A Social History of Early Rock N' Roll in Germany Hamburg From Burlesque To The Beatles, 1956-69 PDF

A Social History of Early
Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany

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Educating the Germans, by David Phillips
Germany, by Stefan Berger
Hitler’s ‘National Community’, by Lisa Pine
A Social History of Early
Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany
Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69
Julia Sneeringer
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Julia Sneeringer, 2018
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Cover design by Adriana Brioso

Cover image: Gig audience at Star Club in 1964 in Hamburg, Germany.
(© Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Redferns/Getty Images)
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For Augie and Johnny
vi
Contents
List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Days in the Life of Rock ‘n’ Roll in St. Pauli 1

1 A Brief History of Entertainment in St. Pauli 11
2 The Birth of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Clubs 45
3 The Musicians 67
4 Fans and Audiences 91
5 The Authorities 121
6 The End of the Hamburg Scene 147
Epilogue 167
Notes 177
Select Bibliography 249
Index 275
List of Illustrations
1.1 Refreshment pavilion on the Reeperbahn, c. 1820 13

1.2 Operettenhaus on the Spielbudenplatz, 1905 18
1.3 Map of St. Pauli in 1909 21
1.4 Ruins of the Trichter on the Reeperbahn, 1945 32
1.5 Grosse Freiheit at night, c. 1955 39
2.1 Advertisement for Paul Becker’s Hippodrome at Grosse
Freiheit 36, c. 1925 51
2.2 Top Ten owner Peter Eckhorn, with singer Isabella
Bond in 1965 57
2.3 Advertisement for Weissleder’s Erotic Night Club:
“Listen to your wife! Don’t go to the Erotic Night Club!” 61
3.1 The view from the stage at the Star Club, c. 1964 77
4.1 Fans line the front of the stage at the Star Club 91
4.2 Rock ‘n’ roll fans customize their jackets with the names
of their favorite performers 99
4.3 Couple peruses the Star Club’s display window 100
4.4 Audience at a weekend afternoon show for younger fans
at the Star Club 107
5.1 A Youth Protection Squad on patrol in the Grosse Freiheit 129
6.1 Palais d’Amour and Top Ten club on the Reeperbahn, early 1970s 159
6.2 Exterior of Grünspan, Grosse Freiheit 58, late 1960s 164
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making, and it is a pleasure finally to
be able to thank the many individuals and institutions whose support made it
possible.
A grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) got this
project off the ground. Recurring financial support was generously provided
by the PSC-CUNY Research Awards program, which is jointly funded by the
Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York. Those grants
underwrote visits to archives and institutions in Germany. Many thanks to the
helpful staff at the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, especially Helga Mügge, Ulf Bollmann,
Volker Reißmann, and Joachim Frank. Thanks also to Angelika Voß-Louis at the
archive of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH). The FZH
in general has been a wonderful, welcoming place that connected me to other
historians of Hamburg—many thanks to Axel Schildt, Dorothee Wierling, and
Christoph Strupp. Thanks also to Gunhild Ohl-Hinz and the St. Pauli Archiv,
as well as Ortwin Pelc at the Hamburg Museum. Special thanks to Günter Zint,
who generously shared with me his amazing collection of material on St. Pauli
and the Star Club. May the Sankt Pauli Museum flourish!
Sincere thanks to those who shared their memories of the music scene with
me. Gibson Kemp, Ulf Krüger, Bärbel Niewohner, and Ingrid Noetzel have
been generous with their time every step of the way. Ingrid is a rock star in
her own right—her help has been invaluable. I am also very grateful to Ulf for
granting permission to use many of the images reproduced in this book—he
has been generous above the call of duty. Thanks also to everyone else who let
me pick their brains about rock and Beat in St. Pauli: Ted “Kingsize” Taylor,
Rosi Sheridan McGinnity, Horst and Uwe Fascher, Marion Berghahn, Lothar
Geißler, Christina Gaebel, Ruth Lallemand, Ecki Hoffmann, Heike Gerdes, and
Peter Kirchberger.
I have benefited tremendously over the years from the generosity of friends
and colleagues who read chapters or hashed out ideas in formal and informal
settings. My first thanks go to Detlef Siegfried, who has encouraged this project
since we first met at a German Studies Association conference years ago. I’m
indebted to him for his generosity and truly honored to have him as a friend.
x Acknowledgments
Maria Höhn has been there since Penn and always points me in the right
direction. I would be hard-pressed to find more supportive allies than Maria
Mitchell and Paul Lerner. Kathy Pence and Paul Steege are some of the smartest
readers one could ever hope for.
In New York, I am lucky to be part of several scholarly communities. Thanks
to my students and colleagues in History at Queens College, especially Joel
Allen, Sarah Covington, Josh Freeman, Satadru Sen, Bob Wintermute, writing
guru Peter Conolly-Smith, and Marilyn Harris and Alex Vickery, who run the
office so well. At the CUNY Graduate Center, Dagmar Herzog’s advice and
moral support have made all the difference. Thanks also to Tim Alborn, Ben
Hett, David Nasaw, Helena Rosenblatt, Aoibheann Sweeney of the Center for
Humanities, Marilyn Weber, and my students in European history. Megan
Brown, Ky Woltering, and Alex Baltovski provided ace research assistance.
Many thanks also to the New York German women’s history group for their
ongoing support and gentle critiques: Renate Bridenthal, Bonnie Anderson,
Dolores Augustine, Marion Berghahn, Atina Grossmann, Amy Hackett, Maria
Höhn, Marion Kaplan (who reminds me that not everyone in 1960s Hamburg
hung out in Beat clubs), Jan Lambertz, Molly Nolan, Krista Molly O’Donnell,
Kathy Pence, and Nancy Reagin (who also believes that fandom has a history).
In Philadelphia, I am grateful for the feedback and comradeship of the central
European historians Paul Steege corrals together each spring: Jay Lockenour,
Heikki Lempa, Anita Kurimay, David Imhoof, Andy Lees, Jeff Johnson, Greg
Eghighian, Rita Krueger, and Paul Hanebrink. Special thanks to my neighbor
Belinda Davis for coffee and sympathy.
Others in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have helped
me in ways big and small. Thanks to Tobias Becker, Anne Berg, Tim Brown,
Julia Brüggemann, Geoff Eley, Neil Gregor, Jeff Hayton, Andrew Hurley, Tom
Irvine, Eden Kainer, Ed Larkey, James Lewes, Beate Meyer, Klaus Nathaus,
Michael Rauhut, Martin Rempe, Leo Schmieding, Rob Stephens, and Clayton
Whisnant. Tony Waine kindly sent me some of his early writing on the Beatles.
Jens Wunderlich supplied beautiful historic images of St. Pauli. Alina Tiews and
Yvonne Robel organized a wonderful conference through the FZH on the history
of popular entertainment that helped me work through some big ideas. Elizabeth
von Dücker, David Waite, and Nicola Bruns were most gracious hosts in Hamburg
and Berlin. Tom Budnewski and Detlef “Eddy” Hollatz introduced me years ago
to the worlds that inspired this book, for which I will always be grateful.
It has been a real pleasure to work with the smart and efficient team at
Bloomsbury. Many thanks to Rhodri Mogford for taking on this project and
Acknowledgments xi
to Beatriz Lopez for all her help with the process. For permission to reproduce
parts of previously published articles, thanks to Cambridge University Press and
Karen Hellekson at the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to everyone on the home front who has lived
through this project with me. Thanks to the Sneeringer clan, especially my sisters
Ann Wilson and Sue Sneeringer, fellow writer and student of the sixties. Barbara
Solbach will always be my German sister. My husband, Agustin Bolanos, shares
music and ideas and life with me every day; ours is a house built on rock ‘n’ roll.
My son Johnny has gone from kindergartener to bass-playing teenager in the
time it’s taken me to write this book. I’m glad I was there to watch him grow and
thank him for being patient with his music-obsessed mom. Without the love,
laughter, and support of Augie and Johnny, I could not have pulled this off. This
book is dedicated to them.
xii
Introduction: Days in the Life
of Rock ‘n’ Roll in St. Pauli
On most any night in the 1960s, groups of young women and men made their
way to Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, their destination the Star Club or one of
the other nearby music venues. To get there they might walk through the small
Chinatown in Schmuckstrasse, turning at the baroque Catholic Church into a
street called Grosse Freiheit (its name means “great freedom”). Or maybe they
came via the Reeperbahn, St. Pauli’s main drag bustling with alcohol-lubricated
tourists from around the world. Turning right into the narrow Freiheit, they
would be confronted by touts promoting nightclubs offering striptease, female
mud wrestling, or transvestite shows. Once past this gauntlet they would at last
arrive at their club, buy a ticket, and step into a world of cool kids and hot music.
The Star Club was the hub of a new pop culture universe in the early 1960s,
a place insiders came to consider Europe’s cradle of rock.1 While rock ‘n’ roll
moldered in its native United States, in Hamburg it absorbed new energies as
young musicians from Britain played it to enthusiastic audiences in the red-
light district of this port city. The Star Club, Top Ten, Kaiserkeller, and other
short-lived venues became the heart of a music scene that emerged organically
around Beat, as rock ‘n’ roll was rechristened in this period.2 The Hamburg
scene flourished in the clubs, pubs, and other local businesses that catered to
musicians and fans. It brought together young people born during and just after
the war to dance, drink, make friends, and find romance. It grew from a few
dozen participants in 1960 to thousands by 1964, the year Beatlemania brought
international attention to the place where the band had played hundreds of
gigs between 1960 and 1962. Before Beatlemania, the media largely ignored the
scene, but not the authorities. Indeed, as part of an effort to protect youth from
the district’s vices and fix St. Pauli’s increasingly sleazy reputation, the city even
shut down the Star Club in June 1964 due to complaints about violence. But fans
staged a peaceful sit-down strike in the Grosse Freiheit and within days the club
reopened, continuing on as the nucleus of Hamburg’s Beat music scene until
closing for good on New Year’s Eve 1969.
2 A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany
The Hamburg scene’s role as incubator of the Beatles and the British Invasion
has made it the subject of dozens of popular books, music compilations, films,
tourist attractions, even an exhibit at the prestigious Hamburg Museum.3 Many of
these are well produced and informative, but even the most sophisticated4 do not
analyze the scene with the empirical tools of the historian. None treat together the
converging histories of popular music, youth culture, and the St. Pauli milieu.5
This book does, using sources from state archives, private collections, interviews
with participants, published oral histories, and contemporary materials, as
well as concepts from cultural studies, musicology, and anthropology. It argues
for the Hamburg Beat music scene as a crucial incubator of the transnational
youth culture that became central to our understanding of the 1960s. It also
situates postwar popular music and youth culture within the long history
of mass entertainment. The entertainment zone was an important field of
cultural exchange, a place for people across lines of nation, class, gender, and
race to experience the pleasures of difference through music. By examining
relationships between actors usually treated separately—musicians, fans, club
entrepreneurs, police, and bureaucrats—this book explores how popular culture
operated at the intersection of consumer capitalism, tourism, the regulatory
state, and prevailing sexual and social mores. Young people, with help from
sympathetic adults, used music to push back at those boundaries. The Hamburg
scene became their laboratory of democratization as they used Beat music and
style to fashion a distinct identity, as well as escape an emotionally repressed
present haunted by the recent past. But their activities should not be interpreted
merely as a reaction against Nazism: they were an assertion of youth’s rising
power as a sociocultural force in the here and now. Before the sexual revolution,
young men and women were claiming physical pleasure as a right in the unique
milieu of St. Pauli, where the pleasures of the body were the coin of the realm.
While they sought more democratization in everyday life, the gains they made
were often fleeting and limited. A social history of early rock ‘n’ roll in Hamburg
offers an alternative German history from the perspective of a place built on
self-expression and bodily liberation—impulses from the margins that became
culturally central as the Sixties progressed.
Before we journey into the Hamburg music scene, let me provide some
points of orientation. First, the place. Hamburg was West Germany’s largest
city, far more central to the country’s fortunes than divided, isolated Berlin. This
prosperous, cosmopolitan port city was also the Federal Republic’s media capital
and prime exemplar of a new, post-Nazi German identity based on liberalism,
consumerism, and openness to the world. Yet Hamburg was simultaneously
unlike any other German place, known as much for St. Pauli’s twenty-four-
hour party culture as for Hanseatic merchant capitalism. One of the city’s oldest
areas of settlement along the Elbe river, St. Pauli only attained full status within
Hamburg in the late nineteenth century. The trade that passed through its harbor
generated much of Hamburg’s wealth, yet St. Pauli itself remained home to many
of the city’s poorest, most marginal residents. At the same time, this district was
known to travelers far and wide as a licentious outpost selling legal prostitution
and other bawdy amusements. By the early twentieth century, more respectable
attractions like circuses, operettas, and motion pictures established St. Pauli as
one of Germany’s premier entertainment quarters for both locals and tourists.
Sites of entertainment have not featured prominently in narratives of German
history, where Nazism and war cast long shadows.6 Yet this has begun to change.7
As in other industrialized countries, “going out” became a common activity
in modern Germany as fixed work hours and rising wages made commercial
pleasures accessible to the masses.8 Dance halls, musical theaters, animal shows,
and burlesque mirrored forces of social change, prosperity, crisis, war, and peace
in their own ways.9 Mass entertainments reflected existing social hierarchies
and economic inequalities, while also offering audiences space to assert their
own values and demands. Cultural elites fiercely opposed popular culture for
its effects especially on “impressionable” women and youths.10 Nationalists
(most famously in Weimar and Nazi Germany) fought it for its transnational
and cosmopolitan impulses—the same qualities that enchanted audiences with
a seemingly endless curiosity about the Other.11 Top-down resistance could not
stop the establishment of mass taste as a prime force within national cultures,
a process Eric Hobsbawm called the actual cultural revolution of the twentieth
century.12 People’s use of amusement spaces to construct the self, talk back to
power, and experience new sensations makes them important sites of history.
Studying them allows us to tell stories about the past in which leisure and
pleasure are central themes, not peripheral.
St. Pauli’s long history as a site of popular entertainment entered a new
phase in the 1950s, which brings us to our next orientation point: time. The
main action of this book takes place between the late 1950s and the late 1960s,
particularly 1958 to 1964—years often overshadowed by early rock-related
violence on the one side and “1968” (a term denoting the sexual revolution,
the student movement, and the counterculture) on the other. The years 1958
through 1964 coincided with the peak of West Germany’s Economic Miracle,13
which played out in St. Pauli in ways that enabled rock ‘n’ roll to gain a foothold
there. St. Pauli’s tourism industry rebounded quickly after the war and attracted
record numbers of visitors in the 1950s. A nation at full employment with modest
disposable income now aggressively pursued leisure as a basic right. Talk about
sexual matters and titillating images of women became increasingly common in
mass media after 1960, a phenomenon sometimes called the “sex wave.” While
Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic government (1949–63) promoted the
idealized nuclear family, sexual modesty, emotional restraint, and a return to
“normalcy,” adults used alcohol and sex on weekend getaways to blow off steam
and suppress memories of Nazism and war. St. Pauli profited handsomely off
these impulses, making a distinct contribution to postwar recovery by serving
as the national id.14
Into this world landed rock ‘n’ roll, which shot across the Atlantic like a comet
in 1956. When Bill Haley toured West Germany in 1956 and 1958, excitable fans
(mainly working-class, teenage males) trashed concert halls and rumbled in the
streets. This violence brought fierce denunciations by politicians, pundits, and
preachers. Programmers and concert promoters banished rock from German
airwaves and stages while the native music industry served up sanitized versions
sung auf deutsch. By the late fifties, about the only places to see live rock ‘n’
roll were joints catering to American GIs dotted around West Berlin and the
Rhine-Main garrison towns. Hamburg, in contrast, was a bastion of jazz. So how
did it come to occupy such an important place in the history of rock ‘n’ roll?
The answer lies in St. Pauli’s entertainment economy, which brought together a
cast of characters whose activities would help transform rock ‘n’ roll from party
music into an artistically ambitious sound and style.
The Hamburg scene was made up of musicians and fans drawn together by a
love of rock ‘n’ roll.15 It became defined by its location and its sound—a stomping
four-four beat with amphetamine tempos and raucous songs perfect for group
singing. Its birth was facilitated by a handful of nightclub owners initially
seeking nothing more than to stand out in St. Pauli’s crowded entertainment
landscape. In 1960 rock ‘n’ roll was still novel in Germany, derided as “jungle
music” and forced underground. It also happened to be good dance music,
perfect for selling drinks. Those considerations drove a struggling entrepreneur
named Bruno Koschmider to give it a try. That spring he began hiring British
bands (playfully dubbed “rock ‘n’ roll guest workers” by literary critic Tony
Waine) at a time when Germany lacked homegrown talent that could sing this
music in its native tongue.16 Local workers, sailors, and then young music fans
discovered the thrill of live rock ‘n’ roll at Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller and Indra
clubs. Other businesses began to copy his success, opening new venues that
would draw thousands by the mid-decade. Teenagers had not initially been the
target demographic for St. Pauli amusements outside of movies—indeed, under-

eighteens were banned from establishments serving alcohol after 10:00 p.m.
But when nightclubs began offering live rock ‘n’ roll, an intrepid subset of young
men and women flocked to St. Pauli to hear it. They had to steal away to a district
the law deemed dangerous to youth. But they were not going to St. Pauli for
sexual spectacle: their geography was oriented around places to hear music and
meet others who shared their passion. The moments of joy they found in St.
Pauli were powerful enough to keep them coming back, despite attempts by the
authorities to keep them out of Germany’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Concerns about minors in St. Pauli had existed for decades, but took on new
urgency as the Baby Boomers hit puberty. This large cohort possessed spending
power, a growing sense of a distinct generational identity, and budding sexual
energies. They came of age at a time marked by broadly shared prosperity,
official rhetorics of democracy and pluralism, and the widespread proliferation
of mass media. They became the target audience for popular culture, which was
anchoring itself as the dominant culture of mass democracy.17 The consumer
culture of the Economic Miracle cemented pop as a young person’s game. Indeed,
this period cannot be understood without attention to pop culture, a term that
came into widespread use in the mid-1960s. Pop culture both mirrored the age
and shaped it, translating “the spirit of its time . . . into objects or music or
fashion or behaviour,” as George Melly wrote in 1970.18 Not merely a colorful
supplement to the “hard facts” of politics and economics, pop became a key
way especially for young people to interpret the world and articulate what they
wanted out of life.19
Putting pop culture at the center of history puts the spotlight on youth—
another point of orientation for this book. “Youth” can be defined as a number,
a stage of life, and a legal category (twenty-one was the age of majority in West
Germany in the 1960s). This book defines youth as people aged thirteen through
twenty-five.20 Constructed by the law and social reformers as a vulnerable
group in need of protection, youth became objects of surveillance and welfare
state intervention, particularly during periods of political or economic
crisis.21 While most youths followed society’s rules, some consciously defined
themselves in opposition to adult authority. In the 1950s and 1960s young rebels
and conformists alike were at the forefront of exploring the possibilities of a
rapidly expanding consumer culture. Cultural goods from the United States in
particular were eagerly consumed by German youths less bound by traditional
social categories and open to what was “modern.” That included mass media
and new technologies of listening to and playing music.22 These practices made
music the most influential pop culture form in the 1960s. Youth itself came to
be defined by an attraction to music. As Simon Frith writes, pop music became
synonymous with youth because it
ties into a particular kind of emotional turbulence, when issues of individual

identity and social place, the control of public and private feelings, are at a
premium. . . . The most significant pop songs for all generations are those they
heard as adolescents. What this suggests is not just that young people need
music, but that youth is itself defined by music.23
Historical studies of popular music in twentieth-century Germany tend to

emphasize its political aspects, perhaps as a way to justify it as a legitimate subject
of inquiry.24 One sees this with jazz, a music Weimar- and Nazi-era politicians
and observers loaded with political meanings.25 This has been the trend in works
on rock ‘n’ roll as well. For example, Uta Poiger’s landmark study of rock ‘n’ roll’s
initial reception in West and East Germany uses music to unpack larger debates
about the Cold War, Americanization, and notions of race and gender. Works on
music-oriented youth cultures in East Germany position them in relation to the
communist state, which had enormous power to permit or censor them. Works
on rock’s role in the revolts of 1968 and their aftermath in the West foreground
avowedly political (but not widely popular) bands like Ton Steine Scherben.26
While histories of popular music’s political valences are certainly necessary, they
often have the effect of reducing music to a stand-in for “bigger” issues. “Talking
around” music, they obscure the obvious point that most people embraced
certain songs or sounds because they enjoyed them.27
One way to avoid talking around music is to investigate historical subjects’
engagement with it. The experience of music as a special sphere providing unique
access to intense states of feeling has historical dimensions. It is particularly
important to the history of periods since the 1950s when concert going and
music consumption became common daily activities. This book searches for
the Alltagsgeschichte—the everyday life—of early rock ‘n’ roll in West Germany.
What did this music mean to the young woman at the Star Club in 1963 who may
have had to overcome significant obstacles to get there? Why would a teenage
boy trek over hill and dale to find new records by Chuck Berry or Vince Taylor?
How did British teens come to play rock ‘n’ roll in St. Pauli, and what did they
think as they looked out at an audience whose fathers had bombed their cities a
generation earlier?
Music happens in society, and society also happens in music.28 Historians
are well positioned to uncover the material texture of those processes through
attention to music’s production, reception, and circulation. A useful concept

in this regard comes from musicologist Christopher Small, “musicking.” To
understand the social meanings of music, he argues, we must pay attention to
everyone in the space when music is created: musicians as well as audiences,
technicians, managers, even bartenders, waiters, and cleaners.29 That approach
inspires this study, which treats musicians, club owners, audiences, and
authorities as key interlocking sets of actors.
The Beat music scene was distinctive in that youths made music for other
youths. In St. Pauli, a majority of those performers (especially early on) came
from Britain, with Liverpool making an outsize contribution to what came
to be called the Hamburg Sound. This book asks how these young men and
a few adventurous women experienced Hamburg. That includes consideration
of the place and time that first shaped them—postwar Britain, which had its
own encounter with America and rock ‘n’ roll. I am also interested in musicians’
interactions with bosses and coworkers: the clubs were, after all, sites of work
too. A look at their conditions of employment illuminates the micropolitics of
music’s production and circulation while adding a new dimension to our picture
of this period’s economic and labor history.30 For the musicians—most of whom
had never before been so far from home—Hamburg also had a huge personal
and emotional impact. This book explores how their circulation through the city
shaped their identity, particularly their ideas about sex and national belonging as
they encountered German fans who were themselves creating identity through
music. Similar questions inform my interest in young Germans who became
inspired to play rock and Beat themselves.
This last group overlaps with fans and audiences. Fans were deeply invested in
music and emotionally linked to each other, whether through physical proximity
in club spaces or virtually through listening to the same records and reading the
same magazines. Not merely passive consumers, their uses of music made them
active participants in musicking too.
German fans stood athwart several historical currents. They hailed from
the land of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms: music, particularly forms we call
“classical,” was foundational to German culture and identity.31 Nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century audiences had been instrumental in creating
that ideal, treating music as an exalted counterworld and a key to the soul.
Classical music publics also used music to communicate, create distinctions
around class and gender, and generate new forms of social capital.32 Historians
of music in Germany have portrayed musical culture as “a site at which
ideological politics cohere,” particularly those of national identity.33 In postwar
Hamburg, however, Beat fans engaged with a very different kind of music—one
more emblematic of the accelerating processes of globalization than national
production. Its roots were African-American and Appalachian, played by sexy
young Brits in West Germany’s most visibly international city. The sense of
belonging German audiences created through this music was shaped less by
national loyalties than by participation in a growing transnational community
of youth.34 Rock and Beat music fandom offered an idea of community that
transcended national identity for a generation born to a world nearly destroyed
by German nationalism.35
The same music can be received very differently in different places, which is
why we cannot speak about music without localizing it in its social and cultural
contexts.36 In St. Pauli the fan community manifested itself in particular ways.
Their counterworld harnessed the international impulses that flowed through
Hamburg. They created a subculture—not in the traditional sociological
definition of a cohesive group that consciously uses pop to resist the dominant
culture, but in terms of a culture existing below the surface of the dominant
one.37 It first coalesced literally underground—the Kaiserkeller was located in
the basement of Grosse Freiheit 36—in a milieu stamped by the sensibilities of
social outsiders and the sexually divergent. The only politics pursued there were
those of fun, physical expression, and an embrace of racial tolerance, sprinkled
with the occasional outburst at “old Nazis” who tried to clamp down on rock ‘n’
roll. Fans took advantage of spaces free of parental supervision to act in ways
that eroded the era’s sexual conservatism and social conformity, which helped
prepare the ground for the upheavals of the late 1960s.38
Pop culture became a key vehicle for emancipation processes beyond high
politics: questioning sexual taboos, asserting independence from the parental
home, bonding with peers.39 But we should be cautious about seeing this as a
straight road toward emancipation.40 The empowering pleasures of the Hamburg
scene were not equally available to all. Females in particular faced clear limits
on their freedom—from police and parents, as well as some young men in the
scene—rooted in still powerful gender norms. Also, the Beat clubs were part of
what could be considered a manipulative culture industry. They were products
of St. Pauli’s tourism and entertainment economy, capitalist enterprises designed
to turn youths’ desire for sensation and connection into profits. At the same
time, however, these were not seamless systems of commodification or control.
Star Club owner Manfred Weissleder, a man whose personal fortunes depended
on selling Beat music to hungry audiences, became an articulate critic of the
pop culture industry. His publication, the Star-Club News, challenged prevailing
notions of authority and defended young people’s right to express themselves.

Just as important for the history of both rock and youth culture, the commercial
spaces of the Hamburg scene brought together young men and women who
created their own homegrown style that later traveled the world. The Beatles’
mop top was a style they borrowed from German artist friends. One of them
in particular, Astrid Kirchherr, was instrumental in revealing to the young
Brits the potential in their rock ‘n’ roll; the aesthetic impulses she and her circle
introduced generated something aesthetically ambitious and emotionally true
within a debased commercial realm. The limits of liberalization notwithstanding,
Hamburg’s Beat scene became an important part of West Germany’s processes of
democratization from below.
The square mile of St. Pauli’s entertainment district played a major role in the
development of rock music, youth culture, and the broader history of popular
culture in modern Germany. This small place illuminates big questions about
the social meanings of rock ‘n’ roll, as well as the music’s meanings to those
who played and listened to it. It offers a rich case study of the material realities
of music’s production, staging, and reception. Studying the cultural exchanges
facilitated by popular entertainment there also reveals new aspects of the daily
life workings of the Economic Miracle, as well as the shifting dynamics of sex
and gender in an era of both official prudery and exploding consumer desire.
Young people’s use of St. Pauli’s music spaces challenged powerful forces of
conservatism and conformity, though this was no straightforward march toward
liberation. They were also early producers of the sound and style that later
became the lingua franca of youth across the global Sixties. The story of early
rock ‘n’ roll in Hamburg may seem familiar, but its connections to the broader
histories of popular culture, youth culture, and Germany itself have yet to be
fully explored. Let’s begin to uncover that story by first going to the place where
those cultures came together in new and powerful ways: St. Pauli.
10
1
A Brief History of Entertainment in St. Pauli
The music clubs in St. Pauli that became such important incubators of the
new youth culture didn’t spring up out of nowhere: they arose in a place with
centuries-long traditions of commercialized entertainment, a geographic
and cultural border zone where those on society’s margins carved out space
for themselves. The story of the music clubs must be set in the context of the
place that allowed them to come into being: Hamburg, a Hanseatic city-state
built around one of the world’s most important ports. Positioning itself as a
counterweight both to Prussian authoritarianism and Catholic moralism, this
prosperous, fiercely independent northern metropolis has long identified with
the values of commerce, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism as conveyed in its
unofficial slogan, “gateway to the world” (das Tor zur Welt).1 Zooming in even
further, the place we must really explore is the district of St. Pauli. St. Pauli’s
location on the River Elbe facilitated the trade that produced Hamburg’s burgher
elite. But life along the river was anything but respectable: it was muscular and
hedonistic, to paraphrase historian David Blackbourn.2 Along with the sailor
and the longshoreman, St. Pauli harbored the “low other”—the prostitute and the
criminal, the immigrant and the wandering laborer, the deviant and the defiant
who to this day have all played crucial roles in the symbolic economy as objects
of fascination and fear.3 As a recent New York Times profile put it, “St. Pauli acts as
an exhilarating foil to the beauty and almost sterile perfectionism of Hamburg.”4
To date there is little scholarly work in English on St. Pauli, with only bits
and pieces scattered throughout the historiography on Hamburg. This chapter
aims to fill that gap, surveying the history of St. Pauli and its overlapping worlds
from their first recorded traces up to the appearance of rock ‘n’ roll in the late
1950s. The goal is to set the clubs within the long continuity of St. Pauli’s role as a
cultural crossroads and center of popular entertainments. It presents St. Pauli as a
physical, economic, and social space shared by many groups and individuals—a
cosmopolitan space whose Germanness has long been a matter of debate. It also
reveals St. Pauli as an imagined space, a culturally significant repository of myths

for Hamburg and Germany as a whole. Guidebooks and popular works long
depicted St. Pauli merely as a place of entertainment and sailor life,5 but it has
also always been a place of work; this chapter explores its unique configurations
of work and leisure, particularly the ways in which leisure for some translated
into work for others. Finally, it illustrates how the pleasure economy, including
the market in commodified sex, was not merely a by-product of urbanization
and modernization but an often-overlooked driver of them. It was an intrinsic
part of the rise of modern consumer culture and played a key role in how people
rethought their basic needs and desires.6
Hamburg’s “Wild West”
St. Pauli originated as a hilly borderland called Hamburger Berg, situated directly
west of Hamburg on the north shore of the Elbe river with unfettered access to
the North Sea sixty miles downstream. Officially belonging to Hamburg since
1258, but cut off from it by the city’s medieval wall, this liminal space constituted
Hamburg’s “wild west.” (It was only fully incorporated into Hamburg in 1876.)
Appearing in the earliest sources as the site of a thirteenth-century cloister for
Cistercian nuns, this unprotected zone was decreed off-limits to settlement in
1306. Apart from a bit role in the legend of pirate Klaus Störtebeker, St. Pauli
recedes from the historical record for the next three centuries, though chronicles
do note the existence of an inn (the Nobiskrug) on a spot where an altar for
pagan sacrifices once stood—an early indication of the ways particular spaces
here would serve as sites of unchristian excess for generation after generation.7
In 1606 the plague gave the area a new function as Hamburg’s dumping ground
for the sick and the insane, and settlement gradually opened up to anyone willing
to risk it. The city also began to force space-intensive, noxious manufacturies
to relocate here. Its main thoroughfare, the Reeperbahn, got its name from the
rope-makers who used its mile-long lanes to make their hempen wares. As the
connecting road between Hamburg and the new city of Altona,8 the Reeperbahn
made a convenient throughway for invading armies, who laid waste to the area
during the Thirty Years’ War and again in 1713. It also brought less malevolent
travelers, merchants, and foreign emissaries. Hamburg’s deep economic and
cultural ties with England in particular were forged in this period. Religious and
political refugees fled here from neighboring lands, as did displaced peasants.
Artisans could produce goods here without having to belong to a guild.9
A Brief History of Entertainment in St. Pauli 13
By the late eighteenth century, enterprising locals sowed the seeds of a

modern entertainment economy by setting up booths just outside the city
gate at Millerntor, selling refreshments and spectacles such as juggling and
animal wrangling. These improvised attractions delighted tourists and locals
from both sides of the wall. A description of the area from 1808 reveals how
intertwined maritime trade and entertainment had already become: “[Saint
Pauli’s] residents are largely boatmen and ship builders, artisans and the many
tavern and bordello owners who cater primarily to the needs of sailors, who
seek and find here the summum bonum of their pleasure in spirits, dancing,
and the embraces of saleable nymphs of the lowest classes.”10 Another
contemporary surely had the port in mind when he wrote, “Hamburg is a city
of the most brutal hedonism. Sensuality and merchandized vice have taken on
such a disgusting form here that they make Sodom-Berlin appear a bastion of
innocence. For Hamburgers, mammon is their god, the belly their prophet,
the beer barrel their gospel, and the pubis their altar.”11 This outpost of Freiheit
established its own moral code marked by hostility to conformity and a
Figure 1.1 Refreshment pavilion on the Reeperbahn, c. 1820.

