German Migration Center

The German Migration Center in Bremerhaven provides automatic guided tours in both English and German through themed rooms to bring you along the journey of emigrants and immigrants. You are provided with a card called a “boarding pass” to tap on exhibits for explanations and quotes spoken by actors. 

It combines several of the best museum designs I’ve seen all into one place to help educate visitors. The automation won the Hergiswil Glas Museum the European Museum of the Year award in 1996 and the endless drawers with personal details of emigrants mirror the index cards of WWI prisoners of war in the Red Cross Museum in Geneva. 

By embarking on the journey with the emigrants on a ship and it’s various rooms, visitors learn about the hardships of travel by sea in the last two centuries. Natural daylight has also been used to evoke the feeling of an “arrival” as the museum transitions from its emigration theme to its immigration theme. 

For those making the visit a more person al experience, a family research center is available from 12 noon every day the museum is open. For me, the experience in the immigration exhibition was strangely familiar and distant at the same time. I connected bewilderment and disorientation from an immigration experience to Germany coupled with the excitement of exploring a new land. The mid-century exhibits were immediately familiar with life in the East but the product variety and anglicised German of the West remained foreign to me. 

Throughout the exhibition, and especially in the short documentary films shown at the end of the museum, there are subtle calls for Germans to become more open minded towards other cultures. Personally, I have experienced racism in Germany before, but I don’t think it’s a grave issue if we take into account the openness and acceptance of the younger generation, who in a few decades will inherit the country. No matter how often I wear my leather jacket while eating Bratwurst with a side of Kartoffelsalat then washing it down with an Augustiner beer, I will never become German to the eyes of a German. It takes time to remedy issues like racism, and this exhibition is a strong reminder that once upon a time, Germans were immigrants seeking a better life, too.