The waiting halls
A reconstruction of the rooms where emigrants slept for weeks waiting for their ships, with the beds and luggage.
Holger.Ellgaard — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Enter — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Vitavia — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Holger.Ellgaard — CC BY-SA 4.0
The subject speaks to anyone who has thought about emigration or seen it in their own family: the reasons for leaving, the waiting, the strangeness of arrival. Labelling is German and English only, with no Arabic. The story is a broadly human one and easy to connect with.
Older children respond to the rebuilt rooms, the luggage and the ship section; younger ones may get bored, since the museum leans heavily on reading. An hour and a half is a sensible limit with a family.
It is slightly out of the centre, so give it half a day of its own or pair it with a harbour trip, since both are about ships and the sea. The port and its boat tours are a short train ride away.
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BallinStadt is a museum about emigration, built on the very ground the emigrants left from. Between 1850 and 1934 more than five million people left Europe through the port of Hamburg for America and elsewhere, fleeing poverty, war or persecution. The shipping magnate Albert Ballin built them whole halls to wait in for their ships, and the place carries his name. The museum rebuilds those halls and tells the story from the travellers' side: why they left home, what the crossing was like, and what they found at the other end. It also holds a large searchable database of emigrant names, which is why many Americans come here looking for their ancestors.
A reconstruction of the rooms where emigrants slept for weeks waiting for their ships, with the beds and luggage.
Millions of names searchable by surname or year of departure — visitors use it to trace their ancestors.
The museum follows particular families from their villages to the port they landed at, so emigration reads as human experience rather than statistics.
Veddeler Bogen 2, 20539 Hamburg