Gerwien, Magdalena; et.al.: “31x Arriving. Stories of Immigration”
Deutsches Auswandererhaus Bremerhaven: edition DAH, 2022.
Prize: 9,90 €
34 people with migration backgrounds, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, are visible on 31 concrete slabs on the new facade of the German Emigration Center. Selected through a nationwide call by the museum and brought into the third dimension using an elaborate high-tech process on relief panels, their portrait photos make the newly developed exhibition on Germany’s immigration history also visible on the exterior of the building.
The life stories of those portrayed are told in the new book “31x Arriving. Stories of Immigration,” presented in an anecdotal style with large-format photos. They all represent personal moments of Germany’s immigration history in the 20th and 21st centuries. The range is correspondingly broad: the reports include the sending of a half-orphan from the USA to Germany, strong women who bravely escape from Silesia in today’s Poland, and a child whose silence makes the escape from East Germany possible, to a Turkish teenager in a village in Upper Franconia during the 1970s. Transnational love stories and migrations over several generations are equally included, as are traumatic flight experiences from today’s Afghanistan, Syria, and Guinea. Bremerhaven as an important anchor point in 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 histories and invites further exploration in the museum.
The book in a handy format also serves as an architectural guide for discovering the new facade on-site and reflects the question of the relationship between the museum and urban space.