penchant for violence, as well as solidarity in the face of tough conditions.12

Here popular entertainment and sexual commerce grew in tandem with urban
expansion and a capitalist economy that seemed to emerge naturally from the
physical landscape.13
The year 1806 brought occupation by the French, who strangled the north
German coastal economy with their Continental System (though smuggling
and prostitution still flourished) and flattened Hamburger Berg during
Napoleon’s last campaign in 1813–14.14 After his retreat, the area rebuilt yet
again. An extended period of peace allowed the harbor to take on its modern
aspect.15 One sign of things to come was the docking of the first steamship
at what became the Landungsbrücken in 1816. As trade, shipping, passenger
travel, and related industries proliferated along the waterfront of Hamburger
Berg and adjoining Altona, so did popular amusements in tents and booths on
the Reeperbahn’s Spielbudenplatz. One of the most successful was the Optisch
Belwider, where paying visitors could see panoramas, a facsimile of Lübeck’s
famed Totentanz painting, and animals wild and tame. Such attractions, meant
to be both titillating and educational, indicate the growing appetite for visual
spectacle among audiences drawn from both the higher and lower social orders.
Over the coming decades, city authorities recognized the economic potential
of amusements and granted rights for permanent structures with concession
licenses to theaters, circuses, and opera houses along the Reeperbahn. Germany’s
most famous zoo originated here in 1848 when fishmonger Gottfried Hagenbeck
began displaying live animals (he’d received a shipment of seals and decided to
exhibit rather than butcher them). His son Carl later built a menagerie on the
Spielbudenplatz where over a million customers also ogled human “primitives”
during Germany’s colonial period.16 Other bodies were also displayed in these
amusement halls, notably those of women who posed for “living pictures”—
recreated tableaux from famous paintings or scenes invented as an excuse to
show women in stages of undress.17 By the early twentieth century, the public’s
ever-growing appetite for visual spectacle was fed by some of Germany’s first
places to watch motion pictures.18
Entertainment, along with the dramatic expansion of the harbor in the
nineteenth century, spun off a host of businesses catering to visitors’ other desires,
including restaurants, bakeries, cafes, photography studios, and haberdasheries.
The city erected hundreds of fixed oil-burning streetlights by the 1840s, making
St. Pauli a pioneer in illumination—a status it maintained well into the next
century with dramatic electric, and later, neon lighting. At a time when this area
was still cut off from Hamburg by a gate that closed at sundown, torchbearers
made a living escorting residents who’d stayed out too late back across the border
for a fee.19
In 1833 this district noted more for its flouting of the Ten Commandments
was renamed St. Pauli after its main Lutheran church, reflecting Lutheranism’s
cultural and political dominance in Hamburg. But other sects also found
sanctuary. Just over St. Pauli’s lightly fortified border with Altona (whose streets
stitched together over time with St. Pauli’s), Catholics and Mennonites built
houses of worship in the Grosse Freiheit. North and West of the Reeperbahn
grew a Jewish community that originated with the arrival of Portuguese Sephardi
in 1590 and German Ashkenazi in the early 1600s. Jews initially unwelcome in
Hamburg found refuge in this neighborhood. By 1800 this Jewish community
was Germany’s largest. While most Jews eventually left for more comfortable
districts, their presence can still be detected in the Yiddishisms in local slang.
Jews here suffered many of the same indignities as Jews elsewhere in the German
lands, but by the nineteenth century they came to be tolerated and even accepted
because of their contributions to the economy.20
Indeed, money was the ultimate key to social standing in Hamburg, whose
elite was determined not by blood but wealth.21 Money and property ownership
were prerequisites for citizenship status, which few residents of St. Pauli could
afford. The nineteenth century saw the origins of what became a familiar tale:
the trade that passed through St. Pauli enriched Hamburg’s elite, but that wealth
rarely trickled down to St. Pauli itself. Moneyed merchants (Pfeffersäcke or
“pepper sacks”) built spacious villas and lush promenades further west along
the Elbe while St. Pauli (population 12,000 in 1840) became increasingly packed
with workers and others of the lower classes. Residents who could afford the fee,
regardless of where they were born, could attain some citizen rights after riots
in 1830 spurred the city to undertake limited reforms. During the revolutionary
year 1848, St. Paulianers again took to the streets demanding equal status within
Hamburg plus an end to the nightly closure of the city gates (the Torsperre); this
was granted in 1860 only when it appeared in Hamburg’s interest to dismantle
what was now a hindrance to commerce. But the area’s political volatility didn’t
fade. Hamburg’s liberal censorship practices made St. Pauli a haven for artists,
nonconformists, and radicals.22 After German unification in 1871, universal
male suffrage for the national parliament was undercut by Hamburg’s property-
based franchise, diluting the votes of St. Pauli residents in the local governing
bodies with the most power. Nonetheless, by 1890 Social Democrats (SPD) held
Hamburg’s three Reichstag seats. A 1896–97 strike by 15,000 dockworkers—one
of the Imperial Germany’s biggest—showed the area to be a bastion of the labor
movement. Indeed, SPD leader August Bebel declared Hamburg the “capital city
of German socialism,” the movement’s strength fed by the growth of a wage-
earning proletariat in districts like St. Pauli.23
Once the Torsperre was lifted, Hamburg burst its boundaries. St. Pauli
underwent a building boom in the last third of the nineteenth century as
urban planners erased old dwellings to make way for a more industrial harbor
and new warehouses for the toll-free zone Hamburg demanded in exchange
for joining the German Customs Union in 1888. Families driven out of these
areas and gentrifying Hamburg-Neustadt pushed into St. Pauli, which by 1894
contained 72,000 residents in little more than a square mile. However, the new
housing that sprang up to serve the swelling lumpenproletariat (as Friedrich
Engels dubbed the local populace24) was often just as crowded and unsanitary
as the old. Richard Evans’ study of the 1892 cholera epidemic shows just how
unsanitary: St. Pauli had among the fewest dwellings in Germany with their
own bathroom and most residents drew their water from unfiltered communal
taps. “Green men”—dockers covered in the dust of green rye meal—walked
the streets dirty for lack of washing facilities. The city’s effluvia spewed directly
into the Elbe at a sewer outlet on the St. Pauli-Altona line. Between 1885 and
1894 St. Pauli had some of Germany’s highest rates of tuberculosis and cholera.
While liberal reformers succeeded in constructing a few model housing
projects (such as the Jägerstrasse homes), and the cholera disaster brought
some sanitary reform, experts and policymakers would cast St. Pauli well
into the next century as a breeding ground for disease and the “degeneracy”
associated with it.25
Water powered the growth of Hamburg, by the 1890s Europe’s largest port.
It was less the production of goods than their movement that made Hamburg
Germany’s second largest industrial area. The harbor employed a range of skilled
and unskilled workers, from shipbuilders and welders to drivers, engineers, and
cooks. In the 1870s it became the center of Germany’s fishing industry, with buyers
and sellers congregating at the Fischmarkt. Fish processing employed many
unskilled laborers, particularly women, who earned little more than half their
male counterparts (such as the workers at northern St. Pauli’s slaughterhouses);
the Tollgreve smokery that still stands at Grosse Freiheit 70 (it smoked its last
fish in 1988) was typical of the small- to medium-sized factories that proliferated
here.26 Loading and unloading ships constituted another readily available form
of employment for thousands of unskilled workers. The men who performed
this rough, casual labor constituted an unruly counterpart to the respectable
working class settling down in other districts.
Ancillary trades employed thousands more. Next to Bremerhaven, Hamburg

was Germany’s main transit port for migrants. From 1850 to 1934 some 5 million
Europeans (only 40 percent of them from the Reich) exited through its port.27
Guesthouses, hotels, and other businesses arose catering to travelers. Migrants
also flowed inward. St. Pauli’s growth had always been driven by “outsiders”;
in the nineteenth century it was a key landing point for immigrants, making
Hamburg more conspicuously international than any other German city. The
language of liberalism that dominated Hamburg’s official presentation and self-
perception asserted that this flow of people and products fostered a healthy
internationalism that enhanced both the city’s and the nation’s strength.28
Rope and sail makers plied their trades in St. Pauli until the 1880s, when
Hamburg expropriated their land in one of many bursts of modernization. New
jobs in construction were generated as the Reeperbahn was laid with mains for
water and gas, widened and paved to accommodate modern traffic. This had the
effect of accelerating the centralization of entertainment establishments along
this mile-long corridor. Competition for customers spurred the building of
grand new buildings to replace older ones—a pattern repeated ever since in this
relentlessly modernizing city. At the head of the Reeperbahn arose the stately
Trichter, where respectable mixed-sex audiences enjoyed daily concerts in its
gardens and ballrooms or took in sweeping views of the harbor from its 100-foot-
tall funnel-shaped tower.29 Culmbacher’s Bierhaus, dating to 1866, inaugurated
the Reeperbahn’s love affair with the Bavarian-style beer hall. Ludwig’s
Concerthaus was built in the 1890s by a family that had sold Reeperbahn
amusements since Napoleon’s day. In 1875 arose the opulent Concerthaus
Concordia, which earned a coveted star from Baedeker’s travel guide; after
going bankrupt in 1890 it became a “people’s coffee hall,” then a quarantine
station during the cholera epidemic—a poignant example of how fortunes
were both won and lost along this boulevard of (broken) dreams.30 Alongside
the grand palaces and theaters catering to bourgeois audiences, working-class
beer halls did a booming trade, especially on paydays. St. Pauli was home to
several breweries and distilleries, as establishments were permitted to make
their own liquors before 1888. Informal, unlicensed cabarets and watering holes
also popped up in the courtyards and cellars of backstreet tenements. The list
of cafes, restaurants, cabarets, and theaters built during the go-go Gründerjahre
is long, their common goal to satisfy and stimulate a diverse public’s desire to
drink and dance.31 Even if Baedeker’s 1900 guide deemed St. Pauli’s amusements
typical of “Hamburg low life,” their mix of burlesque and serious theater still
attracted both middle- and working-class audiences. Bourgeois and proletarian
Figure 1.2 Operettenhaus on the Spielbudenplatz, 1905.
rubbed elbows in music halls and movie houses, where they perceived common
interests and similar reactions to exciting, arousing, or comic fare.32
Entertainment for some, work for others
By the turn of the twentieth century, as urban space settled into distinct districts
for business, bureaucracy, industrial production, and residential life, St. Pauli
solidified its role as Hamburg’s entertainment district.33 Feeding the public’s
appetite for spectacle created an economy of both service and manufacturing
jobs. This meant work for seamstresses and costume makers, artistes, and
stagehands. Performers of all descriptions and talent levels—from dancers and
singers to fakirs and human oddities—found work at local theaters, circuses,
and Tingel-Tangel, which offered song and dance with a flash of leg or décolleté.
Other performers used the streets or tenement courtyards as their stage. St. Pauli
became a world center of tattooing by 1900, with itinerant inkers and permanent
shops known to sailors far and wide. Until a 1911 national ban on tattooed
women, shows featuring them were popular in St. Pauli, combining colonial-
era fascination with the “primitive” (seen in the Völkerschaue displaying African
and Asian peoples) with the growing sexualization of spectacle along the
Reeperbahn.34
Other service jobs proliferated too, their practitioners serving as the interface
between the bourgeois and working classes.35 One such worker appeared in the
late nineteenth century, the Animierdame. Hired for her looks, she posed as
a sexually available customer whose job it was to induce male punters to buy
drink after drink (the bartender, in on the scam, served her sugar water). In
some establishments she was in fact available for paid assignations in private
booths; in others, she would sneak out after the customer had rung up a hefty
tab but before the implied promise of sex was kept. The Animierdame became
a fixture of St. Pauli’s entertainment economy for the next century, blurring the
line between customer and client, legitimate and illegitimate commerce, and
prostitute and “respectable” woman.
Another female worker who scrambled established categories was the
waitress. While taverns and small restaurants had long employed female family
members as servers, several Reeperbahn establishments introduced waitresses
as a gimmick at the turn of the twentieth century. The glittering Amerika-Bar
prominently featured twelve female bartenders dressed in white, while the
Eden beer hall employed a team of buxom waitresses. These women became
both desired and derided. Their novelty brought in business but male waiters
resented them, fearing they would drive down wages, and raised concerns about
“moral decline,” as it was clear female servers were hired for their sex appeal.36
Waitresses had been linked in the public mind with prostitutes since the early
modern period.37 Regulations in late-nineteenth-century Frankfurt and Leipzig
mandated that they be checked for venereal disease, while the waitress-prostitute
link persisted in the minds of Hamburg officials well into the twentieth century.38
Waitressing could indeed serve as a gateway to prostitution because earnings
were often meager and offers from customers tempting, though we should be
careful not to replicate the assumptions of moral watchdogs here.
Sex for hire aside, the expanding service sector in St. Pauli’s entertainment
economy and women’s presence in it altered the sexual landscape. Waitresses
were important actors in a broader renegotiation of sexual mores occurring in
this period in sites of commercialized popular culture. They, along with barmaids,
chorus girls, and actresses, were what historian Peter Bailey describes as “part
of a larger nexus of people and institutions that stood athwart the public-private
line” where a new form of “open but licit” sexuality could be displayed.39 The
server hired for her attractiveness was available to be looked at or talked to. She
offered men a taste of glamour and sex appeal, but also exhibited authority and
independence: “mistress of the situation,” she was not required to be invisible

or sexually available. Through the new service economy, sexuality increasingly
entered daily life but as “contained license,” forcing men and women to work
out new rules of interaction in these public spaces. While male sexual desire
remained the driver, businesses like the bar “provided the social space within
which a more democratized, heterosocial world of sex and sociability was being
constituted.” Arguing that “history is made in pubs too,” Bailey correctly asserts
that these “less august branches of capitalism converted sexuality from anathema
to resource, and from resource to commodity, in the development of a modern
sexualized consumerism.”40
The figure that most embodied this new sexualized consumerism was
the female prostitute—St. Pauli’s most iconic service worker, rendered in
postcards, travel guides, and musical comedy as the lovably bawdy “joy girl”
(Freudenmädchen).41 Prostitutes were fixtures of the local scene since the origins
of the harbor itself; “moral histories” date the first “houses of joy” to the thirteenth
century.42 By the time of Jonas Ludwig von Hess’ 1787–97 chronicle, Hamburger
Berg was known far and wide for prostitution despite a Senate ban in 1732.
Sailors were routinely assumed to be the main customer base, though clients in
fact came from across the social spectrum, from businessmen and students to
farmers.43 The French occupation brought a system of regulation. In 1807 the
Hamburg Senate allowed prostitution, provided the seller established residency
in a bordello, whose owner (often a woman) had to ensure each lodger was
regularly examined for venereal disease by a surgeon. This system came under
police control and prevailed more or less intact into the 1920s. When imperial
law banned bordellos in 1876, here they were simply renamed “lodging houses.”
Prostitution was locally tolerated in the interest of public health as long as the
women confined themselves to certain streets and registered with the police
(unregistered prostitutes, whose numbers waxed and waned depending on the
state of the economy, were vulnerable to arrest under penal code §361.6).44
Prostitution grew in tandem with modernization. More shipping meant
more seamen and travelers, while improved transport brought women from
surrounding lands seeking work, some of whom ended up as registered or part-
time prostitutes in a place where earnings were the best in the field.45 Sex for hire
was also stimulated by the tourist industry, whose modern form took shape after
the 1892 cholera epidemic. While not openly advocating prostitution, guide
books referred to St. Pauli as “Sankt Liederlich” (saint licentious) and left little
doubt as to what curious travelers could find there.46 Indeed, prostitution grew in
lockstep with St. Pauli’s broader entertainment economy, as many male visitors
Figure 1.3 Map of St. Pauli in 1909.
wanted more from a night out than just a meal or a show. Davidstrasse south
of the Reeperbahn housed dozens of establishments for meeting prostitutes.
For example, since the 1820s, at the Four Lions suggestively clothed women
displayed themselves on the street behind a fence; the first story had a dance
floor where contact could also be made, while “dancers” rented rooms upstairs
to service customers. Similar arrangements prevailed at some of the “Viennese
cafes” that sprang up in the 1890s. Dance halls could also serve as places to
meet prostitutes in the guise of “legitimate” entertainment, as racy music and
strong libations put punters in the mood.47 Sexual commerce provided work
for an amazingly broad range of individuals and businesses, with the result that
prostitutes themselves were not outcast but integrated into the economic, social
and cultural fabric of St. Pauli.48
“No breaks during the break!”
By the First World War, St. Pauli had an international reputation for large-
scale amusements that appealed to broad cross-class audiences.49 But the war,
specifically the British blockade, devastated an area whose fortunes depended
on trade. The number of entertainment venues shrank under what one
desperate owner called the “poor business situation.”50 Away from the bright
lights of the Reeperbahn, St. Paulianers suffered dire shortages of food and
fuel like other urban Germans of lesser means.51 Women and youths rioted
for food, particularly during the ghastly winter of 1916–17. Plundering and
black marketeering brought a heavy police presence, heightening tensions in a
district already known for radical politics. When mutinying sailors sparked the
German revolution of 1918, St. Pauli embraced them. On 6 November, 40,000
people rallied at the Heiligengeistfeld in support of the workers’ and soldiers’
soviets while revolutionaries occupied the main train station, the Elbtunnel, and
torpedo boats in the harbor. While Hamburg quickly transitioned to democratic
rule (with the SPD winning 51.3 percent there in the republic’s first elections
in January 1919), St. Pauli remained a hotbed of unrest. Continued food
scarcity generated all-out revolt on June 26, 1919, when crowds at Hamburg’s
Rathaus lynched nineteen soldiers sent to keep order. In St. Pauli and Altona,
Freikorps commanded by war hero Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck combed through
tenements to flush out insurgents. Turmoil persisted into the early 1920s, now
fueled by galloping inflation. In June 1920 bands of young men stormed up the
Reeperbahn, looting shops and reselling goods at what they deemed fair prices.
Such events form a stark reminder that in the shadow of the Reeperbahn’s bright
lights, thousands of locals and immigrants led marginal lives. St. Pauli remained
a place of sharp social contrasts whose volatility struck fear into the hearts of
respectable citizens and reformers.52
That same charged atmosphere attracted flâneurs and sensation-seekers, who
helped the amusement economy rebound. Unlike the maritime economy, which
was hobbled for years by the Versailles Treaty53, tourism and entertainment
snapped back quickly, feeding off the public’s desire to forget—if only for
a night—a brutal war and an uncertain present. Film Kurier wrote of the
Reeperbahn, “Here café stands next to restaurant, cabaret next to cinema, theater
to Tingel-Tangel, wax museum to magic show—a screaming, colorful mélange.”54
A tourist guide from the inflation year 1922 described the area as teeming with
foreign visitors living by the old sailors’ maxim, “What use is money if you hang
onto it!”55 One measure of St. Pauli’s popularity was the presence of over a dozen
movie theaters on and around the Reeperbahn.56 Another was the dance boom,
fed by a 1926 ordinance that made it easier for all kinds of establishments—pubs,
cafes, even department stores—to obtain dance licenses.57 Live music, which had
always been the backdrop to amusements, became a central attraction; by the
late 1920s some 19,000 musicians and singers worked in Hamburg’s dance halls,
many of which were in St. Pauli.58 Homegrown acts like the Wolf Brothers drew
big audiences with comic songs in local dialect, while musicians from American
passenger ships brought new jazz sounds. Whether the Weimar Republic’s
fortunes were up or down, St. Pauli’s amusement economy hummed.
Berlin’s nightlife has come to symbolize Weimar-era decadence, but St.
Pauli’s was just as notorious in its day. The epitome of this was the Alkazar, a
grand varieté at Reeperbahn 108–14. It arose on a site that had by turns been a
hemp warehouse in the 1600s, the Neue Dröge eatery, a dance hall popular with
prostitutes, and the Hamburg Bierpalast. In 1925, clerk-turned-dance teacher
Arthur Wittkowski created what became the strip’s most famous attraction.
Promising “a sensation every fifteen minutes and no breaks during the break,” the
Alkazar offered a continuous program of jazzy numbers, acrobatic feats, dancing
waters, and elaborate choreography featuring topless showgirls. Here Cilly de
Rheydt invented modern striptease in Germany and Anita Berber performed
“dances of eroticism and ecstasy.”59 The Black Revue “direct from Broadway”
brought Billy Thompson’s Negerkapelle, the Chocolate Kiddies, and “the black
naked ballet.” The Alkazar set a new standard for adult entertainment; imitators
made topless dancing common along the Reeperbahn by 1928.60
Indeed, the entertainment economy as a whole reached new levels of
sophistication, professionalization, and internationalization during Weimar.
Hamburg, which had long welcomed foreign visitors, now courted them
actively, its tourism bureau churning out materials in many languages. Tourist
publications sold St. Pauli as an amusement Eldorado where one could experience
“unusual” things like Italian food.61 Films, postcards, and “alternative” guides
played up the exotic angle. Ludwig Jürgens’ 1930 guide spotlighted St. Pauli’s
hippodromes, tattoo parlors, and “mysterious” Chinese quarter. Pimps and
prostitutes formed part of the colorful scenery, as did the “dark types” that
congregated at the “thieves’ den” Finkenbude.62 Flashy gangsters showed their
muscle as the port became second only to London’s Whitechapel as a European
locus of organized crime and the trade in cocaine, hashish, and opium. Salacious
crime stories, as well as ostensibly more serious reportage like Ernst Engelbrecht
and Leo Hiller’s Kinder der Nacht, titillated readers with tales of secret opium
dens where delicious dreams could end in robbery—or worse.63
Many of these less refined amusements were clustered in a side street off the
Reeperbahn, the Grosse Freiheit (“great freedom”).64 Its name derived from
the freedom of trade, production, and religion granted in 1610–11 by Count
Ernst von Schaumburg und Holstein-Pinneberg in a bid to attract settlers.65 It
developed its own entertainment and sexual commerce in the eighteenth century.
By the 1920s it attracted urban explorers seeking Orientalist spectacles and more
risqué shows. Hans Harbeck’s “what’s not in Baedeker’s” guide spotlighted its
“mix of people, white and colored, throng[ing] this narrow street” where “the
Chinese with their smiling countenances . . . exude an unsettling air.”66 Here
“the collarless proletarian and the luxury car owner” rubbed elbows in “pocket
Broadway” theaters like Neu-China or the Ballhaus Cheong Sing. Amid the
“wild heap” of beer houses and cabarets stood a baroque Catholic Church, “a
striking Rembrandtian vision of light and darkness.”67 Such contrasts were key to
the Grosse Freiheit’s allure. Visitors came to experience the frisson generated by
encounters between black and white, foreign and native, licit and illicit. Colonial-
era exhibitions of non-white peoples had given way in the 1920s to slumming
among Chinese and Africans (though establishments like Käppen Haase’s pub,
a “museum of colony and Heimat” displaying objects collected by a sea captain,
testify to the ongoing allure of colonial exhibition).68 While St. Pauli’s long history
of openness to outsiders meant a degree of tolerance toward them there, it also
re-produced these people as objects in a colorful tableau to be consumed by the
European visitor—not necessarily a challenge to prevailing racial hierarchies.
If St. Pauli increasingly sold itself as a locus of the exotic, it also served as
a showcase for theatrical expressions of local identity. Its unofficial anthem,
“Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins,” was written in 1912 by Ralph
Arthur Roberts (born Robert Arthur Schönherr) in the voice of a sailor with
money in his pocket and a Mädel on his arm, declaiming in dialect the joys
of the Reeperbahn after midnight. Still sung in local bars to this day, the song
became the basis for several movies, most famously in 1954 starring local son
Hans Albers.69 The Wolf Brothers were another example of performing in
St. Pauli. This trio began on St. Pauli’s vaudeville stages in the 1890s, changing their
surname from Isaac to circumvent anti-Semitism. Hamburg’s musical answer to
Heinrich Zille’s drawings of proletarian life in Berlin, the Wolfs sang ditties in
plattdeutsch celebrating local characters like Zitronenjette and the “Jung mit’n
Tüdelband.” Silent films and recordings spread their popularity across German-
speaking Europe and Scandinavia. Success allowed them to buy the Neue
Operettentheater on the Spielbudenplatz in 1924.70 The Wolfs and Albers were
part of a larger cultural transformation that turned local, proletarian figures into
stock characters for cross-class audiences, who were themselves moving away
from traditional culture but enjoyed it repackaged as entertainment. Already
in the 1920s we see in this the workings of nostalgia for a world disappearing
in the face of modernity. The city and its entertainment entrepreneurs had a
sharp instinct for packaging this St. Pauli, using new media like film and radio to
present old, comforting themes—and in the process cementing clichés.71
Indeed, writer Kurt Tucholsky complained already in 1927 that the area was
becoming clichéd and commodified.72 Other critics, however, only saw ever-
increasing excess. The loudest of these was Hermann Abel, publisher of Abel’s
Nachtpost, a catalogue of complaint about the nightlife he saw ruining Hamburg
and the nation as a whole.73 It might well have seemed that the streets were awash
with sex, as topless shows became commonplace and Hamburg’s abolition of
brothels in 1922 temporarily dispersed over 800 sex workers.74 Abel fulminated
against St. Pauli’s “wild lust for the flesh” and the “scandal” of “scantily clad
women doing the most depraved dances.”75 He argued that sexy shows led to
child molestation and homosexuality. He reserved particular ire for ostensibly
respectable establishments like the Kaffeehaus Menke or the Trichter where
customers could make contact with prostitutes: “Many a landlord survives by
turning his establishment into a warming hall for whores.”76 Such connections
were in fact made in these places, but so were more innocent contacts; Victoria
Harris’ study of the prostitute milieu shows “the blurriness of the line between
prostitution and ‘normal’ interaction between men and women” in this period.77
That blurriness infuriated Abel, as even the police did not have a clear idea where
to draw the line. The 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases decriminalized
prostitution in most locales. Local social workers advocated treatment over
punishment, while police tolerated known sites of solicitation and seemed
uncertain about how much nudity to allow in nightclub shows.78 Locals largely
accepted the sexual economy—to which many of them were economically
linked, directly or indirectly—as part of the neighborhood fabric, provided it
did not disrupt their own routines. Abel did not. When his rage erupted one
night in 1927 into a fistfight with Wittkowski in front of the Alkazar, the court
sided with Wittkowski’s plea of self-defense while Abel was pilloried in the press.
The incident speaks volumes about the operations of St. Pauli: here Abel was
seen as a noisy crank, unpopular even among anti-prostitution activists, while
Wittkowski, whose businesses contributed mightily to the local tax base, enjoyed
good relations with the authorities—at least until the Nazis came to power.
The Nazi era: Sin under wraps
In the early 1930s, as the Depression roiled Germany, St. Pauli’s entertainment
economy struggled too, though some businesses actually expanded.79 But the
Nazis’ rise was bound to bring change. Streets along the St. Pauli-Altona border
had long seen brawls between rival gangs—these now became politicized as
local pubs took on Nazi or Communist affiliations.80 St. Pauli was a Communist
Party (KPD) redoubt during Weimar; even in the March 1933 election, held
under conditions of severe repression of the left, the Nazis scored but 35 percent
there while the KPD won 32 percent and the SPD 24 percent. A Nazi-era social
atlas deemed St. Pauli “a socially decaying district among the most left-radical
in Hamburg, where the inferior spirit of the morally crippled has long had a
foothold.”81
Tough talk about “cleaning up” St. Pauli flew around during the first year
of Nazi rule in Hamburg under Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann and Mayor Carl
Krogmann. Black musicians had already been banned from working in Germany
since summer 1932 by decree of the Papen administration.82 “Red” streets where
brownshirts once feared to tread were now bedecked with swastikas. Architect
Konstanty Gutschow drew up plans to level swaths of St. Pauli and Altona for
a massive high-rise Party headquarters and marching grounds.83 Under the
auspices of the Reichstag fire decree, in 1933 the Interior Ministry propagated
tighter regulations on bars, theaters, burlesque halls, and public baths. They
instructed police to interdict more forcefully the sale or display of “youth-
endangering” publications. No more nude displays or performances that even
suggested nudity. No more beauty contests with contestants only in bathing
suits. Dancing licenses could be revoked if dancing led to “immorality.” Police
were also to be on the lookout for the advertisement or sale of contraceptives
and abortifacients. Establishments known to have bordellos or be frequented
by persons “known to commit unnatural sexual relations” (a phrase open to
a range of interpretations) should be shuttered. To protect their morality,
all female employees of amusement establishments were to register with the
police and their wages had to be sufficient to prevent them moonlighting as
Animierdamen.84
The state also amended existing law on prostitution. In May 1933 Hamburg
outlawed street solicitation and returned to a police-run brothel system
that corralled prostitutes into a small number of gated streets (in St. Pauli,
Herbertstrasse). The idea was to protect public health and restore order by
eliminating prostitutes’ visibility, though prostitution itself remained legal and
deployed by the state for its own racial agenda. Police clawed back their power
in this sphere, although social workers (most of them female) also played key
roles in disciplining prostitutes or women and girls deemed in danger of falling
into sex work. The language of “youth protection” (Jugendschutz)—of which
we will hear more in Chapter 5—became a rationale for pushing prostitution
behind gates, rounding up hundreds of women and male hustlers, and policing
the streets to keep youths out of St. Pauli. While some of this had Weimar-era
roots, the Nazis significantly ratcheted up punishments for women charged
with unregistered solicitation or merely frequently changing sexual partners.
They could be put under the guardianship of a social worker who had the
power to order detention, “rehabilitation through labor” at a penal complex, or
sterilization.85
The new regime also brought intensified surveillance of gay men. Even before
punishments for same-sex activity between men were expanded in 1935, on
February 23, 1933 Operation Clean Reich forced the closure of gay bars across
Germany. While Neustadt, not St. Pauli, was Hamburg’s center of gay life then,
the Nazi justice system ground up hundreds of men for soliciting or seeking
sexual partners in St. Pauli’s bars, streets, transient hotels, parks, and public
toilets. Lumped in with homosexual men, performers in drag and transvestites
faced the terrible prospect of the concentration camp or castration.86
Nazi racial policy left other scars on St. Pauli. Even before 1933 little was
left of St. Pauli’s Jewish community, as most Jews had long decamped for more
comfortable neighborhoods.87 Nazi policies hastened the decline of a prominent
institution of that community, the Israelitisches Krankenhaus; Rabbi Joseph
Carlebach held the last services in the hospital’s Orthodox synagogue in August
1939.88 Historian Frank Bajohr’s work lists only a handful of Jewish-owned
retail stores on or around the Reeperbahn, which were liquidated or sold during
Hamburg’s Aryanization drive in 1938–39.89 The Wolf Brothers sold the Neue
Operettentheater under pressure to party member Gustav Pohl. They were also
banned from performing except in Jewish variety shows, though some of their
songs (which were quite compatible with a German national sensibility) had
become such a part of vernacular culture they were still performed by others.
Most of the Wolf family fled to Shanghai or New York, though James perished in
1943 at Theresienstadt; Ludwig, who had long distanced himself from Judaism
and married a non-Jewish German, survived the Third Reich in a house for
“privileged mixed marriages.”90 Jews who owned movie theaters were pressured
to sell after the founding of the National Socialist Theater Owners’ Cell in April
1933. Isidor and Ada Lachmann reluctantly sold their Union-Theater on the
Spielbudenplatz in 1935; the new owners allowed Ada to work at the candy
counter until 1939.91
Nazi racial policy forever changed other lives in St. Pauli too. As part of the
campaign against “asocials” the city tore down the Finkenbude, a notorious
flophouse where the most destitute congregated. The Nazis also targeted
Hamburg’s small Chinese population. They had originally come in the late
nineteenth century as ship stokers, then a new wave of immigrants after 1919
put down roots in Schmuckstrasse off the Grosse Freiheit. Their “mysterious”
ways inspired more curiosity than harassment in St. Pauli, a place accustomed
to foreign faces. Even relationships between Chinese men and German women
were not terribly spectacular here. But the Nazi state was not so benign. Asian
seamen lost their jobs and the law forbade new marriages with Germans.
Sensational reports in the Nazified press accused the Chinese of drug dealing
and espionage. At the height of war in May 1944, all Chinese in Hamburg were
arrested on suspicion of spying for England, put to forced labor, and eventually
deported.92
This overview might lead the reader to conclude that Hamburg was anti-Nazi,
but in fact there was no shortage of locals who embraced the regime, nor did
Hitler hate Hamburg. In 1937 the regime named Hamburg one of five “Führer
cities”: Nazi planners, led by Gutschow, envisioned a grandiose new harbor that
would proclaim Hamburg’s status as gateway to the Reich and project German
power to visitors arriving by ship. To facilitate this, authorities created “Greater
Hamburg” by absorbing adjacent localities, including Altona, increasing the
city’s area by 80 percent.
Harbor infrastructure construction and rearmament created jobs after
1933, though the collapse of world trade plus Nazi autarchic economic policies
saddled Hamburg with the Reich’s highest unemployment rate.93 Thus St. Pauli’s
economy relied increasingly on tourism and leisure, portrayed in Nazi-era
propaganda as the reward for hard day’s work. In 1938 district leader Johannes
Häfker proposed a beautification program (never implemented) to rejuvenate
St. Pauli’s reputation as “a healthy, clean, pulsating, modern epicenter of German
culture.”94 But Germanness in Hamburg still accommodated internationalism,
even under the Nazis. Official guides downplayed sex and sleaze in favor of
St. Pauli’s bracing sea air and status as “gateway to the world.” Xenophobic
words and deeds were kept in check not only by local businessmen but party
leaders, who recognized that attacks on foreigners were bad for business and
for Hamburg’s image. While Nazi demagogues might rant elsewhere against
“cosmopolitanism,” here it was an asset marketed as “exceptionalism.”
Nazism did not fundamentally alter much of what went on in St. Pauli’s
entertainment economy, nor was entertainment incompatible with building
Nazism at the local level.95 Local businessmen jockeyed to get a piece of the
action. August Stranz invoked his status as an Alte Kämpfer in a 1935 request
to the local Gau for a license to re-open the Zauberflöte tavern. A Labor Front
official assented, noting that this would provide “bread and wages” for thirty
workers, though Stranz didn’t have the skills to keep the place open long.96
Wilhelm Menke, whose Kaffeehaus was once derided by Abel as a “warming hall
for whores,” supported Stranz’s proposal as head of the local business association;
his “Heil Hitler” salutation shows Menke’s own willingness to play ball with the
Nazis.97 Elsewhere in the annals of opportunism, Johannes Quast, owner of the
Rheinterassen café in the Trichter, divorced his Jewish wife.98 The Association of
Dance Hall Owners angled for recognition of their “years-long struggle against
the culturally degrading activities of the former Marxist regime”—a reference
to their lobbying against the liberal 1926 dance license policy, which undercut
their monopoly. Their correspondence with the city’s trade agency (now
staffed by party members) paints them driving out “amateurs” and fighting the
proliferation of “non-German music” in the interest of protecting youth and
elevating St. Pauli’s “broken down” reputation.99 These examples show how some
business owners dressed their economic interests in Nazi garb, using German
culture as a pretext to banish competition from a crowded marketplace.
St. Pauli’s most famous venue, the Alkazar, initially seemed to have
transitioned smoothly into the new regime. Wittkowski was a local celebrity and
ads from early 1933 show no performance changes with Hitler coming to power.
Yet Wittkowski soon ran into trouble. First he was cited for not complying
with a dance ban on a national day of mourning in March. Complaints then
mounted over noise and unpaid taxes. In 1935 his business license was revoked
and, facing bankruptcy, in 1936 he sold the Alkazar to party member Georg
Leopold, who later changed its name to Allotria (Alkazar being the site of a
Francoist defeat during the Spanish Civil War). What went wrong? Popular
sources and Wittkowski himself claimed he was persecuted for opposing the
regime, but the reality is more complex. He had applied (unsuccessfully) for
Nazi party membership in 1931, telling a judge in 1941 that he was an early SA
supporter.100 In 1943 he groveled (again, unsuccessfully) for a license to open a
new establishment where “soldiers could get a decent meal after 9pm.”101 In other
words, he was an opportunist like so many others. But a lifestyle that embodied
Weimar decadence, as well as his fiery temper, prevented his acceptance by the
new regime. Disgruntled employees informed on him, alleging crooked dealings
and sexual harassment of both male and female workers. A Nazi senator went
after him in summer 1933 over a villa he was building on the cliffs at nearby
Rissen, a gaudy eyesore for his decadent parties whose shoddy construction
symbolized “the sins of a rotten [Weimar] system.”102 When Wittkowski sued
the senator for slander (as he had often done to past enemies), the police began
compiling accusations against him of homosexuality, sado-masochism, pimping,
and bribery of “Marxist” officials. Rumors that he was a Jew (he was not)
circulated in the press and on the street. After impulsively hanging out a sign at
his Rissen villa reading “Volk ohne Recht” (people without rights), Wittkowski
was arrested in 1934 and spent four months at Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp.
His career was all but over.103
Wittkowski missed out on the boom that came with Hamburg’s new role as
home port for the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) ships. The
popular KdF program made leisure travel affordable to average Germans who
were racially and politically “clean.” Participants who came via KdF cruises spent
time and money in St. Pauli, where they could recreate the jolly camaraderie
depicted in popular movies and songs. Conventions and celebrations of the
harbor’s 750th birthday also filled restaurants and hotels. By day respectable
visitors could enjoy coffee and cake with scenic harbor views.104
Indeed, for many the Nazi era meant “good times.” Willi Bartels, whose path
to becoming St. Pauli’s most successful landlord began in 1935 when he became
manager of his father’s Jungmühle cabaret in the Grosse Freiheit, recalled a
“golden age”: “The Nazis didn’t make much nonsense here—the [entertainment]
mile was a kind of grey zone.”105 One could find in St. Pauli what was forbidden
elsewhere: hot jazz, dancing behind blackout curtains, abundant food and drink.
Beer halls were packed. Nightclubs still featured female nudity as authorities
either ignored or were simply unable to enforce the 1933 rules. The Allotria’s
offerings were still erotic, while the Jungmühle lured punters with swimming
swans and bathing beauties, a hunger artist, and St. Pauli’s first female mud
wrestlers. Sexual vices remained available for those with the means and interest,
even outside Herbertstrasse.106 Abortions could be had despite the threat of
draconian punishments.107 While shows of tattooed performers were illegal,
tattoo artists like Christian Wahrlich could barely keep up with demand from
soldiers and SS men seeking permanent markers of their affiliations.108 Theaters
and cinemas bustled with entertainment largely devoid of “Nazi” content,
which had its own political function of binding the masses to the regime by
creating positive associations and sensations of pleasure.109 Ultimately, St. Pauli’s
entertainment economy helped normalize life in the Third Reich.
But entertainment also remained stubbornly immune to attempts to
instrumentalize it completely, as in the case of Swing music. Hamburg’s role as
center of the “Swing youth” subculture has been well documented.110 In 1935,
the regime banned American Swing as “degenerate” and denounced hot swing
as war approached. Yet “Germanized” Swing flourished as the line between the
forbidden and the acceptable was in practice quite fuzzy. The center of Hamburg’s
Swing scene was Café Heinze. Built on the site of Ludwig’s Concerthaus and the
Trichter, Heinze’s was an art deco showplace with a dance floor lit from below.
This fashionable spot hosted the major European big bands.111 Here the Party
loyalist, the unpolitical conformist, and the rebellious Swing kid (provided they
were at least eighteen) could find themselves on the same dance floor.
The Reich Music Chamber scrutinized set lists and band personnel at such
high-profile nightspots. But tucked away on St. Pauli’s fringes were niches where
those in the know could hear Count Basie and Duke Ellington even during the
war, thanks to the portable gramophone. One such place was Cap Norte, tucked
away in the basement of Grosse Freiheit 36. Several Swing Youths credit Cap
Norte for their initiation into the jazz cult around 1940.112 The bar came onto the
Gestapo’s radar in March 1942:
Around the record player stood adolescent Swing-types of the worst sort. They
“animaled” and “niggered” with wild gestures to English records and drank lots
of alcohol. [Two days later] when we entered at 8:00 we saw about ten youths,
best described as cheap imitations of Swing Youth . . . . In a neighboring room
were many members of the Wehrmacht. The musical numbers (played on a
gramophone) were exclusively modern dance hits. Along with German records
could be heard English ones. . . . The second night there were youths with their
girlfriends and soldiers. . . . In the course of the evening there arrived a few
foreign workers (Danish or Dutch) who winked knowingly and called attention
to themselves with their gestures.113
This report led Gestapo agents and the head of Hamburg’s Volkskulturkammer
to raid the bar; they seized forty-two records of “negroid” English-American
“enemy music” and closed Cap Norte. Proprietor Luise Weise appealed to
the police in several letters. She’d been running the bar, she wrote, since her
husband was called up in 1940. She had to offer music to attract customers, so
she played records in her husband’s collection. “If I allowed [forbidden] records
to be played I did so out of ignorance. I am a good German and a thoroughly
nationally-minded woman” whose husband was serving on the Eastern front.
She even enclosed a list of records she owned and asked for guidance on
which were acceptable, signing off with the Hitler greeting. Their “Heil Hitler”
notwithstanding, Weise’s letters (which included the subtly defeatist complaint
that the war had gone on longer than expected), plus the fact that her bar was
known among Swing fans, suggest she was no Nazi. The authorities denied her
appeals “in light of the current fight against Swing youth,” a fight that shuttered
150 establishments by spring 1943.114 The Nazis were increasingly alarmed
at their inability to control the movements in St. Pauli of young people who,
whether or not they consciously rejected Nazism, used music and other products
of the mass culture industry to maintain a semblance of individuality in the face
of a totalizing state and its inhumane war.115
That war slammed into St. Pauli in May 1940 as the British began bombing
installations of shipping, oil refining, and U-boat construction. For the next five
years Hamburgers spent on average every other night in an air raid shelter. On
July 25, 1943 British and American bombers unleashed the ten-day Operation
Gomorrah: at least 34,000 people died in those raids and the resulting firestorm—
to that point the deadliest attack on a German city.116 One-third of St. Pauli’s
buildings were hit, including Café Heinze, the Trichter dome, and part of the
Jungmühle. Those nights of bombing drove home how helpless Hamburgers
were—knowledge that some chose to drown in St. Pauli’s remaining functioning
nightclubs. As soon as the lights came back on, Bartels resumed serving
drinks, now mostly colored sugar water as alcohol and other foodstuffs became
increasingly scarce.117 Survivors danced and drank and screwed as if each time
was their last. They crowded into the Reeperbahn’s only operational movie
Figure 1.4 Ruins of the Trichter site on the Reeperbahn, 1945.

