Precarious Passages: On Migrant Maritime Mobilities, ca. 1907

Abstract

Taking contemporary visual discourse on ‘precarious passages’ as a starting point, Sander’s contribution explores the media and material conditions of migrant maritime mobilities around 1900. In the wake of the second wave of mass migration to the United States, a new kind of steamship was developed that shaped the experience of the passage from the ‘Old’ to the New World: the Grand Ocean Lines. Not unlike today, the parameters of this experience were based on economic and social structures. While the great mass of migrants traveled under unreasonably perilous conditions in the dark and dirty steerage holds of the ship, the upper decks of the ocean liners developed into ‘Grand Hotels,’ offering the first- and second-class passengers luxurious voyages on the very same steamers. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous cubist photograph “The Steerage” (1907) powerfully shows these divergent class conditions. The picture, in which new formal parameters are combined with a clear look at everyday reality on the steamship, thus became one of the most important images of maritime modernity.

The recording of the sea by modernity begins with the rupture between the age of sail and that of steam.

Allan Sekula, Fish Story

Translated from German by Eléonore Tarla.

Maritime Modernity, Part 1

Early in June 1907, a photograph was taken on board the transatlantic liner Kaiser Wilhelm II on its way from New York to Bremen, which would become one of the most important images of early American modernism: Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage. The American Pictorialist photographer and proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession was on his way from New York to Paris, when he took the picture on board the fashionable North German Lloyd’s flagship (see Stieglitz [1942] 2000b, 197). The photograph shows a particular view of the ship. It depicts men, women and children, framed by the ship’s architecture, on the overcrowded weather deck of the steamship. The Steerage is considered a visual founding document of modernist photography, because it combines new formal parameters with a clear focus on daily life.¹ As a document of the time, it chronicles social life while representing a proto-cubist photographic perspective (see Solomon-Godeau 2003, 53–74). When Stieglitz first publicly presented the picture in 1911, it was exhibited together with works by Pablo Picasso. This association not only established The Steerage’s fame as Stieglitz’s first ‘modernist photograph,’ but also highlights the transatlantic exchange, which was characteristic of a maritime modernity around 1900.

Based on the existence of a new dispositive of mobility—which transformed the visible and the articulable forms of transatlantic traffic around 1900—my contribution focuses on the medial and material conditions of the precarious passages between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Worlds.² While the vast majority of migrants crossed the Atlantic under unbearable conditions in the ocean liners’ dark and stuffy steerages, these ships’ first- and second-class decks turned into swimming hotels, guaranteeing its passengers increasingly luxurious and comfortable crossings. The new types of transatlantic steamships were foundational for the modern experience of the transatlantic passage in the course of the so-called second wave of mass immigration from Europe to the United States between the 1880s and 1920s. Additionally, regular transatlantic crossings were the basis for the circulation of people, goods and ideas, which can be considered essential for globalization as well as for migrant mobilities.³

The new character of maritime mobility had emerged with the establishment of steamship crossings according to a regular transatlantic schedule in the later nineteenth century. The dispositive was based on the increasing mechanization, industrialization, and capitalization of means of production and transportation, and aimed at mitigating the ocean’s danger and unpredictability by building ‘floating cities’ (Wolf 2013, 257–292). These ‘floating palaces’—as the grand ocean liners of the early twentieth century also were referred to—led to a ‘landing of the sea’ that sought to approximate the nomos of the land through the comforts of ocean liner crossings (see Siegert 2005, 39–56). This new character of maritime mobility—in line with Steve Mentz and Allan Sekula, I call it maritime modernity—not only showed itself in transportation-related ways, but was also expressed in art.⁴

Following American photographer, critic, and art theorist Sekula, maritime modernity denotes a period characterized by the transition from the sail boat to the steamship as well as by a changed conception of the sea (see Sekula 1995, 107): The advent of steam power displaced the idea of the high seas as an adventurous, existential, and free space due to the troubling experience of the ocean as an overloaded traffic area—in particular in the arts.⁵ While on an economic level, maritime modernity found its expression in the capitalist principle of accelerating circulation, in the arts, the mechanization resulted in the replacement of picturesque sea panoramas with images that focused on the conditions of modern seafaring—on steam and smoke as signifiers of a new propulsive force (for instance, in William Turner’s paintings), on overcrowded industrialized ports (as in Oskar Kokoschka’s harbor scenes), or on the precarious spaces of maritime migrants—depicted in The Steerage. As Sekula writes, the panoramic view of the ocean was replaced by a detailed view in modernity.⁶ Following his analysis of Western modernity, a disenchantment with the sea can consequently be understood by examining the interplay of art, technology, and economy.

