This is a companion piece to Annika Bärwald’s article ‘The Port City as Borderland: Hamburg Authorities and Their Interactions with People of Non-European Descent, 1770–1840‘ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 101.
In October 2025, German chancellor Friedrich Merz caused widespread outrage when he remarked that ‘of course, we still have this problem in the cityscape’. He had been discussing issues of immigration, claiming that the number of new immigrants and asylum seekers had fallen by sixty percent. To address ‘this problem in the cityscape’, he suggested his government increase the number of deportations. To the many people who took to the streets in Hamburg and elsewhere in the following weeks, the use of the term ‘cityscape’ (Stadtbild) read as a racist dog whistle rather than a mere gaffe. Merz’s visual terminology – Bild meaning ‘image’ – implied that by simply looking, one could identify who belonged and who did not, whose presence was welcome and whose was concerning. It echoed the experience reported by Black and other non-white people in Germany who are routinely confronted with assumptions of perpetual foreignness, of not-quite belonging.
The ‘cityscape’ controversy alluded to an image of the past less affected by forces of globalisation – imagining a time of greater ethnic homogeneity. For Hamburg, Germany’s largest port city, this imagined past is less salient, however. Here, ideas of what the city once was veer between those of early modern merchant elites cultivating global connections and idealised notions of a cosmopolitan, quasi colour-blind port culture that emerged in the early twentieth century. But Hamburg saw the arrival and departure of significant numbers of labourers of African and Asian descent well before German colonial expansions commenced at the end of the nineteenth century. As early as the eighteenth century, its port – and by extension the city that surrounded it – formed a kind of borderland that connected the region to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts. In this borderland, as I explore in my article for History Workshop Journal, enslaved and free Black domestic and maritime workers from the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and South Asia were an increasingly common sight. At the same time, the crossing of geographical borders did not dissolve borders of belonging, racialised difference, and legal status. African, Caribbean, and Asian labourers, along with other ‘foreigners’, were subject to measures of policing and restriction within the city.
What does it mean then to describe Hamburg as ‘borderland’? The term has most often been used to describe swathes of territory. In particular it evokes the westward expansion of European settlement in North America, settlers pushing into Native American territory, encountering Indigenous societies and finding a middle ground through interacting, negotiating, and trading. ‘Borderlands’ suggest spaces of encounter that were not solely characterised by domination. And yet, borderlands are by definition contested places. Bordering connotes processes of marking territory, of drawing lines, of eventually fixing something in place. They are ‘places where states, empires, and other sources of governing institutional authority demarcate, expand and protect territories under their control’. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphorical rendering, they signify ‘a vague and undetermined place’ where blended and conflicting identities emerge.
Thinking of Hamburg and of port cities more generally as borderlands highlights their role not just as places of mobility and connection but also of separation and control. The port and its connection to the sea were also used as a means of enforcing borders, of rejection and exclusion. These competing forces of inclusion and exclusion and of fragile belonging become evident in the case of Daniel Peter Joachim Martin Mosambique, a Black man residing in Hamburg in the early nineteenth century. As published and archival sources suggest, Mosambique had most likely been brought to Hamburg from East Africa around 1803 at the age of six by a captain named Nikolaus Krohn. Krohn may have purchased him as an enslaved child (though this is not made explicit). In his short autobiography, Krohn states that in 1803 – his last year as a seafaring captain – he had sailed to Mauritius. Eight years later, when Mosambique was baptised, Krohn served as one of his godfathers, a symbolically important role often associated with guidance of the baptised. While the meaning of godparenthood could shift, it often reinforced existing dynamics of power. According to the baptismal register, the 14-year-old now lived with Krohn’s father-in-law, a wood merchant named Daniel Gottfried Voss, near the Hamburg timber port. By stating that Voss had ‘his moor’ baptised, the church’s scribe hinted at the merchant’s sense of ownership over the teenager.
Another six years later, in 1817, Daniel Mosambique, along with a young man from the same neighbourhood named Georg Hinrich Eggers, was arrested and incarcerated. The two of them had stolen a sailcloth and were both sentenced to four weeks of hard labour. At this point, the two young men’s tales diverge. Prison registers show that while Eggers was released at the end of their sentence, Mosambique, who was still merchant Voss’s ‘servant’, was not. The police magistrate had expressly demanded that Mosambique was ‘to be held in custody until Mr Voss has found a ship to transport him back to his homeland’. After the initial four weeks had passed, the magistrate reiterated that ‘Mr Voss had not yet found an opportunity for the transport and that, for reasons of public safety, the Negro must not be set free’. The young man was, instead, to be ‘made to work for his keep and held in custody.’
Though brief, the passage contains two key pieces of information. First, unlike his presumably white accomplice, Mosambique was not released after his four-week-arrest. Instead, he was sentenced to a ‘transportation’ – a deportation to be arranged in conjunction with his godfather. There is nothing to indicate that Voss appealed this verdict. Second, the magistrate only deemed Mosambique a risk to ‘public safety’. Though he did not explain his reasoning, and perhaps did not think it necessary to do so, one may well assume that racial ascriptions played a role. It is difficult to gauge what would have awaited the prisoner abroad, as the deportation never came about: in September 1818, almost a year after his arrest, Daniel Mosambique died in the prison hospital.
Not all interactions between Hamburg authorities and people of non-European descent at the time follow such discernable patterns of inclusion and subsequent exclusion. In some cases, baptisms provided an entry to social networks, in others, Hamburg authorities reacted to the plight of non-Europeans with what reads as genuine humanitarian concern. ‘Transportations’ remained relatively rare but they were used both as a form of punishment and as material assistance to those stranded in the port city. More than once, perceptions of racial difference inflected notions of guilt and innocence, status and responsibility. Few cases are as well-documented as Mosambique’s. Still, what emerges in them echoes what Nicholas De Genova has described as ‘a palpable sense of deportability’, a vulnerability to exclusion that persisted over time and was diminished neither by acquired language skills nor ceremonies of inclusion.
The image a casual visitor would encounter when walking Hamburg’s streets at the turn of the nineteenth century, taking in Hamburg’s cityscape of the past, was neither uniformly white nor did it correspond to idealised imaginings of a diverse yet egalitarian port life. Rather, as a port city, Hamburg was a space in which borders were regularly being crossed and redrawn, where belonging was constantly contested and negotiated, with tangible – and sometimes deadly – effects. Thinking of port cities of the past as borderlands speaks to debates around migration and belonging today. It can also inform historical research around minority mobilities: beyond documenting historical diversity, ‘borderlands’ brings to the fore attendant phenomena of exclusion, restriction, and expulsion.
The author would like to thank Sarah Schober for her suggestions on an earlier version of this piece.