Hamburg’s Reeperbahn has long been synonymous with sin and sleaze but, as William Cook discovers, this often infamous street is today cleaning up its act. Photos by Bartek Pagoda.
Waffen Verboten (weapons forbidden) reads the sign on the wall of the subway station. On the busy street above, the sex shops are doing brisk business. Seventh Heaven reads a neon sign, glowing in the darkness. Welcome to the Reeperbahn, famous – or infamous – throughout Germany as the centre of Hamburg’s notorious Red Light industry.
But tonight the big surprise is that this broad boulevard is packed. Every Friday night well over 100,000 people flock to the Reeperbahn, and they are not all lads on stag nights or dirty old men.
Tonight, most of them are young couples. There are some old age pensioners, even a few young families. They have not come to see the strip shows, so what on Earth is going
on? There are plenty of Red Light dives with names like Sexy Devil and Sexy Angel (dark rooms, play rooms and jail rooms, reads another sign), but they are outnumbered by trendy bars, respectable theatres and international fast food chains. Since I first came here 15 years ago, the Reeperbahn has really changed.
What has happened in that time is what has occurred in lots of Red Light districts worldwide. The sex trade drives prices down, drawing in artists, writers and musicians, who do not mind living somewhere seedy and cannot afford to live elsewhere. These outsiders make the area chic, attracting mainstream creative industries, such as advertising and film-making, and more prestigious leisure outlets, such as upscale restaurants and hotels. Like London’s Soho, the Reeperbahn is still a Red Light district, but nowadays it is also the most fashionable part of town.
If you had to pick one building that summed up the Reeperbahn’s Red Light renaissance, it would probably be East, Hamburg’s hippest hotel. Housed in a former iron foundry, in a street just off the Reeperbahn, it is built around a vast central atrium, decorated with Oriental drapes and sculptures. Tonight, the cavernous lobby bar is packed with affluent young professionals. It is like this every weekend.
Designed by the American architect Jordan Mozer, East has been a driving force behind the Reeperbahn’s revival. Wading through its yuppie scrum, it is hard to believe that, before it reopened as a hotel in 2004, this dramatic brick building had been derelict for 30 years. ‘It looked like a ruin,’ says Kathrin Beulshausen, East’s concierge, over a drink in the designer bar. ‘No one could have thought it would be like this one day.’
On East’s opening night, the management invited all the locals. During the evening, an old man said to Beulshausen: ‘When I was younger, I used to work here. I’ve known this place for more than 60 years. What you’ve done is so beautiful.’
‘That made us proud, that we could do something for the area,’ she says. East made people see the Reeperbahn in a new light.
A short walk away is an even newer addition to the area’s jagged skyline. The Empire Riverside opened in November 2007, in a street between the Reeperbahn and the harbour. Designed by British architect David Chipperfield, it is an enormous skyscraper which towers over the high-rise buildings that surround it. Looking down from the popular penthouse bar, on the 20th floor, the whole of Hamburg lies spread out before you like a map.
Tonight this panoramic nightspot is full of elegantly dressed couples, sipping cocktails and gazing down at the sparkling cityscape below. Clearly, this is an area with immense economic potential. There are more than 300 bedrooms in this huge hotel, and there are brand new flats and office blocks going up on either side.
The Reeperbahn, and the district of St Pauli that surrounds it, has always been Hamburg’s entertainment mecca and the hub of its sex trade. It is only minutes from the heart of town, but it was originally outside the city walls and, like London’s South Bank, where Shakespeare performed at the Globe Theatre (now rebuilt), looser rules – and morals – applied. Sailors from the nearby docks came here looking for a place to blow their wages, while they waited for their ships to load or unload.
Hamburg suffered appalling damage during World War II, particularly in July 1943, when a series of air raids are believed to have killed more than 40,000 people. The waterfront was a prime target, but even tonnes of high explosive and incendiaries could not destroy St Pauli’s grubby energy, and after Germany’ssurrender in 1945 the Reeperbahn carried on much as before. In the early Sixties, the Beatles performed in the nightclubs and dancehalls of Grosse Freiheit, a lurid sidestreet that adjoins the Reeperbahn, where reputable and disreputable shows have always operated side by side. ‘Except to the exceedingly chaste, it is all good, clean, German fun,’ wrote Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, after an eventful night out in St Pauli in 1960, watching women mud wrestling (among other things). ‘People are cheerful.
They laugh and applaud and whistle.’ owever, new technology did something to the Reeperbahn that even the RAF and USAF never managed. It normalised pornography, killing off the Reeperbahn’s main selling point. It also put paid to the Reeperbahn’s main customers – the sailors and dockers from the harbour. Hamburg is still Germany’s busiest port (the second biggest in Europe, after Rotterdam) but containerisation has eliminated the need for large numbers of working men. The harbour now handles more tonnage than ever, but with a fraction of the old workforce.
Without this captive audience, the Reeperbahn went to seed. Before the war, there were dozens of theatres here, but when I first arrived in 1992, it seemed to be on its last legs – a virtual ghost town. Yet since then, against all odds, the area has turned around.
The Imperial, on the Reeperbahn, is a good example of this trend. It used to be a porn cinema. Now it is a critically renowned theatre that stages straight plays and stand-up comedy. Germany’s leading stand-up comic, Thomas Hermanns, launched his career here. ‘It’s unbelievable how many people are coming to the Reeperbahn,’ says the Imperial’s director, Florian Leinkamp, between shows, over a cup of coffee on the stage of his cosy theatre.
