In the edition DAH: 31x Arrival. Stories of Immigration
31x Arrival.
Stories of Immigration
On the facade of the new building opened in 2021, the German Emigration Center has immortalized people with migration experiences through portraits. These are individuals who immigrated to Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries. A new book, which is also available in our shop, now tells their stories and provides an overview and insights into the facade architecture of the new building.
34 individuals with migration histories, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, can be seen on 31 concrete slabs on the new facade of the German Emigration Center. Selected in a nationwide call by the museum and transformed into the third dimension using an elaborate high-tech process, their portrait photos make the newly developed exhibition on the immigration history of Germany visible even on the exterior of the building.
The life stories of those portrayed are recounted in the new book “31x Arrival. Stories of Immigration,” which presents anecdotes along with large-format photographs. They all depict personal moments from Germany’s immigration history in the 20th and 21st centuries. The range is correspondingly broad: the reports range from the dispatch of a half-orphan from the USA to Germany, from strong women who independently manage their escape from Silesia in today’s Poland, and a child whose silence makes the escape from the GDR possible, to a Turkish teenager in a Franconian village in the 1970s. Transnational love stories and migrations over several generations also find a place, as do the traumatic experiences of fleeing from present-day Afghanistan, Syria, and Guinea. Bremerhaven, as an important anchor point of these stories, is often a historical coincidence: it could have been any other West German city. Each biography is accompanied by a “Historical Intersection” – a moment that connects individual and general migration history and invites further exploration in the museum.
At the same time a guide to architecture and a collection of biographies, the handy book also contains a map of the museum’s new building, developed by architect Andreas Heller (Andreas Heller Architects & Designers). The map correlates the concrete slabs with the portraits to the biographies, inviting visitors to get to know the stories behind the photos as well as to explore the multifaceted structure on-site – and reflects on the question of the relationship between the museum and urban space.
To the museum shop
“Behind each of the faces in the new building lies a unique world of memories, experiences, and ideas. Meeting this challenge was an important task over the past months,” reports Magdalena Gerwien, a museum employee and author of the volume about the creation process. For each of the personal stories, she has compiled many hours of interviews and reports from firsthand or family accounts that the museum’s researchers gathered over two years into narrative texts. “Communication with the portrait contributors about the content was close to our hearts during the project, so they can find themselves as individuals in the texts and become personally visible and audible.”
“We sincerely thank the biographers,” says museum director Dr. Simone Blaschka, “They entrusted us with their personal images and stories, which have become part of our museum’s architecture and will have an impact for a very long time. It is only through their support that we can tell the profound relationship between people and places in this way and do justice to the dynamic history of German migration.”