AEMI

Dreams, Returning Emigrants and
Millions of Dollars – What We Get Back
from Overseas
Paul-Heinz Pauseback
Have you already seen the American,
the people in a little village ask each
other, because someone has arrived
there, coming back from the states.
He has an impressive red beard, a grey
hat and a dark blue overcoat, which he
wears open, so that its sides fly with the
wind and show the scarlet red lining inside
the coat and the collar. Now I can
understand, why the people are gathering
in the streets where he appears and
why they all – old and young – rush to
the windows when he walks by … and
all the more when he begins to tell them
from the land of the free, from the big
cities, that mushroomed overnight, and
the mighty rivers there on the other side
of the ocean. And when he tells them
how every work earns its good pay –
then I can easily understand why they
are listening to the American as if his
words contained the ultimate wisdom.
This extract, from a newspaper published
in 1847 in my home town of
Husum, serves as a good way in to this
article about remigration and the steady
stream of material. 1 For this article is
about remigration and the steady stream
of material and immaterial goods back to
Europe, to Germany, to Scheswig-Holstein,
to North-Frisia and to Husum.
In fact this stream affected nearly every
native North-Frisian family, for almost
all sent family members overseas at one
time or the other.
One result of this stream is the NordseeMuseum,
Nissenhaus in Husum,
which in the 1930s was built and
equipped by the money and the art collection
of Ludwig Nissen, a rich New
Yorker diamond importer, who bequeathed
his earthly goods to his city of
birth for the building there of a museum
with a library, an art gallery, and
an assembly room, for the use of the
people. (Pauseback, From Bootblack:
97-109). A more recent example is Professor
Karen Moloney from the Webber
State University in Utah who last year
visited the Nordfriisk Instituut, where
the North-Frisian Emigration Archive
is located. Professor Moloney’s grandmother
emigrated from North-Frisia
to the United States in the end of the
19th century. Her mother later married
an Irishman, so the name changed from
Thomsen to Moloney, but the contact
with family members in Germany continued.
Professor Moloney has been visiting
the home area of her grandmother