Most visitors to St Pauli are in their twenties and most of them are looking for legitimate – rather than illegitimate – entertainment. Some of them even end up living in the area. ‘It’s very liberal and very creative,’ adds Leinkamp.
So what was the catalyst that sparked this unlikely revolution? Well, from the top of the Empire Riverside, you can see a clue, on the wall of one of the older buildings down below. ‘Kein mensch ist illegal’ (no one is illegal) reads the graffiti, in big block capitals, on one of the old brick buildings beside the River Elbe. This is one of the Hafenstrasse squats, where the battle for St Pauli was fought out 20 years ago.
Back in the 1980s, when local government and big business decided to overhaul Hamburg’s crumbling water-front, they figured – not unreasonably – that the squatters in the old houses on Hafenstrasse would have to go. Yet these squatters and their supporters in St Pauli had other ideas, and they fought (sometimes literally) for the right to stay. Remarkably, they won a partial victory, and now upmarket developments such as the Empire Riverside co-exist with bohemian apartment blocks.
Yet far from holding St Pauli back, these beatnik survivors have given the area a creative edge that continues to attract new business. St Pauli still has its problems – almost half the locals are immigrants (mainly Turkish), around the same number are on social security – but without its original residents, these riverside developments would be as sterile as London’s Docklands. The pearl is the disease of the oyster, and these refuseniks are the grit that makes St Pauli grow. his anarchic spirit is epitomised by FC St Pauli, the area’s grungy football team. ‘Non Established since 1910’ reads the motto on their T-shirts. Their unofficial logo is a pirate skull and crossbones. One of the first soccer clubs in Germany to initiate a proper anti-racist policy, the team attracts a big punk following. Their pleasantly dilapidated stadium is only a few minutes’ walk from the Reeperbahn, and on Saturday afternoon the atmosphere is more like an underground rock festival than a sporting contest. The team run on to the pitch to the opening riff from AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells.
It is a world away from the corporate glitz you find at most football grounds but, like the Reeperbahn itself, FC St Pauli proves that counter-culture sells. They are only mid-table in the German Second Division, but their matches are frequent sell-outs, packing out their 20,000 capacity, and they sell more merchandise than most German First Division teams. The club is currently building a new main stand, to make room for an additional 7,000 fans. When I visit they are playing Hanover 96 from the First Division in a friendly, but FC St Pauli eclipse them, on and off the field, and the game ends in a two-all draw.
A lot of alternative musicians started going to the football club,’ says Sven Brux, the press officer for FC St Pauli. Brux has worked for the club since 1989 and has lived in St Pauli since 1986. ‘It’s changed from a rough, working-class area with lots of empty houses,’ he says. ‘More and more richer people have moved in.’ Nowadays, Brux sees more middle class fans at matches, but it will take an awful lot of gentrification before FC St Pauli becomes just another normal soccer team.
However, many of the new attractions in St Pauli are a lot more debonair than its football club. Melanie Kampermann works for Esskultur, one of St Pauli’s smart new restaurants. When she was growing up in Hamburg, St Pauli was regarded as off limits, but, during the past decade, she has seen local attitudes change. ‘Now, because of these new places, people come to St Pauli again – people who would never have come here before,’ she tells me, over dinner at Esskultur. ‘There might be a cheap sex shop, and next door you have a really nice bar where wealthy people go.’ Esskultur encapsulates this sea change. It is only a stone’s throw from the Reeperbahn, but last year Kampermann’s grandmother held her birthday party here.
On Saturday night I am back on the Reeperbahn, at the Tivoli Theatre, a lovely old auditorium restored by local impresario Corny Littmann. I am watching Heisse Ecke (Hot Corner), a musical that celebrates St Pauli’s legendary lowlife. It is a feelgood show, full of rousing anthems – you can see why it has been running for five years, and why almost every seat is taken. There is a bit of bare midriff but it is a show you could take your children to, and the audience are mainly middle-aged couples – bourgeois out-of-towners on a night out. As the crowd spills out into the night, I realise this is just one of half a dozen hit shows packing them in up and down the strip. The Reeperbahn remains a Red Light zone, and it probably always will be, but after a generation in the doldrums, it has become Hamburg’s cultural quarter one again.
GETTING THERE
Lufthansa is the main airline for scheduled flights to Hamburg, with direct connections to over 40 national and international destinations. There are also direct flights to New York with Emirates and to Moscow with Aeroflot. The airport is 12km from the city centre. www.lufthansa.com
WHERE TO EAT
Essckultur serves classic German cuisine with a modern international twist in a suave new restaurant, just off the Reeperbahn.It doubles as a performance space for jazz and blues. The décor, like the menu, offers a subtle blend of old and new.Tel: (+49) 40 808 128 520 www.esskultur-hamburg.de
WHERE TO STAY
East is a surreal mix of East and West, in an old foundry beside the Reeperbahn, with stylish retro-chic bedrooms and an ultra-cool restaurant and bar. At the weekends it is more like a hip nightclub than a normal hotel, but there is still lots of room to chill out in the upstairs lounge, or the state-of-the-art spa.Tel: (+49) 40 309 930 www.east-hamburg.de
Behind the Reeperbahn, with spectacular views over the harbour, the Empire Riverside is a stark new skyscraper, built in striking modernist style. Most of the rooms have river views. Tel: (+49) 40 31190 www.empire-riverside.de
MORE INFORMATION
www.germany-tourism.de www.hamburg-tourism.de
