Reeperbahn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district that carries two reputations at once: a place of world-class entertainment, and a place the city's Lutheran neighbors once called die sündige Meile, the sinful mile. That nickname is centuries old, and the street has spent much of its history earning it. But long before the neon signs and the nightclubs, before the strip clubs and the brothels, this street had a far more practical purpose. And before The Beatles became The Beatles, they played here so many nights that John Lennon would later claim Hamburg was where he grew up. How did a ropewalk on the edge of a Protestant city become one of the most written-about streets in Europe? And what does it look like today, caught between its rowdy past and the quiet creep of gentrification?

• 2. A Ropewalk Becomes a Road

  ›

  Until the 1620s, Hamburg's ropewalks sat in the Neustadt quarter, close to the Elbe. As the city filled in around them, the ropewalks had to be relocated outside the city walls, onto the country road leading toward Altona. That road eventually took on the name Reperbahn, then Reeperbahn. In Low German, Reep means rope, and Bahn means track. The street functioned as a genuine ropewalk through the 17th and 18th centuries, a long open lane where craftsmen would twist fibers into the ropes that Hamburg's port needed. The port's demand drove the district's early character as a working-class edge of town, outside the jurisdiction and the norms of the city proper. That outsider status would prove durable. The Große Freiheit, a street branching off the Reeperbahn's north side, takes its name from the fact that Catholics were permitted to practice their religion there at a time when the district did not yet belong to Hamburg. Protestant Hamburg proper forbade it. Freedom, in other words, was baked into the neighborhood's geography before the nightlife arrived.

• 3. The Architecture of Vice

  ›

  In 1967, Europe's largest brothel at the time opened on the Reeperbahn. The six-floor Eros Center stood as a kind of monument to the district's permissiveness, until the AIDS scare closed it in the late 1980s. The Herbertstraße, a short side street off Davidstraße, has long featured sex workers displaying themselves behind windows. Since 1933, large screens have blocked the view into Herbertstraße from the adjacent streets, and since the 1970s signs have declared the street off limits to women and juveniles. Despite those signs, it remains a public road that anyone may enter. Street prostitution is legal on Davidstraße during certain hours. Governing all of this is the Davidwache, a police station that sits on the south side of the Reeperbahn at the cross street Davidstraße. It is one of the most recognizable landmarks on the strip. On the Große Freiheit, Hotel Luxor, Hamburg's oldest brothel, operated for sixty years before closing in 2008. The live sex theatres that once lined that street, with names like Salambo, Regina, Colibri, and Safari, closed one by one. Safari was the last live sex theatre in Germany; it closed in 2013. The table dance club Dollhouse now occupies the space where Salambo once stood.

• 4. Where The Beatles Grew Up

  ›

  In the early 1960s, a young band from Liverpool played residencies at several clubs around the Reeperbahn: the Indra, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten at Reeperbahn 136, and the Star-Club. They had not yet become world-famous. The stories from those nights are many. Some are confirmed, including the night John Lennon performed a set with a toilet seat around his neck. Others have grown in the retelling. A fellow musician named Ted "Kingsize" Taylor made a crude tape recording of the band's last New Year's Eve show, at the Star-Club in December 1962. A cleaned-up version of that tape was later released as an album. George Harrison later characterized it as "awful." Lennon's own summary of the Hamburg years became one of the most quoted lines associated with him: "I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg." To mark what those years meant, a Beatles-Platz was built at the intersection of the Reeperbahn and Große Freiheit.

• 5. Songs, Films, and the Street's Long Shadow

  ›

  The Reeperbahn has collected creative admirers across every decade since the mid-twentieth century. The 1944 film Große Freiheit Nr. 7 starred Hans Albers as a singer working in a Reeperbahn club who falls in love with a character played by Ilse Werner. Albers returned to the subject a decade later in the 1954 film Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins, this time alongside Heinz Rühmann. In 1978, Udo Lindenberg recorded a song called "Reeperbahn," set to the tune of Penny Lane, mourning the decay of the entertainment district he knew. In 1965, the film Ship of Fools featured Jose Ferrer and Christiane Schmidtmer singing "Heute Abend Geh'n Wir Bummeln Auf Der Reeperbahn." The Police wrote "Low Life" about the street. Blue Cheer put "Sweet Child of the Reeperbahn" on their 1991 album Dining with the Sharks. The Toy Dolls released "Caught up the Reeperbahn" on their 1993 album Absurd-Ditties. Tom Waits included a track called "Reeperbahn" on his 2002 album Alice. German electro house duo Digitalism added their own version on their 2011 release I Love You Dude. London indie band Spector included a bonus track with the same name on the deluxe version of their 2015 album Moth Boys. Australian punk band the Hard-Ons titled their tribute "Don't Fear The Reeperbahn" on their 2007 album Most People Are Nicer Than Us, a deliberate nod to the Blue Oyster Cult song. Karen Duve's 1999 novel Regenroman, published in English as Rain, returns to the Reeperbahn repeatedly. Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Paul Kelly, Midnight Oil, and Runrig have all mentioned the street in songs. Randy Pie, a band from Hamburg, wrote about a curiosity shop there in their 1975 song "Kitsch."

• 6. Crime, Control, and Change

  ›

  At a major trial running through 2006 and 2007, ten members of a group known as the Marek Gang faced charges of pimping. The gang controlled brothels on and near the Reeperbahn. The judge rejected the charge of forming a criminal gang. The men had recruited young women from local discotheques, an illegal practice when the women were under 21. Some men had also abused women who worked for them. The sentences handed down were suspended. In 2007, prompted by the area's persistently high crime rate, the Senate of Hamburg enacted a weapons ban for the Reeperbahn. The only other Hamburg location under such a ban is the Hansaplatz in St. Georg. The St. Pauli Preservation Society has raised its voice against gentrification. Some longtime residents pointed to the rise of discotheques and cheap bars drawing teenage customers as a factor in the decline of the area's older sex industry. In 2013, the Dancing Towers were erected at the eastern end of the Reeperbahn, designed to evoke a couple dancing tango. Their arrival drew criticism from some St. Pauli residents. Then COVID-19 forced almost every establishment on the strip to close. The Reeperbahn Festival, which ranks among the largest club festivals in the world, represents the district's ongoing claim to cultural relevance alongside its older, harder reputation.