Objekt des Monats
Jedes Objekt in der Sammlung des Deutschen Auswandererhauses erzählt eine ganz persönliche Auswanderungs- oder Einwanderungsgeschichte. In dieser Rubrik stellen wir Ihnen jeden Monat ein anderes Objekt vor – eine Fotografie, ein Dokument oder ein persönliches Erinnerungsstück.
August 2016
Leather suitcase
Short biography
In April 2016, Ute Andohr-Keller donated to the German Emigration Center, among other items, a suitcase belonging to her father, August Lohsen. She included the following self-written ‘autobiography’ of the suitcase:
“I am a stately brown leather suitcase […]. For my return to the sea as a ship engineer in March 1957, I was deemed suitable and purchased by August Lohsen from Bremerhaven. The first ship was the AURIGA of the Argo shipping company, and our first journey took us from Rotterdam to the Mediterranean. Besides clothing and the usual travel items, I had to transport many books. Even today, I wonder how this little man (he measured only 1.60 meters and was slender) managed to carry me aboard so heavily loaded. In the following years, I made several trips to the Mediterranean. A significant exception was my excursion to New York. During a home leave of my owner, I was borrowed by him to his nephew, Georg Meier, who traveled to New York on the BERLIN to emigrate and reunite with his father, who had already emigrated a few years earlier. Since I was only a loan, my owner’s brother-in-law, Lüder Wehrs, who was working as a ship musician on the BERLIN at the same time, took me back to Bremerhaven. After that, I returned to the AURIGA. However, my Mediterranean travels came to a sudden end in February 1960: August Lohsen unexpectedly passed away at sea off Cherbourg from a heart attack on February 21. In the following years, I led a dreary existence in the attic, interrupted only by a few trips to Austria with my new owner, Marie Lohsen. My last significant journey was in 1977. […] Since my return to Germany, I have again been uselessly living on various attics. But I have always been a memento of my first owner, August Lohsen, from whom my current owner did not want to completely part. She would gladly make an exception for the Emigrant Museum, where I could spend my retirement in dignity.”
Significance of the object
Those who examine a suitcase in the museum will rarely find anything special about it – after all, it is just a ‘standard’ mass product. Nevertheless, the suitcase is often linked to the most personal and emotional memories of its owners. More than any other object, it symbolizes the transition from the old life to the new: They carefully packed their belongings into it, usually selected with care, and they cherished it during the journey like their most prized possession. It was with this suitcase that they crossed into their destination country, and from it, they took out the items needed in their first room abroad… Nothing shows how much experience and suffering can lie behind the most unremarkable things quite like a suitcase.
This makes the suitcase particularly appealing for a museum. In a way, it serves as a counterpoint to the museum’s display cases: Instead of openly presenting its contents, the closed suitcase leaves it to the imagination of the museum visitor to envision what it holds. And it silently poses the question: What would you take with you on this journey?
Do You Also Have …
… a story of emigration or immigration in your family that you would like to share with the German Emigration Center together with the related objects and documents for its collection? Then please contact Dr. Tanja Fittkau by phone at +49 471 / 90 22 0 – 0
or by e-mail at: t.fittkau@dah-bremerhaven.de