Off to Sea!. Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa

      Emigration map and pointer towards America by Gotthelf Zimmermann, published in 1853 by the Metzler bookshop in Stuttgart.

      In addition, long distance migrations overseas, as well as in the destination areas themselves, became much easier because of the hugely improved transport situation in Europe as a result of industrialization – areas became more closely integrated. This led to a reduction in the time needed for a journey, and the cost also dropped considerably. More and more people and goods covered ever greater distances. Communication connections were quickly developed (postal traffic, telegraphy, telephone). Newspapers turned into cheap sources of news for everyone as a result of the rapid rise in quantity and circulation numbers. The most well-known newspaper, which was produced as a reaction to the need of German Russian immigrants to the U.S., is reckoned to be the Dakota Freie Presse, published from 1874 onwards. In its heyday between 1900 and 1930, it was delivered to over 1,100 post offices in the U.S. for distribution worldwide as well as to Europe.

      Particularly in the correspondence columns of the newspaper was a virtually global network becoming widespread, where you could find comments, news, and messages, not just relating to the U.S., but also to Canada, South America, and to the home regions in Russia. By means such as these, there were also improvements in the possibilities for spreading information about opportunities offered in the settlements or for getting employment elsewhere. The accelerated expansion of transport and communication connections also facilitated the formation of markets in the migration zones. Globally operating shipping companies in Europe and North America, which were in competition with one another, made use of the most modern advertising methods and a widely developed system of agents in order to open up new migration destinations and to fill up their steamships with migrants. Among those who went to the regions settled by German minority groups were agents of the U.S- and Canadian railway companies, who owned large tracts of land along their railway lines, which they wanted to be colonized, as well as agents of the governments of U.S. states or Canadian provinces, who were concerned with encouraging settlements for the purpose of development. These agents, who were to some extent in fierce competition with one another, would outbid each other through aggressive advertising on behalf of their clients and even with downright threats to the rural populations concerned. This caused even Heinrich Wiegand himself, the Director General of the North German Lloyds, to refer to his agents in Galicia as the “scum of the earth.”

      It was a smaller section of the European intercontinental emigrants who followed a land-based route and settled predominantly in Asian areas of the Tsarist Empire. The vast majority crossed the maritime borders of the continent. Of the 55 to 60 million Europeans who went overseas between 1815 and 1930, more than two-thirds of them went to North America, with the U.S. and Canada being clearly predominant with a six-fold increase in immigration. About a fifth emigrated to South America, about 7% reached Australia and New Zealand. North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South America, along with Siberia, formed the settlement areas of the socalled Neo-Europe.

      There was an enormous increase in overseas migration to the U.S. in the 1820s, when around 152,000 Europeans came to the U.S. In the 1830s, this amount had already risen to around 600,000. The period from the 1840s to the 1880s then became the peak period for the immigration of about 15 million Europeans in total, coming mainly from the west, the north and the central areas of the continent. Over four million Germans, three million Irish, three million English, Scottish and Welsh, and one million Scandinavians emigrated to the U.S., the population of which grew during this half-century from 17 million to 63 million.

      The background to this was an agricultural and industrial boom, with an ongoing demand for new labor forces. Economic growth was closely correlated to the permanent territorial expansion of the thirteen founding states of the U.S. The territorial area of the U.S. expanded fivefold in just a few decades. In 1820, almost three quarters of the total population of the U.S. still lived in the states along the east coast and only a quarter to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. By 1860, intercontinental immigration and inter-regional migration meant that half of the U.S. population was now to be found living west of the Appalachians. Above all, the population of the new settlement zones in the Mid-West was expanding, and their proportion of the total population of the whole country had trebled to 29%. In contrast, in 1860 the extreme west of the U.S. on the Pacific coast was still largely undeveloped. The areas that had come into the possession of the United States in the 1840s were home to only about 2% of the whole population of the U.S. in 1860. Their growth as a destination for European immigration and for North American internal migration, especially California, still lay in the future.

      The phase of accelerated colonial development across the world and economic globalization that happened in the last thirty to forty years before the start of World War I marked the peak of the global long-distance migration of Europeans during the “long” 19th century.

      On average 50,000 people per year had left Europe by sea at the beginning of the 19th century. The 1840s created a turning point: between 1846 and 1850 there were on average year by year more than 250,000 migrants crossing the Atlantic. In this phase, researchers have identified a first small group of around thirty families from the German minority living north of the Black Sea, who reached New York in 1849 and travelled on to Ohio and Iowa. With the world financial crisis of the late 1850s and the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, European migration to the U.S. declined significantly. Yet, immediately after the end of the Civil War it soon exceeded the level of the earlier 1850s, but only to reduce yet again in the world economic crisis of the 1870s. From the 1880s onwards, European overseas migration reached its peak.

      In the second half of the 1880s, European overseas migration comprised on average almost 800,000 people per year, with the majority going to the U.S. The peak levels were reached in the decade and a half before the outbreak of World War I, when on average more than 1.3 million Europeans per year left the “old world.” Only about one third of the migrants now came from Western, Northern, and Central Europe, where the modernization of agriculture and increased industrialization required a larger workforce, and the level of wages had also risen. In contrast, two thirds of them originated from the economically weaker south and east of the continent. Whereas up to 1880, the U.S. immigration authorities had for example only counted a total of 150,000 immigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. Between 1900 and 1910, they registered no fewer than 2.1 million immigrants from the area ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy and 1.6 million from the Tsarist Empire. This phase also includes the comparatively extensive transatlantic migration of German Russians. Between 1870 and 1914, about 116,000 of the German-speaking population alone migrated to the U.S. from the Tsarist Empire, whose population roughly totaled 1.8 million according to the 1897 census. The largest section of the German Russian transatlantic migrants left Russia after the turn of the century. The peak years for emigration were 1904-05 and 1912. A proportion of these then continued their migration northwards from the U.S., in particular Mennonite settlers who moved into the large settlement centers of their faith community in western Canada.

      The main settlement areas for the German Russians were in Oregon and Washington, as well as the prairie areas particularly of states situated in the Great Plains such as Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, which had begun to be settled by both Americans and Europeans in the 1860s and reached their peak in the phase involving the German Russian immigrants. In the two Dakotas there was a self-contained “German Russian Triangle” in 23 counties, where the population had a particularly high proportion of German Russian migrants, who predominantly came from the Black Sea region.

      The proportion of urban settlers was also by no means low. Migrant members of the German minority in the Tsarist Empire also turned up in considerable numbers for example among the workforce of the cement industry in Chicago, the roadbuilders in Portland, Oregon, or the seasonal workers for the processing of sugar beet in Lincoln, Nebraska.

      With regard to the total emigration from the continent of Europe around 1900, there was also an increase in other ‘Neo-Europe’ areas other than North America, including above all Australia, Brazil, and Argentine, but also New Zealand, Uruguay, and Chile. Before 1850, the U.S. had taken in about fourth fifths of all European emigrants. In the second half of the 19 th century, it was about three quarters, and from the turn of the century round about half. The increase