Hamburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Hamburg has more bridges than London, Amsterdam, and Venice put together. Around 2,500 of them cross the city's rivers and canals, more than any other city on Earth. The water is everywhere here, branching through a place that grew up where the Alster and the Bille meet the River Elbe. This is the second-largest city in Germany after Berlin, with a population of over 1.9 million, and a metropolitan region of more than 5.1 million. Its full name is the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. That title is not decoration. It carries a thousand years of independence, fire, plague, war, and stubborn recovery. So how did a castle built in a marsh become one of Europe's great ports? Why does this single city count as one of Germany's sixteen states? And what keeps drawing sailors, refugees, musicians, and merchants to a place so often destroyed?

• 2. Castle In The Marsh

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  Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the 2nd century AD, recorded the first name for this vicinity as Treva. The settlement that followed took a different name entirely. In AD 808, the Emperor Charlemagne ordered a castle built on rocky ground in a marsh between the Alster and the Elbe. It was meant as a defence against Slavic incursion, and it gave the place its name: Hammaburg, where burg means castle or fort. The meaning of the Hamma part remains uncertain. Its likely location is the site of today's Hammaburgplatz. In 834 CE, Hamburg became the seat of a bishopric. Its first bishop, Ansgar, later known as the Apostle of the North, founded the city's early Christian institutions. Two years later it was joined with Bremen to form the Bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. Survival was never guaranteed. In 845, a fleet of 600 Viking ships sailed up the Elbe and destroyed the town, which then held about 500 inhabitants. King Mieszko II Lambert of Poland burned it in 1030. Valdemar II of Denmark raided and occupied it in 1201 and again in 1214. Worse came in 1350, when the Black Death killed at least 60 percent of the population. Out of that fragile early settlement, a trading power was about to rise.

• 3. The Hanseatic Power

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  In 1189, Frederick Barbarossa granted Hamburg the status of a Free Imperial City. The charter carried tax-free passage down the Lower Elbe to the North Sea, an early kind of free-trade zone. Sitting between the North Sea and Baltic trade routes, the city became a major port in Northern Europe. Its alliance with Lübeck in 1241 is regarded as the founding moment of the Hanseatic League. On the 8th of November 1266, a contract between Henry III of England and Hamburg's merchants let them set up a hanse in London. That was the first recorded use of the word for the League's trading guild. The city also became a place of laws and rituals. In 1270, Jordan von Boitzenburg, solicitor to the Senate, wrote the Ordeelbook, the first description of civil, criminal and procedural law for a German city in the German language. On the 10th of August 1410, civil unrest produced a negotiated compromise known as a Rezess, considered the first constitution of Hamburg. And on the 25th of February 1356, the first day of spring in medieval reckoning, the Matthiae-Mahl feast for Hanseatic cities was held for the first time. It continues today as the world's oldest ceremonial meal.

• 4. Fire, Flood, And Firestorm

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  On the night of the 4th of May 1842, a fire broke out that was not extinguished until the 8th. The Great Fire of Hamburg destroyed about a quarter of the inner city, including three churches, the town hall, and many other buildings. It killed 51 people and left an estimated 20,000 homeless. Reconstruction took more than 40 years. Disease struck on a scale to match. A major cholera outbreak in 1892 was badly handled by a city government that kept an unusual degree of independence. About 8,600 people died, the largest German epidemic of the late 19th century and the last major cholera outbreak in a great city of the Western world. The deadliest catastrophe came from the air. On the 23rd of July 1943, Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force firebombing created a firestorm that spread from the main railway station and moved south-east. It completely destroyed boroughs such as Hammerbrook, Billbrook and Hamm South. The raids, codenamed Operation Gomorrah by the RAF, killed at least 42,600 civilians, and about one million were evacuated afterward. Water returned as the next disaster. The North Sea flood of 1962 pushed the Elbe to an all-time high, inundating one-fifth of Hamburg and killing more than 300 people. Each time, the city recovered, and often emerged wealthier than before.

