remember a particular exhibition at the Red Star Line museum in Antwerp that showed the relative speeds of trains vs. horses and steam liners vs. traditional sailing ships. Sailing ships took four to six weeks to make the journey across the Atlantic, while steam liners cut that time down to around a week. Without the invention of the steam engine, this level of mass movement would have been impossible.
The second peculiarity is that the role of the environment and the emigrants’ relationship to it was vastly understated. Whenever an exhibit would cite “famine,” “bad harvest,” or “lack of land,” as a push factor for emigration, they remained vague as to which famine, which bad harvest, or what land. More often than not, bad harvests don’t just happen out of nowhere; they’re very much tied to the environment. Famine doesn’t spring up from the well of human mistakes; there are multitudes of reasons for them. For example: the potato was the most common food source for so many in the 1800s due to inheritance laws splitting farm parcels into smaller and smaller areas. Many museums noted this: BallinStadt spoke on Erbteilung, and the Polish Emigration museum did as well. Much of this essay could have been written about the potato. A food cultivated for thousands of years by the people in the Andes in Peru, it provided a calorically dense alternative to grain after the Columbian exchange and arguably fueled European expansion. Most theories for the potato blight look to the shipping of guano—a natural fertilizer—from Peru into the port of Antwerpas the cause for the potato famine. European land inheritance laws eventually atomized land holdings to the point where the potato was planted as a monoculture.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argued that museums helped create a national identity by establishing particular narratives in conjunction with a display of artifacts that are eventually canonized into a sense of national identity. Given the rich history of emigration from various European countries to the United States, the phenomenon of “emigration museums” has recently proliferated. The majority of the museums I visited have a direct historical and physical tie to mass emigration from Europe to the US and are located at or near historic ports through which millions passed to get to the U.S.
