My name is Jakob Gürtler, and these are the records of my emigration, when I left my parents' house in Wismar and embarked on a journey to Halifax, Canada.
One has to do as one at sea with a sailing ship, reach one's course having regard to prevailing winds.
William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime minister of Canada, around 1922
I discovered the letter from Uncle Leo, with a postmark from Halifax, in the letterbox just as I was about to leave the house for the last time. The apartment in Wismar's Schillergasse was the only remaining anchor in my life, I was 21 years old and nothing was stable in 1922. I hadn't paid my rent for months and was almost relieved to be leaving the apartment. The strange, damaged letter from a distant country seemed like a farewell greeting in my hands. The letter was addressed to my father, but neither he nor our family had survived the First World War. My father had fallen on the Eastern Front in the war’s early years and my mother had died a bit later at home, at the age of 41 as a result of influenza.
Leo
Uncle Leo had done the right thing, my mother had said a few times over the years, to simply turn his back on all this Kaiser and Heimat stuff, he now had a future in the new world; he had boarded the next best steamer, paid for the passage with a few bottles of his home-brew and who knows what else, and then he had gone on board, straight into steerage with all the other penniless adventurers. A free spirit in a world that was just coming apart at the seams.
“Opportunities”
In the letter, uncle Leo described his new life, he had landed in Halifax in Canada and stayed there. He had settled in the harbor area and was involved in trade he wrote, both nationally and internationally. The letter was mainly to inform his brother and family of his engagement. Hanna and her family had been on the same ship of the Hamburg-America Line, the Cleveland, on which he had experienced a less than comfortable crossing. The letter concluded with an invitation to my father: “What else do you want in this European shambles, pack up your family and start with me”. Here in Canada everyone has a chance to build up an existence. In his brief words, he sounded satisfied, almost happy. There was no worry between the lines, which was the biggest contrast to the world I was living in. He didn't leave an address, but he did leave a place where he could be found, a bar called the Split Crow Pub. People would know him there.
Devastation/Farewell
I walked towards the harbor. The port of Wismar, where I had spent the last few months, even if only by the hour, had become like a second home to me. I had made friends here, forgotten my worries in the pubs in the evenings, looked out over the Baltic Sea at night and imagined the great crossing. But that had always been just a distant dream. Uncle Leo's letter had changed that. It was possible to simply leave, and that's exactly what I did. I signed on as a seaman on a cargo ship to Hamburg.
Hamburg
In the most important German port, my first destination was the Altona Seamen's Mission, a contact point for unemployed seamen to prevent homelessness. I spent a few days at the mission, there was free food, the camaraderie was good and I was able to help unload the ships in the port in the afternoons. My time in Hamburg wasn't to last long however; in mid-September I boarded the SS Deutschland to start the hard work as a stoker. The ship served the popular route to Canada.
Halifax
I disembarked at Pier 2 in Halifax. There were dormitories next to the check-in counters for those who had not yet found a place to stay. From there, I started to explore the harbor and discover the city. Alongside Boston and Ellis Island in New York, Halifax was one of the most important immigration ports on the continent and the largest in Canada. I began to like my new surroundings and felt free and independent.
I had hesitated to follow Leo's lead to one of the oldest bars in the country, the Split Crow Pub. There had been a general ban on alcohol in Nova Scotia since 1921, so at first it seemed like a pointless venture to run a bar to me. I would later learn that bootlegging, the illegal alcohol trade was quite a profitable business for many of those establishments. It was also interesting to learn a special thing about Canadian jurisdiction, which was that the consumption and local sale, but not the production and export of alcohol was prohibited, which opened up the possibility of serving the huge illegal market in the neighboring country to the south without the risk of conflict with the local authorities. On my third day in Halifax, I made my way into the city. At dusk, I stepped through the low door of the old bar on Duke Street. The only visible employee, a short, pudgy bartender, didn't know someone named Leo or Leopold, though he did seem hesitant when I told him the name.
Werner
I had been at the piers for over a week when one day a tall woman caught my eye. I recognized the bartender from the Split Crow Pub in her company, his stocky figure looking even more sinister in the daylight than it did behind the bar in the evening. The next day, I decided to go back to the pub. It was fuller than last time and the atmosphere was as boisterous as it could have been during Prohibition. The barman was there too. I sat down at the bar. A few moments later, I heard a female voice ask in flawless German if I knew a certain Werner Gürtler. I looked at the speaker asking about my father and recognized the tall woman from the pier. Hanna. The contact point from the letter had been right after all. I had reached my destination.
Trachoma
I met Uncle Leo in a boarded-up house in the city. Hanna led me to this new place, through two doors, each with a person waiting behind it, into a dark living room. Leo was sitting in a simple wooden chair at a low table, holding a glass in one hand. He wasn't looking directly at me, but he was smiling. He held his hand out to me, and now I saw that he had difficulty with his eyes, he was almost blind. Hanna had had to take over many of his activities, by now it was she who had to manage the day-to-day business completely, which was not easy for a woman, especially in a business like hers. My uncle, who had paid for his passage with a bottle of his homemade brandy, had quickly become a welcome guest in the nightlife of the small town. By the time Prohibition hit almost the entire North American continent in the 1920s, he had already built up a network of hidden production facilities, secret routes and reliable middlemen. He had hoped to lure my father to Canada so that he could take over his business. Now I had come instead. And I really liked it in that back room on Barrington Street. I had little to lose and a lot to gain, and the first thing I had found was a family again in Hanna and Leo. I shook hands with Leo and never looked back.