The Steerage is a good example of this new encoding of the modern maritime world. With its focus on industrial details and the confusing action on deck, it escapes established orders of representation: the photograph provides no overview, and, as a result, no longer adheres to the logic of sovereign representation (see Siegert 2005, 40–42). Rather, it is a symbol of modernity, shaped by transformation and transition. However, the photograph not only provides information about the visual codes of maritime modernity, but is also a good example of the social structures of the ship and the material paradigms of the passage. In what follows, the image will thus be the starting point for my reconstruction of the media and material conditions of maritime im/mobility around 1900. By way of a reconstruction of the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s hold, I examine the construction of social realities on the passage.

The class structure of the grand ocean liners was threefold, and the passengers’ social prospects were determined by the ship’s architecture and interiors to a large extent. Notably, the productive function of the ship’s architecture corresponds to a paradigmatic figure of the modern transatlantic passage: the ‘birds of passage’ on board the ships. ‘Bird of passage’ was a contemporary term used to refer to labor migrants who regularly traveled between Europe and the United States (see Brandenburg 1904, 198–201). The knowledge they gained from these frequent travels turn the ‘birds of passage’ into a representative of the social and geographical mobility of workers and emigrants. More precisely, the ‘birds of passage’ are specific figures of maritime modernity associated with a certain set of knowledge and tricks. A figure that directs our attention to the circulation of knowledge and the strategies of agency employed by precarious passengers, and hence will be at the center of my analysis.

In the chapter “The Ship” of her acclaimed book In the Wake, American art and literature scholar Christina Sharpe shows how the Middle Passage was not only central to the history of enslavement and of slave transport, but also for the economic growth of the United States. She criticizes that Allan Sekula’s focus on the transportation of goods as a basic condition of modernity completely disregards the history of slave trade and transportation, which was a fundamental component of the globalization that occurred in the wake of colonization (Sharpe 2016, 25–67). It could be argued that Sekula also largely ignored the history of precarious passengers—the shipment of migrants—in his history of modernization and globalization. Within the scope of this argument, the ‘birds of passage’ as self-made (wo)men of the steerage passage could reenact the legacy of the enslaved without only victimizing them again.⁷ Therefore, this essay focuses on the constitutive role of migrant maritime mobilities in the development of globalization.

From a media and cultural studies perspective, questions arise about the mediated manifestations of emerging maritime mobilities as well as about the modern subjects produced by the new dispositive of the steamship: How exactly did people become modern subjects during the crossing? In which way did the transfer and transition of humans and knowledge take place on the transatlantic liners? How were these transfers handled? How were they lived? And how (or in which way) was this encoded by the medium of the ship? The clever techniques of pretense employed by the ‘birds of passage,’ who took on new identities with the help of false names and papers, different clothes, or the rehearsal of predetermined roles, direct our attention to the agency shared by humans, rules, laws, and infrastructures.⁸ In this assemblage, human actors are not viewed as autonomous, sovereign subjects standing above events, but are instead involved, ‘semi-sovereign’ subjects, constituted through and moving in the given conditions.⁹ This points to a constitution of the subject as an effect of both governmental structures and practices of subjection and assimilation.¹⁰

By focusing on the productive role of precarious passengers in the transatlantic transportation business between Europe and the United States around 1900, I aim at sketching an account of maritime modernity that considers both sides of history: the side of modernity typically associated with progress, steam power, the avant-garde, and abstraction, as well as the other, ‘darker side of modernity,’ based on work, exploitation, trade, inequality, migration, and silenced historical voices. This ‘dark side of globalization’ is the hidden basis for the history conventionally remembered.¹¹ As the following contextual reconstruction reveals, Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage is characterized by this ambiguous complexity of maritime modernity.