house, Knopf ’s, until Goebbels ordered all theaters closed in the name of Total
War.118 As British troops drew ever closer in 1945, the authorities ordered slave
laborers to erect tank traps on the Reeperbahn. These went unused, however, as
Gauleiter Kaufmann and local commanders defied Hitler’s order to fight to the
last man.119 Still, by the time Hamburg surrendered on May 3, 60 percent of the
Reeperbahn lay in ruins.
Getting a piece of the peace
The war now over, Hamburg harbor lay eerily quiet, its massive wharves charred
tangles of rubble lapped by the Elbe. The “gateway to the world” seemed shut.120
But Zero Hour was no break for St. Paulianers, particularly the women who
continued the struggle to feed themselves and what remained of their families.
The return of those who’d fled the air raids, an influx of refugees from the east,
and the collapse of normal channels of production and distribution left Hamburg
crowded and badly provisioned for the next three years. To give one measure, an
adult woman in Hamburg subsisted on 1180 calories a day in spring 1946, less
than her counterparts in the American or Soviet occupation zones.121
Despite Hamburg’s long-standing ties with England, their occupiers initially
cut them no breaks. The British set up rigid harbor checkpoints and declared
nearby farm communities off-limits in a vain attempt to prevent starving
urbanites from “hamstering.” In response, desperate dockers and other workers
staged strikes and asserted their right to pilfer, while over 100,000 people staged
a massive hunger demonstration at the Rathaus on May 9, 1947. Meanwhile,
Hamburg’s black market, centered in St. Pauli, flourished.122
The poor health of their own economy and the costs of occupation soon
compelled the British to transition from punishment and denazification to
helping their zone regain self-sufficiency. Thus they promoted rebuilding of the
harbor, removing thousands of wrecks and modernizing communications and
other technologies that would eventually pave the way for container shipping.
Life on shore also resumed its natural state of motion. Under Provisional Mayor
Rudolf Petersen and his successor, Max Brauer (elected in 1946 after the SPD
won 43 percent in Hamburg’s first post-Nazi elections), rubble clearance and
most urgent repairs to public equipment were completed by 1948.123 Bourgeois
experts, bureaucrats (many fired for Nazi affiliations in 1945 but back on the
job by 1948), and the new city leaders united in their desire to overcome—and
forget, as Petersen plainly stated124—the recent past. They wrapped themselves
in Hamburg’s traditional self-image as a bastion of internationalism within

Germany, now with an even stronger orientation to Britain and the Atlantic.125
This dovetailed perfectly with the maritime spirit and commerce, “the idea that
rules the broad spectrum of life here,” as Wolfgang Berkefeld wrote in 1952.126
The preamble to Hamburg’s new constitution declared that this “world harbor
city” had a special mission to the German people to be a mediator in the spirit
of peace between all regions of the world. This was reiterated in promotional
materials and official ceremonies that reworked Hamburg’s attributes into a new
model for the post-fascist nation: industrious and open-minded, an old place
with a young heart and a healthy sense of fun.127
Rebuilding Hamburg also meant rebuilding St. Pauli. Bombing had destroyed
one-third of its housing, though residential streets north of the Reeperbahn were
less damaged than those closer to the harbor. Residents with intact dwellings
took in displaced family, neighbors, even strangers. Those without squatted in
cellars beneath the Reeperbahn or in air raid shelters, such as the massive bunker
on the Heiligengeistfeld, where the British put up Quonset huts that kept out the
rain, if not the cold. The city would attempt to use new housing policy to expunge
St. Pauli’s stubborn “asocial” element, clean up its hodgepodge of mixed-used
buildings, and decrease its population density in the name of urban reform.128
Under such conditions of dire need, entertainment might seem a low priority.
Yet entertainment sites in St. Pauli were among the first to rebuild, something
clearly promoted by both British and local authorities.129 While the British
initially set a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew and closed theaters to the public,
by summer 1945 they recognized the stabilizing power of entertainment and
reversed course. For example, cinemas reopened (provided the light bulbs hadn’t
been stolen), the price of admission a piece of firewood or coal. A public deprived
of Hollywood fare thronged in. St. Pauli could even see a fictional version of
itself in the box-office smash, Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7, starring Hans Albers.130
Swing music similarly burst back into the open in May 1945, even though
the British didn’t fully rescind a dancing ban until December. Hans Massaquoi,
a working-class Swing kid during the war, remembers these days as particularly
liberating: son of a German mother and a Liberian father, his racial identity
suddenly transformed from liability to asset. His skin color helped him win a
spot in the house band at the (re-renamed) Alkazar, as “finding someone who
looks like an American and can play the saxophone [wasn’t] easy in Germany”
then.131 There he earned a healthy 610DM a month and made contact with
African-American GIs and merchant marines who exposed him to marijuana
and provided access to black market commodities.
Other entertainment sites didn’t wait for permission or a settled economy to

begin rebuilding. As Bartels put it, “The more miserable the times, the hungrier
for entertainment the public. They were set free, now joined by occupation
soldiers, lots of seamen, black marketeers, tons of hookers—all on the make,
grabbing their piece of the peace.”132 Improvised cabarets sprang up in the ruins
while structures that had served as entertainment locales for decades, like the
Trichter, tried to rebuild.133 The black market provisioned all of it, with only
selective British enforcement. For example, Wahrlich, who ran a bar next to
his famous tattoo studio, was one of the first to get real beer in 1946 because
his tattoos were beloved by British soldiers, right up to General Montgomery
(not to mention ex-German soldiers seeking to camouflage incriminating Nazi
tattoos).134 Cashing in on his own connections, Bartels snapped up real estate
along the Grosse Freiheit, enhancing his portfolio of nightclubs, eateries, and
apartments. He bartered horses from the Jungmühle hippodrome (slaughtered
for their meat) for Rhine wine. When the British fined him 2000DM for watering
down the alcohol, he took it in stride.135 Wittkowski was not so lucky: in 1946
he petitioned to get back the Alkazar, which he argued had been improperly
expropriated. After initially approving his request, the British abruptly rescinded
it after police found in his office cigarettes and bolts of silk destined for the
black market. Evidence that he’d joined the Nazi party in 1939 sealed his fate:
Wittkowski was deemed “neither politically, morally or criminally suited” to
retake possession now or in the future.136 He never recovered his business and
died a forgotten man in 1960.
Perhaps the most naked manifestation of the black market was the exploding
sexual barter economy, as Germans’ desperate material condition collided with
a dramatic upswing in indiscriminate, often impersonal sexual activity at the
end of the Third Reich.137 Widespread across postwar Germany, in St. Pauli
this was exacerbated by a highly developed market for prostitution and the
presence of soldiers and sailors with goods to exchange. Contemporary reports
noted a massive influx of refugees from the Soviet zone, several of whom ended
up working in St. Pauli as prostitutes—some registered, most not. British and
German officials also noted sharp rises in casual prostitution. They viewed St.
Pauli as a particular source of moral danger for its flow of people and sheer
number of spaces for sexual encounters, from bars and hotels that rent rooms by
the hour to semi-public rubble spaces.138 Under the pretext of fighting venereal
disease among its armed forces, the British policed sexuality with noticeable
brutality. In places of amusement in St. Pauli, they indiscriminately rounded up
women—4,667 just in 1945—suspected of prostitution, even when they were
in the company of their husbands. Public criticism139 and the effective end of
denazification induced the British in early 1947 to turn things over to Hamburg
police and social workers, who resumed their long rivalry—and continued the
raids. Indeed, continuities in both personnel and attitudes from the Weimar and
Nazi eras marked this sphere. One of the most notorious examples, Dr. Käthe
Petersen—legal guardian during the Third Reich of over 1400 “asocial” women,
600 of whom were forcibly sterilized—rose to become one of postwar Hamburg’s
most powerful welfare officials. Future mayor Paul Nevermann (SPD) wrote in
1946 that suspicious women should continue to be confined not only because
they jeopardized public health but because “most of them” exhibited “work-shy”
or criminal tendencies.140 They, as well as male hustlers, embodied the period’s
broader fears of gender chaos and social disorder. The June 1948 currency
reform, which eliminated the black market and made penicillin more available,
ended the most visible hunger prostitution and brought down VD rates. But
fears about St. Pauli and sexuality would persist and adapt to changing material
conditions.141
The gift of laughter and forgetting
The currency reform in the British and American zones paved the way for the
establishment of two German states in 1949. With Berlin divided and isolated,
Hamburg became the Federal Republic’s largest city and media capital. The
currency reform also jumpstarted a recovery that grew into West Germany’s
fabled Economic Miracle in the 1950s. Shops now had things to buy with
money that had value, but high prices meant that most Germans—and certainly
St. Pauli’s many marginal residents—had to content themselves more with
looking than buying for several years. During the “miracle years” workers put
in long hours, wages steadily climbed, and time off (the five-day workweek,
three weeks’ vacation) became guaranteed by law by mid-decade.142 These
material changes affected West Germans’ self-image and expectations. By 1955,
a majority saw leisure travel no longer as a luxury. Since international travel was
out of reach for most, rising income and time in which to spend it drew many
to St. Pauli’s entertainment quarter, which was well placed to serve a public that
now saw leisure as a basic need and right.143 If the official tenor of Adenauer’s
chancellorship stressed hard work and a return to respectability for the disgraced
nation, St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn made their own vital contribution to
recovery by serving as the nation’s id.144
Entertainment establishments along the Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit

rebuilt on sites that had served the same function for decades, even centuries.
If the new buildings were less grand, they compensated with extravagant neon
signage that made “St. Pauli by night” a popular motif for photographers and
publicists. The 1950s saw the maturation of a leisure economy serving mass tastes,
with record attendance at movies and spectator sports like soccer and wrestling
(both played on the Heiligengeistfeld).145 Sports and movies still brought locals
to the area, but visitors increasingly were not middle-class Hamburgers, who
now viewed the area as déclassé. Tourism targeted other Germans and northern
Europeans seeking a weekend of adult entertainment in an accessible locale.146
St. Pauli’s unspectacular residents slipped from view.
Local histories routinely portray the 1950s as golden age when a mixed-sex
public could amuse themselves in a safe zone. If we consider tourism not as a flight
from reality but a symbolic practice through which to negotiate and understand
the world,147 the popularity of particular St. Pauli spectacles tells us something
about how Germans and other tourists navigated the reconstruction era. They
used St. Pauli to process memories of the past and manage the stresses of the
present. As the war’s forced dislocations receded into the past, the desirability
of travel—which is, after all, the voluntary experience of displacement—served
as a marker of growing stability. But “normalcy” was constantly disrupted by
reminders of the past—memories entertainment could help blunt, as one guide
put it: “St. Pauli has given many generations the gift of joy and forgetting.”148
Tour books glossed over Germany’s recent past by portraying the country as
victim of war and occupation—a process in which Germans and their English-
speaking allies collaborated (Fodor’s 1959 London edition, for example, deemed
Hamburg a “city of great vitality” that has “refused to be ruined.”).149
Another tool for processing the past was nostalgia, that “vague collective
longing for a bygone but half-remembered time” that can never return—a
powerful emotion for the millions who’d lost homes and loved ones.150 St. Pauli
had been selling nostalgia since the 1920s in the form of plattdeutsch vaudeville.
After the war, nostalgia found full expression in sailor culture. City promoters
touted the harbor as Hamburg’s repository of folksy Heimat virtues at a time
when other signifiers of Old Hamburg had fallen to the forces of war or urban
renewal. The sailor embodied the spirit of adventure and worldliness, of working
hard and playing harder. Actual sailors still roamed St. Pauli in this period, but
their numbers were declining as the growing use of container shipping meant
fewer deckhands and shorter stays in port; by the early 1960s, the area had
more Sehleute than Seeleute (more rubberneckers than seamen).151 Thus sailors
increasingly became stock characters experienced through entertainment.

Albers’ films in particular sealed a vision of St. Pauli in the popular imagination
as a place of good times and boozy camaraderie tinged with the melancholy of
the sailor who is forever saying goodbye.
Maritime romanticism and nostalgia also pervaded the oeuvre of St. Pauli’s
other major pop culture export of this period, Freddy Quinn. Born Manfred Nidl
in Austria in 1931, Quinn was one of the postwar legion of displaced teenagers.
In 1954 he was “discovered” at St. Pauli’s Washington Bar, singing odes to the
peripatetic life inspired by his travels in America, northern Africa, and southern
Europe.152 His 1956 million-selling single “Heimweh” (Homesickness) spoke to
Germans’ sense of loss, while his rugged but sensitive seaman persona exuded a
wholesome, reassuring masculinity at a time when gender roles were in flux.153 His
and other sailor songs became raw material for the St. Pauli Theater production
Heimweh nach St. Pauli, as well as a television variety show, Haifischbar, that
brought the harbor into living rooms across the German-speaking world starting
in 1962. These sanitized versions of sailor culture offered emotional catharsis
and the chance to dwell for a few precious moments in an uncomplicated past.154
Another attraction served as a monument to sailor culture, the hippodrome—a
type of “low-class music hall full of jolly Jacks and their saucy prostitute
girlfriends.”155 Beer-fueled customers paid to ride horses, donkeys, or even camels
and won prizes if they could stay on the animal for a set amount of time. The ring
also offered chances to see female flesh when suggestively clothed Animierdamen
rode. The hippodrome was a vestige of the previous century’s love of live animal
shows. After 1945, Bartels’ hippodrome received a burst of popularity from its
depiction in Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 as fans came to recreate their own movie magic.
But changing tastes meant this type of entertainment’s days were numbered.156
Indeed, in the 1950s St. Pauli entertainments became more oriented than
ever around sex and alcohol, as visitors seeking release from the stresses of the
present indulged in bodily pleasures. To put this in context: Adenauer’s Christian
Democratic government, in cooperation with the resurgent churches, promoted
a social conservatism aimed at restoring “traditional” gender roles, shoring up
battered male egos, and restoring Germany to “moral health” after the perceived
licentiousness of the Weimar, Nazi, and postwar periods.157 In many respects the
Economic Miracle supported this as it brought new levels of domestic material
comfort that encouraged the privatization of leisure (seen, for example, in the
decline in movie going after 1956 in favor of TV). But comfy parlors and steady
jobs in suburban or white-collar settings also increasingly produced desires,
particularly among men, for intense experiences that couldn’t be replicated
Figure 1.5 Grosse Freiheit at night, c. 1955.
at home.158 To meet and reproduce that demand, St. Pauli offered temporary
escape from the demands of the straight life in a place where the normal rules
of conduct seemed suspended. One could consume it all, then impress the folks
back home with tales of the urban jungle.
Visitors could experience St. Pauli bodily by dancing or getting a tattoo.
Drinking was another way, as bars and beer halls catered aggressively to those bent
on burning through their wages (to the point that local officials became worried
about deceptive billing practices, as we’ll see). Busloads of Scandinavians came
to take advantage of alcohol prices far cheaper than those at home.159 While St.
Pauli had always liberally dispensed libations, sources describe the Miracle Years
as an age of “great boozing.”160 St. Pauli became so synonymous with drinking
that a 1962 pseudo-documentary on “shocking” sights from around the world,
Mondo Cane, featured a sequence of drunks on the Reeperbahn. Over shots of
brawling alcoholics and aggressively unattractive barflies—types still commonly
referred to as asozial—the narrator intones,
And now let us do as these wise Germans of Hamburg do and drown the memory
of so many cemeteries in beer. In this gay German bar on the Reeperbahnstrasse,
our attention is attracted not by the cult of death but of life. Life is joy and gaiety.
It’s mental deftness, physical fitness, social grace, serenity, the power to forget—
but most of all, the absence of any memory or sense of death.161
While the film’s intent is to skewer notions of German racial superiority, its
invocation of memory hits at another truth: good times at the “anchorage of joy”
always crackled with tension and barely suppressed violence.162
The ultimate bodily pleasure was sexual entertainment, which St. Pauli offered
in a number and variety unique in Europe. The Reeperbahn, according to a 1961
official tourist brochure, was “the assembly line of joys.”163 A rise in sex-themed
amusements at the expense of other kinds of attractions first became noticeable
during Weimar, but exploded in the 1950s as part of a larger broadening out
of sexual consumer culture in West Germany.164 Historian Elizabeth Heineman
has detailed the lively commerce in “marital aids,” contraceptives, and erotic
publications sold by mail order firms.165 They catered to and stimulated
consumer demand for sexual experience beneath West Germany’s veneer
of official prudishness. While most of this sexual consumption took place in
private, St. Pauli rolled out the red carpet to those who wanted to experience
intense sensations outside the domestic context.
Prostitution was the most overt manifestation of this. In the Federal Republic,
prostitution remained decriminalized in urban areas if the seller was registered
with the authorities, though the unregistered or those caught without proper
identification or a fixed address could be prosecuted for vagrancy, as could
violators of the law against spreading venereal disease. Prostitution had always
existed in St. Pauli, but the postwar years brought it unprecedented visibility,
even as the numbers of registered prostitutes actually declined. A steady supply
of women and men willing to do this work came from the pool of postwar
refugees and expellees, then from East Germany until the Berlin Wall cut off
that flow in August 1961. Hamburg police saw their city as awash in unregulated
sex for hire, offered not only in the usual venues but outside defined solicitation
zones as well as a new site, the automobile.166 Prostitutes clustered so thickly at
some intersections they blocked traffic. Despite the police’s stepped-up attempts
to gain control of the situation, there was no shortage of clients willing to pay
for sex: over half of West German men admitted to contact with a prostitute
between 1949 and 1963.167
Even more visitors consumed sex in St. Pauli visually at a time when voyeurism
was actively encouraged through movies, magazines, and advertising.168 Before
the sexual revolution promoted an aesthetic of “natural” nudity, in the 1950s
the fetishized female body reigned as an obsessive site for the male gaze. For
women, this brought myriad job opportunities short of actual prostitution as
Animierdamen or “beauty dancers” (though old links between such performers
and prostitutes persisted in official and media discourses).169 If Paris epitomized
sophistication in the popular imagination, St. Pauli staked out more earthy
brands of sexual spectacle such as mud wrestling and “lingerie shows”—titillating
but tame ways of showing flesh without crossing into full nudity, which law and
custom still banned.
The voyeuristic spectacle of the 1950s was striptease. Striptease’s roots went
back to the 1890s when burlesque numbers featured dimly lit women removing
articles of clothing in the context of a contrived story. Clubs dedicated purely
to shows of women disrobing for the erotic entertainment of male audiences,
sans storyline, only emerged after the Second World War, most famously Paris’
Crazy Horse. St. Pauli’s strip clubs were clustered in the Grosse Freiheit, long a
location for the disreputable and the risqué. At first, strippers revealed only their
breasts, then clubs adopted the “English solution”: as the dancer shed her last
covering, she posed stock still for a split second before the spotlight dimmed.170
Club owners continually pushed at the boundaries of what could be displayed
until, by the mid-1960s, full nudity and even simulated sex acts could be found
in the Grosse Freiheit.171
Bodily display also included the transvestite show, also found in the Grosse
Freiheit. Frank Miller’s 1960 guidebook describes one such performer, La
Conchita—“a woman like you’ve never seen.” Miller relates a conversation
between some “province uncles” at the Indra Club. Conchita dances with
castanets to a Spanish guitar, entrancing the audience as she sheds one item
of clothing after another. Soon Conchita is down to a “skimpy bikini, which
covers her charms.” She then grasps her bustier and rips it open, simultaneously
tearing off her wig to reveal “a man!” The startled audience erupts in wild
applause. But then a sense of unease spreads as “Karl” asks his mates, “Do you
think it’s one of them—you know, who don’t know whether they’re a man or a
woman? Poor devils. Nah, I don’t believe it—this is a respectable club here.”172
While on one level Miller is having a bit of fun at these rubes’ expense (and
affirming the sophistication of readers who get the joke), this episode also
reveals the unease generated when the porous boundary between normalcy
and deviance is exposed. For the world to remain intelligible it is vital to define
what constitutes respectability: playacting is harmless but gender confusion
and homosexuality are not.
This raises the question of what the massive popularity of such voyeuristic
spectacles can tell us about this period historically. On one level, the Reeperbahn
can be seen as just a well-ordered carnival where one could let off steam before
returning to the “real” world. Roland Barthes wrote that striptease “inoculat[ed]
the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently
immune Moral Good.”173 Striptease or prostitute encounters offered men in

