The search for new livelihoods and the fascination for the unknown always draws people to distant worlds. For 20 years, the German Emigration Center Bremerhaven has been documenting and staging the history of migration with its award-winning permanent exhibition. As one of the largest emigration ports in continental Europe, Bremerhaven wrote global migration history, but above all family history for millions of people and their descendants. With touching biographies, detailed reconstructions of the historical sites and personal memorabilia, the museum tells 300 years of migration history - from the perspective of those who set out.
A special focus of the collection and exhibition is on family stories that document migration history: the museum's constantly growing collection includes over 35,000 mostly personal memorabilia and over 500 eyewitness interviews from over 50 countries. In addition to impressive family stories from the collection, a variety of reconstructed historical rooms, audiovisual media, art installations and interactive hands-on stations can be seen. The digital "Critical Thinking Stations" are a special participatory offering that documents the opinions of museum visitors on socio-politically relevant issues and processes them into statistics in real time.
Departure © Collection German Emigration Center, donation Matthias Kauder
The exhibition tour combines multi-sensory, emotional and reflective moments. It begins at one of Bremerhaven's quays as the symbolic moment between saying goodbye to the old life and taking the decisive step onto the gangway into a new future. It follows the emigrants' tracks onto the ships, leads via Ellis Island to New York's Grand Central Station and exemplary places in the lives of immigrants around 1900 in the American metropolis: a pub, a sweatshop and a deli. Linked by the "Transit" connecting bridge, the next part of the exhibition is dedicated to the history of immigration to Germany. One focus here is on historically recurring core questions of immigration societies, which have also been debated in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1950s. They are answered from multiple perspectives with over 50 interviews with contemporary witnesses from society and politics. In the rest of the tour, life memories and personal memorabilia of immigrants reflect how they shaped their lives in the Federal Republic. In addition to its permanent exhibition, the German Emigration Center also explores the discourse on migration in a variety of ways: A wide variety of aspects of the topic are highlighted in regular special exhibitions.
all year round, Mon to Sun
German Emigration Center, "Transit" © German Emigration Center, photo Werner Huthmacher
From July 5, 2025, the museum dares to look ahead: in the special exhibition "The lure of space. Emigrating to the Moon, Mars, Venus?", it asks how humanity could realize the dream of life in space. With its expertise in migration history and together with partners from the fields of space technology, science and art, the Emigration Center sets out in search of answers, ideas and fantasies: What do we dream of when we look up at the stars? Who do planets belong to? How can people live up there? Who decides whether and how we emigrate into space?