The Steerage: Points of View

In an open letter, which was published in 1942 in Twice A Year, a journal edited by Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz describes “How The Steerage Happened” in an anecdote: in June 1907, he and his small family—his wife, his daughter and her governess—were on their way to Europe to visit friends, relatives, and galleries (Stieglitz [1942] 2000a, 194–197).¹² His wife had insisted on traveling on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the most prestigious passenger steamships of their time, since it guaranteed passengers of the first class the most comfort and luxury.¹³ Reading Stieglitz’s anecdote, the photograph’s media and social dispositive can be reconstructed:

How I hated the atmosphere of the first class on that ship. One couldn’t escape the nouveaux riches. I sat much in my steamer chair the first days out—sat with closed eyes. … On the third day out I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I tried to get away from that company. I went as far forward on deck as I could. …

As I came to the end of the deck I stood alone, looking down. There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. … On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man in a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck. (Stieglitz 2000a, 194)

In this depiction of events—more parable than anecdote—Stieglitz’s point of view mirrors the division structuring his famous photograph. The photographic composition of The Steerage divides the image into two deck levels: an upper outer deck, where primarily men in dark suits are standing tightly packed behind a rail, and a lower outer deck, where mostly women and children in light-colored dresses and scarves are visible (see Fig. 8.1).¹⁴ The passengers are surrounded by the ship’s architecture: the upper deck’s rail groups those standing behind it in a row, a bright white deck bridge cuts through the image diagonally, a chimney tilts to the left, a ladder leaning right directs outside the picture frame. The ship’s architecture not only separates the passengers, but also positions them. In this way, the composition of the photograph contributes significantly to the image’s connotative meanings.

Fig. 8.1

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage (1907). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, https://collections.lacma.org/node/195304

Due to the vertical division of the photograph, The Steerage has often been interpreted as the representation of a society segregated by class and gender. But on closer inspection, the space represented in the photograph is not representative of the strict separation of decks typical of the transatlantic steamships of this period. The ladder on the right of the photograph indicates that the two decks were connected (which was certainly not the case for the first-class deck and the steerage); a girl leaning on the lower steps of the ladder also points to the lack of a social or architectural barrier separating both spaces. As it happens, both the upper and the lower sections of the decks visible in the photograph were parts of the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s steerage class (Wheeler 2007, 1342).¹⁵ Additionally, on closer inspection, a few women become visible on the upper deck, and, on the lower deck, a bowler hat and a man’s back can be identified amidst the women, children, and laundry (see Stieglitz [1942] 2000b, 197). The photograph’s vertical division thus can be said signify the different ‘worlds’ of the steamships’ distinct passenger classes without, however, representing them photographically (see Barthes 2001, 135–138).¹⁶ In other words, the photograph makes use of a visual metonymy.¹⁷

In this interpretation, The Steerage no longer stands for a strict twofold class separation—as was often claimed—but instead exemplifies the increasing interconnection of Europe and the United States. After all, at the beginning of the new century, it was not only poor emigrants who crossed the Atlantic for the New World, but also increasingly wealthy immigrants who returned to visit the Old World (see Kludas 1987, 147–198). Even if the steerage was still the cheapest and therefore most popular Atlantic passage, the internationally competitive, large shipping lines simultaneously promoted their ocean liners as ‘floating palaces’ in the style of grand hotels to attract well-paying cabin passengers like the Stieglitz family.¹⁸

In the early twentieth century, steamships transported an average of 300.000 passengers from Europe to the United States every year, and, for the first time, also made the return to Europe with an occupancy rate of almost 20% (see Kludas 1988, 80).¹⁹ While these steamships became constantly faster and more comfortable, increasingly restrictive US-American immigration laws and border controls additionally produced a previously nonexistent return migration. On average, the United States was receiving 5,000 immigrants every day, and with a 2% rejection rate, steamships transported 700 returnees back to Europe every week—without counting first-class passengers and voluntary returnees.²⁰ In fact, on their way to Europe, the ocean liners were not only occupied by those who had been rejected by immigration officials, but also held established immigrants visiting their countries of origin, labor migrants as well as those returning home for good.²¹

The steerage passengers Stieglitz portrayed in his modernist photograph were thus rejected migrants and returnees, as well as ‘birds of passage.’ Skilled workers who were employed in the booming construction sector in American metropolises traveled back and forth regularly on the steamships between Europe and the United States, between family to work, in irregular two-year cycles with special work visas (Sassen [1988] 2011, 26–54). And, as Arthur Holitscher (the inspiration for Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika) wrote about the ‘migrant birds’ in 1912, “one notices right away about those below, whether he has already been ‘over there’ or not” (“[m]an merkt das einem von denen dort unten gleich an, ob er schon ‘drüben’ gewesen ist oder nicht”): “it’s noticeable already from the way he looks up to us on the promenade deck” (“Schon an der Art, wie er zu uns auf dem Promenadendeck hinaufschaut, merkt man’s,” 12).