particular the chance to recapture an uncomplicated masculinity and be king for
a night at a time when their power within the family might be contested by their
wives or children.174 Guidebooks, tourist advertising, even “Auf der Reeperbahn
nachts um halb eins” offered up St. Pauli as a spectacle to be mastered by the male
consumer. The cover of Miller’s book makes this clear by depicting a self-assured
chap strolling the Reeperbahn with one woman, turning to ogle another who is
clearly a prostitute. All of this cultural production contributed to the ongoing
remasculinization of the West German male who exhibited mastery through
possession and consumption of sexualized experiences and erotic sights.175
But this picture is complicated by the fact that it wasn’t just men who fed
the economy of sexual spectacle: women participated as well, often (though not
always) as part of a couple. The most famous marker of women’s presence on
the Reeperbahn was the Café Keese “Ball Paradox,” which opened in 1953 as a
ballroom where only women had the right to ask for a dance (a scenario made
“plausible” by the postwar demographic gender imbalance). Women patronized
beer halls, strip clubs, and dive bars. They danced with foreign servicemen and
listened raptly at jazz performances.176 They were not merely objects to be looked
at but exhibited desire and demanded pleasure too. While patriarchal values still
weighed heavily in the 1950s, sexual consumption offered a possible route to
more companionate relations within the heterosexual couple.177
St. Pauli didn’t just cater to heterosexuals, however. The forces of economic
recovery, consumerism, and a blossoming print landscape also promoted the
re-emergence of Hamburg’s gay scene, which quickly became one of Europe’s
most vital in the early 1950s. Bars catering to gay men and lesbians opened
around St. Pauli and other districts, while other sites offered opportunities for
socializing and connection such as cabarets, dance clubs, public toilets, and the
park beneath the Bismarck statue. As historian Clayton Whisnant shows, gay
men justifiably viewed Hamburg at the time as one of the most tolerant German
cities, a place where police and judges only lightly enforced anti-sodomy laws.178
The gay scene remained vulnerable to the whims of law enforcement, however,
and public opinion still linked homosexuality with mental illness and child
molestation. (As we’ll see, a moral panic about the state of youth in St. Pauli
would lead to a crackdown on gay bars in the late fifties.) Yet the spirit of “live and
let live” that pervaded St. Pauli nightlife extended to those outside the nuclear
family ideal. “Going out” provided access to alternative, more liberated ways of
living.179 One document of this, a men’s guide to Hamburg nightlife, grapples
with prejudice toward “men who are different,” only to conclude that bigotry is
something Germany can no longer afford. To be truly hip—a desirable attribute

in the new age of Playboy and beatnik subculture—meant being open-minded.
As another guide put it, “Enjoy the freedom of the Grosse Freiheit, tolerate the
tolerance of the Reeperbahn.”180
“Tolerance” was a central concept in Hamburg’s self-promotion, with the
implication that visiting the city practically constituted a lesson in liberalism.
It was exemplified by the international flavor of the harbor and its street-level
palette of faces from around the world.181 Guides celebrated internationalism as
a spectacle to be consumed. One raved that visitors could find Italian, Chinese,
Swedish, and Indonesian restaurants in St. Pauli: “That too is Hamburg. Or:
precisely that is Hamburg.”182 Another boasted that St. Pauli was so international,
locals didn’t look twice at the “exotics” (jokingly listed as Neger, Chinese, and
Saxons) in their midst.183 Picture books routinely featured images of black men
enjoying themselves on the Reeperbahn, suggesting both their own comfort in
that milieu and the milieu’s comfort with them as stereotypes were overcome
after a few beers.184 Celebrating cosmopolitanism became a way to bury the
memory of Führer-Stadt Hamburg by repositioning the city as independent,
tolerant, and sophisticated. Whether or not that tolerance produced actual
equality—treating “colorful” faces as part of the carnival one hopes to find on
the Reeperbahn doesn’t render the complexity of individual lives—the fact that
St. Pauli marketed itself this way suggests an audience receptive to progressive
attitudes about race, gender, and sexual identity. “Hamburg at night” constituted
a smorgasbord of visual displays, straight and queer, that thrived in the gap
between official repression, hegemonic domesticity, and the actual practices and
desires of consumers, whose growing addiction to spectacle would jam the gears
of censorship by the late 1960s.
* * *
This whirlwind tour of the history of entertainment in St. Pauli has tried to show
the ways the pleasure economy reveals German history intensified in its extremes.
The long continuities in the use of particular spaces for entertainment reveals
the steady, unshakable growth among the masses of the “right” to amusement.
These demands could not be controlled by the state, church, or cultural elites.
Clever entrepreneurs catered to popular tastes, reflecting as well as steering
them. Entertainment helped rebuild the local infrastructure and brought
economic opportunity to thousands. It made “St. Pauli”—the concept, as distinct
from the actual place where thousands of ordinary people lived and died. And
even though St. Pauli always occupied Hamburg’s margins, it came to play a
central role in defining Hamburg.185 This unruly district was by turns shunned,
managed, and promoted.
St. Pauli’s history also reflects the vicissitudes of war, revolution, Nazism, and
Economic Miracle. If consumer culture had the power to legitimize political
regimes,186 the same can be said of entertainment. But St. Pauli’s entertainment
economy also served as a place to evade those forces and live solely in the
moment. It reflected the state of the national economy but also belied it, as
consumers’ lust for distraction proved so hardy it persisted even amid the worst
privations of the twentieth century. It even found ways to express itself despite
the Nazis’ murderous attempts to control it.
St. Pauli has long been a place with the power to shape notions of Germany
and Germanness. But, like Hamburg itself, St. Pauli served as a foil to
dominant notions of national identity. It accommodated—indeed thrived on—
international impulses and made cosmopolitanism central to its identity even
during Germany’s most racist, xenophobic days. Promotional materials and the
street-level face of St. Pauli helped Hamburg cast itself as Germany’s school for
liberal tolerance and exhibit a “better” Germany to the world after 1945. Leisure
and consumption for pleasure, as much as the political arena, became the terrain
on which such changes in perception were produced.
St. Pauli also became a place with the power to construct the self by allowing
visitors to enact many personae (the savage, the sinner, the emancipated woman,
and so on). This is particularly true of its ability to stimulate powerful ideas about
sexual character. Entertainment entrepreneurs and the spaces they provided to
meet their customers’ wishes drove changes in mores as much as politicians and
social reformers. These spaces revealed sexual identity in particular to be not so
much the product of changing economic conditions, but as what historian Frank
Mort calls “an intrinsic part of the shifting dynamics of consumer demand.”187
By the 1950s, individualized, eroticized pleasures became central to the tastes of
modern women and men.
St. Pauli also traded heavily on nostalgia and idealized images of the past as a
source of entertainment. The limits of that approach would reveal themselves by
1960 as an older, more proletarian entertainment regime with roots in burlesque
and animal shows faded.188 In its place, a group of entrepreneurs would seek to
attract an untapped market to their clubs: young people who, like their parents,
had money and leisure to spend. That younger generation of visitors, desirous
of intense experiences of their own, would descend on St. Pauli not for mud
wrestling or camel rides, but for live rock ‘n’ roll.
2
The Birth of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Clubs
Live music has always been part of the soundscape of amusement in St. Pauli.
Musicians whose names have long been forgotten provided rhythms for dancing
as far back as 1527 at the Nobiskrug. The grand ballrooms that arose on the
Reeperbahn in the nineteenth century had ensembles that catered to the Tanzlust
of the new bourgeoisie and respectable working class. Even the humblest dive
or sailor bar had an accordion or piano. The 1920s ushered in the golden age of
dance orchestras with dozens of players at lush nightspots like the Alkazar or
Café Heinze. After the war, big bands remained popular while pubs still hired
individual performers (such as young Freddy Quinn) well into the 1950s.1
Musicians gave dancers and drinkers what they wanted to hear: the day’s popular
styles, from waltzes and ragtime to hot jazz and Swing. When rock ‘n’ roll—
which is, after all, dance music—emerged in the mid-1950s, it seemed logical
that it too would join the roster of offerings. Yet this took time: rock ‘n’ roll’s
main constituency, teenagers, were not the target audience for venues in this
adult entertainment mecca, nor was this music’s entry into West Germany as a
whole smooth. But by 1960 several factors came together in St. Pauli to produce
a group of music clubs that would profoundly shape rock ‘n’ roll’s evolution into
the lingua franca of youth in the global Sixties.2
This chapter explores how rock ‘n’ roll came to St. Pauli, focusing on three
entrepreneurs—Bruno Koschmider, Peter Eckhorn, and Manfred Weissleder—
who were instrumental in its staging and circulation there. Two outsiders and
one native son, these businessmen participated in the postwar boom that
brought a flood of new customers to the Reeperbahn. The latest in a long line
of experimenters in the field of popular culture, they initially began offering
rock ‘n’ roll as a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Seed money often
came from sex-themed businesses they already owned in the district. Thus
their story is part of the long history of the entertainment economy, as well
as the broadening out of a sexual consumer culture during the Economic
Miracle—modernizing impulses that percolated on the fringes of Germany’s

historical development.
These ventures lured rock’s prime audience—young men and women in their
teens and early twenties, an untapped market in St. Pauli. By offering spaces in
which young people could experience a music that had few German outlets by
the late 1950s, club owners facilitated the birth of what came to be known as
the Hamburg scene. These spaces on the margins of West Germany’s prevailing
culture of respectability (and often of St. Pauli itself) allowed for a mixing of
people and styles that worked against the era’s social conformity well before the
better-known radical movements of the late 1960s. This counterworld harnessed
the international impulses that flowed through the port city, celebrating the joys
of amplified sound and physical connection in a place where the pleasures of the
body were the coin of the realm. The entrepreneurs who set up St. Pauli’s rock ‘n’
roll clubs were initially lured by the scent of profits, but they facilitated something
that became more culturally significant as they tapped into a longing among
many young people for alternatives to the era’s sanitized youth culture. Here
commercial impulses were not antithetical to grassroots cultural innovation:
they were indispensible to it.
Rock ‘n’ roll comes to Germany
The emergence of commercial popular music is inextricably bound up with

processes of industrialization and urbanization. Since the nineteenth century,
cities in Europe and North America served as key sites of popular music
production, performance, promotion, circulation, and consumption. But cities
aren’t merely cultural transmission belts or empty containers in which music
just “happens”: music contributes to the making of the city itself.3 We have
already seen how popular culture “made” St. Pauli. It also played an important
role in making Hamburg, which became one of several hubs of the German
music industry at the turn of the twentieth century.4 After 1949 that industry’s
center of gravity shifted from divided Berlin to Hamburg. Hamburg’s record
labels, recording device manufacturers, vinyl pressing plants, professional
organizations, and media generated over 50 percent of all music products in
West Germany, the third largest music market in the world. Hamburg’s proximity
and ties to Britain became an added plus as Anglo-American artists increasingly
dominated the international market. Hamburg also had top-notch recording
studios that attracted professional musicians.5
The Birth of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Clubs 47
Hamburg-based labels were most adept at producing classical music, that

quintessentially “German” form. They were also key purveyors of Schlager—
popular songs without syncopated rhythms conveying folksy, sentimental
themes and sung in German. Schlager thrived during Weimar- and Nazi-era
campaigns against Jewish and African-American influences in German music.
Their continued dominance throughout the 1950s as measured by record sales
and radio airplay stands as a marker of that period’s cultural conservatism and
nostalgic bent.6 While Hamburg’s music industry churned out well-crafted easy
listening for the German-speaking market, it was inward looking and stylistically
conservative. To find more cutting-edge impulses, one had to visit live music
clubs, where American forms found enthusiastic audiences.
Before rock ‘n’ roll, no musical form epitomized the postwar cultural influence
of the United States better than jazz. Hamburg already had a lively jazz scene in
the 1920s, which persisted even through the Nazi era, as we saw in Chapter 1.
In the 1950s the city became even more a bastion of live jazz as it evolved from
big band Swing to bebop and “cool,” featured at clubs like Pigalle or Barrett in
the city center. Dixieland jazz (also called Trad), purveyed by British bandleader
Chris Barber, became so popular locally that fans dubbed their town the “free
and Hanseatic Barber-city.” Accessible jazz styles like Dixieland served well as
the soundtrack to a night in the town, and several clubs around St. Pauli, such as
the New Orleans (located in the old Trichter site at the head of the Reeperbahn),
did good business with it. “Jazz” also conjured up images of a sexually charged
exoticism that fit seamlessly both into St. Pauli’s long history of racialized
display and the modern nightlife landscape. This can be seen, for example, in an
advertisement for the Mäuschen Bar that promised “negro dancing,” “ecstasy,”
and “fire” by Joe Dawkins’ Cuban Rhythm Orchestra.7 Jazz offered licensed
deviancy from the norm,8 just like St. Pauli entertainments as a whole.
Jazz also appealed to an audience left cold by the garish commercialism of the
Reeperbahn: middle-class students. They congregated in haunts often located
in cellars near the university or the harbor, such as the River Kasematten. These
mixed-sex audiences loved the music in its own right, but were also drawn by
its promise of cultural reinvigoration through an African-American cultural
form—a romantic reification of difference that sought to transcend German
racism through a spirit of liberal humanism.9 Influenced by Joachim Berendt’s
bestselling Jazzbuch, they touted jazz as a truly “authentic” music played with
“real feeling,” unlike (in their view) mass-produced dance music or Schlager.10
While jazz enthusiasts were a minority of young Germans,11 they began to
gain notice in St. Pauli guidebooks in the late 1950s as harbingers of a new force
in the entertainment market: youth. Horst Günter noted with bemusement the
increasing presence in jazz clubs of serious-looking young “Existentialists.”12
Frank Miller devoted a chapter of his nightlife guide to “cellar joints [that]
have nothing to do with the hoopla of the Reeperbahn . . . another world that
adults may gawk at but not participate in.”13 The presence of youth in St. Pauli
was actually not new: children and teens from the neighborhood region had
long visited family-oriented amusements like the circus or the Panopticon wax
museum, and they were also avid moviegoers. Along with women, they were a
target audience for mass culture since its inception, emerging as a measurable
force in German consumer demand after the First World War.14 Their attraction
to popular culture generated official anxiety and prohibitive measures during
the Weimar and Nazi eras. Yet youths then rarely had dedicated spaces in which
to consume or produce popular culture among themselves. It would take a series
of demographic and economic breakthroughs during the Economic Miracle to
change that.
In postwar West Germany, under-20s constituted the fastest growing
segment of the population—28.8 percent and rising in 1960.15 By the late 1950s
an expanding economy was generating real rises in personal income across
the board, which translated into family purchases of radios and record players,
including portable devices children could use in their own bedrooms.16 Rising
wages also meant more disposable income for older teenagers, the majority
of whom still lived at home while starting their working lives, training as
apprentices or, increasingly, staying in school to study for white-collar careers.17
Their growing numbers and economic power enhanced their identity as a distinct
cohort with its own attitudes, preferences, and desires. Sociologists noted their
increasing mobility, social permeability, and waning allegiance to traditional
markers of class. Largely freed from worry about material survival, they came of
age in a consumer society in which mass media promoted the sensual enjoyment
of wealth and the fun to be gained from intense experiences. Germany’s opening
to America and the West, which promoted cultural democratization in general,
also opened up cultural space to productions appealing to youth, typified by
films like Rebel without a Cause. By the late 1950s, “the teenager” was firmly
established as a social fact in West Germany and commercial interests lined up
to sell him and her magazines, movies, clothes, and drinks.18
And pop music, whose production reached new heights of sophistication
and ubiquity. The ultimate style for youths—and increasingly by youths—was
rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll simmered along in pockets of American society for
several years before exploding onto the national consciousness in 1954–55. This
process looked different in West Germany. The state-owned radio and television
stations that dominated its airwaves had little youth-oriented programming
at this time, forcing rock ‘n’ roll to enter through other channels. It trickled
in through programs playing the American hit parade on US armed forces
radio (AFN), British Forces Network (BFN), and Radio Luxemburg, Europe’s
first major commercial station.19 A few positive notices on it appeared in West
German publications plugged into American trends, particularly BRAVO,
a magazine of film, television, and radio founded in 1956. The influential
newsmagazine Der Spiegel put Elvis Presley on its cover in December 1956 and
dissected with barely concealed disdain the Elvis phenomenon in the United
States.20 It also noted that Teldec had just released a dozen Presley singles in
West Germany (which, Spiegel noted with relief, did not cause hysteria among
German teens, who are “of a different blood type”). Jukeboxes, increasingly
found at teen meeting spots like snack bars and coffee shops, provided other
outlets for these songs.21 Rock ‘n’ roll also seeped into the Federal Republic via
Hollywood. Films like Blackboard Jungle fueled the popularity of Bill Haley,
whose “Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ‘n’ roll single to top the
German charts in June 1956. But records were hard to find. Pressings for US
troops sometimes circulated, but singles usually only turned up in shops after
they had fallen off the US or UK charts. German labels did little to advertise
them, putting their weight instead behind German-language remakes and
Schlager, which ruled the charts well into the 1960s. Any success early rock
‘n’ roll enjoyed in West Germany was more the result of happenstance than a
concerted industry push.22
Matters were not helped by the politicians, pundits, and pastors who
denounced rock ‘n’ roll in language reminiscent of Nazi campaigns against
degenerate music.23 This peaked during a wave of violence at concerts and rock-
themed movie showings between 1956 and 1958, the so-called hooligan riots
(Halbstarken-Krawalle).24 During Bill Haley and the Comets’ October 1958 tour,
concertgoers at West Berlin’s Sportpalast caused thousands of Deutsche marks
in damage and injured other spectators and police—events decried by Mayor
Willy Brandt (SPD) as “the shameful result of youths’ lust for kicks.”25 At Haley’s
Hamburg concert the next day, the toxic combination of a tightly packed hall
(with folding chairs for seating), a large police presence, and a Schlager orchestra
as the opening act brought things to a boil. Amid a hail of flying chairs and
exploding firecrackers, Haley and his band managed to play for barely twenty
minutes. These widely publicized incidents dealt rock ‘n’ roll a blow it took years
to recover from as German promoters and national broadcasters embargoed it.26
Besides being an expression of the libidinal energy of the working-class

males that dominated early rock’s German audience, concert violence was also
a function of pent-up demand. There were few opportunities to experience
rock ‘n’ roll live outside the US garrison towns of the Rhine-Main region. Bars
and nightclubs there catered to white and African-American soldiers (in self-
segregated surroundings) with American acts and European “show bands.”27
Germans were welcome too, especially females, though GI bars’ unsavory
reputations limited their appeal. In contrast, Hamburg’s live music scene was
still dominated by Dixieland and its offshoot skiffle. (Skiffle would become an
important bridge into rock ‘n’ roll in Europe, as we’ll see in the next chapter.)
Social divisions consigned rock ‘n’ roll—coded as lascivious, proletarian, and
racially other—to jukeboxes in a few working-class dive bars or the midway at
the Dom, the seasonal carnival that attracted packs of teenagers.28 Otherwise,
North German fans had to content themselves with one hour on Saturdays
Westdeutsche Rundfunk allotted deejay Chris Howland to play hits from the
UK. Or they could listen surreptitiously to BFN or Radio Luxemburg—stations,
Rüdiger Bloemeke writes, that in many German households were “as taboo as
the ‘enemy stations’ of the Nazi era.”29 Early German partisans of rock ‘n’ roll
began to perceive themselves as outsiders in their own land.30
While St. Pauli’s focus on entertainment for adults initially blinded it to rock
‘n’ roll, in retrospect the music seems tailor-made for the milieu. In one telling
bit of cultural translation, the German version of Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” was
“Harbor Rock” (Hafenrock). Recorded by Peter Kraus in 1958, “Harbor Rock”
substituted Elvis’ party in the county jail with maritime tropes of the young man
who packs in his job to sail the world. When German Schlager artisans wanted
to conjure up rebellion and escape, they looked to the harbor. The real St. Pauli
was too rough for their polished acts, but would prove to be perfect for wild and
crazy rockers.
Rock ‘n’ roll comes to St. Pauli: Bruno Koschmider

and the Kaiserkeller
Grosse Freiheit 36, a block north of the Reeperbahn at the corner of

Schmuckstrasse, had long been an address for entertainment served with a
side of sex appeal. Since the nineteenth century it housed a succession of dance
halls such as the Blumensäle and Tanzpalast Resi, where respectable mixed-sex
audiences rubbed elbows with the demimonde. Nooks throughout the building
contained intimate bars like the Piccadilly or the Nazi-era Swing haunt Cap
Norte. Its basement was the site of Paul Becker’s Hippodrome until bombing
caused significant damage in 1943. After the 1948 currency reform Willi Bartels
scooped up the ruined parcel, commissioning a new complex with parking for
two hundred automobiles.31 In 1958 the boxy new building opened to local
fanfare as Tanzpalast Lido.
The Lido’s main floor housed the Tivoli ballroom with room for 900 guests.
Its proprietor was Werner Mörschel, a man whose story typifies the Economic
Miracle gold rush around the Reeperbahn. Mörschel was a Berliner who went
from working in restaurants to running a movie theater in that city’s west in
the early 1950s. He then came to Hamburg, where he became the successful
proprietor of the New Orleans jazz club, another club on that site featuring
transvestite shows, and Box, a center-city nightspot frequented by celebrities.
He and a partner opened the Tivoli in 1958. It featured big bands, such as Ivy
Benson’s All-Girl Orchestra, and billed itself as Germany’s “most modern dance
palace,” where guests could feel comfortable “without evening wear.” It also
held “Miss Pullover” and “Ideal Teenager” contests to attract a younger crowd;
indeed, city inspectors deemed the Lido-Tivoli a respectable place for minors.
But big bands were rapidly falling out of fashion and the Lido faced dwindling
Figure 2.1 Advertisement for Paul Becker’s Hippodrome at Grosse Freiheit 36, c. 1925.
Courtesy of the St. Pauli Archiv.
audiences in the 1960s. A crushing blow came when authorities discovered that
Mörschel had embezzled 100.000DM.32 The future of Grosse Freiheit 36 lay not
in its ballroom but its basement.
That basement housed the Kaiserkeller. Its proprietor was Bruno Koschmider,
a middle-aged outsider who, like Mörschel, sought his fortune in postwar
St. Pauli. Koschmider was born in 1926 to a German circus family in Danzig,
then a disputed city on the German-Polish border. He spent his youth on
society’s margins as an itinerant acrobat and magician. An accident (possibly
a war injury) left him with a crippled foot. Around 1950 he landed in St. Pauli,
a natural destination for someone with roots in the world of physical spectacle.
There he became involved in businesses on the fringes of the entertainment
district such as the Indra at the far end of the Grosse Freiheit at number 64. Once
a hangout for Nazi-era Swing fans, the Indra was now a tacky strip club tricked
out in red velvet advertising a “daily international program with risqué lingerie
show.”33 Koschmider also operated the Bambi Kino, a space even further off the
main drag that had devolved from a working-class dance hall into a grind house
cinema showing B-Westerns and the occasional stag film.34 These down-market
enterprises did not yield great riches, so Koschmider supplemented his income
by dealing in gambling machines and jukeboxes. The latter alerted him to the
potential of the youth market.
Koschmider leased the basement of Grosse Freiheit 36, which he opened
on October 14, 1959 as the Kaiserkeller, a “dance palace for youth.” Customers
detoured off the Tivoli ballroom down a flight of steps into a low-ceilinged room
outfitted with a boat-shaped bar, fishing nets and brass portholes on the walls,
and heavy wooden tables in front of a small stage. The club’s nautical décor
and name evoked St. Pauli’s past more than its future. At first, the only music
came from the jukebox. Then came open-mike contests and the occasional live
jazz or Schlager on weekends; these drew some jazz fans, but otherwise the
Kaiserkeller attracted little notice. The only thing that initially distinguished
it was its jukebox, stocked with the latest rock ‘n’ roll records, suggesting that
Koschmider understood that music’s potential even if he was no particular fan of
it. In 1960 he hired a few Dutch “Indo-rock” bands—Indonesian and Moluccan
immigrants who played a frenetic instrumental rock laced with Hawaiian and
Krontjong musical elements.35 Their matching suits and acrobatic moves (Andy
Tielman played electric guitar behind his back before Jimi Hendrix) made
them a hit in the Rhine-Main clubs and increasingly in St. Pauli too (where
they also played at the Blauer Peter). But Koschmider balked at the cost of these
professional combos and kept an eye out for cheaper alternatives.36
He found them in England, as Germany did not yet have a crop of

professional-caliber rock ‘n’ roll bands. Accounts differ as to who first hit upon
the idea of hiring Brits as “rock ‘n’ roll guest workers.”37 Rick Hardy (of the Jets,
the first British rock act to come over) states that Koschmider visited London in
late May or June 1960, where he met Jets singer Ian Hines at Soho’s trendy 2I’s
Coffee Bar.38 Another version comes from Horst Fascher, a local fan who pops
up at every turn in St. Pauli’s early rock ‘n’ roll history. Fascher was a boxer on
tour with his team in London in 1959. He visited the 2I’s where he saw Tony
Sheridan, a guitar whizz with a minor career on British television. Blown away,
he returned to the Kaiserkeller (where he worked managing the waiters) and
eventually convinced Koschmider to book Sheridan and the Jets.39 Neither
account is completely accurate and each bears traces of various actors’ desire to
claim they were “first” (Koschmider, for his part, never publicly commented on
it). What is clear, however, is that by summer 1960, these performers breathed
new life into the Kaiserkeller.
Sheridan lit the spark: “The audience went berserk because we weren’t
amateurs and we were belting out rock and roll like the clappers.”40 Suddenly
the place was hot, as one guidebook noted: “Bruno Koschmider was the first to
recognize the demand of the hour: a dance cellar for youth. Night after night
up to 300 young people who want nothing more than to dance and hear music,
meet here.”41 Koschmider sent Fascher and an associate back to Britain for more
bands.42 A connection to Liverpool was forged when that city’s Royal Caribbean
Steel Band found gigs in St. Pauli through a German sailor. Back home, their
tales of money to be made there piqued the interest of sometime-member
Harold Philips, aka Lord Woodbine, a business partner of Allan Williams, who
owned Liverpool’s Jacaranda coffee bar and managed several bands. Williams
persuaded Koschmider to hire his clients Derry and the Seniors and Rory Storm,
as well as one of his second-tier acts, The Silver Beetles. Koschmider intended to
use these groups at the Kaiserkeller and the struggling Indra. In August 1960 he
installed the renamed Beatles at the latter but neighbors complained about the
noise (they wanted the strippers back!), forcing the band down the street to the
Kaiserkeller, where they found a more receptive audience.43
The audience in that basement—in stark contrast to the genteel couples
wheeling on the Lido’s dance floor above—was initially a motley assortment
of sailors, underworld toughs, and workers in the local sex and entertainment
industries.44 They sought release through dance, drink, and sex; as long as the
music was wild, they didn’t care much about its content. They were soon joined by
others that did: the Rockers, working-class devotees of Elvis and Gene Vincent.
(More on them and the middle-class bohemians that joined the mix in the next
two chapters.) This was a violent crowd: fists and chairs flew nightly. Violence
also came from the waiters who didn’t hesitate to use force with unruly punters,
and even Koschmider himself. Sheridan claimed the first time he saw the cane-
wielding Koschmider that he was “beating a guy who was already down with a
rubber truncheon.”45
The bands channeled this atmosphere of violence into their performances.
Koschmider famously ordered them to “mach Schau!”—put on a show—so
they did, offering music so wild it buckled the stage.46 Indeed, the Kaiserkeller
put rock ‘n’ roll’s primitive side on full display. That primitiveness extended to
the club’s work conditions. It had no proper sound system. Its stage was just
planks held up by beer crates; when Rory Storm broke it one night, Koschmider
sicced his waiters on him and had him arrested for destruction of property.
Koschmider billeted his performers in storage closets or airless rooms off the
toilets at the Bambi Kino. Guitarist Johnny Byrnes said Koschmider locked
them in their room at night because he didn’t trust them alone in the building
with the liquor.47 While some musicians have since defended Koschmider
as a savvy businessman capable of largesse,48 in general there was little love
lost. British musicians resented his authoritarian manner and saw him as the
Ugly German.49 For example, the Beatles acquired a pig at the Fischmarkt
and named him “Bruno.” Koschmider retaliated for this and other slights
by reporting underage George Harrison to immigration authorities and had
Paul McCartney and Pete Best arrested in November 1960 for attempted
arson at the Bambi Kino.50 Some musicians surmised that Koschmider (who
spoke little English) treated them harshly because of war-related resentments,
while Rosi Sheridan (née Haitmann), a St. Paulianer who worked behind the
bar, surmised that his homosexuality and his age put distance between him
and “us young folk.”51 When other entrepreneurs began to copy his success,
Koschmider would find himself deserted, hastening the end of his experiment
with rock ‘n’ roll.52
From hippodrome to twist shack: Peter Eckhorn

and the Top Ten
If Bruno Koschmider represents the outsiders who sought their fortune in

