The two faces of Hamburg

I’m back in my old stomping ground of Hamburg where, not too long ago, I was Her Majesty’s Consul-General. As anyone who has visited knows, this is notoriously a city of two faces. I remember HRH the Duke of York arriving there on a formal visit. Asked whether this was his first visit to Hamburg, the Duke seemed to hesitate a little before replying: “Well, I was here once with the Navy, but we saw a rather different side of town.” Laughter all round.

I am especially well-positioned to appreciate the Janus face of Hamburg. When I visit I see many friends from my time as Consul-General; pillars of society, genial, prosperous but unostentatious (flaunting one’s wealth is not the Hamburg style), intensely Anglophile, all models of respectability. However, I am no longer a diplomat with all conveniences laid on courtesy of the taxpayer, but a freelance hack who has to pay his own way and hasn’t much to pay it with. So, after my coffee with a millionaire or beer with former consular colleagues, where do I retreat to? The zone of absolutely-no-frills hotels, internet cafes, shops from which you can make phone calls (exclusively manned by chaps of the Turkish persuasion) pizza by the slice and late night supermarkets; in short, the Reeperbahn.

There’s nothing glamorous about the Reeperbahn, day or night. At all hours the pavements are full of men of my own kind of age, dressed in shabby leather jackets, frequently sporting ponytails of painfully dyed hair. All clutch bottles of Astra beer and all adjacent surfaces are a mass of empties. It is as if the city employed rafts of character actors to stand around the Kiez (the local name for the red light district, pronounced like the poet Keats, a fact of which anyone who teaches Eng. Lit. in Hamburg ought to be aware) preserving the area’s reputation as a pimps’ paradise for the sake of tourists. But these aren’t actors, and they’re not pimps either – the real pimps are all Albanian and don’t stand around swigging beer in the street. The kindest word to describe them is “wannabes”. They will occasionally address you in passing, usually with something ribald, but there is no threat or hostility involved. In fact the Reeperbahn is one of the world’s safest sleaze zones, thanks to the enormous cop-shop, the Davidwache, slap in the middle of it.

Already by mid-afternoon the ladies of negotiable virtue are emerging; not scantily dressed – Hamburg is almost always far too cold for that – but recognisable by their figure-hugging clothes and by the fact that they alone don’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s an international business these days, of course – I saw one girl who I’d swear was Mongolian – but Latin America seems to be the prevailing trend. As evening proceeds some of the wannabe-pimp-or-madame types morph into touts trying to manhandle you into the go-go bars, which are presumably clip joints although I’ve never dared investigate.

The Reeperbahn is a real temple to the free market: Germany is notorious for draconian shop-opening laws, but you can buy anything, anytime, on the Kiez. There’s a large, well-stocked gun shop not a hundred yards from the Davidwache. I’m too old to stay up late enough to find out what time the shops close, especially the sex shops. I cannot imagine the sort of person who suddenly requires complex rubber appliances at half past three in the morning, but he or she will not be disappointed.

Both sides of Hamburg attract disapproval, but both provide unrivalled people-watching opportunities. And I’m glad to have a foot in both camps.