Living in Hamburg, you get quite a lot of visitors. After moving to Germany and before living here, I spent some time in Dortmund, Düsseldorf and Münster, and this has given me a circle of non-Hamburg friends with whom I have absolutely no difficulty keeping in touch.

This is because, as soon as they get a Friday off work or uni or, where applicable, get their girlfriends’ permission, they’re up here visiting. It’s not that this last category live in unhappy relationships with horribly complicated partners, of course; no, the reason is more that when Germans hear “young man” and “going to Hamburg” they think one thing: Reeperbahn.

The Reeperbahn: half a mile of clubs, bars and brothels (Flickr: PCHH photography)

The Reeperbahn is a street, just over half a mile long, running parallel to the Hamburg harbour up to the old medieval city limits. The fact that it stops at the former city walls and is within walking distance of a harbour should give you a clue as to the main trade of this strip – and I use the word “strip” not incidentally.

For those of you who haven’t got it yet, let me try a quotation from Austin Powers:

Austin: “Only sailors use condoms, baby.”
Vanessa: “Not any more, Austin.”
Austin: “Well so they should, the filthy beggars, they go from port to port.”

Got it?

Oh, alright then: look, it’s a red-light district. Formerly reliant on sailors with little other opportunity for enjoying female company, prostitution on the Reeperbahn today is now almost wholly reliant on sex-tourists and stag parties. It’s a loud stretch of neon lights with descriptions of its charms in the standard Eurotrash vocabulary of “erotik” and “sex-x-x”, complemented by side-streets stuffed to the gunnels with brothels – and bars that would appear to have a side-line in being indistinguishable from brothels, both in terms of décor and of the guests.

Casino – razzle-dazzle on the Reeperbahn (Flickr: o_de_Andrade)

Yet despite this, the Reeperbahn is more than just the main artery of Europe’s second largest red-light district – it’s a phenomenon, an important location in post-war German cultural history. After all, if it were nothing more than just a conspicuously large collection of brothels, my mates’ girlfriends would never let them come up here to see me.

No, despite its current seediness, the Reeperbahn has more to offer: its past. It’s a bit like Soho – the sex-town of London – being a district that screams faded glamour, 1950’s charm à la Ingrid Bergman and ivory cigarette holders at you over the pools of vomit and heaps of discarded kebab-wreckage. Back in the days when society in general was very uptight, especially in the provinces, metropolises like London and Hamburg became centres of licentiousness. Nowadays, where anyone can go drinking for an evening almost anywhere, it’s hard to understand just how attractive the very few places with large numbers of bars and night-clubs would once have been.

Yet in conservative 1950’s Germany, anyone with a thirst for drink or a lingering curiosity about the birds and bees headed for Hamburg. The louche atmosphere they experienced there was immortalised by a string of popular black-and-white films such as Nachts um halb eins auf der Reeperbahn (acted by the German Cary Grant) Hans Albers, and song after song born of the cabaret style of the time.

And it is echoes of this heady time, this edginess and fame, of music and film, that people are straining to hear above the roar of traffic and drunken youths on the Reeperbahn today. They start at the Spielbudenplatz, whose attractions include not only Germany’s best-known police station, the Davidwache, but also its best known petrol station, the Esso Tankstelle, where alcohol can be procured 24/7.

Herbertstraße – men only, please! (Flickr: vovchychko)

Then they move to the Herbertstraße itself, a side-street into which only men are allowed, women being seen as competition by the prostitutes and pelted with abuse (and more) until they leave. After that, its Hans-Albers-Platz (named after the big man himself) for some drinks and then the choice of the Hamburger Berg (bars for transvestites alongside hip clubs), Talstraße (bit of everything) and Große Freiheit (strips shows, strip shows and more strip-shows).

They’re looking for the frisson of the forbidden amongst the banalisation of sex and drink, and are usually disappointed. The Reeperbahn today is too big, too professional, too tuned to the needs of its clientele to offer much adventure.

Unless they’re with me, of course, in which case we retreat to the side-streets just north of the Reeperbahn, into little bars with smiling barkeeps, kitsch wood-veneer-panelling and women who wear fur and smoke through cigarette-holders. Instantly, it feels like you’re a runaway in a film in the fifties taking refuge from repressive home-life.

Which my friends with girlfriends would, in some respects, appear to be doing.