St. Pauli, Peter Eckhorn embodies the homegrown entertainment dynasty. In
the twentieth century St. Pauli produced its own elite of families who acquired
sizable holdings by successfully catering to public tastes. They worked with the
city, tourism bureau, and the press to promote St. Pauli as Germany’s amusement
mecca. Adaptability (or opportunism, if you prefer) helped them survive the
century’s political upheavals, as seen in the case of Wilhelm Menke, who served
as a business leader during both the Nazi and Adenauer eras.53 Adaptability was
also crucial to surviving economic shifts, as seen in the story of Reeperbahn 136.
This four-story house with half-timbered accents on the north side of the
Reeperbahn was built during Germany’s post-unification boom in the 1870s.
Acquired by Peter Eckhorn (born 1877 in nearby Ottensen) in 1920, its spacious
hall housed one of St. Pauli’s hippodromes plus a small, plush bar. A nervous
breakdown forced Peter to transfer the business to his wife Else in 1932.54 Their
son Herbert took over in 1937 while the family lived upstairs. After Allied
bombs destroyed the hippodrome in April 1945, Herbert quickly rebuilt, selling
donkey rides and female mud wrestling to postwar revelers. As they served up
bawdy entertainment to the masses, financial success allowed the Eckhorns to
acquire cultivation. Herbert married an educated woman and they sent their
son Peter (born 1939) to boarding school, where he acquired a polish that
belied his Reeperbahn roots. Young Peter stood to inherit the business, but the
increasing mechanization of shipping was killing St. Pauli’s old sailor culture,
symbolized by the massive July 1960 funeral of the “singing seaman,” actor Hans
Albers. Herbert Eckhorn’s hippodrome—a monument to that culture—faced
bankruptcy at the dawn of the 1960s.55 To survive, the business would have to
take a more modern direction.
Just back from his apprenticeship as a ship’s steward in summer 1960, Peter
heard the buzz about the Kaiserkeller likely from Fascher, who was kicking
around the neighborhood after falling out with Koschmider. That September,
21-year-old Peter Eckhorn applied for a license to turn the hippodrome into a
music club for youth. He smelled profits but he also liked pop music and was
determined to make something appealing to young people like himself. He and
his team moved quickly to capitalize on what Koschmider started. His fiancée,
Christa (who would run the box office), pawned valuables to raise cash for
glassware and chairs. Tony Sheridan (who had quit the Kaiserkeller and was
playing backup for strippers at a local joint called Studio X56) and other musicians
pitched in to transform the space from an old-fashioned amusement hall to a
modern space for dancing. They painted the walls black and junked everything
that didn’t look like “club.” They stuffed the jukebox with their favorite American
records and banished Schlager.57 The new club’s name—Top Ten—announced a
break with St. Pauli’s past in favor of international pop.
The Top Ten opened in November 1960 and was a hit from day one. The
Kaiserkeller crowd followed Sheridan to his new roost where he and the Beatles
(minus recently deported Harrison) jammed on the opening night.58 But the
Top Ten didn’t just snap up Koschmider’s regulars. Occupying a central spot on
St. Pauli’s main mile, it drew people who wouldn’t set foot in the Kaiserkeller:
white-collar workers, students, businessmen and their dates, music industry
types, and media flacks—the mixed-sex, bourgeois public that studies showed
were increasingly the city’s tourist base. Horst Ansin (born 1931), a jazz fan
more likely to frequent the New Orleans club, enjoyed the Top Ten’s “better
atmosphere.” Celebrities came to partake in the “Twist” craze (the press dubbed
the Top Ten a “Twist shack”). The club popped up in guidebooks and magazines
for young adults. Cynthia Powell, who visited boyfriend John Lennon there
at Easter 1961, described it this way: “Dazzling lights shone down on a rich
assortment of people. There were teenagers out for a good time, sailors on shore
leave, portly middle-aged men on the way home from work, and gangsters
who looked so menacing I hardly dared glance at them.”59 The Top Ten was
broadening the audience for rock ‘n’ roll.
Like Koschmider, Eckhorn crossed the English Channel to find talent. He
hired Liverpoolers like Gerry and the Pacemakers, as well as groups from
London, Birmingham, Bristol, and Scotland. He aimed initially to be more
like a friend than a boss, disbursing bonuses and goodies like bowling jackets
or lighters emblazoned with the club’s name. He housed his musicians in the
building’s attic above his own family’s apartment—nothing luxurious, but
at least they got light and air. When the Beatles’ equipment was stranded at
Koschmider’s after the arson flap, Eckhorn had it shipped back to Liverpool
at his own expense. He tolerated musicians’ eccentricities and helped facilitate
the Beatles’ first professional recording session with Sheridan.60 Pianist Roy
Young, who also worked behind the scenes, points out that Eckhorn paid black
artists equally. He struck a suave, well-dressed figure and heralded a generation
of young entrepreneurs who had knowledge and appreciation of pop, fostered
unconventional talent, and understood youthful tastes.61 Rock ‘n’ roll was slowly
climbing out of the basement.
But despite the club’s dapper owner, this was still St. Pauli, where violence
could flare up at a moment’s notice. Powell wrote, “Fights broke out most nights—
flick-knives would appear with terrifying speed and we’d dive for cover until
the gun-toting police stormed in and hauled out the troublemakers.”62 Eckhorn
employed his own posse of waiters to keep order, initially managed by none
other than Fascher. One particularly violent night came in January 1962 when
Figure 2.2 Top Ten owner Peter Eckhorn, with singer Isabella Bond in 1965. Courtesy
of Staatsarchiv Hamburg.
the USS Essex was in port: an argument between white and black servicemen and
other customers over black men dancing with German women became a melee
that spilled down the Reeperbahn.63 Local gangsters commandeered the club
on other nights. In exchange for endless rounds of drinks (which the musicians
dared not decline), they muscled their way onstage to sing and refused to let
bands stop playing, lest the party mood evaporate.64
All of these new visitors made the Top Ten a success, but those who were
there at the beginning, like Sheridan and Fascher, increasingly felt alienated by
Eckhorn’s desire to please audiences who may not have had the same reverence
for the music. Success also unleashed some of Eckhorn’s inner St. Pauli. He kept
a snarling bulldog and began consuming noticeable quantities of amphetamines,
which were readily available in the nightlife economy. Speed and alcohol
impaired his judgment, fueling tantrums in which he’d fire everyone only to have
his business manager beg them to return. He wanted non-stop music, which
overtaxed the musicians; during their April 1961 residency, for example, the
Beatles played seven hours a night with few breaks as the only band on the bill.
When Eckhorn opened another Top Ten nearly two hours away in Hannover,
he could demand that the house band play both clubs on the same night.65
What began as the promise of change—a club for young rock fans in which the
musicians had an emotional investment—soured amid strained relationships
and accusations of greed.
Nonetheless, the Top Ten played an important role in the story of rock ‘n’
roll in Germany as it evolved into the 1960s sound known as Beat music. The
Top Ten expanded both the music’s audience and its infrastructure in St. Pauli.
It also embodied a transitional moment in St. Pauli’s entertainment economy:
its reworking of a hippodrome into a rock venue heralded the sunset of older,
proletarian-identified amusements and the dawn of an internationally oriented,
cross-class youth market. But just as Koschmider lost his audience to Eckhorn,
Eckhorn would lose his edge when another ambitious competitor emerged.
The Top Ten soldiered on for many years (even surviving Eckhorn’s premature
death in 197866), but its place in the history of rock ‘n’ roll in Germany would be
eclipsed by rise of the Star Club.
The era of village music is over! Manfred Weissleder

and the Star Club
By 1962 the success of the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten had fostered a local
infrastructure for the burgeoning subculture around Beat music. After a night at
the clubs, one could party until sunrise at the Blockhütte, a family-run pub next
to the Indra that now featured live rock ‘n’ roll. One could meet other musicians
or fans for a beer down the street at Gretel and Alfons or get breakfast at the
Mambo-Schänke around the corner. Existing businesses found new customers,
such as Erdmann’s leather shop on the Reeperbahn, Rotthoff ’s instrument store
on Schanzenstrasse, or Heinemann’s custom tailors on Kastanienallee. A record
automat opened in the Grosse Freiheit amid the strip joints and transvestite
cabarets. St. Pauli had always evolved to accommodate shifting popular tastes—
now it opened space for the small but growing tribe of Beat music fans. But the
market still had plenty of room to grow.
Horst Fascher would be a key actor in its expansion. Fascher was born in
Hamburg in 1936 to a cleaning lady and a ship’s stoker. Evacuated during the
war, he developed an instinctual aversion to Nazism and nationalism, finding
the postwar British presence in Hamburg more congenial than the Germans
squatting in his family’s Neustadt apartment. An indifferent student, he picked
up English by dint of living near the harbor. Music became another opening to
the world: hearing pianist George Maycock’s playing drifting out of a nightclub
in 1949 sparked a lifelong love of African-American sounds. A tough product of
the rubble generation, he threw himself into professional boxing in the 1950s. His
temper turned deadly one night in 1959 when he punched a sailor over a casual
insult—“nothing unusual in those days,” in his view, but the man later died.
Fascher was convicted of manslaughter and served six months in jail. Stripped
of his boxing titles, rock ‘n’ roll became his refuge as he kicked around the harbor
wards. But he had to content himself initially with recordings since, as he put it,
there were no “real” live offerings locally. He eventually found his Eldorado at the
Kaiserkeller, where he also got a job managing its pugilistic waiters and serving
as a translator for Koschmider. A son of the lumpenproletariat ill-suited for the
straight life, Fascher carved out a niche in St. Pauli’s entertainment economy
that straddled both its traditions and new directions. He was an insider with
connections to gangsters and prostitutes who could help outsiders navigate the
terrain, a bruiser who added muscle in a district where violence was routine,
and a rock ‘n’ roll fan whose enthusiasm helped secure the music’s foothold in
St Pauli.67
After falling out with both Koschmider and Eckhorn, by the winter of 1961–
62 Fascher was managing Der Lachende Vagabund, an all-night bar at Grosse
Freiheit 50. Fascher replaced the Schlager on its jukebox with rock ‘n’ roll 45s,
which brought in Beat musicians and fans.68 He began to notice a returning
customer who didn’t quite fit in: a towering blond man with a crew cut who
ordered black coffee to sip with his white bread. This 34-year-old “square” turned
out to be Manfred Weissleder, owner of a string of successful local strip clubs.
Weissleder was curious about the idea of a music venue and learned of Fascher’s
experience in that area. Whether or not Fascher can rightly be considered
the founder of the Star Club (as his memoir claims), he did play a key role as
Weissleder’s guide into the world of rock ‘n’ roll.69
Weissleder, like Koschmider, was an outsider who came to St. Pauli during
the go-go fifties. Born in 1928 in the industrial Ruhr Valley, he was part of the
“flak helper” generation, manning an anti-aircraft gun as a teenager during the
last months of the war. In 1956 he moved to Hamburg where he found work as
an electrician at the Tabu strip club. By 1958 this thrifty Dortmunder had saved
enough capital to start his own “erotic cabaret” upstairs at Grosse Freiheit 16. Its
success quickly enabled further acquisitions: Kleine Paris, the Rote Katze, and
at least seven other establishments dotting Davidstrasse and the west side of
the Grosse Freiheit’s busiest block.70 Like Eckhorn and Koschmider, Weissleder
represented a new cohort of entrepreneurs from obscure backgrounds that were
reshaping the period’s mass culture infrastructure.71 At a time when mainstream
entertainment projected a “wholesome” tone, striptease appealed to a male
public’s desire to see female flesh, fed by mass market films and increasingly
suggestive advertising.72 St. Pauli responded to and stoked this desire, selling
itself as a place to experience things that couldn’t be replicated elsewhere, with
striptease as its “greatest weapon against television.”73 Amid the dominant
culture’s emphasis on domesticity and respectability, Weissleder built an empire
by offering men temporary “liberation” in an urban jungle where they could
exhibit mastery through the consumption of titillating spectacles.74
The Erotic Night Club upstairs at Grosse Freiheit 39 became Weissleder’s
marquee venue. It offered a continuous program of women stripping onstage,
women stripping behind a scrim (which allowed them to be naked in silhouette
at a time when full nudity on stage was still taboo), and women stripping on film.
These films, which Weissleder shot himself with the aid of Erwin Ross, a graphic
artist from East Germany he met at Tabu,75 are innocent by today’s standards,
but in 1960 they led Hamburg’s district attorney to bring charges of indecency
(Unzucht) and dissemination of youth-endangering materials. Weissleder’s
lawyer countered that the human body was not obscene: “If we follow the D.A.’s
argument, we might as well bury St. Pauli’s entertainment industry until it’s just
coffee and cake and family concerts.”76 When the judge levied a fine and ordered
the films to be destroyed, Weissleder shrugged it off: the case had brought free
publicity and the films (which he and Ross continued to make) generated more
than enough profits to cover the penalties.77
The electrician also revealed business savvy in his playful use of advertising.
He paid schoolboys to hand out fake wage packets with a 20DM “note”
sticking out that turned out to be an ad for the Erotic.78 Another ad played
to male punters seeking to shake off the shackles of domesticity with this tag
line: “Listen to your wife—don’t come to the Erotic Night Club!”79 Weissleder
pushed the envelope of marketing conventions and obscenity statutes, even as
his businesses complied with the letter of the law.80 He worked the levers of
the era’s sexual consumer economy—which he argued was as legitimate as any
other type of business—to the hilt, in the process becoming a self-made man
who embodied the Economic Miracle.81 His entertainment offerings resonated
with a knowing male clientele, and he lived out their playboy fantasies: he slept
with a gun under his pillow and hunted for big game in Africa. While he lived
Figure 2.3 Advertisement for Weissleder’s Erotic Night Club: “Listen to your wife!
Don’t go to the Erotic Night Club!” Courtesy of Staatsarchiv Hamburg.
spartanly in a flat above the shop, he indulged his appetites for Coca-Cola,
flashy cars, and the charms of young women.82
In 1961 the city notified him that he needed more than one fire exit for his
clubs in the Paradieshof and the adjoining Erotic. To attain compliance, he took
over the entire building at Grosse Freiheit 39—and in so doing acquired a piece
of St. Pauli history. Built in 1880 as the Sternensaal, this four-story building had
an industrial kitchen that supplied food (including millions of meatballs) to
other local establishments. Socialists had once used its hall for meetings and
Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann (a son of Hamburg) spoke there in
the 1920s. Working-class Swing kids danced there in the 1930s and 1940s. After
surviving the war it joined the postwar cinema boom as the Stern-Kino, its six-
pointed star logo visible from the Reeperbahn. Operated by Jethelda Iderhoff,
a divorcée from the countryside who took her ambitions to St. Pauli, this 800-
seat theater served up a steady diet of American Westerns, which flooded the
West German market after 1948. It prospered for several years, yet despite
upgrading to Cinemascope and 3-D, by the early 1960s it could not keep up
with the challenge from television. Meanwhile, the Erotic Night Club upstairs
was bursting at the seams. Conflicts with the Stern-Kino over noise plus the fire
exit issue induced Weissleder to acquire the building in early 1962. But what to
do with the large theater space? Fascher convinced Weissleder to turn it into a
rock ‘n’ roll club.83
Forty days of frantic renovation followed, which Weissleder funded by
subletting several of his adult nightclubs. The movie seats were torn out and a
state-of-the-art sound system installed. Unlike the Kaiserkeller’s rickety planks,
the Star Club had a proper stage with a curtain and a backdrop depicting the
Manhattan skyline, painted by Ross. The building’s name was anglicized from
“Stern” to “star.” Weissleder had big ambitions: this was to be no St. Pauli
nostalgia trip but an opening to the world. He had no desire to toil underground:
this was to be the best rock ‘n’ roll club in Europe.
In March 1962, just weeks after a flood had killed 315 people in southern
Hamburg,84 bright orange flyers popped up around town: “The misery is
at an END! The era of village music (Dorfmusik) is over!” They announced
the opening of a new club with “first-class” bands, including local favorites the
Beatles. They also suggested something more: a haven for those consigned to the
margins, connoisseurs of rock ‘n’ roll immiserated by the continued dominance
of “village music,” that is, Schlager. This guerilla marketing lured some 1200
customers, who lined up all the way down to the Reeperbahn on opening night,
April 13, 1962. Initially the audience was mainly local kids from working-class
neighborhoods. But Weissleder sensed there were thousands more out there and
that keeping admission prices low would draw them out. The strategy worked:
by August 1962, up to 4000 guests came through the door on weekend nights.85
Fans were drawn by the club’s insistence on quality. Rather than one band
grinding it out all night, Weissleder booked three to eight other bands, each
playing shorter and more energetic sets. While most clubs closed at 4:00 a.m. on
weekends, the Star Club stayed open until six: “The last beat came when the bell
rang for mass at St. Joseph’s” Catholic Church next door.86 Weissleder initially
poached popular bands from rival clubs: he bought out Sheridan’s contract with
the Top Ten for over 3000DM and flew the Beatles in from Liverpool for the
opening week. Like Koschmider and Eckhorn, he made regular trips to England
and also partnered with British talent managers Don Arden and Brian Epstein.
Not having much knowledge of rock and Beat before,87 Weissleder quickly
developed a taste for it, particularly acts with a natural charisma. He initially
rejected German groups because he felt they lacked an “authentic” sound. Instead,
he brought in American hitmakers like Joey Dee and Brenda Lee. When the Top
Ten hired an Everly Brothers clone, the Star Club bagged the original. Indeed, it
hosted nearly all the early rock pioneers, who had become passé in the United
States but found rapturous audiences in rock-starved West Germany: Gene
Vincent (the first major US rocker to play there since the Halbstarken riots), Bill
Haley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis.88 Perhaps
its most prestigious coup was the May 1963 appearance by Ray Charles. Charles
appealed to rock and jazz fans alike and Weissleder was determined to get him.
But even at a hefty 20DM apiece, ticket sales came nowhere close to covering
Charles’ 60.000DM fee. Weissleder, who subsidized such pricey acts with the
take from regular nights, sent Fascher to scrounge up cash from his strip clubs
as well as other local businesses benefiting from the extra trade Charles brought.
When Weissleder, who personally took tickets at the door that night, noticed
how many fans (including African-American servicemen who traveled there
from southern Germany just for this event) couldn’t get in, he persuaded Charles
to put on a second show at half price. Weissleder never did balance the books,
but press coverage praising the show as a major cultural event had been worth
every penny. By mid-1963 the Star Club had acquired a national reputation.89
Weissleder understood the game of publicity in West Germany’s media
capital, where stories by locally based reporters could resonate across the national
press.90 He also understood another game necessary to survival in both the
music business and in St. Pauli: the performance of a tough masculinity. The Star
Club maintained a crew of white-jacketed waiters (again managed by Fascher)
to maintain order. Local gangster Paulchen Müller was an investor. Weissleder
conducted business in cash and drove hard bargains with suppliers. He also
didn’t hesitate to brandish his gun, like the time he fired a shot over the head
of Bill Haley’s European agent after paying him a huge advance: “That’s in case
you take my money and Haley doesn’t show up.”91 When Chuck Berry refused to
go onstage unless Weissleder coughed up a $10,000 “bonus,” Weissleder replied
he was free to go—but would have to leave through the packed house and exit
through the front door (Berry demurred and went on to play a rousing show).
With his imposing six-foot-six frame, this landlubber from the Ruhr could
channel St. Pauli’s gangster spirit at will.92
Behind this facade was an unexpectedly progressive outlook regarding youth
culture. When Beatlemania in 1964 brought a windfall to the club Weissleder
touted as “the cradle of The Beatles,” he ploughed the profits not into his sex-
themed clubs but into offerings for music fans. He chartered budget excursions
between Hamburg and Liverpool. He licensed the Star Club name to merchandise,
a record label, and venues in a range of cities. He began managing bands. He
started Germany’s first serious magazine devoted to rock and Beat music, and
attempted to break German radio’s embargo on rock with plans for a pirate radio
station and partnerships with US stations for broadcasts from the club.93 The
fact that he pursued these ventures despite their cost should dispel the notion
that Weissleder cared only about money.94 His young employees saw him as an
ally who expected hard work but rewarded them with bonuses, gifts, even trips
to the beach. When Ansin, who worked in advertising at the newspaper BILD,
fixed up his ad, Weissleder thanked him with tickets to the coveted Charles gig
and a lifetime pass to the club. Sheridan called him a “man of the world” truly
interested in his musicians, while John Lennon—never one to praise his German
employers—dubbed him “a good skin.”95
Despite being in his mid-thirties, Weissleder embraced rock ‘n’ roll as a
generationally defining music. Fascher interprets this as a desire to reclaim his
own youth, which the Nazis had stolen. Embracing youth culture was also a buffer
against social aging and, like buying fast cars with the profits from striptease,
a way of thumbing his nose at the establishment. Günter Zint, then a young
photographer, lauded Weissleder’s music ventures as groundbreaking alternatives
to West Germany’s tightly controlled world of schmaltzy entertainment.96 Early
rock partisans like Fascher, who came to resent Eckhorn’s attempts to please a
broad clientele, felt no such resentment at the Star Club’s popularity because
they saw Weissleder as a kindred spirit. The club’s popularity affirmed their own
sense of rock ‘n’ roll’s value, cementing feelings of belonging among musicians
and fans that will be explored in the next two chapters.
* * *
The success of the Kaiserkeller, Top Ten, and Star Club unleashed a wave of
Beat club openings in St. Pauli. While the Kaiserkeller went dark shortly before
the Star Club opened, others took its place. In 1962, young entrepreneurs Peter
Denk and Heinrich Henkel opened Club o.k. in the old Bambi Kino, and the
short-lived Rock‘n’Twist Club in the Indra space. The Hit Club opened in 1963 at
Grosse Freiheit 58, a building that had been by turns a dance hall, hippodrome,
public bathhouse, and movie theater.97 Even Kaffeehaus Menke, a Reeperbahn
fixture that had already tried its hand at jazz, turned its basement into a Beat
club in 1964.98
This chapter’s detailed look at the histories of these addresses aims to make
the point that physical spaces matter in social history. St. Pauli’s entertainment
spaces weren’t just empty containers: they helped mold what went on inside
as diverse actors came together to work and play. Cellars, failing cinemas, and
bankrupt hippodromes became sites of cultural innovation in an urban district
that rewarded boldness. They stand as repositories of an alternative German
history marked by hedonism and release from the demands of maintaining
the social order, even if that release was only temporary. They link the local to
broader histories of modernity, leisure, and sexuality. Charting these spaces’
evolution situates the rock ‘n’ roll clubs—something new—in a long continuity
of experimentation in the field of mass culture, a story with echoes in the
entertainment districts of London, New York, and other metropolises.99 Temples
of officially reviled rock ‘n’ roll had once served as sites of forbidden Swing,
celluloid fantasies, and illicit sexual commerce. In a city and a nation desperately
rushing forward to escape the past, that continuity of uses is striking.
Charting the rise of the rock and Beat clubs also opens a window on the
infrequently told history of musical production and its materiality. Music, after
all, needs staging, attendance, and attention by many people.100 That those
processes occurred within the commercial sphere does not make the music they
generated any less “authentic.” Indeed, St. Pauli’s music clubs participated in the
organic development of mass culture. While Schlager maintained a consistent
domestic popularity (aided by industry and media backing), the history of
live music in St. Pauli reveals equally strong audience desires for novelty and
exoticism. Customers wanted hot jazz and rock ‘n’ roll for dancing, drinking, and
sexual stimulation—appetites that could not be met strictly out of Germany’s
own national production. Curiosity about the “foreign” and the blurring of
borders have always been intrinsic to mass culture; without American content
in particular, modern mass culture was (and still is) unthinkable. Exploring one
locale’s engagement with it illuminates larger, transnational processes of cultural
circulation, as well as specific aspects of Germans’ ongoing engagement with
African-American culture in particular. Looking at these processes through the
material realities of music’s staging and circulation shows some of the workings
of how desires for difference and variety became normalized in a country that
had only recently worked to impose racial homogeneity.101
Characteristic of modernity since the nineteenth century, these forces gained
unprecedented momentum as economic expansion brought West Germany into
a new, more intense phase of modernity in the late 1950s. Prosperity accelerated
the erosion of traditional social milieus. Young people had new opportunities to
buy consumer goods, and more time in which to play with identity as adolescence
was prolonged by longer periods spent in school or at home. Advertising and
media preaching instant gratification called into question traditional values like
obedience and deference. The increasing ubiquity of mass culture undermined
elites’ ability to ignore or control it. All of this was fertile ground for the rise of a
distinct youth culture.102
That this youth culture found space in St. Pauli resulted from another set
of conditions. There, entrepreneurs curious about the youth market brought
experience and connections in the entertainment economy, a willingness
to experiment, and the resources to acquire spaces in transition. They found
a clientele in that subset of young people dissatisfied with West Germany’s
prevailing popular culture. Between 1958 and 1962 rock ‘n’ roll was the sound of
a small minority with almost no presence in national or local media.103 Rejecting
German pop music as insipid and phony, the alienated were attracted to places
like the Top Ten and the Star Club that projected an aura of being plugged into
Anglo-American sounds. Those clubs’ location in St. Pauli—a place that was “not
Germany,” where “things were discussed with the fist and cashed up with the
knife”104—scared away most. But that unruliness made it all the more attractive
to passionate rock and Beat fans for whom the clubs became outposts of freedom
in a world hostile to their pleasure. These refuges on the fringes—of the city, of
mainstream music, of respectability—would reshape the center, becoming key
crucibles of the new youth culture that resonated across the global Sixties.105
3
The Musicians
The expanding mass culture that gave rise to St. Pauli’s rock and Beat clubs caused
deep consternation among critics who worried it would erase local cultures and
turn young people into passive, manipulated consumers.1 A look at the social
history of popular music, however, reveals those fears to have been overblown.
Rock ‘n’ roll and its offshoot, skiffle, unleashed a wave of creative activity in
the late 1950s and early 1960s built around listening to and making music.
Thousands of boys and girls in West Germany and Britain formed bands—some
never playing to more than a few friends, others becoming world famous. This
chapter explores the musicians who moved through Hamburg’s clubs during the
Beat scene’s peak years, 1960 to 1966. Drawing on print sources and recollections
of participants, it focuses on the spatial and social circulation of musicians from
Britain, as well as some of the German bands that followed. Beat music became
the vehicle for a generation to express a distinct identity at a time of profound
anxiety marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, political scandals, Kennedy’s
assassination, and the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials. Baby Boomers, who were
now sexually energized teenagers, increasingly forged emotional loyalties across
national lines to each other and against the perceived hypocrisy of their elders.
Those affinities reveal something of the emotional history of this period. Those
who played rock and Beat music also modeled a way of life oriented around self-
expression and the pursuit of pleasure, garnering subcultural capital that made
them pioneers of a new youth culture.2 For the generation born in the 1940s,
they became the authorities.
Historians have not paid much attention to those who made popular music, yet
their cultural practices played an increasingly important role in the development
of individual and collective identities among youth, particularly since in the 1950s.
Musicians have generally been more of interest to sociologists and anthropologists,3
typified by Howard Becker’s 1963 study of Chicago jazz musicians as a “deviant”
group. “Musicians are different than other people,” one of his subjects declared.
“They talk different, they act different, they look different. They’re just not like
other people, that’s all.”4 Musicians consciously deviated from the period’s values
of hard work, sobriety, and restraint. They anticipated a broader softening of those
norms as popular culture, with its emphasis on leisure, pleasure, and informality,
solidified itself as the dominant culture of mass democracy.5 As music surpassed
film as the leading genre of international mass culture in the 1960s, musicians
became important cultural actors in this transformation, playing a symbolic role
out of proportion to their relatively small numbers.6
Beat musicians were the same age as their audience, putting them on the
cutting edge of their generation’s exploration of the boundaries of experience.
They maximized the era’s possibilities of mobility while also revealing its
limits, particularly the persistence of traditional gender roles for females. They
became a vehicle for youth to participate in these changes, whether directly or
vicariously. The musicians discussed in this chapter had as their stage St. Pauli,
an urban zone where prevailing morals were relaxed and nonconformists could
pursue their dreams while delaying their entry into adulthood.7 For the young
Brits hired to entertain there, St. Pauli’s 24-hour culture of sex, speed, and sleaze
represented an opportunity to earn money playing music, as well as a school
of life. It would reshape their sense of sex, generation, and national belonging.
There they interacted with German fans who themselves crossed boundaries of
class, gender, and nation to experience a liminal zone outside West Germany’s
prevailing culture of respectability. Such encounters generated new cultural
syntheses that would resonate far beyond St. Pauli.8
This world of musicians, audiences, and clubs comprised a “scene.” Scholars
first applied this term to jazz communities in the 1950s, then broadened it to
denote any group of popular music producers and audiences that coalesces at a
specific time and place, such as New York’s punk scene of the 1970s. Scenes have a
temporal dimension and wither after a few years as material realities change and
participants age. They also have a spatial aspect: live shows generate a different
quality of communication between performer and audience than private
listening. Participants experience physical connection in an atmosphere that
generates feelings of solidarity.9 Scenes also produce sounds that evoke the place
where they are made.10 Hamburg’s Beat scene, dominated by Brits performing
American music, drew in elements from St. Pauli such as bawdiness, group
singing, and sailor culture (a prime example of this is Tony Sheridan and the
Beatles’ 1961 recording of “My Bonnie”). This created an identifiable “Hamburg
sound” that grew organically within this commercial entertainment zone. The
city put its stamp on the music, just as music-making produced the city.11
The Musicians 69
In addition to illuminating the histories of emotion and generation,12

exploring Hamburg’s Beat scene through a focus on musicians also allows us
to think about processes of Americanization and Westernization that have long
preoccupied historians of postwar Germany.13 West Germany imbibed America
deeply, as did Britain. But Americanization was not merely a force imposed on
hapless Europeans: they brought their own impulses into a process of creative
appropriations that resulted in new cultural hybrids. This chapter (and the next,
on fans) explores how this played out at the grassroots level. In this case, Liverpool
rockers melded American sounds with those from their city’s Irish and African
diasporas, then carried these to Hamburg, a place with its own hybrid cultures
and audience tastes. The musical remixes produced there became foundational
sounds of the global Sixties.
“Uncle Manfred’s Home for Lost Scousers”:

