AWCH Chicago Goes Hamburg

Hamburg and Chicago are celebrating ten years of being sister cities with a special cultural program that runs May 2 – Oct. 10, 2004. Here are a couple of articles published in the U.S. that might be of interest to Currents readers.

Welcome address by the Lord Mayor:

On July 20, 1994, the Lord Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the Mayor of Chicago signed the joint sister city partnership declaration in the presence of some 500 leading figures from the worlds of business, politics and the arts. At that time I was a member of the Hamburg parliament and part of the delegation that was warmly welcomed in the Preston Bradley Hall of the Chicago Cultural Center. Ten years have passed since then and the partnership between Hamburg and Chicago has taken shape. As the present Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, I am delighted to be able to offer my congratulations today on the tenth anniversary of our partnership. The United States of America are important partners of the port of Hamburg.

Hamburg and the United States have always enjoyed close relations; it is a friendship steeped in tradition. In 1790 the first consul of the United States of America, John Parish, began his official duties in Hamburg. When in the 1770s the thirteen British colonies on the far side of the Atlantic were fighting for independence, there was just one German city that stood by them in their struggle for freedom – the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Hamburg opened up a secret shipping route to America.

With the Hamburg arts festival from May 2 through October 2004, we would like to demonstrate to the people of our sister city Chicago how very proud Hamburg is of this German-American city friendship. Hamburg’s eight sister cities are all major cultural and commercial centers, among them St. Petersburg, Prague, Dresden, and the port cities of Osaka and Shanghai. Due to our particular geographic location, our role as an international port city and a hub of global trade between East and West is further highlighted by these links.

The Hamburg arts program in Chicago emphasizes the importance of our partnership. It is proof of our trust in the German-American friendship and of our desire to intensify this relationship over the next ten years.

Auf Wiedersehen in Hamburg!

Ole von Beust, First Lord Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg Cultural Exchange Programs

Link to your Roots: Hamburg as an Historic Emigration Port

Exhibition, Chicago Historical Society and Newberry Library, Chicago

Beginning in the 18th century, the ancestors of many American families emigrated from Europe to America by ship via Hamburg. Do you know Steinway grand pianos? Henry E. Steinway, his wife and seven children came in 1850 by ship via the Port of Hamburg to America from Seesen, Germany. Did you know that the inventor of the phonograph and the first records was Emil Berliner, born 1851 in Hanover, Germany and who emigrated 1870 to the United States, also via Hamburg? With the development of steam ships after 1870, which made the voyage quicker and cheaper, Hamburg increasingly became the gateway to the New World, not only for Germans, but also for people from all over Eastern Europe.

By 1900 it had become the pre-dominant German emigration port. Between 1850 and 1934 more than five million people left the continent via Hamburg. A project initiated by the Hamburg State Archives is creating an internet database called Link to Your Roots, meticulously registering the information on the emigrants available in the Hamburg emigration lists, including the emigrants’ locality of origin – a precious resource for genealogists. (To date, the period of 1890 - 1905 is available online.)

Do you want to know the name of the ship your ancestors booked to America? Do you want to have a copy of the passengers list with the name of your grand-grandfather written on it? Ask Mark Rosen or Tim-Oliver Seedorf from Link to Your Roots, a service in Hamburg, Germany, which deals with enquiries concerning emigrants not yet in the database and other genealogical information. Maybe they can help you to discover your forefather’s name on the old emigration lists. If so you can buy a copy of it. In December 2002 the one-millionth emigrant, Mr. Selig Ackermann, was added to the Link to Your Roots project. To commemorate the event, Mayor Ole von Beust invited the descendants of Selig Ackermann from the United States to Hamburg and said: “The invitation is to honor all those people who were forced to leave their homes, board the ships here in Hamburg and undertake an arduous journey in the hope of finding a life of freedom and social security across the ocean.”

For more information, see www.linktoyourroots.hamburg.de.

Courtesy of the Service Partner Beschäftigung + Bildung e.V., a social agency combined with a business firm. Through the Link to Your Roots project, Beschäftigung + Bildung e.V. promotes the integration of the handicapped into the regular labor market.