The male figure with the white straw hat at the center of the photograph, gazing down at the lower deck from behind the rails, is an iconic representation of this class dynamic. This observer in the photograph has often been interpreted as Stieglitz’s stand-in, or the ‘man of the crowd,’ a middle-class man.²² But most likely, he seems to have been a ‘bird of passage’: a labor migrant who had perhaps made money in the United States and now returned to Europe to visit friends or family—or to return for good. This kind of work migration was a new phenomenon of the accelerated transatlantic crossings. It is thus only at first sight that the observer duplicates Stieglitz’s class-based point of view of looking down. The young man on the upper outer deck, who through the direction of his gaze establishes a connection between the two spaces on the ship, is ultimately an iconic stand-in for the ship’s ‘birds of passage,’ a representative of the social circulation and upward mobility possible in the United States.

By 1900, what had begun as one-way immigration became increasingly circular. The new media of this circulation—steamships, but also the international press, postal service, and photography—transported more than just passengers, cargo, and information across the ocean; they also carried knowledge about this circulation, which manifested itself in schedules, laws, and border controls, as well as in art. The emergence of steamship travel and transatlantic regular service thereby not only led to constantly increasing numbers of passengers, but also to the internationalization of art—evident in the mobility of artists, discourses, and works of art (see Lévy and Derouet 2003). Alfred Stieglitz is representative of this development. His photograph The Steerage was itself a product of the exchange of images and ideas across oceans and national borders. Stieglitz developed the photograph while he was still in Paris; he first exhibited and published it after having been introduced to abstract modernism by the European avant-garde (see Stieglitz 2000, 198; also Bochner 2005, 117–159). The transatlantic steamship is thus the media-technological base for this maritime image of the modern, interconnected world.

Migrant Maritime Im/Mobility and the Grand Ocean Liner

At the turn of the twentieth century, transatlantic modernity was characterized by competition and superlatives: advertising strategies emphasized that the ships were ever bigger, faster, and more luxurious. The Kaiser Wilhelm II met the luxury standards of the ocean liners circling the world’s oceans at the time: luxury suites and spacious cabins for first-class passengers, salons, lounges, winter gardens, music rooms, libraries and cafés, sporting halls and swimming pools, covered promenade decks, and spacious first-class dining halls made this prestigious transatlantic steamship into a ‘floating city.’²³ The North German Lloyd had been a leading transatlantic shipping line since the mid-1800s (Kludas 1987, 147–198),²⁴ and the Kaiser Wilhelm II, which was almost 20,000 GRT (gross register tonnage) large and reached a speed of 23 knots between Bremerhaven and New York, was the Lloyd’s flagship since her launch in 1902.

The Kaiser Wilhelm II was 215 meters long and 22 meters wide. The seven decks amounted to almost 55,000 cubic meters and could hold up to 2,216 people (Kludas 1987, 183). The steerage was designed for 798 people, the second deck class for 260 and the first deck class for 508. Generally, the nouveaux riches and the European aristocracy crossed the Atlantic in the first class, while the second class accommodated social climbers who had come into money, and the steerage deck was available to the poor, emigrants, and returnees (see Moreno 2004, 264). The leftover passenger space was reserved for a crew of 650 people. The hierarchy in the passenger classes was replicated in crew accommodations: The first officers were given comfortable cabins on the sundeck, while the heaters and coal trimmers were housed in mass quarters with dirty bunks on the berth deck near the machines (Kludas 1987, 186).²⁵

The spatial division of the separate deck classes as well as the different deck facilities hence reflected the social position of passengers and crew members, but also (re-)produced it: As Kludas’s color-coded illustration of the decks of the Kaiser Wilhelm II indicates (1987, 184–185, 188–189), not only the upper and lower promenade decks with their stately rooms and halls were exclusively available to the 508 first-class passengers, but also the lifeboats,²⁶ sport halls, smoking rooms, and ‘Viennese’ cafés, as well as an expansive first-class dining hall.²⁷ The passengers of the first cabin thus had time and space for ennui and idleness crossing the Atlantic. The North German Lloyd’s house architect Johann G. Poppe designed the dining hall, which seated 560 people, in the style of a grand hotel’s: The hall spanned four decks at its highest point and was decorated with intricate balcony balustrades and richly ornamented elements in Rococo, Baroque, and German Renaissance style. Critics called the pompous interior architecture of the Lloyd’s steamships “Bremener Baroque” (122).

