Hamburg is said to exist at least 18 times in the USA, plus at least 30 in Berlin, seven in Heidelberg, three in Ulm and two in Stuttgart.
The place names bear witness to the many people from German countries who were looking for a new life in the New World.
And emigrants were not only attracted to overseas: In Russia, Tsarina Catherine the Great lured them with tax breaks, the trip to Paris was particularly cheap, and England offered professional opportunities.
Between 1816 and 1914, five and a half million German emigrants made their way to the USA alone. After hesitant beginnings, emigration became a kind of mass movement during this period.
In New York, a separate district called “Little Germany” was created with German clubs, German shops, German restaurants and German newspapers, large ocean liners brought people across the Atlantic from Hamburg and Bremerhaven, and even human traffickers discovered their opportunities in emigration.
But the Germans were not welcome everywhere: they were met with reservations, they were accused of being unwilling to integrate, and quite a few returned to their old homeland for homesickness or for economic reasons.
In the SPIEGEL HISTORY podcast, the historian Simone Blaschka explains why people decided to leave their homeland and their families behind and to emigrate, how they fared abroad and what parallels there are between the emigration of yesteryear and the migration movements of today.
Blaschka is director and managing director of the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven.
