BallinStadt - Emigrant Museum Hamburg

Very nice and interesting but small museum about emmigration. Very nicely and well explained. Bottomline, clear recommendation!

Please note: text boxes are in German and English, see photos. This is a very good museum on the emigrant experience, mostly in the nineteenth century. The layout is a bit confusing and I found it difficult to follow the sequential numbering of the displays. The restaurant is basic and the gift shop is tiny.

A nice museum with engaged and knowledgeable personnel. However, to me, it's a great shame to see so much AI-generated slop in a museum telling such an important and interesting story. Not only in the exhibition but the museum shop as well. If you want to be taken seriously use real historical media. Do better.

Wonderful museum that tells a lot of stories about and around immigration - not just from Hamburg - and including legal frameworks and developments through the centuries. The exhibition is carefully and impeccably presented through 3 halls giving a lot of thought-provoking impulses, visual candies and places to sit down, listen and feeling through. Separatly I cannot but mention the children-friendly story that goes through the whole exhibition and presented by the cute little Jette the Rat. My schoolchildren liked it a lot. The only improvement I suggest is adding English texts to the mostly German ones. I am sure foreign visitors who are following the footsteps of their forefathers would greatly appreciate it. The museum grounds are taken good care of too and one can enjoy sitting in the young birch-trees shadows, taking a meal from the museum's cafe outside and savour it in the plaineair or make a picnic on the meadow nearby. We will definitely return here, bit for now - big thanks to the people behind this wonderful museum!

We went to this museum as we have an ancestor who can through this place. They have have signs in English and at the end you can look up names in ancestry.

This museum has impressed the great work of the Ballin family, starting in business as an emigration agent and expanding to a full service transportation service for emigrants to travel from Hamburg Germany to other continents and ensuring the level of health required was achieved before sending the persons abroad. Children are addressed through the museum (4 stages) by the mascot mouse and various social activities in each area of the museum. Historical facts for most families!

A nice place to spend time for an afternoon. There are nice pictures, videos and audios to show the different eras of migration. There is also a small "game" where kids can choose a character and experience a possible migration story. Some minor aspects I didn't liked: - the light is off at some places and a few plates can't be read easily - some interactive aspects didn't work (buttons not functioning) But it still is a nice place to visit, especially with kids.

I found the ship manifest for the ship voyage my great grandmother took My great grandmother sailed from Hamburg to NYC in 1882. The ship manifest showed her age and residence. With that information, I went to the archives in Schleswig, Germany, which led me to the church administrative offices which keep records of baptism, marriage, and death. I found my long lost relatives!

Unfortunately it's only in German. It feels a little uncoordinated when walking through the museum. There's just a lot of text/information everywhere. It was cool to see and I got a little information brochure in English, still I think such a museum, especially in such an international city like Hamburg, should offer it in both languages, German and English.

The BallinStadt Auswanderermuseum is located close to Veddel S-Bahn Station at the old location where the emigrants stayed before the left for their new lives. The museum explains the lives of the emigrants in Hamburg and shows where they emigrated to. It is also possible to search for ancestors but I was a bit disappointed that there was not a good explanation how to search.

This is a review for the museum cafe: Free parking. No wifi. Nice atmosphere. Very expensive macchiato which I was charged €2.80 for 200 ml. The average price in Hamburg is €2.30 for 400 ml, so to be charged this amount in one of Hamburg's poorest neighborhoods is out of order. If and only if the cafe's money supports the existence of the museum is this ok. This must be the reason this place is nearly empty at prime time (12:35 pm).

Welcome to the Auswanderermuseum BallinStadt in Hamburg aka museum about emigrantion. First of all: I will not join the overall praise for this museum. Now, 3 days after I visited it, I still think the quality of the exhibition is pretty mixed. I visited it with friends, both fluent in English and German, and we switched languages depending on which seemed to get us quicker through, because the museum was pretty crowded on the day of our visit. We both had intermediate to advanced knowledge of German history and emigration waves from Germany. I don't know how much you would get our of the exhibition if you are just searching for information where your ancestors are from. That's because the exhibition is pretty inconsistent. Albeit, the general layout makes sense: Situation in Germany and Eastern Europe Migration waves Destinations - the development of the ships and the ship passage Entering the new country (with a special focus on Ellis Island) Immigration Countries other than the USA/Canada (Brazil, Australia) famous immigrants who've made it. In another building the history of the BallinStadt is told, with the situation which led to the building of the barracks, their short-lived fate from 1901-1914 and the seemingly even shorter time between WW I and WW II. Plus the story about the back-then CEO of HAPAG, the shipping company that invented ship cruises and got big by shipping immigrants over the Big Pond. About the flaws in the concept: English vs. German: Everything is labelled in English in German, but the German label dominate, the English is always a bit shorter and layouted in a smaller font. Bigger picture vs. individual story: In the beginning you are confronted with six individuals, which should guide you through the exhibition and tell you their story. They literally tell you their story, which might be longer with the one and quicker with the other. Unfortunately you cannot skip when you dialled the wrong language, you have to wait until they are finished. On crowded days, you have to stand in line, there are only two earphones per puppet, and you can dial only one language at a time for both earphones. And in the end you find out the six individuals don't really guide you through. You just see them back at the end of the exhibition, then they tell you what their life is like not that they are away from home for a couple of month or years. There is no alternative way to find out about their fate, you either wait and here or you don't find out about them. During the different stages of the migration, there are different individuals who show up and just present one piece of information, you don't get informed what their background is, et cetera. So if they already put such an efford in telling an individual's story, why don't they use it to describe the different stages of emigration better? History of BallinStadt There is a lot of pictures and exhibition objects which are not labelled, and you might only get the meaning of it later on, if you get it. Conclusion: Ok, we learned a lot, and I think for kids it might be funny to run through a ship which changes from early 18th century to early 20th century within a few meters. But there is a lot that is forbidden to touch (not a good idea with kids). The fact that a lot of exhibition objects are not labelled and you might learn to know what it was waaayyy later is annoying. The entrance fee is 12 EUR, which is not cheap. As the museum is not publicly funded, it is heavily sponsored, f.e. by Ancestry.com. This is a bit ironic, because the digitalization of the archieves is publicly funded, so it is a strange kind of private-public partnership.