On the whole I have used German sources to describe the German experience, but on one or two occasions I have turned to existing English translations out of necessity. For those who are interested in further study, there are substantial notes at the end of this book (pages 401–58) – but this should not be necessary for the general reader.
PART ONE
Hamburg
1. City on the River
Wherever there’s trade, there tread Hamburgers.
Hamburg saying, mid-nineteenth century 1
The city of Hamburg lies on the banks of the river Elbe in northern Germany, about sixty miles from the coast of the North Sea. In truth, it is not a hospitable place to found a city. Situated on a fluvial plain, most of the ground is little better than marsh, and it is prone to flooding. Ever since the area was first settled the city fathers have fought a constant battle against the storms and tides that regularly cause the waters of the river to rise and break their banks. The threat extends far beyond the city boundaries. For mile after mile the earth lies flat, perhaps rises a little, then is flat again, providing scant protection from the whims of the river. In times of flood the entire area becomes submerged: farmland, docklands, parks, city streets and houses are ruined. When eventually the water subsides it leaves behind it a blanket of silt covering city and countryside alike, reducing everything to a dull, muddy uniformity.
There is nothing to protect the city from the weather either. No mountains infringe on the curve of the horizon, or provide a break to the prevailing winds rolling in from the North Sea. The moist sea air produces huge banks of cloud, which smother the region for most of the year, bringing frequent rain and occasionally sleet and snow. In winter, if the wind changes direction and blows in from the Baltic, temperatures plummet and drift ice appears on the river. Even in summer the nights can be cold and wet, and the temperature rarely reaches the highs that other parts of Europe experience.
The element that dominates the city is water. The river Elbe is its lifeblood, linking it to the North Sea and trade routes across the globe. A second river, the Alster, was dammed in 1235 and has formed two large lakes right in the city centre. To the east, elaborate networks of canals creep like tentacles into the city’s warehouse and workers’ districts. To the south, in the midst of the Elbe, lies a series of islands that have been linked together over the centuries into a vast complex of docks and waterways: this is Hamburg’s harbour, one of the largest ports in the world, and the foundation of the city’s considerable prosperity.
Apart from its harbour, Hamburg is an unremarkable place. Unlike Dresden, which lies a couple of hundred miles upstream, it has never been considered a jewel, and its architecture is generally functional rather than ornate. Its city churches have none of the scale and grandeur of other German cathedrals, like that at Cologne. There are no palaces or castles here, like those in Berlin, Potsdam or Munich; in fact, the grandest houses the city has to offer are the upper-middle-class villas along the Elbe Chaussee. The city boasts more bridges than Venice, but that is where the comparison ends, and not even its most enthusiastic citizens would pretend otherwise. Few pleasure boats travel the city’s canals, hardly any of the buildings are more than sixty years old, and the sound of voices and footfalls is drowned by the noise of traffic flowing down the six-lane dual-carriageways that scar the city in all directions.
Even before the Second World War, Hamburg was never really considered a destination for sightseers: the historic centre of the city was not particularly historic, since most of it had been destroyed by fire less than a century before. The few tourists who came to this part of Germany generally preferred the picturesque centre of nearby Lübeck. Neither is it considered a city of culture. Hamburg did not have a university until after the First World War, and while the Musikhalle and the Hamburg Opera are much admired by the middle classes, the city has always been better known for the more low-brow pleasures to be found on the Reeperbahn in the St Pauli district.
To their credit, the people of Hamburg have never much cared about the lack of superlatives connected to their city: they are proud of what they have, and unconcerned about what they do not. They are a tough, practical people, accustomed to dealing with challenges and to making the best of any situation that Fate might throw at them. Over the past two centuries they have seen their city ravaged in turn by epidemics of cholera, famine, economic recession, unemployment and, of course, by flooding. The town centre has been destroyed by fire not once but four times – despite the huge quantities of water that dominate the city’s open spaces. 2In the face of such a history it is little wonder that there are so few ancient architectural gems.
However, the lack of grand monuments in the city cannot be blamed entirely on natural disasters: it is also the result of an inherent reserve that has deep roots in the city’s mentality. For more than eight hundred years Hamburg has been a place of merchants, and the centuries have carved it into a middle-class rather than an aristocratic city. The town centre is dominated by the towers of that most bourgeois of German buildings, the Rathaus(or town hall). It sits before a large piazza, where Adolf Hitler once addressed a crowd of more than twenty thousand, overlooking the great Alster lakes. The streets around the Rathausare filled with exactly the kind of buildings one would expect in a city of merchants: shops, office buildings and, a little further south, the warehouse district of the Speicherstadt. The only towers to break the skyline, apart from those of the Rathaus, are the spires of the city’s five main churches.
As for the rest of Hamburg, it is generally a green, pleasant place to live. To the west of the city are the tree-lined boulevards of Eimsbüttel, Eppendorf and Harvestehude, with their tall, elegant apartment buildings and rows of flower-filled balconies. To the north, the leafy suburbs of Winterhude, Barmbek and Alsterdorf cluster round the huge Stadtpark. Further north still, in Ohlsdorf, the greenery conceals the largest cemetery in Europe: four square miles of gravestones among well-tended gardens.
The working-class districts have traditionally been confined to the east of the city, in suburbs like Hammerbrook, Hamm, Rothenburgsort and Billbrook. Here, low-rise apartment blocks have always crammed in high concentrations of people within easy commuting distance of the docks and warehouses. There is nothing – not a building, not a tree, not a lamp-post, not even a street sign – that is more than sixty years old. In some areas even the people have moved away. In Hammerbrook, for example, there are few apartments, only offices and warehouses, garages and depots. After office hours, the only human beings that walk along Süderstrasse are prostitutes trying to attract the attention of a passing car. In the smaller streets even those signs of life are missing, and the whole area lies silent.
* * *
While the historic centre of the city might lie on the north shore of the Elbe, it is the harbour that is its true heart. The industrial landscape here is vast and impressive, and has a savage beauty unparalleled by any other place in Germany. Formations of cranes stretch as far as the eye can see, towering above the warehouses and the dry docks of Hamburg’s ship-building companies, like the silent regiments of some huge mechanical army. The manycoloured blocks of transport containers rise in mountains from the quayside, dwarfing the trucks and railway trains that come from all over Europe to collect them. Their reflection stains the grey waters of the Elbe with every colour of the rainbow.