The name reveals a paradox of maritime modernity: While the mechanical transatlantic modernity of steamships, with their countless steerage passengers, seemed to steer toward a Metropolis not unlike that created by Fritz Lang (1927) in his eponymous film after he had visited New York by ship (see Schönemann 1992), the aesthetic anachronism of “Bremener Baroque” translated the codes of an outdated European nobility to a relatively new North American bourgeoisie, and thereby stimulated the mobility of affluent ‘cosmopolitans.’²⁸ Maritime mobility thus not only relied on steam power and mass migration, but also on the aesthetic anachronism of these floating grand hotels. That is a given paradox of maritime modernity:. While the ladies’ and gentlemen’s salons, in their neo-Baroque pomp, reproduced the class relations of the Old World, the ‘New America’ was traveling on the steerage. The functional aesthetic of unclad steel walls as well as the steerage passengers, who would travel second class on their return journey if they had found fortune in the United States, embodied the ‘dream’ of the United States.

The second class was, in that sense, the deck of social climbers and a new middle class. Private cabins, social salons, smoking rooms, and a dining hall also existed in the second class (see Kludas 1987, 15–34). These conveniences were available to all precarious passengers who could afford the additional charge.²⁹ The facilities of the second class were advertised in terms of the comfort provided by an upscale guest house (see Kludas 1987, 54–87). The transatlantic steamships, however, presented not a two-tiered, but a three-tiered world; an ‘American’ model of society in which upward social mobility into a higher passenger class was not impossible—it was dependent only on the fare, that is, on a passenger’s economic power. But those who could afford a second-class ticket ultimately enjoyed more than the conveniences of an upscale boarding house: They could avoid the border controls on Ellis Island.³⁰ This was a welcome prospect, especially for steerage passengers who were unwanted by the restrictive immigration laws.

The steerage passengers, after all, did not have their own dining hall, not to mention private cabins or lounges. The Kaiser Wilhelm II’s steerage passengers were housed in seven mass dormitories, each holding 52 to 146 bunks, which was approximately equal in terms of area to the first-class dining hall. Eating, sleeping, and all other activities had to take place in these mass quarters. Arnold Kludas compares the level of comfort on the steerage to that of a prison (Kludas 1988, 186). In most cases, the rooms of the steerage were windowless, unpaneled and undecorated. The contrast with the décor and facilities of upper decks is striking:³¹ The steerage had neither the luxury and elegance of the first class, nor the comfort of the second class; there were no spacious winter gardens, ballrooms or libraries, no wide, carpeted stairways, no ladies’ rooms or Viennese cafés. Steerage passengers could not access the promenade decks for strolls, much less the sundeck. The only outdoor space available to steerage passengers was the unstructured lower part of the bow, which offered neither seating space nor protection from the wind. In contrast to first- and second-class spaces, no comfortable recliner seats or small verandas invited them to linger. If the steerage passengers wanted to escape the confines of the mass dormitories, they had to find space among steely planks, chimneys, ropes, and loading cranes, as depicted in The Steerage—and as Charlie Chaplin demonstrates pointedly in The Immigrant (1917). Ultimately, however, ascending to a higher-deck class on a return trip to Europe remained a present possibility. The steerage was correspondingly not only characterized by constrictions and misery, but also by ambition.

Transatlantic Transfers: Subject Constitution at Sea

The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia.