• 5. City That Rules Itself

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  Hamburg is one of Germany's three city-states, alongside Berlin and Bremen. Because it is both a city and one of the sixteen German states, the Mayor of Hamburg's office matches a minister-president more than an ordinary city mayor. As a state it handles public education, correctional institutions, and public safety. As a municipality it also runs libraries, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply, and welfare. This independence runs deep in its past. Before the 1871 unification of Germany, Hamburg was a fully sovereign city-state. Before 1919 it was a civic republic led by a class of hereditary Grand Burghers, the Hanseaten. When the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806, it became a sovereign state titled the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Napoleon I briefly annexed it to the First French Empire, and Russian forces under General Bennigsen freed the city in 1814. The Congress of Vienna of 1815 confirmed its independence, making it one of 39 sovereign states of the German Confederation. Since 1897 the seat of government has been Hamburg City Hall, a richly decorated Neo-Renaissance building whose tower stands 112 metres high. Its façade, 111 metres long, depicts the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, a reminder that as a Free Imperial City, Hamburg answered only to the emperor.

• 6. Gateway To The World

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  The Port of Hamburg is Germany's largest and Europe's third-largest, after Rotterdam and Antwerp, and ranks 17th worldwide. In 2016 it handled 138.2 million tons of goods. Though it sits 110 kilometres up the Elbe, it counts as a seaport because it can handle large ocean-going vessels. The city's fastest growth came in the second half of the 19th century, when its population more than quadrupled to 800,000 and its Atlantic trade made it Europe's second-largest port. The Hamburg America Line, directed by Albert Ballin, became the world's largest transatlantic shipping company around the start of the 20th century. Hamburg was the departure point for many Germans and Eastern Europeans emigrating to the United States. That migration left a memorial. BallinStadt, a former emigration station, is dedicated to the millions of Europeans who left for the Americas between 1850 and 1939, with terminals where descendants can search for their ancestors. The water is also home to industry and finance. Hamburg holds Germany's oldest stock exchange and the world's oldest merchant bank, Berenberg Bank. Heavy industry includes steel, aluminium, copper, and large shipyards such as Blohm + Voss. Alongside Seattle and Toulouse, the city is a major centre of civil aerospace, where Airbus runs its Finkenwerder assembly plant and employs over 13,000 people.

• 7. Where The Beatles Began

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  The Beatles lived and played in Hamburg from August 1960 to December 1962, gaining local acclaim before their fame. One of the venues they performed at was the Star-Club on St. Pauli. The city was an important centre of rock music in the early 1960s, and music has stayed woven into its life ever since. Today Hamburg has more than 40 theatres, 60 museums, and 100 music venues and clubs. With 6.6 music venues per 100,000 inhabitants, it has the second-highest density of music venues among Germany's largest cities, after Munich. Johannes Brahms was born here and spent his formative early years in the city. The composer György Ligeti and Alfred Schnittke taught at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. The Hamburger Schule is a term for alternative bands like Tocotronic, Blumfeld, Tomte and Kante. In the 1980s the city was a major centre for heavy metal, where Helloween, Gamma Ray, Running Wild and Grave Digger began, helping establish power metal. Its venues are landmarks too. The Elbphilharmonie, opened in January 2017, holds concerts in a sail-shaped building set on top of an old warehouse, designed by Herzog and de Meuron. The older concert hall is the Laeiszhalle. And St. Pauli's Reeperbahn, among the best-known European red-light districts, draws between 25 and 30 million visitors every year.

• 8. Many Communities, One City

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  On the 31st of December 2016, there were 1,860,759 people registered in Hamburg, in an area of 755.3 square kilometres. There were 631,246 residents with a migrant background, representing 34 percent of the population, with immigrants from 200 countries. The city's character has long been shaped by people arriving by sea. Hamburg holds the largest Portuguese community in Germany, about 30,000 people of Portuguese heritage, with roots reaching back to sailors and merchants who came beginning in the 15th century. A Portuguese quarter has grown since the 1970s, and a Vasco da Gama statue stands on the Kornhaus bridge. Its Afghan community of about 50,000 is the largest in Europe, first arriving in the 1970s and expanding through the Afghan conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Many carpet businesses in Speicherstadt are run by Afghan traders, and Hamburg remains a global leader in the trade of oriental rugs. The city also has a long anglophile streak. William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent the last two weeks of September 1798 here, and Dorothy kept a detailed journal of their stay. A local saying captures the mood: when it starts raining in London, people in Hamburg open their umbrellas. The city has not forgotten its darker history either. About 7,800 Hamburg Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, of the nearly 17,000 who had lived there before Hitler's rise. In 2009, more than 2,500 stumbling blocks, or Stolpersteine, were laid into the pavement in front of the former homes of deported and murdered citizens, carrying their names into the everyday streets.