From Liverpool to Hamburg
Musicians in Hamburg’s Beat music scene hailed from London, Bristol,

Manchester, and other towns in the UK.14 But Liverpool provided the sound most
identified with it, particularly at the Star Club, which musicians dubbed “Uncle
Manfred’s Home for Lost Scousers.”15 Liverpudlians and Hamburgers developed
strong emotional affinities. As we think about the cultural synthesis between
Hamburg and Britain in the music scene, let’s briefly consider Liverpool’s role in
shaping a generation of musicians.
Like Hamburg, Liverpool’s identity derives from its port. It was Britain’s
gateway to empire and a key point in the triangular slave trade. These flows not
only enriched the city, they also altered its complexion as freed slaves, African
seamen, servants, and later students settled there, establishing the oldest black
community in Europe. High rates of intermarriage with locals did not dissipate
racial prejudice, however, and the city resembled more an ethnic-racial patchwork
quilt than a melting pot. The Irish famine of the 1840s brought another wave of
refugees (including the forebears of Lennon and McCartney) with their own
music cultures. Over the next century Cunard steamships brought in American
sounds—early jazz, country-western, rhythm, and blues—long before they
could be heard elsewhere in the UK or Europe. As in Hamburg, passenger and
commercial ships also brought sailors, traders, and tourists. Jewish entrepreneurs
were instrumental in erecting a modern entertainment industry in the early
1900s. Liverpool became a fiercely vibrant mass cultural crossroads.16
If shipping brought the city wealth, it also brought pain. The Depression
triggered mass unemployment as trade dramatically contracted. During the
First World War, German bombers targeting Merseyside’s dockworks inflicted
the most extensive damage on any British city outside London. When postwar
recession delayed the rebuilding of the city center, Liverpool’s Victorian slums
became national symbols of urban decay.17 Merseyside did, however, experience
some recovery in the 1950s, stimulated by large plants such as Unilever and
Ford, and new housing developments such as Speke. For teens this translated
into material goods like radios and phonographs, as well as new social spaces
like the coffee bar.18
One point of this constellation particular to Liverpool was Burtonwood air
base.19 Burtonwood provided jobs and contact between locals and Americans.
Between 1945 and 1958, some 6,500 Americans stationed here married English
women; countless other liaisons did not result in marriage.20 Locals could go
there to see American entertainers perform for the troops, while servicemen
frequently went into Liverpool for R&R. Black-and-white GIs attended social
clubs, cafes, and house parties, often bringing along guitars or the latest
American records (like the much-mythologized Cunard Yanks who worked on
passenger ships). Such connections made Liverpool seem “the most American
of English cities.”21
Informal exchanges shaped local music cultures.22 For the generation born in
the 1940s, rock ‘n’ roll’s arrival was transformative. Coming soon after the end
of rationing, it (like comic books and Hollywood films) conveyed a Technicolor
modernity in stark contrast to what writer Christopher Booker called Britain’s
elite, “middle-aged” culture.23 Musician Ian Whitcomb recalls rock’s arrival in
his hometown Woking, a drab London suburb: “I well remember when I first
became aware of that good-news train clickety-clacking across the weeping gray
skies of Austerity England, belching beat and dropping molten rock and roll on
the history-laden, good-taste-riddled islanders. . . . How we loved those friendly
invaders!”24 His generation’s road to rock ‘n’ roll ran through the media: they
could read about it in the New Musical Express, see it at the cinema, or catch
it nightly on Radio Luxemburg.25 Maybe Bill Haley’s 1957 tour rolled through
their town. Or they could tune their new tellies to the BBC’s Six-Five Special, a
youth-oriented show of music and skits that aired on Saturday evenings in 1957
and 1958.26
The Six-Five Special was particularly important as a showcase for Lonnie
Donnegan, Britain’s first homegrown star of the rock ‘n’ roll era. Donnegan
fused American blues (which he first heard on US forces radio while stationed
The Musicians 71
in postwar Austria), the Scottish folk of his childhood, and the Dixieland jazz
he played with Chris Barber and Ken Colyer into skiffle. Skiffle was fun, easy
to play music based on a simple formula of acoustic guitar, tea chest bass, and
washboard percussion. It tapped into still-vibrant British cultures of music-
making at home. Donnegan’s frenetic cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line”
sold 1 million copies in 1956 and became the Six-Five Special theme song. It
inspired guitar sales as boys and girls across the UK formed their own skiffle
combos. By the time the skiffle fad ran its course in 1959, many teenage players
(such as John Lennon and Jimmy Page) graduated to rock ‘n’ roll. Like their
anti-Schlager German counterparts, they rejected the “schlocky-wet state” of the
national hit parade.27 Donnegan bequeathed to them a performance style like
the early rockers’ and a repertoire of American tunes that “inhabited a space
somewhere between black and white histories.”28
Liverpool absorbed these myriad influences, developing a distinct subculture
around listening to and covering obscure American rock ‘n’ roll, black vocal,
country, and rhythm and blues records. Musicians infused these sounds with
their own energy and local humor. Their aim was to please audiences, unlike
the blues cultists then congregating in London (whose ranks included the young
Rolling Stones). Liverpool’s music-obsessed youths came together at schools, art
colleges, and cafes, as well as the factories and waterfront industries where many
worked.29 By the late 1950s Liverpool had at least 300 rock ‘n’ roll bands. They
performed at block parties, workingmen’s clubs, and church dances. But those
with ambition grew frustrated as university halls and professional venues froze
out their “primitive” music.30
By 1960 a few promoters saw this gap in the marketplace and opened spaces
to rock. Ray McFall introduced Beat music nights at the Cavern, a jazz club
in the labyrinthine cellars of a Victorian warehouse near the river. Mona Best
opened the Casbah in the basement of her spacious home as a private club where
young people (including her son Pete) could play music and spin records in a
safe environment. Allan Williams and Lord Woodbine ran the downtown New
Colony Club, where the young Beatles provided backing for a stripper known
only as Janice. Williams began to manage some of the bands that hung out at his
Jacaranda espresso bar. In 1960 he put together a “Merseybeat festival” starring
Gene Vincent and a slate of local acts.31 Record shops like the Musical Box and
NEMS catered to fans with extensive selections of rock imports and English
covers. Bill Harry founded Mersey Beat, a weekly publication on the local scene.
Yet despite its abundant talent, Liverpool was considered a backwater by the
London-based record industry. To make it big, one had to leave.
Riding to the rescue was St. Pauli and its tourist industry. In 1960 Koschmider
began importing talent from Williams’ stable and London’s 2I’s, kicking off what
musician Iain Hines called a “second British invasion” of Germany.32 While a
few performers already had small-time careers in England, most went straight
from playing local dances to logging all-nighters on Europe’s most sinful mile.
As John Lennon famously quipped, “I was born in Liverpool but grew up on the
Reeperbahn.”
Dreams of Hamburg, dreams of freedom
For a Liverpool band in the early 1960s, the journey to Hamburg meant long
hours in a van full of gear driving south, more hours on a ferry, and still more
driving across the Netherlands into Germany.33 The trip became less arduous
when Weissleder began flying performers over for the Star Club in 1962, though
tickets were initially only one-way: those who didn’t perform well had to find
their own way home. Either way, this was a leap of faith for musicians; that so
many set aside the certainties of school or a traditional career testifies to the
era’s plentiful jobs and the optimism of the first generation fully nurtured by the
welfare state.34 What were they getting themselves into?
In some respects Hamburg resembled Liverpool. Both were port cities with
a strong local identity, cosmopolitan outposts in wounded nations. Hamburg
had a long Anglophile streak. German reminded Cynthia Powell Lennon of “the
guttural sound of pure Scouse.”35 But for the working- or lower-middle-class
British youths who were unlikely to have ever traveled, St. Pauli was still a culture
shock. Dressed in his school blazer (the only suit he had), seventeen-year-old
Gibson Kemp first flew over in 1963 to play drums for Rory Storm at the Star
Club. “I went out of Liverpool once when I was on holiday to Wales—I’d never
even been to Manchester.”36 Despite Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s boast
that Britons had “never had it so good,” Kemp and his generation remember
their homeland as gray.37 The Liverpool of his youth was “bomb sites and ration
cards.” Nightlife shut down before midnight. St. Pauli, in contrast, burned bright
until dawn, a place of laughter and forgetting in a visibly wealthier city. To
Kemp, touching down in Hamburg was “a complete dream.” To Richard Starkey
(aka Ringo Starr), Hamburg felt free and “fabulous,” like “opening your eyes.”
It seemed to Cynthia Lennon like “a larger, more wicked version of Liverpool.”
Ted “Kingsize” Taylor (at twenty-two, one of the older Beat musicians) recalled
arriving at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, driving from the airport through
The Musicians 73
a darkened city, “and then all of a sudden we turned into the Reeperbahn and
everybody’s mouth fell open: ‘Where are we?’”38 Tony Sheridan, a Norwich
native with a budding career in London, declared that Soho had nothing on
Hamburg in terms of licentiousness. Echoing stereotypes of German orderliness
and Nazi sexual repressiveness, he found “nothing Nazi or even much German”
about St. Pauli in 1960.39 His cohort’s experience of Hamburg shifted their view
of Germany from the land of Hitler to the land of dreams of stardom.
Remarkably few parents prevented their children from pursuing those
dreams. While the Jewish mother of the Semitones’ bassist put her foot down
and Millie Sutcliffe would later disapprove of her son Stuart’s relationship with a
German woman, anti-German sentiments hardly surface in the sources.40 Many
supportive parents were themselves musical, such as the mothers of Kemp,
Taylor, and Harrison (whose bus driver father also collected country-western
records). Derry Wilkie’s father was a mandolin player from West Africa. Stu
Sutcliffe’s mum, a teacher and Fabian socialist, encouraged his creativity with
art and books. Gender norms also shaped parental attitudes. Sixteen-year-old
Beryl Marsden was only allowed to go to Hamburg after manager Joe Flannery
made himself her legal guardian; Cilla Black’s father forbade her to go at all.41
In contrast, Kemp’s and Sutcliffe’s dads, who knew Hamburg from working on
ships, seemingly saw it as a place to “make men” of their boys, consistent with the
day’s assertive masculinity and the widespread notion that parental control for
males effectively ended around age fifteen.42 Pete Best’s mother Mona reflected
the growing pragmatism of British sexual mores with her advice to “Watch your
step, Peter! You’ll probably come back educated—of a different type.”43 Other
parents’ ignorance of St. Pauli translated into tacit approval. Guitarist John
Frankland’s parents had no idea the Star Club was in a red-light district and
were pleased to hear of the Catholic Church next door, which John assured them
he attended every Sunday. That church was the first thing Mary McGlory saw
when a taxi took her to the club for the first time—then she saw the rest of the
Grosse Freiheit and nearly fainted. Carefully worded letters home stuffed with
money (often borrowed) mollified Valerie Gell’s family. Kemp and Taylor insist
that parents didn’t compare notes or have a phone chain (or sometimes even a
phone). Many likely saw a gig in Hamburg as a good opportunity, even if the
mother of Roy Young, a successful session player, always asked when he was
going to get a “real” job. Jobs were still plentiful in the mainstream economy and
parents assumed their children would settle down soon enough.44
The wages these musicians earned in St. Pauli suggest how flush its
entertainment economy was in the early 1960s. The first contract for the
unknown (and barely competent) Beatles with the parsimonious Koschmider

paid them roughly 29DM per person per day—quadruple the Cavern’s rate
and more than McCartney’s father made as a salesman at the Liverpool Cotton
Exchange.45 Their 1961 stint at the Top Ten raised them to 35DM each, nearly
four times the average working-class income in Hamburg.46 Drummer Chris
“Ace” Kefford made four times at the Star Club what his father made as a
plasterer in Birmingham. Taylor was working as a butcher in 1962 when his
band the Dominoes won their first Star Club contract. Offered the chance to
quadruple his wages as a musician, “I said yes, I would take the chance, and I
never regretted.”47
If the money was good, it was hard earned: playing professionally in St. Pauli
had always been hard work and the Beat scene was no exception. Musicians were
living jukeboxes: to keep the dancers hopping and the drinks flowing, owners
wanted music as continuous as possible.48 Koschmider and Eckhorn demanded
long sets from the one or two bands on the bill at their clubs. Even with three or
more bands nightly at the Star Club, musicians were still on call for twelve hours.
Saturday all-nighters ended on Sunday mornings with hangover breakfasts at
the Fischmarkt. Rare days off were spent sleeping or visiting music shops. This
schedule limited musicians’ spatial experience of Hamburg. For weeks, Kemp
thought the Reeperbahn was Hamburg’s main road—his world was bounded by
what was within “staggering distance” of the club. Some musicians were broken
by the routine of long nights, beer, amphetamines, and little sleep. Bassist Roger
Glover contracted peritonitis and likened working conditions in the Beat clubs
to a sweatshop. British managers came to see Hamburg as a form of boot camp
for their charges.49
The violence that underpinned life in the Kiez (as locals called the red-light
district) left its mark as well. Gangsters were attracted to the rockers, with whom
they shared a folk rebel image.50 As children of war growing up in emotionally
repressed societies, musicians and audiences used rock ‘n’ roll as catharsis,
channeling other, unspoken violence.51 Sheridan adopted a menacing visage on
stage, abusing his guitar when fights erupted in the audience.52 When they were
heckled, some bands started fights from the stage or retaliated with help from
the waiters, part of whose job it was to protect the musicians. (Keeping Lennon
and his rude mouth out of trouble became a full-time job for Horst Fascher.)
Weissleder created a cocoon around his musicians, giving them Star Club pins
to wear around town, partly to keep aggressors at bay on the tough streets of the
Kiez. When this “hands off ” policy was violated—as happened to Kemp, who was
beaten up one morning in the Schmuckstrasse—Weissleder sent a squad of his
The Musicians 75
own to get revenge, symbolically reclaiming his turf and displaying the violent
masculinity that still ruled St. Pauli. All of this was known as “self-policing.”53
This circling of the wagons made the musicians part of the Kiez “family.”
Indeed, an image of the scene as family pervades musicians’ memories. They
recalled acts of mutual aid, like pooling their money to help a band buy tickets
home after they bombed at the Star Club. They shared living quarters (with the
exception of female artists, who were housed at respectable hotels). They have
fond memories of Weissleder’s and Eckhorn’s largesse, Fascher’s mother doing
their laundry, and jaunts to the seaside arranged by local friends with cars. Small
kindnesses meant a lot to youths far from home in an area considered “a real
rough-house.”54 The club “family” encompassed all the workers, from the bands
to the waiters to the cleaners. Barmaid Betti Darlien combed McCartney’s hair
during breaks and bathroom attendant Tante Rosa allowed musicians to use her
houseboat. This family welcomed black musicians like Tony Cavanagh and Billy
Preston.55 It even had a living room at Gretel and Alfons, where a beer or a bite
could be had at any hour. Indeed, food often surfaces in musicians’ memories
as a bridge into local culture paved with Wurst and potato pancakes. It was also
a bridge back home: local eateries served chips, tea, and cornflakes, while the
Seamen’s Mission offered the homesick tastes of Britain. All these sites forged
familial ties that linger to this day. They persist in part because these elective
affinities were unburdened by domestic expectations, serving as a safe haven
from which hungry young artists could chase their dreams of success.56
Hamburg’s Beat scene also offered the dream of freedom, particularly sexual
freedom.57 Adventuring is to be expected from any group of unchaperoned
youths, but the timing of these musicians’ tenure in Hamburg had distinct
elements. They were the first British cohort not required to do military service,
allowing them, as Cynthia Lennon wrote, to feel truly “youthful and unafraid.”58
St. Pauli freed them to do things they’d never do back home. Sex became central
to their experience and memories, particularly for males. Kemp sums it up with
characteristic Liverpool wit:
Sex in all its forms, the discovery thereof, . . . [was] the biggest single element that
contributed to this so-called musical [revolution]. . . . Beat music, the incompetent
copying of good American music, was the soundtrack to it. My theory is that
suddenly, there was a vehicle for young people to go and sort of let loose, out of
parental control. And this new hypnotic Beat music . . . was sexy, there were these
young kids onstage who played good, and if they didn’t play good they weren’t
allowed to play. And suddenly there was a while sort of new mood. . . . Between
1960 and 1970 the whole world changed. And music was a part of changing it.59
This notion of discovery is significant, as most musicians were only teens when
they arrived in St. Pauli. They were part of a large demographic cohort possessed
of a “potent bundle of emotional and erotic energies.”60 Competing forces tugged
on those energies. Historian Kate Fisher finds little sex education in Britain
circa 1960, though this was beginning to change. Michael Schofield’s study of
Britons’ sexual behavior in the early 1960s found that only 20 percent of boys,
and 12 percent of girls, aged fifteen to nineteen had had intercourse. Yet Charles
Hamblett and Jane Deverson’s Generation X (published in 1965) suggested that
sex was becoming more common and desired among secondary schoolers.
Historian Hera Cook sees a long-term liberalization of sexual attitudes among
British adults, including the gradual acceptance of non-normative practices
and male libertinage.61 Yet change still occurred largely within traditional social
structures. Even as taboos against premarital sex eroded, people married younger
and at higher rates in 1956–64, often because the bride was pregnant. Sue Miles,
of London’s beatnik scene, sums up the competing forces of desire and restraint:
“No one admitted to sex. I got married because you couldn’t get a flat if you said
you lived with somebody. No real contraception, no abortion, all those kind of
things. There was an overall atmosphere of oneself against society.”62 Yet even
if the early 1960s were not a time of uncomplicated hedonism, they did see the
emergence of what Marwick calls a “teenage avant-garde of the daring.” Music
clubs became important spaces in which the daring could try on new behaviors
and attitudes about sex or the body, particularly in St. Pauli, a place not shrouded
in the “cloak of Victorian guilt.”63
St. Pauli offered a smorgasbord of sexual opportunities, especially (though
not exclusively) for straight men. Musicians lost their virginity there. Male
musicians also enjoyed the favors of strippers and prostitutes, colleagues in the
entertainment business that shared their nocturnal lifestyle and isolation from
the straight world.64 Other women also sought them out, such as the denizens of
the Ritzenecke, who occupied a table near the Star Club stage from which they
decided who would pair off with which musician. Draconian bans on women in
their rooms didn’t deter musicians from sexual encounters there and elsewhere,
if their memoirs are to be believed.65 Ruth Lallemand, a club barmaid who
became McCartney’s Hamburg girlfriend, stated, “We girls did go wild for the
guys just because they were musicians.”66
While clubs attracted the particularly adventurous, West German youths
were on average more sexually active than their British peers, even before the
so-called sexual revolution. Estimates from this period suggest that over 80
percent of West Germans had engaged in coitus before marriage. The median
The Musicians 77
Figure 3.1 The view from the stage at the Star Club, c. 1964. Reprinted by kind
permission of K&K Ulf Krüger oHG Hamburg.
age of sexual initiation was also falling. But females were still far more likely to
engage in sex only in the context of a monogamous relationship they assumed
would end in marriage.67 If they got pregnant in those years before the pill (when
coitus interruptus was the dominant birth control method), they married or
secretly risked abortion.68 These practices were reflected within the music scene.
No one seems to have discussed contraception. Musicians distinguished between
“birds” for sex and “girlfriends,” who provided affection and domestic comforts
like Sunday dinners. Girlfriends, for their part, testify to the pleasure they got out
of these relationships: British boyfriends, for example, brought music-making
back into German homes that had stopped doing so after the war.69 Girlfriends
formed emotional bonds with the musicians and also insisted on their own
respectability, distinguishing themselves from both the Ritzenecke and from
prostitutes, as well as the sexual revolution cohort that followed them.70 Sexual
behaviors and attitudes may have been liberalizing, but traditional frameworks
of marriage and monogamy retained considerable power, especially for young
women who suffered the most for transgressing those norms.
Green youths from Britain encountered not just sexually available women in
St. Pauli but non-normative sexualities openly on display. Transvestites, highly
visible in the Grosse Freiheit before a crackdown in 1964, exerted particular

fascination.71 Lallemand says bands wanted to experience “everything” and
howled with laughter when these “ladies” lifted their skirts—“they’d never seen
anything like that.”72 Lennon was a regular at the Monika-Bar, where Fascher
claims he once discovered him being fellated by a cross-dressing prostitute.73
Ian “Tich” Amey enjoyed “great conversations” at the Roxa bar with a performer
named the Duchess.74 Unspectacular gay men and women, in contrast, remain
largely invisible in musicians’ memories, even though they too visited the Beat
clubs.75 Sutcliffe was one of the few to document his feelings about them. In
letters he told his sister about his popularity with both girls and gay men, “who
tell me I’m the sweetest, most beautiful boy. . . . When in Liverpool I would never
have dreamt I could possibly speak to one without shuddering. As it is, I find
the one or two I speak to more interesting and entertaining than any others.”76
Unlike gawking at a transvestite show, personal encounters had the potential to
force a reexamination of inherited prejudices in a place that preached tolerance
for those who were “different.”77
Musicians’ memories of the scene are colored by nostalgia for their youth
and gloss over unpleasant realities like pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease,
homophobia, and men’s indifference to women’s pleasure.78 Libertine behavior
did not automatically translate into liberated attitudes: Rosi Sheridan, for
example, quit working at the Kaiserkeller because of Tony’s fits of jealousy. But
the fact that the musicians repeatedly credit St. Pauli’s liberal atmosphere with
expanding their own horizons is still worth taking seriously as a measure of
where they came from and where they were going. They were able to test out
new modes of sexual discovery and emotional openness well before the sexual
revolution. At a time when youth was caught between the dominant culture’s
demands for propriety and restraint, while consumer capitalism simultaneously
stimulated all kinds of wants,79 musicians in the Hamburg scene could live out
desire in a place of exile from the constraints of home.
St. Pauli and the making of The Beatles
The Beatles were undoubtedly the most famous musicians to apprentice in

St. Pauli, grinding it out over 250 nights between August 1960 and December
1962, and their experiences illustrate well the dynamics described above. They
ate up what Hamburg had to offer, melding that with their own musicality,
identification with the American rebel and the racial other, surreal humor, and
The Musicians 79
beatnik impulses. Encounters with young Germans broadened their worldview.

Friendships with artists in particular showed them what they were capable of
and gave them elements they took back to Britain, where other musicians and
fans tried them on.80 Connections forged in St. Pauli generated the sound and
style that later traveled the world as Beatlemania.81 Drawing on the extensive
documentation of their lives, let’s consider the Beatles’ time in Hamburg as part
of the social history of music, youth culture, and changing mores in the early
Sixties.
Liverpool bequeathed them a rich musical heritage. They grew up in working-
or middle-class families where instruments were played and songs sung.82
They also came up in a city attuned to black American music. That familiarity
set these sounds free as forms to be experimented with, as seen in their early
repertoire. While it is just a myth that Lennon’s grandfather had once been a
member of the Kentucky Minstrels, that doesn’t negate Lennon’s own place
in the long history of white musicians who sought to experience vicariously
the pleasures of blackness by emulating their sounds and movements. Black
music offered them symbolic space in which to articulate their distance from
mainstream society and fashion “authentic” selves.83 The Beatles carried this to
Germany, where they met others seeking distance from their own society.
The Beatles possessed what one local historian calls Liverpool’s constant
tension between local patriotism and “a roving eye to the distant horizon.”84
Sutcliffe saw no future in his home town, which he called “a brass coffin, but
they skimped a bit on the handles and they came off, so now we can’t lower
it into the pit, and the worms and bugs crawl slowly upwards.”85 Art school,
newly accessible to the children of the working and middle classes, offered an
escape route starting in the late fifties. There, creative people shared discoveries
in music, drugs, and art, with Beat literature being a common denominator.86
Sutcliffe, a talented painter, befriended Lennon, who cared more about rock ‘n’
roll (which he was already playing with Liverpool Institute students McCartney
and Harrison) than his studies. Despite Sutcliffe’s lack of musical ability, Lennon
begged him to join his band, The Silver Beetles, fusing his own surreal humor
and Sutcliffe’s bohemian cool with McCartney and Harrison’s musicianship.
The band soon moved in both rock and art circles, providing backing at poetry
readings and “happenings.”87
In 1960 they came under Williams’ management. After securing their first
Hamburg stint they added drummer Pete Best, whom they knew through
his mother’s Casbah club. After a 24-hour journey spat them out onto the
Reeperbahn one August morning, Koschmider installed them at the Indra.
They played there for six weeks, billeted next to the men’s toilets at the squalid
Bambi Kino. Except for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (then with Ringo Starr
on drums), they made no friends. They avoided other Brits in the audience, who
were usually hated servicemen. They initially made no German friends either.
Sutcliffe hated St. Pauli: “Hamburg has little quality, except the kind you would
find in an analysis of a test tube of sewer water. It’s nothing but a vast amoral
jungle.”88 Such impressions were partly shaped by the historical past. Sutcliffe felt
“guilty” talking to German girls because of the war. Lennon considered Germans
“thick” and called them Nazis to their faces. His fanciful account in Mersey Beat
of the Beatles’ origins refers to German officials as “Gestapoes.”89
Things changed when Koschmider moved them to the Kaiserkeller in
October 1960. There they met young Germans alienated from their own nation’s
culture of conformity. Astrid Kirchherr recalled, “When The Beatles met Klaus
[Voormann] and me, and later our circle of artist friends, they were completely
bowled over. Suddenly they realized that this country also had sensitive, attractive
people in it.”90 Kirchherr in particular—a working photographer of striking
physical beauty—dazzled them. The feeling was mutual: these Germans were
enthralled by the Brits’ look and wit. At a time when rock ‘n’ roll was the epitome
of unkultur, Kirchherr saw art in it. Within weeks, she photographed the band at
the nearby Dom, creating soulful portraits that have since become iconic images
of their Hamburg days. She and Sutcliffe became lovers. Sharing enthusiasms
and intimacies in broken English, Kirchherr and her circle redefined Germany
for the young Brits and showed them the broader possibilities of their rock ‘n’
roll.91 (More on them and other German fans in Chapter 4.)
Just as these new possibilities emerged, the Beatles’ first Hamburg residency
ended in arrest and deportation. McCartney found himself back in Liverpool
working on a lorry and winding coils for seven pound a week, fodder for a
young man’s blues.92 Desperate to get back, the group arranged a return in 1961,
with Kirchherr securing proper permits for a four-month residency at the Top
Ten. The success they found there sealed their status as local matadors and led
Weissleder to book them for both the Star Club’s opening and recurring stints
in 1962.
Sutcliffe was most eager to return. In Liverpool, he had always been the most
artistically and stylistically adventurous, adopting a look that was part James
Dean, part Zbigniew Cybulski (Polish star of 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds). In
Hamburg, he embraced the impulses Kirchherr brought his way, allowing her to
style and photograph him in ways that played up his androgynous features. This
convergence of rock ‘n’ roll, sexual exploration, encounters with the demimonde,
The Musicians 81
and the worlds of fashion and Hamburg’s gay elite Kirchherr moved in through
her work, gave him a sense that anything was possible, anything permissible.
This ultimately led him to settle in Hamburg to study painting until his sudden
death in 1962.93
His mates eventually copied these impulses and explored St Pauli’s possibilities
in their own ways. As Fascher writes, once they realized “how safe their asses
were,” they took full advantage of the local fascination with British musicians.94
They had both girlfriends and casual sex with many partners. (McCartney in
particular would be dogged by paternity claims stemming from this period.95)
Drugs (after sex, the third leg of the rock ‘n’ roll stool) were also part of life
in St. Pauli. The Beatles indulged in them well before Bob Dylan supposedly
introduced them to cannabis in 1964. Hans Meister remembered an “African
grass scene” and claims he smoked with the band on the Star Club’s opening
night. Before they became known for psychedelic experimentation, they were
avid consumers of pharmaceutical speed. Captagon and Preludin were available
in West Germany by prescription as diet pills. Local pimps also sold them and
clubs kept them in stock for employee use.96 Speed and strong German beer
fuelled antic behavior, such as the time Lennon ran through the Kiez wearing an
ape pelt Weissleder had brought back from Borneo, or the night he performed
with a toilet seat around his neck.97
Whether or not the road of excess led them to the palace of wisdom, St. Pauli’s
entertainment regime indelibly shaped the Beatles as performers. Long sets
night after night honed their musical chops. It also professionalized them: after
Weissleder briefly fired them when Lennon called him a Nazi, they gradually
shed their sloppy stage manner. They had no desire to remain a cult phenomenon:
hunger for success led them to channel the energy they drew from St. Pauli into
a broadly appealing expression of youthful creativity.98 One sees this evolution
in their style across the Hamburg years. First came the masculine flamboyance
of the leather gear they bought there: the jackets may have said Gene Vincent
but the trousers suggested something German, even kinky. Indeed, when they
returned to Liverpool in late 1960, promoter Brian Kelly advertised them as “The
Beatles, live from Hamburg,” and some unsuspecting locals became fascinated
by this “fantastic German group in black leather.”99 Then Hamburg gave them the
“mop top,” the forward-combed, free-flowing hairstyle worn by their German
friends, both male and female.100 When the Beatles exploded onto the world
stage in 1964, that hairstyle unleashed wide-ranging debate over masculinity
and establishment values. Freed from the constraints of the factory or office,
musicians could experiment with long hair, making them the avant-garde of a
gender-bending style that was “casual instead of crisp.”101 Parts of that style came
straight from the Hamburg scene and its democratic politics of self-invention
from below.102
Hamburg-St. Pauli was a unique forcing house of sensation for the Beatles.
Ignored by London, they left home to find an audience for whom rock ‘n’ roll felt like
the difference between life and death. This “toilet of their miserable beginnings”
taught them how to survive on society’s fringe.103 As Devin McKinney writes, the
connections they forged in St. Pauli showed them how to “thrive on the currents
of desire and sensation crackling between themselves and their audiences . . .
[a] recognition of war, hunger, deep hostility, and fellow feeling between the
undergrounders of two nations so lately striving to ruin each other.”104 These
musicians from battered, polyracial Liverpool played American rock ‘n’ roll—
an expression of “the hot, fluid underside of American society”—in a cultural
border zone in West Germany, then thrust those subterranean impulses onto the
world.105 The Beatles’ development and rise reflected larger processes of cultural
hybridity and postwar mobility as young people increasingly felt emboldened to
cross boundaries of class and nation in search of authentic experiences. St. Pauli
offered them freedom and a recognition they might never have found at home.
Girls with guitars?
Was this same journey available to young women? This was, after all, a period
when the dominant culture in both Britain and West Germany worked hard
to restore traditional, binary gender roles after the upheavals of war. At the
same time, economic and social conditions opened up for girls new avenues of
mobility and increasing access to higher education, job training, and the fruits
of consumer culture. While the burdens of respectability weighed heavier on
them, nonconformist young women could find in rock ‘n’ roll new modes of
expression.106 Most experienced this as fans. Others made music themselves,
most typically and visibly as singers (examples include Tanya Day, Beryl Marsden,
and Carol Elvin). Guitars and drums, in contrast, were coded as masculine;
with almost no role models, girls were hard-pressed to see themselves wielding
them.107 That didn’t stop an intrepid few from taking them up, most notably the
all-female Liverbirds.108
Amateur-friendly skiffle had produced some female combos, as did British
folk.109 Out of the latter emerged the Liverbirds, who got together in Liverpool
in 1963 as a group of friends meeting after work. They started out playing folky
The Musicians 83
instrumentals, then switched to rock and Beat. No one had much experience
performing; some were still learning their instruments. The addition of singer
Pam Birch hastened their evolution: an employee at NEMS, she had a deep
knowledge of American music as well as a gutsy singing style. Her charisma as
a front person notwithstanding, the Liverbirds presented themselves as a band
of equals: Birch on guitar and lead vocals, McGlory on bass, Gell on guitar, and
Sylvia Saunders on drums.110
Liverpool’s Beat scene was inhospitable to a female group, as encapsulated by
Lennon’s snarky remark, “Girls with guitars? That’ll never work.”111 In a city that
now had 400 active bands, the Liverbirds had a hard time getting gigs or being
paid fairly when they did. When Henri Henroid came scouting for the Star Club,
they took a chance and won the audition. As they waited for work permits, back
in Hamburg Flannery (working for Weissleder) hyped the impending arrival of
the “female Beatles.”112 Privately he was skeptical of their ability and hoped they
could at least coast on their novelty. McGlory, however, recalls instant success
in 1964, the audience tossing them coins as they played Barrett Strong’s “Money
(That’s What I Want).” They had that gutbucket quality St. Pauli audiences liked,
and their repertoire of harder-edged R&B and Chuck Berry tunes fit well with
the new sound being purveyed by the Kinks and Rolling Stones.
While they could “keep up with the boy groups,” their gender shaped
expectations and their treatment within the Hamburg scene. The Chants, with
whom they shared a bill, told Mersey Beat they looked after them like “little
sisters.”113 Flannery took it upon himself to act in loco parentis, sending messages
and money home to their families. Paternalism and an abundance of caution
motivated Weissleder to house them at the Hotel Pacific, away from the Kiez
(not that they spent much time there, as they played the same grueling schedule
as other bands). Unlike Flannery, however, Weissleder saw them as more than a
novelty act. They reciprocated that confidence by signing with him despite offers
of management from Brian Epstein and Larry Page. McGlory says they chose
Hamburg because “it was a dream of everybody in Liverpool to get that Star
Club stencil on their guitar case.”114 Being part of Weissleder’s stable meant good
wages, camaraderie, and subcultural credibility. For the Liverbirds it also meant
a recording contract, appearances in a movie and the television show Beat-Club,
and three years of steady gigs in Europe.115
Their status as an all-female band was a marketable gimmick. The Star-
Club News, for example, ran a cover story calling them a “breath of fresh air”
while declaring, “bachelors take note—they are still available!”116 Another piece
showed them laughing at an article in Musikparade assuring readers they were
“real girls”: “Skeptics . . . just can’t believe the weaker sex is capable of hammering
out such a great beat.”117 But the group also quietly expanded the possibilities
for female rockers. McGlory says they took comments like Lennon’s mostly as
teasing, but also set out to prove him wrong. Photographs and memories suggest
they saw themselves, and were treated within the scene, as equals. Their look
reinforced that. Kirchherr, working as a stylist at the Star Club in 1964, switched
their stage attire from skirts and blouses to leather vests and trousers, giving
them the gender neutrality of the male rocker who’s free to just “get on with
it.”118 And get on with it they did, onstage and off. If McGlory nearly fainted
the first time she saw the Grosse Freiheit, she and her bandmates soon availed
themselves of the sexual freedom of St. Pauli’s music scene.119
The Liverbirds did not set out to be pioneers. McGlory went into it thinking
it “probably wouldn’t work out.” They were so happy to find success in West
Germany that they didn’t worry about being unknown back home.120 But they
ultimately ran up against both the limits of their ability and the era’s gender
expectations. The rise of a technically virtuosic rock after 1966 sidelined
unassuming female performers.121 Saunders and Gell quit the band in 1967 when
they married, leaving McGlory and Birch to play one last gig to 12,000 Japanese
fans. Saunders moved to Spain with the drummer from another band, while
the others stayed in Hamburg. McGlory married Frank Dostal of the Rattles,
with whom she formed a music publishing company. Birch joined a cover
band in Iran, then later moved back to Hamburg where she worked in record
promotion and gastronomy until her death.122 Their story illustrates both the
era’s exhilarating possibilities and the persistence of traditional gender norms
as seen through the lens of the Beat music scene—a place of both liberation and
limitation for women.
Homegrown sounds
The same currents of rock and skiffle that inspired young Brits also spurred
thousands of German boys and girls to form bands, albeit with a time lag
stemming from rock ‘n’ roll’s difficulty penetrating West Germany. Few of these
homegrown musicians became famous or even got near a recording studio, yet
music-making became a meaningful ritual in their lives—as real and important
as other aspects more commonly studied by historians.123 Unlike work or school,
“playing in a band provided a medium where players could express their own
personal aesthetic vision and through their music achieve a sense of controlling
The Musicians 85
their own values, destiny, and self-identity,” as anthropologist Ruth Finnegan

