A River Runs through It: Disaster Mobilities of an Elbe Island

Rivers move. They run, roll and flow, no matter how hard we try to fix them in place. Constantly transgressing physical as well as political borders, rivers also mobilise people, plants, animals and fluvial material. And yet, Wilhelmsburg – a little speck of land located between two branches of the northern German Elbe – was never more in flux than over the long aftermath of Hamburg’s Great Flood in 1962, setting thousands of disaster displacees in motion. The event was pivotal and transformative in the river island’s history. This paper seeks to interrogate how natural catastrophe and displacement have haunted both Wilhelmsburg and the river that ran through it. Such a perspective on disaster mobilities, forced migration and urban renewal reveals the extent to which this ‘migratory island’ has been shaped by social and environmental dynamics, kept in motion by the tides of history and its deeper currents.