(de Certeau, 1984, 111)

After merchant seafaring had developed the passenger ‘cargo’ into a lucrative emigration business in the mid-1800s, circular travel flows between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New World’ emerged (see Kludas 1986). Until the 1880s, however, passengers traveled only in small numbers as well-paying guests of the captain in the first and second cabins. The majority of migrants still made their journey to North America in provisional bunks in the empty hold of transatlantic sailboats that imported goods from the Americas to Europe, and which, therefore, had room to spare on their way back. In the course of so-called mass migration mass quarters were established on the tween and cargo decks of the emigrant ships.³² And it was only around the turn of the century, that both steerage passage and upscale steamship travel were established as circular travel options for all kinds of emigrants and immigrants. The birth of the common passenger out of the logics of cargo was thereby opposed to the structural assurance that the first-class passengers were still guests of the captain (Wolf 2013, 263, 229), as on the same ships the precarious passengers traveled with, first- and second-class facilities were built on the upper decks.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the transatlantic liners had finally become a “world in miniature,” to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin (1982, 45–60, 1041–1060). A ‘miniature world’ not only because everything necessary for life and entertainment was assembled on the prestigious passenger ships like in the Parisian passages, but also in terms of social stratification: The ship’s division into different classes corresponds to the social segregation between the working class, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, and the nouveaux riches. But rather than simply reflecting dominant relations, the fundamental differences in the decks’ equipment and infrastructure created a new social order by producing different patterns of subjectivation: whereas days spent doing nothing on a steamer chair on the first-class sun deck produced men and women of leisure—flâneurs, or ‘(wo)men with a camera,’ as Alfred Stieglitz was one—, the confinement, illness, boredom, and dirt of the steerage created a lower class—depicted not only in Metropolis, but to be found in the New York tenements.³³ Figured as proletariat or as potential social climbers, at the same time this lower class stands for the power and potential associated with America as a ‘promised land.’ Correspondingly, the second-deck class was the place for the new American middle class. Those crossing the ocean in the comfort of the second class could consider themselves as cosmopolitan: the ship interiors offered sufficient amenities and space to do so.

But what were the medial and material conditions of subject constitution at sea (see Coulmas 1990; also Girshovich 2015)? In contrast to the luxurious lodgings of the first-class, the steerage passengers’ accommodation in overcrowded mass dormitories referenced a dark chapter in the transportation of humans across the Atlantic Ocean: the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans to the United States—perhaps the central factor in the transatlantic economy of globalization in the wake of colonization (Sharpe 2016, 25–67). Even though there is of course a significant difference between voluntary and involuntary migration, the spatial distribution of the mass quarters in the steerage decks of the so-called emigrant ships allows for this comparison: in ground plans of the ships, the striking similarity in the organizing principle of most efficient use of space to accommodate precarized passengers becomes evident. However, while the enslaved people had neither beds nor bedding during the transport, the tween decks of the transatlantic liners were gradually equipped with bunk beds and straw mattresses since the mid-nineteenth century. And in the course of the century, additional laws and regulations were passed, which gradually assured the precarious passengers a minimum of space, air, and comfort during the passage, so that even some steerage passengers became frequent travelers between the worlds.

The differences in deck equipment ultimately not only formed the passengers by way of its aesthetic trappings, but also shaped the passengers’ health. After all, those who lived in functionally separate, properly ventilated rooms with recently made beds and clean cutlery were generally healthier than passengers who stayed in the so-called mass accommodations, where illnesses could spread more easily. The ‘floating cities’ brought forth not only different corporeal choreographies and countenances, but also engendered an entire set of concrete techniques and procedures of modern subject constitutions in the different deck classes. Under the premise that architecture and furnishing was involved in the construction of the self, those who crossed the ocean in luxury in ‘floating palaces’ must have emerged differently from the experience of the passage than those who were subjected to the adventurous trials of week-long sail ship crossings, or those who braved the journey in the steerage’s ‘mass quarters’ without first- or second-class conveniences. And the class structure of the transatlantic liners was perpetuated in the ‘New World.’ This can be seen in the immigration and border controls, which were central for the passengers’ futures in the United States: While the first- and second-class passengers could settle entry formalities on board the ships, steerage passengers had to undergo lengthy immigration inspections in transit stations like Ellis Island (Cannato 2009, 19–30).