wrote of amateur musicians in another context.124 Playing rock and Beat also
offered young Germans connection to a transnational community of youth. It
took them outside the utilitarian, providing access to intense experiences. It
became a source of cultural capital, friendships, and sexual contact, even if these
could be ephemeral, with music-making being but one pathway in their lives.125
Beyond its emotional and aesthetic dimensions, music-making depended on
certain material conditions: it required time and money, making it an index
of the era’s prosperity. Rising numbers of teens had their own rooms where
they could play their own radios, records, and instruments received as gifts or
purchased in installments. That thousands of West German youths could form
bands speaks to that generation’s economic power; that they desired to do so
speaks to music’s growing centrality to youth culture.
Homegrown Beat had roots in the skiffle fad that hit West Germany in the
late 1950s, a largely middle-class, high school phenomenon traceable to Barber’s
popularity and Howland’s radio show. At a time when live music was still de
rigueur at social events, skiffle groups found opportunities to play at dances,
festivals, taverns, and state-sponsored youth clubs (Häuser der Jugend). The all-
female Lady Crackers from Hamburg’s Harburg district gained local notoriety
before a difficult father and an uncomprehending boyfriend scuttled the group.
While band competitions dangled the prospect of a record contract, most
skifflers saw music-making as something for fun, not fame.126
By 1962 skiffle had become palatable to adults, and thus “square.” Rebels like
Manfred “Toni” Oberdorffer rejected skiffle and “prissy” Indo-Rock in favor of
“hard” rock ‘n’ roll.127 His group the Tonics, who started playing at youth houses,
recorded singles after work and gigged on Saturday afternoons at the Top Ten.
Günter “Cisco” Berndt, one of St. Pauli’s first homegrown rockers, scored gigs
at the Kaiserkeller, Top Ten, and Club o.k. with his group the Dynamites. These
pioneers, like their counterparts elsewhere in West Germany and Berlin, were
soon joined by a wave of middle-class youths. Harburg’s Rascals formed after
Kai Kienast got a guitar for Christmas in 1961. Their first gig came in May 1962
at a dance school “teenage ball”; paid practically nothing, they were just glad not
to be booed off stage. Playing loud, fast versions of Anglo-American songs, they
soon commanded 5DM per man at dances and local taverns. They made their
own posters and worked part-time jobs to fund their obsession. A patient father
drove them to gigs and subsidized equipment costs, suggesting a nascent adult
receptivity to rock ‘n’ roll, at least within the wholesome confines of youth dances
(one band member, however, was sent off to boarding school when his grades
slid). While Kienast recalls being in a band as just “fun and a welcome change”
from daily life, Ulf Krüger describes his experience of it as a “hard school.” It
took tenacity to find rehearsal space and schlep gear from school party to village
fete to Haus der Jugend. It also took commitment to endure harassment over
long hair or unconventional clothes at a time when a rock musician’s status was
“lower than a garbage man,” as Dicky Tarrach put it. But the thrill of making
and sharing music outweighed the hassles for those who loved rock and Beat.128
Those old enough or bold enough could cross the social divide and go to
St. Pauli to see their music live. Teens from around the region found their joy
at weekend afternoon shows staged specifically for fans under eighteen (which
the law barred from the clubs after 10:00 p.m.). These shows gave many their
first taste of the electricity generated in a live rock environment. They brought
audiences close even to big stars. Dostal credits this ability to see, and even meet,
British and American bands with inspiring Germans like himself to form their
own bands.129 As Beat’s popularity spread, the Star Club and Top Ten sent house
bands to outposts in other cities or newly opened regional clubs, further rippling
out these influences.130
Before 1963, fans rarely saw other Germans onstage. Koschmider and
Eckhorn turned to Britain for talent, even if they hired the occasional local act.
Weissleder initially had a firm policy of not booking German bands because
he felt they lacked the “authentic” sound.131 But in 1963, seeking to add some
variety to its offerings, the Star Club began holding contests to identify local
talent.132 Dozens jumped at the chance to tread the same stage as their heroes.
Those who went over well got gigs that paid “barely enough to live on, but we
were happy just to be paid at all.”133 This setup shows the hierarchy within the
Beat scene, measured by a group’s perceived authenticity. The most authentic
were the Americans, then the British, who sang the music in its native tongue
and brought the requisite energy. German bands only made the cut if they sang
in passable English and projected the excitement local audiences demanded.
The first German group to achieve this were the Rattles, winners of the Star
Club’s inaugural band battle. They emerged organically out of Hamburg’s Beat
scene and St. Pauli itself, where founding member Achim Reichel (born 1944)
grew up. The grandson of comic performers, Reichel embodied St. Pauli’s long
traditions of mass entertainment as well as that cohort whose lives were changed
by American sounds transmitted over the wireless. Rock ‘n’ roll “fit my emotions”
and he left school at fifteen to pursue it. Apprenticing as a waiter by day, at night
he haunted local clubs, decked out in “cool clothes” sent by an American uncle.134
Studying Sheridan on stage served as his music lessons. Armed with three chords
The Musicians 87
and old radios for amps, he and Herbert Hildebrandt formed the Rattles in
1960–61, practicing in a youth hall and a Reeperbahn cinema. They built a fan
base playing for small wages or meals in pubs around the city.135 But it wasn’t
until the Star Club opened up to German bands that they were able to imagine
something bigger. After winning the 1963 band battle they signed a contract with
Weissleder; a string of hit singles followed. Dubbed the “German Beatles,” they
became the only German Beat band to chart in England, where they had a fan
club and toured with Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones. They played a residency
at Liverpool’s Cavern. They later opened for the Beatles on their 1966 German
tour and even made a movie for the German teen market. They became fixtures
of the Hamburg scene, with all the social and sexual opportunities that entailed.136
Other German Beat bands gained followings, but none as big as the Rattles.137
The material German Beat bands produced was highly derivative of the
American original, filtered through the British, whose style they also emulated.
German critics, if they noticed it at all, dismissed these bands as unoriginal
and simplistic.138 Some of this had to do with the universally shared notion
that this music only sounded “right” in English. Musicians wanted to sound
like the artists they revered, plus any hope for broad success hinged on singing
in the music’s native tongue.139 Singing in English was also a rejection—albeit
one usually only articulated in hindsight—of German identity at a time when
“nobody wanted to be German.”140 Groups scoured English dictionaries for
band names and asked British friends to proofread their lyrics. “Rasseln” (to
make noise) became Rattles; Peter Wurst became “Tommy Star.” When words
failed, singers substituted phonetic approximations and lots of “yeah yeah
yeahs.”141 These acts of translation allowed German musicians to inhabit this
music and make it their own, linking themselves to an international network of
like-minded youths. It also provided links to the liberatory impulses of African-
American music, making it part of a long line of German experimentation with
black sounds. This was about creating a wild noise that gloried in its rough edges
and a turning away from German traditions of classical music, “village music,”
and the Schlager industry.142
Encounters with Anglo-American music and musicians provided moments
of transcendence—of adult rules, of subordinate status at school or work, of
Germanness. But for the majority of German players these were only temporary.
Most bands broke up as members aged and adult responsibilities came calling.
Unlike their British counterparts, West German males still had to do military
service, pulling many away at a crucial time in a band’s development (even
Reichel was unable to evade service at the height of the Rattles’ popularity).143
While they indulged in dreams of stardom, most saw a music career as unlikely.
Yet even as they now say it was all just “good fun,” their memory practices—
gathering at revival concerts and pub nights, retelling stories, preserving
mementos—suggest that music deeply shaped their identity. Kemp, who now
owns a Hamburg pub where many of them gather, says those in the scene
have been enriched by their memories of what they did then and it has
become . . . a focal point in their, what probably were pretty mundane, normal
working lives . . . in a sense of having belonged. . . . It’s almost like Indians,
you know, at the turn of the century, all round the campfire, passing on the
knowledge down the generations.144
The meaning they invested in these experiences is shown by Kienast’s

characterization of the Star Club, where his band played its last gig in 1965: “To
us [that stage] meant the world.”145 For British and German Beat musicians alike,
St. Pauli was the center of their emotional geography.
* * *
This exploration of the experiences of Beat musicians from Britain and north
Germany reveals key dynamics at work among Marwick’s “teenage avant-
garde of the daring,” a small cohort of young men and women who acquired
outsize symbolic importance within 1960s youth culture. The Hamburg scene
wasn’t planned (vibrant scenes never are) but grew organically out of St. Pauli’s
entertainment traditions, the conditions of the marketplace, and the Economic
Miracle. Examining the social history of musicians who moved through it restores
to view some of its texture and materiality, as well as the unexpected contingencies
that generated what became an incredibly influential popular culture.146
Such cultural encounters needed the spaces of the city for their realization.
St. Pauli’s music clubs, neighboring establishments, and surrounding streets
provided opportunities for social mixing and exchanges of style. Music became
a catalyst for the production of individual, collective, and local identity.147 British
musicians were dropped into the land of the former enemy, as well as the sub-
world of the “not particularly German” port district. To find their footing, they
created an alternative geography bounded by the spaces of the music scene.
Once they felt safe, they embraced the freedom of being away from home. Some
slummed it while others used their circulation through this counterworld as a
vehicle for growth and self-discovery.
Deeper encounters with Germans who became friends or lovers were another
aspect of musicians’ circulation through this urban space and the social border
The Musicians 89
crossings it facilitated. Both sides forged elective affinities on the field of music,
a realm distinct from ordinary experience. Both found emotional escape from
the countries they were born to through American rock ‘n’ roll, but the relative
lack of actual Americans in Hamburg threw them back on themselves, setting
up new possibilities for cultural translation as they rewrote the myths of another
land in their own idiom.148 Liverpool musicians came from a tough city steeped
in American, Irish, and African sounds; for them music was not a luxury but
“identity, voice, and weapon against inertia.”149 For German fans, rock ‘n’ roll
felt like the difference between life and a slow death in a land of conformity and
emotional repression. The cultural syntheses produced when these two sides
met helped transform rock ‘n’ roll from a niche “proletarian” taste into the lingua
franca of youth in the global Sixties.
Musicians remember Hamburg’s Beat scene as a site of liberation. For some
that liberation was artistic: Kirchherr in particular showed Sutcliffe, the Beatles,
and later Kemp (whom she married in 1967) the possibilities within the “low”
cultural form of rock ‘n’ roll. For all participants, the Beat scene represented
liberation from “the ennuied mid 50s.”150 It offered catharsis for young people
raised in a stifled age. It proffered bodily release through the acts of playing
instruments, singing, dancing, and having sex. This was a logical outgrowth of
what Frank Mort calls the role of advertising, marketing, and capitalist retailing
practices “in restructuring sexual attitudes and personal life” by making
“individualized, eroticized pleasure” central to consumer tastes.151 Young people
rode (and drove) this trend, investing rock and Beat music—dismissed by critics
as mere commodities—with meaning.152 Musicians were key transmitters of
that “product,” modeling the pleasures it contained. Beat’s erotic vibe promised
physical liberation outside the propriety demanded of youth. In St. Pauli, a
place that revolved around the pleasures of the body, sex and music became
intertwined in experience and memory.
The musicians generally deny that their activities had any political resonance
and eschew the grand claims frequently made for Sixties culture. Aside from
expressions of frustration with authority, Beat lyrics steered clear of political
statement. That doesn’t mean these actors didn’t discuss politics in other
forums or that there were no politics within the scene itself. Liverpool poet and
musician Mike Evans, who was part of a consciously avant-garde wing, saw Beat
as “try[ing] to put one over on the existing social order, to live in the spaces their
power leaves open.”153 In the West German context, rock and Beat transmitted
informalized modes of inhabiting the body. In the next two chapters, we will see
how long hair on males, young women’s sexuality, and youth’s claims on public
space became politicized, largely from the outside. On a less overtly political
level, musicians modeled a postmodern way of living loosened from traditional
categories of nation and class.154 They embodied a mode of life emancipated
from school and work (leaving aside the very real labor they performed on
stage). Their uninhibited forms of expression revealed a new emotional regime
brewing among the postwar generation that gave musicians cultural capital
among youth. At a time when scandal, nuclear brinksmanship, and a new public
airing of Nazi crimes opened cracks in the image of the establishment, young
people increasingly saw in musicians an alternative source of authority.155 The
Beatles in particular, who “grew up on the Reeperbahn,” became avatars of the
rising power of a transnational youth culture centered around music.
This culture radiated a democratic aura, its possibilities theoretically
available to all. Beat music’s very form personified this, as anyone armed with a
few chords and some chutzpah could play it. But the scene’s egalitarian potential
remained limited by existing ideas about sex and gender. Youths were a key
force behind the trend toward sexual enlightenment from below. The early
1960s were poised between a lingering world of restrictions, hierarchies, and
restraints, and a new one “lusting to be born.”156 Male musicians were most able
to push at those boundaries at a time when libertine behavior was increasingly
tolerated for men. Females also acted on desires stimulated by their circulation
through the scene. Yet if the Liverbirds could crack the “boys’ club,” they
and other female musicians never had the same degree of freedom.157 Their
trajectories show the lingering power of traditional frameworks of marriage
and monogamy.
We will see similar dynamics in the next chapter as we turn our attention
to fans, the indispensible counterpart of the musicians. They too explored the
possibilities of the age and pursued a democratic politics of self-invention. What
Kemp offhandedly dubbed “the incompetent copying of good American music”
by British kids for German audiences actually meant a great deal to them.
4
Fans and Audiences
A photograph taken from the Star Club stage shows a typical audience circa
1964. Amid a tightly packed crowd, two teenage girls dominate the foreground—
smiling, hair teased high, Cokes in hand. Behind them is a boy in a denim shirt
and workman’s cap, pumping his fist in the air as if to say, “Yeah!” To his left stands
another young man whose long, stringy hair and cleft palate would render him
Figure 4.1 Fans line the front of the stage at the Star Club. Reprinted by kind
a misfit in the outside world; here, however, he might find connection within the
community of Beat fans. This is their space.
These young people were part of a fluid community for whom Beat clubs
were sacred spaces. What did these places and the rituals of fandom mean to
participants and why should we pay attention to them? While these fans were at
this time a minority of youths, going to a rock show was becoming an increasingly
common and meaningful activity that has yet to receive much attention from
historians.1 A look at early rock and Beat fans can illuminate how gender roles,
sexual norms, and generational and class identities were being reconstituted
through popular music and its practices at this moment in time. In an era of
unprecedented media penetration of daily life, fans were highly conscious
consumers of records, magazines, clothes, and experiences. Just as important as
what they bought were the uses to which they put those things. Often dismissed
as passive consumers, fans in fact became producers who used readymade pop
culture in ways that brought them pleasure. They created their own fashions,
music, writings, art, slang, and ways of inhabiting the body. St. Pauli’s Beat fans
pioneered styles and behaviors that became mainstream later in the 1960s.
Without necessarily intending to, their use of spaces free of parental supervision
also helped erode West Germany’s official sexual conservatism. Even as fandom
reflected prevailing social inequalities, it offered avenues of self-reinvention for
both sexes, whether they were in the clubs or only experienced them from afar. A
focus on fans makes young women’s participation in these processes particularly
visible, as they were more likely to be found in the audience than onstage.
Music’s meanings lie, as Christopher Small argues, “in action, what people
do” when they come together to make and listen to music.2 This is a useful
framework for thinking about fans and audiences, particularly when the genre is
rock ‘n’ roll, whose meanings are produced more through its performance than
its texts.3 Performance entails communication between those onstage and those
in front of it. This chapter focuses on German Beat fans and audiences during
the early to mid-1960s and how they constructed self and society through music.
These practices will be reconstructed through an exploration of their accounts
and writings, visual evidence, and the fan-oriented publication Star-Club News.
The Hamburg scene offered possibilities for both individual expression and
community forged around a shared love of music.4 Hamburg’s Beat scene flowered
at a moment when rock was still a minority taste with subversive connotations.
Fans combined it with other cultural elements to distance themselves from their
elders and Germany’s past. Their activities were an assertion of cultural power,
moments of rebellion in a society that prized conformity. Their innovative role
Fans and Audiences 93
consisted not in the production of a new German music but a new style that
fused rock ‘n’ roll’s attitude and physicality with modern aesthetic elements.
That style, which would travel the world through Beatlemania, was born in
encounters between fans and musicians in St. Pauli’s Beat clubs.
Fans as a “problem”
Before we enter the world of Hamburg fans, a brief look at the scholarship on
fandom is in order. Scholars long ignored fans as objects of study, not least
because fandom was associated with “low” cultural forms like Hollywood
movies or comics. Fans did, however, gain negative attention from observers who
constructed the women and adolescents that dominated pop culture audiences
as a social problem, a “tribe of infantilized, alienated, celebrity-following
individuals who could assemble in unstable crowds to pursue their emotional
interest in simplistic cultural forms.”5 In 1941 Theodore Adorno dubbed popular
music “musical automatism” whose frenzied rhythms were engineered to create
“fanatics” that responded to primitive stimuli like “fascinated insects.”6 West
German liberals saw echoes of Nazi rallies in the wild enthusiasm of jazz fans
and later Beatlemania.7 In 1957 British scholar Richard Hoggart lamented the
death of “authentic” working-class culture under the onslaught of standardized
American pap, whose young consumers “form a depressing group” with “no aim,
no ambition, no protection, no belief.”8 These critiques contain some truths: pop
music is a capitalist product perfected by American producers. Its forms often
are repetitive and simple.9 But they disregard what pop might mean to audiences.
A different way of framing the issue emerged from Walter Benjamin’s essay on the
work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Reproducibility makes culture
theoretically accessible to all, allowing it to be adapted for infinite uses. Interest in
what people do with culture later surfaced in the work of Michel de Certeau, who
argued that “the culture of everyday life” is found in those “ways of maneuvering”
around imposed systems that rob people of agency; engagement with mass
culture is one such “strategy of evasion.”10 John Fiske applied this idea to cultural
studies, arguing that pop culture speaks directly to subordinate groups, who can
use it to evade hierarchical systems by creating “meanings and pleasures that
pertain to their [own] social situation.”11 Even as pop is created within structures
of dominance, it contains elements beyond elites’ ability fully to control it. As
Simon Frith and Paul Corrigan write, of course the agents of popular culture
exploit consumers—“the question is to what extent they manipulate them.”12
Interest in how people use pop culture coalesced in the 1990s into the
subfield of fan studies. Early works framed fandom as a form of resistance to
the dominant culture through acts like “textual poaching,” in which fans rewrite
existing works to create new ones, as in fan fiction.13 These studies owed a
debt to Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which cast
the spectacular music-oriented youth groups that emerged in postwar Britain
(Mods, punks, and others) as subcultures performing resistance through style.
They argued that subculture participants who reworked available fashions and
claimed public space were symbolically challenging a sociopolitical order that
aimed to render them invisible. This emphasis on resistance was later challenged
by those who argued that fan cultures could be just as likely to reproduce
existing social hierarchies as challenge them. This can be seen, for example, in
some rock fan communities, whose gender dynamics can be hostile to female
participation.14
Fan studies have tended to operate ahistorically. As Nancy Reagin and Anne
Rubenstein pointed out in a 2011 essay, fandom is directly related to structures
of economic organization, technology, transportation, and communication in
particular places and times.15 Studying fans in historical context illuminates
how changes in the material conditions of work and leisure shaped people’s
engagement with culture. It also reveals new aspects of how modernity was lived
or how popular culture served both to challenge and reinforce existing relations
of power.
The social history of music makes an excellent vehicle for such explorations.
Music is an activity that “creates” society. It helps people locate themselves in
the world and engenders alliances of feeling between those who are similarly
moved by it.16 Small’s concept of “musicking” stresses that communal element
by drawing attention to everyone in the spaces where music is made, not just
musicians. German historians have applied these ideas to classical music publics.
Late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences shaped music’s writing,
performance, and staging—“making the music,” as Sven Oliver Müller puts it.
They also used concert spaces as sites of inclusion and exclusion, communication,
ideology formation, and displays of power.17
The historiography on popular music in Germany also reveals music as
a terrain on which social relations are negotiated. Works emphasize the links
between music and power, a legacy of German historians’ focus on political
and socioeconomic themes, as well as pop culture’s struggles for legitimacy as
a “serious” subject.18 Studies have explored, for example, Swing Youth in Nazi
Germany, rock ‘n’ roll and the Cold War, and rock’s role in the protests around
1968. They show how leisure and consumption became sites of debate over
politics, citizenship, and social participation. However, historians have focused
more on discourses about music than audiences’ experience of it.19 This talking
“around” music overlooks the obvious point that most people embrace certain
songs or sounds because they enjoy them.20 Shifting focus to audiences’ direct
engagement with music offers a way around this problem. It reveals music’s
role in daily life (including changing social relations), young people’s leisure
practices, and changing emotions and ideas of pleasure.
Creating rock ‘n’ roll fans in West Germany
Pop culture penetrated West German life more than ever due to changes
associated with the Economic Miracle. The material conditions of pleasure
shifted: once people had to worry less about basic survival, they could turn their
attention to quality-of-life issues. Desires for pleasurable experiences, stoked by a
rapidly expanding consumer culture, could be met, for example, through sexual
consumption in St. Pauli. Youths, free of adult commitments like mortgages,
could indulge too. For many, pop music was their gateway to pleasure.21
Before the late 1950s, the dominant structures of work and leisure made
parents and children surprisingly similar in their use of music and media.22
Divergences grew as economic and social changes enabled young people to
mark out their own space through pop culture. They increasingly had their
own bedrooms or other spaces just for their use.23 An emotional generation gap
also opened up as the child’s duty to conformity collided with the skepticism
of adolescence—a skepticism rock ‘n’ roll articulated musically. The anxiety of
growing up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb, combined with the boredom of
home life, fomented desires for escape among youths across the developed world.
Other sources of conflict were specific to West Germany. Adenauer-era paeans to
the family and democracy masked conflict in the private sphere as war-damaged
fathers trying to reassert patriarchal authority clashed with their wives and
children. Teachers—many active since the Nazi era—perpetuated authoritarian
values and methods. Traces of Germany’s murderous past were everywhere, yet
little could be said about them publicly under a dominant emotional regime of
restraint.24 Adults busy repressing what they’d seen and done during the Nazi
and war years expected children to be unquestioningly grateful “for the stability
and plenty whose absence they’d never known.”25 By the early 1960s the Berlin
Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, Spiegel Affair, and the Eichmann and Auschwitz
trials generated talk of a crisis of authority. Well before the spectacular protests
of 1967–68, skeptical youths used music to rebel.26
Both girls and boys did this, with jazz’s “Dionysian enthusiasm” offering
a preview.27 But boys’ rebellion was most visible, as seen in the rock ‘n’ roll
violence of 1956–58. Commentators worried about the effects of prosperity.
Welfare officials sought to regulate youth leisure through organized clubs or
chaperoned dances at Häuser der Jugend. But they could not stop more and
more youths from consuming commercial, particularly American, fare that
offered “the promise of freedom, adventure, and pleasurable disorder.”28 AFN,
BFN, and Radio Luxemburg created a virtual community of rock ‘n’ roll fans.
When nightclubs began offering this music, fans could congregate around their
private passion. The clubs muted social distinctions (anyone who was at least
sixteen with some pocket money could enter) while creating new ones based
on musical knowledge and taste. The most devoted fans made these spaces the
focus of their lives, creating a “scene” that provided a sense of empowerment
denied them at home, school, or the job. Experiences of personal liberation and
group affirmation gave them glimpses of an ideal world.29
As we saw in previous chapters, people had been coming for generations to
St. Pauli for entertainment. The history of youths coming for specific types of
music dates to the jazz era. The 1940s Swing subcultures gave way to 1950s jazz
cliques. The Kaiserkeller’s 1959 opening initially attracted some jazz fans along
with casual sensation-seekers. They were soon outnumbered by the hardcore
rock ‘n’ roll fans who came to Grosse Freiheit 36. The most spectacular of these
were the Rockers,30 working-class youths who adopted American rockabilly
styles: black leather jackets, tight blue jeans, and greasy ducktails for the guys;
bullet bras, form-fitting outfits, and beehive hairdos for the gals. They gravitated
“to an underground where the roles [were] fiercest and freest . . . [to] a shadow
society of their own making.”31 This was not a contemplative audience: they
made themselves the stars of the show.32
Observers considered them an oppositional subculture. Jeff Nuttall called
their violence “temple ceremonials of the futureless,” as nothing mattered in the
age of the Bomb “except the crackling certainty of Now.” Dick Hebdige, writing in
the 1980s about Britain’s related Teddy Boy phenomenon, frames their rebellion
as “self-removal” from a society rigged against the lower classes. Historian
Kaspar Maase also sees class at work in West Germany, with rock ‘n’ roll as an
assertion of proletarian identity mixed with symbolic protest against both adults
and hated middle-class peers. Rock’s garishness kept away the unsympathetic
and proclaimed cultural power.33
America offered abundant material for this social distancing through the
body.34 Through creative appropriations, Rocker males styled themselves like
James Dean, who personified American myths of speed and freedom. They
fought with parents or bosses who saw their attention to their hair as unmanly.
Emulating Marlon Brando’s slouchy sensuality or Elvis’ lewd dancing also
carried specific meanings in the German context. They asserted an “informal,”
democratic bodily ideal counter to the militarized body of Germany’s past
and the postwar obsession with order and cleanliness.35 But an orientation to
America was in other ways not oppositional. It was, after all, compatible with
Adenauer’s pro-US foreign policy.36 Rockers’ money for Levi’s and leather came
from steady employment in a capitalist economy. Tensions generated by low
status in the workplace or the high cost of housing (which kept many young
people living with their families into their twenties)37 could be uncorked on
Saturday night, then put back in the bottle on Monday morning when jeans
were swapped for work clothes. While rock ‘n’ roll in this period was culturally
provocative, Rockers’ taste in it was conservative. The oppositional potential
of their subculture was also limited in regards to gender. Rocker masculinity
revolved around male bonding, sexual conquest, and the objectification of
women.38 German Rockers were not as different from their fathers as looks
suggest: both used drink, weekend hedonism, and mass culture to cope with
stress. Contra Hoggart, embracing American pop culture didn’t erase their ties
to their own class.39
Rock ‘n’ roll would have remained a niche, proletarian taste in West Germany
had it not been taken up by middle-class youths. At a time when mainstream
fashions were conservative for both sexes (even male jazz “heads” wore crew
cuts), daring middle-class youths used it for their own cultural experiments as
they moved through Hamburg’s rock ‘n’ roll outposts in the early 1960s. Peter
Kaschel, a doctor’s son from Wilhelmshaven, read about English bands at the
Kaiserkeller in a British forces newspaper. On a family trip to Hamburg, he
snuck out, surreptitiously changing into jeans and his dad’s leather work jacket,
“[leaving] behind the comfort of my parental home for a new, cold, strange
world.” His anxiety at the violence and “beer corpses” in the club was stilled by
the music. Kaschel went on to become a scene regular, making good use of the
English he’d mastered at home among the “Tommies.”40 Icke Braun, a university
student from Berlin, loved dancing to Caribbean jazz at the Pigalle and initially
balked when a friend suggested they check out “that hovel where they play rock
‘n’ roll.” But the music at the Kaiserkeller was “like a punch in the face”: Braun
was hooked.41
Another clique of bourgeois art students, labeled “Exis” (short for

