October 3, 1868.
The Stuttgart Evening News published a recruitment advertisement.
Construction workers urgently needed.
Requirements: skilled workers.
Familiar with all types of Germanic-style architecture.
More than five years of work experience.
Family members may come along.
Work location: overseas.
Benefits: housing provided, free education for children, eight-hour workdays, monthly wages of 3 thalers and 5 groschen.
An advertisement like this could have been mistaken for a scam in any era, yet to workers in Württemberg, its terms were undeniably tempting.
Opportunity always came knocking on the doors of the unlucky, but whether they could seize it was another matter. In this age, when every system was still imperfect, workers lived in extreme hardship.
Especially unemployed workers who had been dismissed by their employers for one reason or another. Fischer was one such worker, abandoned by his employer because he was too old.
Fischer was not actually that old, only in his thirties, but employers always preferred the young and strong.
As Europe industrialized and capitalist agriculture rose, landless German farmers went bankrupt in droves.
The harvests in southwestern Germany had been especially poor in recent years, making it a case of a leaky roof struck by rain through the night for the farming population.
Many farmers were forced to leave their homes behind in search of a way out. Cities absorbed some of them and turned them into industrial workers, and Stuttgart, as a major city in southwestern Germany, naturally saw many farmers pour in.
The labor market was thriving, and Stuttgart's employers became choosier as well.
The cities could not solve the livelihood problems of so many people, especially in the agricultural southwest of Germany.
The rest could only seek other paths. At this time, the East African colony and the United States emerged, and the Hohenzollern Conglomerate