The precarized people who had been transported to the promised land in airless steerages and dark mass dormitories were subjected to a laborious process of juridical questioning and medical tests, in accordance with early twentieth-century immigration laws.³⁴ The crowded, stuffy rooms of the steerage’s mass quarters thereby did more than just leave a social mark on the migrants. Due to the bad hygienic conditions and the spread of diseases in the steerage, many precarious passengers were denied entry to the United States (Fairchild 2003; Lüthi 2009). The biopolitical-governmental inspections carried out in immigration stations—as well as on the ships—were aimed at the future population.³⁵ Such examinations can be understood as procedures of normalization or standardization (see Foucault 2008, 27–51), or, in this context, ‘Americanization.’ In general, however, this kind of state-structured subject constitution is paradigmatic of every migration regime (see Arendt 1943; Seghers 1944; Tsianos and Kuster 2016, 235–249). Identification papers, which formed the basis of the state’s acceptance of immigrants, were at the core of these border controls—and, according to Arthur Holitscher, they already played a major role during the passage:

Down on the steerage order has now come into the crowd, quiet, yes, I am feeling something like apprehensiveness from down there. The people have moved to the side, and from a door below me, below the promenade deck on which I am standing, men, women, old people, and children are stepping out one by one, a card in hand that they hold out to the ship’s officer. They don’t present them as if they wanted to say: But sure! Do read! Instead there is something in their gesture that moves me, something timid, pleading for forgiveness, we would never hold out a card like that, like these people there below me. (Holitscher 1912, 12)³⁶

In his book Imported Americans (1904), American writer and journalist Broughton Brandenburg describes a scene that, once again, shines a different light on subjectivation at sea. The undercover journalist describes a scene which he observed on a North German Lloyd’s steamship that he and his wife had embarked on in Italy and, after twelve days at sea, slowly entered the New York harbor: “I saw more than one man with a little slip of notes in his hand carefully rehearsing his group in all that they were to say when the time came for examination, and by listening here and there I found that hundreds of lies were in preparation” (1904, 200).

In contrast to first-class travelers like Stieglitz and Holitscher, Brandenburg, who traveled with steerage passengers, describes how experienced ‘birds of passage’ prepared newcomers for the questions and inspections they could expect on Ellis Island while they were still on the ship: They dictated answers, gave advice as to how people should behave and appear, as well as directions regarding the information contained in identification papers and health records so that their narratives would not deviate on Ellis Island (Brandenburg 1904, 198–200). The quote emphasizes that subjectivation and the constitution of the self during the transatlantic passage were determined not only by standardization and normalization, but also by migrant knowledge. Consequently, the subjectivation of passengers during the passage took place through normalization and numbering, as well as through cunning, performance, family ties, self-organization, and informal networks.³⁷

Transatlantic liners thus marked the first point of contact between Europe and the New World and hinted at a constitution of the self ‘between two worlds.’ It was ‘between the worlds’ that steerage passengers came into contact with processes of the modern industrialized world during the crossing (sometimes for the first time), but also where the ‘birds of passage’ acquired new identities, using foreign papers and tricks.³⁸ An analytical focus on the transatlantic steamships therefore enables a dual perspective: The cargo and passenger steamships moving between the continents around 1900 were mobile spaces that—as much as they prescribed the movement of people in their holds—also produced and represented the contact between both Worlds. The transatlantic steamships thus direct our attention to a specifically modern spatial constitution whose expression and medium they represent. This spatial constitution is often referred to in terms of keywords like progress, industrialization, interconnection, and modernity, which conceal exploitation, work, inequality, dirt, and stench. Yet what is also concealed is the constitution of maritime modernity, expressed in the slyness and tricks of steerage passengers.

Maritime Modernity, Part 2

As mobile spaces of modernity and media of circulation, transatlantic steamships were not only the simple precondition for the precarious passages between ‘Old’ and ‘New World.’ As the medial and material conditions that made the circulation of humans, knowledge, images, and ideas possible, it also shows the productive logic of maritime mobility around 1900: The hierarchical class structure of the decks reveals the Janus-faced character of the transatlantic transportation business in general. However, it is the steerage passengers, who as ‘birds of passage’ embody the potentiality of the ‘American Dream,’ that encapsulate modern maritime mobility, using informal knowledge. In this way, ‘birds of passage’ opened the US-American space of possibility for other passengers. Those who knew how to play the immigration game of numbering, normalization, and standardization not only had good chances of entering the country, but were also already in the process of acquiring an ‘American’ identity, since the idea of ‘American’ was closely linked to the myth of the self-made man (Paul 2014, 367–420). The migrants’ act of passing on their knowledge can be seen as a form of collectivization that does not position itself in opposition to sovereign power—in contrast to mutinies or uprisings, for example.³⁹ Rather than positioning themselves outside of power, migrants played with the mechanisms of power, in order to better their position within power structures. The ‘birds of passage’ are thus specific figures pointing to a new ordering of society, which was increasingly marked by economic structures and logics of production of the industrialized and capitalized world. My focus on the agency of the ‘birds of passage’ does not mean that examinations and identification procedures were less important in the ‘making of Americans’ at the borders of the United States than the self-subjectivation of the migrants. On the contrary: the operating principle of the ‘New World’ was based on a general logic of circulation in which ‘good elements’ were strengthened and circulated, while ‘bad elements’ were detected and filtered out.⁴⁰ The US-American border regime was after all characterized by porosity as well as strict security controls, disciplinary exclusion, confinement, and procedures of regulation.

Steam ships were hence simultaneously places of existential experiences and spaces of a capitalized culture. As contact zones between the Old and the New World, they represented the placeless places in which—mostly unseen—new subjectivities could be prepared and constituted. Michel Foucault’s description of the ship as “the heterotopia par excellence” (1986, 27) summarizes how existential a place the ship was, which is especially true in the context of mass migration. The ship here figures not only as a ‘real’ utopia/dystopia, in which the order of society is condensed, turned, and reflected, but as a machine that in fact created a new social order—through a transatlantic service that became the motor of maritime modernity (as an interconnected world) and through the experiences and conditions of the passage itself (as switching points for a new constitution of subjects).⁴¹ The cultural analysis of grand ocean liners shows that the passengers—regardless of which deck they traveled on—can be considered as products of the international transportation business (which consisted of facilities, ships, schedules, maps, humans, laws, inspections, railways, and transit stations) because the means of subjectivation depended heavily on existing conditions and surrounding structures. Yet my focus on semi-sovereign subjects goes beyond showing the interplay of humans, ships, and infrastructures connected to transatlantic regular service. Rather, it indicates a merging of humans, technology, regulations, actions, and structures; each component producing and influencing each other reciprocally and, taken together, constitutive of maritime mobility around 1900 (see Sekula 2013; Latour 2005; Law 1987).

The horizonless, detailed view of a quotidian scene on the overcrowded steerage on the North German Lloyd’s flagship after all corresponds with the maritime paradigms of its time in a twofold way: On the one hand, the photograph expresses the class structure that dominated migrant maritime mobilities around 1900; on the other hand, the image itself formally correlates the European avant-garde and American modernism. As a high-profile photograph, The Steerage reveals the structures of maritime modernity.⁴² If we understand “art as a mode of human communication, as a discourse anchored in concrete social relations, rather than as a mystified, vaporous, and ahistorical realm of purely affective expression and experience,” then, “art, like speech, is both symbolic exchange and material practice, involving the production of both meaning and physical presence,” as Allan Sekula writes in “Dismantling Modernism”: “Meaning, as an understanding of that presence, emerges from an interpretive act” (1978, 859). Following Sekula’s reflections, I have traced the question of media and material conditions of migrant maritime mobilities.

Different elements came together in the creation of The Steerage in June 1907:⁴³ Stieglitz’s view from the first-class sun deck onto the steerage, the photo camera in the cabin, as well as his knowledge about the codes of aesthetic modernism and the different possibilities that existed in developing, exhibiting, and circulating photography. This arrangement already shows how hierarchically structured our images of early twentieth-century migrant maritime mobilities are. The architecture of the ship was a decisive detail in this context, because of the underlying lines of sight and the visual structures they enabled, but also because of the different subject positions that existed due to the different class experiences during the transatlantic crossing: As Stieglitz describes in his notes, those who traveled first class might have been trapped in their privileged positions, yet they had more than time and space for contemplation and leisure during the crossing. They could look down onto the lower decks. On the other hand, those who crossed the ocean on the steerage symbolized the dangers and the possibilities of the ‘New World.’ De facto, however, the journey in the steerage was also characterized by grueling boredom, confinement, fear, motion sickness, and worse. Therefore, these crossing did not bring forth many men and women of leisure, flâneurs or ‘(wo)men with cameras’ from the steerage. But the ‘birds of passage’ as well as the middle-class men and women on the second-class decks, are paradigmatic for a maritime modernity produced on and by way of passenger ships. They emerge as central figures of a modern, interconnected world.