Existentialists) for their love of French bohemian looks and cool jazz, discovered
Beat music in late 1960.42 The story of how the first of them, Klaus Voormann,
stumbled across the Kaiserkeller has become an Ur-text of the Hamburg scene
and Beatles history, for it marks the birth of a new cultural fusion.
It came from the cellar club: music like I’d never heard. At home, we listened
only to classical music; boogie-woogie was obscene and the word “rock‘n’roll”
couldn’t be thought, let alone uttered. Our clique listened only to jazz. . . . But
this was different. It went right through me and pleased me so much I wanted
to get closer. . . . I crept carefully down the steps, closer to the magic sounds. I
was used to the atmosphere in jazz clubs; the audiences there were ‘cultivated.’
Here, I realized that someone could grab me by the collar and punch me in the
nose or snatch my wallet or chuck me out head over heels. I felt someone grab
my hand—I pulled it back in horror to see the hand stamp now there. I stumbled
further inside and was soon blinded by a ghastly ultraviolet light. . . . Meanwhile,
the band had changed. The sound was the same: earthy and fat, it landed in a
region below the beltline. On stage, the blondest skeleton on earth tried to swing
his long, bony leg over the back of the guitarist; he rocked and bobbed without
dropping the mic stand. When a waiter barked, ‘take a seat or piss off!’ I took the
nearest stool, close to the stage. With huge eyes under my freshly washed mop of
hair I sipped my beer and followed the scene around me.43
Voormann’s account reads like a conversion narrative, complete with mystical

forces and a sense that his life had changed forever. It also resembles Victorian
narratives of slumming, even colonial exploration. First, a geographic boundary
is crossed: a banker’s son out for a walk crosses into an area defined by sexual
transgression and violence. Intertwined with this boundary are those of class
and race: rock ‘n’ roll in 1960 was strongly coded as proletarian, lascivious,
racially other. Once Voormann crossed the border and entered that cellar he
temporarily lost his class privilege, his hairstyle marking him as an interloper
in the Rockers’ domain. But he soon gained new power: rock ‘n’ roll opened
him up to a spontaneous physicality suppressed by his upbringing. Determined
to meet the musicians, he used art as an icebreaker, returning the next night
with a record sleeve he’d designed for a German label. He also dragged along
photographer friends Jürgen Vollmer and Astrid Kirchherr. They injected a
“bourgeois” element of aesthetic appreciation, listening attentively and clapping
after each song. They also looked different. They wore corduroy jackets, chunky
sweaters, and a long, forward-combed hairstyle the Beatles would later make
famous as the “mop top”; Kirchherr, a northern blonde, wore a short, gamine
coif and dressed all in black. Their style and deportment distinguished them
from “the usual riff-raff that swarmed the Reeperbahn,” which intrigued the
musicians. The feeling was mutual.44 The young artists staked out space in the
club and befriended the bands, with whom they could speak passable English
(unlike the Rockers).45 Vollmer claims they even won respect from the Rockers,
with whom they shared an aversion to middle-class German uptightness.46 Like
Kaschel and Braun, the Exis typified a growing interest among educated youths
in “low” culture.47 They cracked open the Rockers’ monopoly on rock ‘n’ roll,
facilitating its evolution into the cross-class lingua franca of youth in the 1960s.
Social mixing in the clubs gained additional force with the opening of the Top
Ten, which attracted Rockers and Exis, students and workers. It even drew older
visitors like Horst Ansin, whose mental map of St. Pauli revolved around music.
Like Braun, Ansin did not see jazz and rock ‘n’ roll as mutually exclusive—both
were great for dancing. Indeed, a desire to dance linked fans. The spacious Top
Ten had an advantage in this regard, making it a forerunner of the discotheque in
Figure 4.2 Rock ‘n’ roll fans customize their jackets with the names of their favorite
performers. Reprinted by kind permission of K&K Ulf Krüger oHG Hamburg.
Germany.48 It capitalized on the Twist craze of 1961–62, another step in rock ‘n’
roll’s emergence from the basement. Jochen Albrecht stressed that opportunities
to hear this music in large spaces were rare then. To hear it live and loud—and
dance to it with abandon—became an addictive, transformative experience.49
Once the Star Club opened in April 1962, it became the Hamburg scene’s
center of gravity, both at the time and in memory.50 Achim Reichel, who grew up
in St. Pauli, recalls that while some art students and people from “rich families”
came, its initial constituency was local working-class kids and “roughnecks.”
Frank Dostal, a middle-class teen who later joined Reichel’s group the Rattles,
initially avoided it for that reason. Weissleder knew his venue’s location in the
disreputable Grosse Freiheit might limit its appeal; he also understood that in
1962, rock was still the sound of a minority. If the Star Club was to succeed, it
had to expand its base. Thus Weissleder set prices low so fans could come often.
He gave house passes to regulars he liked. He accommodated the fan clubs of
visiting artists with free tickets and mementos. Generosity was good business:
fans brought friends and spread the word. By summer 1962 the club was logging
1,600 to 3,000 admissions a night. Marion Berghahn, from middle-class Pöseldorf,
Figure 4.3 Couple peruses the Star Club’s display window. Reprinted by kind
went with groups of friends and recalls seeing both Teddy Boys and Girl Scouts
there. An in-house profile described the audience this way: “Fully at ease, in
their best suit or motorcycle gear they sit, the apprentice next to the high society
couple, the Norwegian sailor next to the female student—a truly colorful mix.”51
In 1963 the press discovered this “other” St. Pauli. A local paper praised the
Star Club for its lack of “eroticism and hooligan violence.”52 National magazines
Der Spiegel and BRAVO wrote favorable pieces. They seemed particularly
enamored of the practice of the hand stamp, a “tangible ID” that allowed patrons
to come and go all night (which also increased traffic at neighboring pubs and
snack bars). Shows by big-name performers generated stories in the tabloids,
while visits by celebrities like Freddy Quinn (who would not have been welcome
onstage) kept the club’s name in the papers. It became a mandatory stop for
young visitors to Hamburg, with tourism another vehicle for performing
fandom. The Star Club became an important site where impulses from the
cultural underground eventually penetrated the mainstream through Hamburg-
based media.53
Most visitors came for the music. Nowhere else in Germany could one see
so many rock greats at affordable prices. Its size and layout allowed audiences
to get close even to big stars, an intimacy the club cultivated. For example,
when Rüdiger Bloemeke traveled there to see Gene Vincent, a waiter helped
him get an autograph.54 This intimacy benefited emerging artists too, such as the
young Beatles, whose local popularity initially spread by word of mouth. Dostal
overcame his fear of St. Pauli just to see them and soon learned it was easy to
meet musicians if you befriended Betti behind the bar. That accessibility allowed
him—a fan—to imagine himself on stage and led to his own life in music.55
All fans equal? Forms of belonging and distinction
All Beat musicians started as fans.56 That continuity generated the sense of
community that recurs in memories of the Hamburg scene, summed up as the
idea that it didn’t matter if you had money—if you liked rock ‘n’ roll, you were
welcome. This suggests that social contradictions were overcome within the
music scene—but were they? Consuming music in club spaces had connotations
of democracy, freedom, and liberality.57 For example, sources treat the presence
of gays or transvestites in the club as largely unremarkable, suggesting an
unspoken tolerance. It is unclear, however, how Gastarbeiter—migrant laborers
recruited from southern Europe during this period—were received. Sources do
not register their presence, perhaps reflecting the tendency of this first wave of
migrants (who were nearly all men) to spend their leisure among themselves.
Harold Mau, for example, worked with them at the docks but when he
remembered “foreigners” in the clubs he meant the British.58 A remark by Toni
Oberdorffer suggests that migrants didn’t fit fans’ image of rock ‘n’ roll: he called
the Indorockers “prissy,” implying they were mere imitators who lacked the raw
masculinity of the American original.59
In contrast, the scene embraced African-Americans, who possessed musical
authenticity by definition. Black men had long been among St. Pauli’s entertainment
consumers and could now be found on the Beat club dance floor (the few black
women that surface in the sources were performers). Fascher literally threw his
arms around African-American performers, positioning himself and the Star
Club at the forefront of interracial engagement.60 Young Germans alienated
from their own society imagined solidarities with disempowered minorities
and rejected prejudice as the mark of the “square” (Spiesser).61 This resonated
particularly in Hamburg, which prided itself on its liberal cosmopolitanism. Of
course, cosmopolitanism’s positive attitude toward the Other implicitly requires
them to remain “different” to maintain the attraction. Still, small gestures and
a desire for inclusiveness were not meaningless: they gave form to anti-racist
structures of feeling in a country only beginning to confront its racist past.62
While equating blackness with cultural authenticity perpetuated certain
stereotypes, the Hamburg scene played a role in cosmopolitanism’s long-term
penetration of the German mainstream through popular culture.63
Ambiguities also surround the category of class. Traditional markers of class
were weakening in West Germany as the welfare state mitigated dire poverty and
an expanding white-collar sector levered more working and lower-middle-class
adolescents into higher education.64 Beat had its own leveling aspect, its musical
simplicity making it accessible to performers of all backgrounds. Its “primitive”
aspect sounded like freedom to youths pressured to achieve (bourgeois parents’
fear that rock ‘n’ roll would lead their children to emulate proletarian mores
was not unfounded). St. Pauli—a social landscape that blurred boundaries of
all kinds—altered the perspective of young men in particular, who could move
about it more freely. Günter Zint, later a leftist activist, called the Star Club the
first place he experienced “talking back” (Widerspruch). Navigating the Kiez,
“passing” as older, befriending a hard-boiled waiter, even being picked up in
a police raid—such experiences could be thrilling to sheltered youths.65 Scene
participants with proletarian roots, however, saw things differently. Fascher
hated the bourgeois Exis and their “pisspot” hairdos. Conflict between Rockers
and Exis persisted, according to several accounts. Rosi Sheridan, who had left
school at fifteen to train as a butcher’s assistant but ended up as both a club
worker and a fan, described herself and her friends as “working class wretches”
in the eyes of the art students. Her circle disliked theirs for being “posh,” claiming
that staff only buzzed around them because they had money. If being part of the
scene gave bourgeois youths a sense of class transcendence and “insider” status,
it could evoke working-class resentment of those perceived to be slumming.66
Ultimately, however, participants’ memories downplay such social distinctions.
Dostal characterized the Star Club as “a real counterculture where norms of
behavior that held sway outside the club had no function inside.”67 Life after dark
was a chance to be lost in music, “a small piece of freedom in a hostile world
ruled by authorities, rules, and constraints that opposed everything fun.”68 The
scene generated its own alternative forms of distinction—what sociologist Sarah
Thornton dubs “subcultural capital”—around the body and musical taste.69
Dancing ability mattered more than family background or education.70 While
physical perfection was desirable, especially for females, the scene did not require
it. Indeed, Beat gloried in its rough edges.71 Whether or not the lad with the cleft
palate discussed at the start of this chapter found companionship at the club,
the fact that he staked his place suggests he felt a right to be there. Passion, not
perfection, was the scene’s currency.
Passion was also its foundation, driving fans’ efforts to acquire the music,
whether or not they ever experienced it live in St. Pauli. It led boys and girls to
sit by the radio, waiting for a favorite song to be played on BFN or Saturday Club
so they could tape it.72 Passion drove their hunt for records. Germany lacked
great record stores like Liverpool’s NEMS, so fans ordered imports or relied on
the serendipitous inventory of local shops. Peter-Paul Zahl hitchhiked from
his Rhineland home to Holland on weekends because shops there got the new
singles first. Ulf Krüger rode his bike thirty kilometers from Uelzen to a record
store in Lüneburg; once when its chain broke, he schlepped the bike the rest
of the way, only to find the shop didn’t have anything he wanted. Those who
found records passed them around at school or parties. Knut Hartmann took his
portable phonograph into the courtyard of his block so he and his friends could
play their records loud. These discs were contraband in many homes. When
Manfred Tessnow’s father found his cache of “hottentot” records, he cut off his
allowance, forcing Tessnow to get a job digging potatoes to finance his passion.
Before commercial stations outflanked state radio’s embargo on rock and Beat
after 1965, fans’ practices of circulating this music made them innovators in the
use of new media technologies.73
Fans discriminated fiercely in their choices and developed deep knowledge

of their music. This first occurred with jazz, which produced an intelligentsia of
“culturally self-made men.”74 Knowing jazz gave middle-class males in particular
access to emotional and racial authenticity by proxy and a sphere of mastery
outside the dominant culture. Rock fandom developed a similarly gendered
aspect as some male fans derided less “serious,” often female, fans (who might,
for example, tolerate a German cover tune for slow dancing).75 At a time when
Schlager still ruled the charts, understanding the difference between the “real
thing” and the German copy became a source of subcultural capital.76 Hamburg
fans prided themselves on their knowingness at a time when most Germans
couldn’t tell rock ‘n’ roll from jazz. They were among the first to embrace sounds
that defined sixties youth culture, including the Beatles, “heavy” rock, and
English as the language of popular music.77
This use of English was particularly potent as it served not only as the language
of musical authenticity but allowed distance from a tainted German identity. Before
the Beatles’ national breakthrough, nearly all pop was sung in German, including
re-recorded hits by English-speaking artists like Connie Francis. Rock and Beat
fans hated this: to them, rock auf deutsch was an abomination. Anglophone rock,
in contrast, offered openings to the world and a vocabulary not taught in school.
As a child, writer Detlef Diederichsen found in the strange, often misunderstood
English he heard on records a pleasurable dissonance, “a chance to be different.”78
This “dismantling of the self-evident” through the injection of English into daily
life opened up a field of play outside West German conventionality. English
became another sign of belonging among fans who incorporated bits of it into
their speech, a gesture that made particular sense in Anglophile Hamburg.79
(Musician Ian Edwards found it hard to learn German because nobody in St Pauli
wanted to speak it.80) Male fans who could speak English had an “in” with the
musicians and, as Hans Heyer claims, were more attractive to “girls” as well.81
English was also the language of performers fans revered. Embracing it—and rock
‘n’ roll generally—allowed fans to distance themselves from what Fascher called
the “old Nazis” who had once banned Swing and now demonized rock.82 It also
contested war-bred resentments against the British. As Mau put it, “We said, even
then, that we don’t have anything to do with the past. . . . [The English are] there
and they’re making nice music . . . they’re nice people. It doesn’t interest us what
their parents did. I [just] want to have fun here and hear good music.”83 The pop
culture that circulated in cosmopolitan St. Pauli challenged national identity as
the default community and dovetailed with a broader questioning of Germanness
surfacing in contemporary literature and political discourse.84
St. Pauli audiences wanted more than just to see a show: they wanted to
help “make the show.”85 Rejecting (at least within club spaces) the dominant
culture’s fetish for order, they liked their music “hard, brash, and dirty” (hart,
frech, and schmutzig).86 As partners in musicking, fans helped bands forge a
“local authentic” sound, rewarding acts that showed spontaneity, humor, and
sexual charisma.87 This can be heard in the sound of the early Beatles, fashioned
in communication between the group and an audience “with a hunger for raw
meat.”88 Heeding Koschmider’s order to “mach Schau,” they played with abandon.
Lennon impersonated Hitler onstage and called Germans “fucking Nazis,”
eliciting cathartic laughter from the audience.89 Fans’ demand for marathon
versions of favorites like “What’d I Say” honed their musical chops. Hamburg
audiences pushed them in ways that shaped their entire career, preparing
them for the industry grind and the mania that dogged them after 1963.90 The
Beatles’ enormous cultural impact, which emanated from their “switch from
the individualized song of personal emotion to the truly group song,”91 owed a
significant debt to audiences in St. Pauli.
Other bands also appreciated an audience that accepted no boundary
between itself and the performer. Ulf Miehe, who toured with a Beat band in
the mid-1960s, called Hamburg audiences the “most expert.” Paul Raven (later
known as Gary Glitter) incorporated their rituals of stomping, chanting, and
waving into his act. Hamburg fans were receptive to obscure R&B or country
songs and cared little about what was popular elsewhere.92 At a time when Little
Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were washed up in the United States, Hamburg
audiences reenergized them. As rock ‘n’ roll evolved, the audience did as well.
The Pretty Things, who first played the Star Club in 1965, called it “the hippest
crowd,” while Graham “Sandy” Sclater of Manchester’s Playboys declared that
Hamburgers, “more than anywhere in Europe, have a real idea of what’s good.”93
Weissleder tapped their expertise in band competitions. Fans also took their
role as cultural producers into deejaying in neighborhood youth clubs, forming
their own bands, and photography.94 Fandom became a vehicle for both group
experience and creative self-expression.
Fandom, sex, and gender
Self-expression through music also manifested itself through sex and gender.
Beat fans were not the first to use music as a vehicle for physical liberation or
sexual communication. Dancing had always stimulated the passions, but also
had defined roles for women and men who danced in pairs. Jazz eroded some of
those rules, serving as an important mediator of changes in women’s roles starting
into the 1920s.95 The 1950s’ boogie-woogie further scrambled gender roles: men
and women danced apart or even alone, and no one “led.” Rock ‘n’ roll, pervaded
with the spirit of Eros, continued this.96 The body was the site at which it was
experienced. Club spaces forced closeness among revelers crowding onto dance
floors or moving through a packed house.97 Alcohol-lubricated conversations
held at close range over loud music, creating openings for intimacy. For young
people brought up to be restrained, rock and Beat offered opportunities to
explore the body. Fans who could not physically go to the clubs also explored
the music’s potential through recordings and mass media. How did the practices
of music fandom shape participants’ ways of inhabiting the body? Did males and
females live them out in the same ways? What can a look at the Hamburg Beat
scene add to the broader histories of gender and sexuality?
Beat subculture projected a diffuse, androgynous masculinity different from
Rocker males’ tough pose. Male Beat fans engaged in emotive, “feminized”
behaviors. Jürgen Vollmer may have been the first German to wave a sign at a
Beatles show proclaiming, “I love George.” Another young man fell from the Star
Club balcony while screaming out his love for singer Dave Dee, while Albrecht
hung out nightly at Gretel and Alfons just to be near his idol Tony Sheridan.98
Male fans’ identities also relied on consumption, a “feminine” domain. In
fashion-conscious Hamburg, young workers and students experimented with
style. No one “uniform” defined male Beat fans. Photographs show early Top
Ten or Star Club visitors in coats and ties; some later tried Italian Mod looks.
Vollmer’s and Voormann’s corduroy jackets and turtlenecks were unusual in
1960–61, though Liverpool fans of both genders adopted the look when Lennon
and McCartney brought it back from Hamburg.99 Fans adopted styles worn by
their favorite bands, who in turn borrowed ideas from audiences. The same
was true of hairstyles, though musicians had more freedom to experiment in
this regard. German males only widely adopted the mop top once Beatlemania
broadcast it worldwide in 1964. Even then it provoked conflict with parents,
teachers, and peers outside the Beat community. Wolfgang Kraushaar (born
1948) wrote,
It was not at all harmless to run around with that haircut then: long-haired
young men openly grazed the taboo zone of homosexuality. . . . The publicly
displayed sexualized male body was perceived especially in certain corners of
the working class, which was still dominated by a crude ‘matey’ style, as a threat
to be combated with force.100
Beat’s “softer” masculinity made it more accessible to girls, whose participation

helped rock ‘n’ roll transcend its niche. Their involvement was facilitated by the
conditions of the Economic Miracle. Girls growing up in the 1950s and 1960s
enjoyed unprecedented opportunities for higher education and apprenticeships.
They flocked to jobs in the burgeoning retail, secretarial, health, and body care
fields.101 This was also the first generation raised by the postwar welfare state.
Carolyn Steedman’s remarks on growing up in 1950s Britain apply to her West
German sisters too: “I think I would be a very different person now if orange
juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me, in a covert way, that I had
a right to exist, was worth something.”102 Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber
attribute girls’ participation in 1960s music subcultures to girls’ increasing
confidence and visibility overall, as well as their need to dress up for work.103
Yet pressure to conform to traditional roles also intensified. Families still
expected girls to do more chores than their brothers. Stereotypes of female frailty
persisted (experts declared, for example, that the “female knee” was not made
for dancing the Twist).104 While the economy’s need for skilled workers made
Figure 4.4 Audience at a weekend afternoon show for younger fans at the Star Club.
Reprinted by kind permission of K&K Ulf Krüger oHG Hamburg.
job training the new norm, females were still consigned to lower wage categories
with fewer prospects for advancement. Even as housewives gained social power
as consumers and most male privileges were abolished from the legal code in the
late 1950s, girls were still taught to see motherhood and marriage as their ultimate
goals. German youths carried the additional weight of the Nazi past: as one girl
remarked, they never confronted their parents about it but nonetheless held it
against them.105 Many who grew up watching their mothers acquiescence to
their husbands resolved to do things differently.106 Like their male counterparts,
they sought culture forms and spaces they could call their own.
For those who could get there, the Hamburg scene fit the bill. However, idealized
notions of it as a family masked females’ unequal status within it. Beat was still the
sound of male camaraderie, despite its “softer” masculinity. Bands rarely had room
for women except as singers.107 When lyrics didn’t objectify women, they often
cast them as forces of a stifling domesticity. So why did young women embrace
this music? Ellen Willis (born 1941), an American feminist and pioneering rock
journalist, argued that early rock ‘n’ roll’s potential outweighed its misogyny:
Insofar as the music expressed the revolt of black against white, working class
against middle class, youth against parental domination and sexual puritanism,
it spoke for both sexes; insofar as it pitted teenage girls’ inchoate energies against
all their conscious and unconscious frustrations, it spoke implicitly for female
liberation. . . . For all its limitations, rock was the best thing going, and if we had
to filter out certain indignities—well, we had been doing that all our lives, and
there was no feminist movement to suggest that things might be different.108
Astrid Kirchherr (born 1938) dramatically represents those young women who
interpreted rock ‘n’ roll their own way. The only child of a Ford executive and a
supportive mother, Kirchherr studied textiles and design at Hamburg College
of Art. Starting in 1959, she apprenticed with ad photographer Reinhard Wolf,
who brought her into the worlds of high fashion and Hamburg’s gay elite. She
fused impulses from these worlds with her own predilection for black to create
a unique, gender-bending style. At a time when fashion was a powerful tool
of conformity, Kirchherr’s desire to “look different” was a subtle rejection of
prevailing models of femininity.109 A middle-class bohemian who originally
preferred chanson and jazz, her view was reoriented when she encountered
live rock ‘n’ roll. While Kirchherr responded to the beat on her first visit to the
Kaiserkeller, it was the bands’ visual aspect that sealed the attraction. At a time
when rock ‘n’ roll epitomized unkultur, she saw “beauty” and “innocence” in
it—in a word, art. She was most drawn to Sutcliffe, a fellow artist. She dressed
her new lover in her clothes and styled his hair like hers—a look his bandmates
mocked, then later adopted. She borrowed “American” elements from them like
jeans. She dragged Wolf to the clubs (Sutcliffe’s teacher, Pop painter Eduardo
Paolozzi, also visited with his students). Later as a stylist at the Star Club, she
took the Liverbirds from skirts and blouses to leather vests and trousers. Gibson
Kemp declared, “From Astrid I learned the ability to think outside the limited
horizon of the Liverpool box, appreciation of art, books, food, creases on your
kecks and snogging properly.”110 She helped redefine Germany for the British
musicians. Kirchherr, in short, bridged the worlds of high art, gay style, and rock
‘n’ roll, contributing greatly to the Hamburg scene’s role as a source of cultural
innovation and a new transnational style.111
Kirchherr’s other lasting cultural contribution is her photographs of British
musicians. Most famous are her portraits of the Beatles from late 1960, taken
at the fairgrounds on the Heiligengeistfeld. These black-and-white images with
their “German” eye juxtapose “the modernity of youth” with the ruins of the
past.112 Jon Savage sees in them a moment of cultural transition “when black-
derived American music, as played by ferocious British teenagers, came up
against Continental philosophy and avant-garde aesthetics. . . . It was a collision
of art, style and raw emotion” that produced the “very beginning of Pop
Modernism.”113 This work put her in the vanguard of a new wave of art school
graduates who brought high art skills to mass culture.114 They deployed impulses
from rock ‘n’ roll for a grand art project with youth as its canvas. This heralded a
larger transition in the 1960s away from a pop culture conceived of by adults to
one generated by youth for youth.
Kirchherr was part of that elite circle of fans that got to know those who created
the music they loved. She was the musicians’ creative equal, but her relationship
with Sutcliffe also defined her role. This raises the issue of how sex and fandom
were connected. Rock ‘n’ roll was saturated with sexual connotations, the perfect
vehicle for the budding desires of the 15- to 24-year-olds that made up West
Germany’s largest cohort in 1960. While their parents might have experimented
with companionate forms in the privacy of the bedroom or unusual settings
like Café Keese, young people blew past those delicate negotiations in the music
clubs, claiming sexual expression as their right.115
In St. Pauli, sex and fandom were intertwined. Workers in the local sex economy
expressed their music appreciation physically, as we saw in Chapter 3. But
others in the audience also engaged with the bands sexually. The same weekend
party circuit that brought adults to the district also brought young workers and
students eager to let loose, meet people, and experience new sensations.116 Some
(mainly females) adopted the aspect of what were later called groupies: fans with
whom musicians could have a “good time,” including casual sex. These women
(typified by the Ritzenecke, though not limited to them) tossed aside the barrier
between performer and audience, their sexual desire inseparable from their
enjoyment of music.117
Much of what we know about women in the scene’s inner circle comes from
the memories of men, who have long felt empowered—even expected—to speak
openly of their exploits.118 Paul McCartney recounts learning who was “fair
game” and who was “respectable,” while Fascher dubbed Betti Darlien the “blow
job queen of St. Pauli”—evidence that the double standard was alive and well
among young men who themselves eschewed all sense of restraint.119 The women
who have spoken, in contrast, do not frame their relationships with musicians
primarily in sexual terms, even when sex was part of the equation. They distance
themselves from the Ritzenecke, prostitutes, and the groupies. They were
“girlfriends” who made the tea, did the laundry, and enjoyed a privileged position
with the musicians in exchange for (usually broken) promises of commitment.
They weighed carefully whether to offer more sexually than “petting.” Fear of
pregnancy loomed large, with coitus interruptus the most common method of
birth control (if any was used at all). Those who got pregnant risked abortion,
married young, or bore the social costs of unwed motherhood.120 Rosi Haitmann
having a baby out of wedlock with Tony Sheridan in 1961 was scandalous, even
in St Pauli. She was denied welfare support and mocked at the immigration
office for getting “knocked up by a Limey.”121 No one would rent housing to
an unmarried couple for fear of violating the law on “pimping.” While the
Hamburg scene offered women new freedoms, it was not immune from the era’s
punishments for those caught violating the rules.
Most fans never penetrated the insider cliques. They forged relationships with
others in the audience, platonic and sexual.122 People from many backgrounds
met on the dance floor. Guys like Lothar Geißler (a recent transplant from East
Germany) or Uwe Voigt (who later became an SPD politician) found sexual
adventure and future wives.123 Bärbel Niewohner (born 1946), who later married
a musician, was a secretarial trainee in Hamburg who loved both musicals and
rock ‘n’ roll. She would sneak out to St. Pauli after telling her parents she was
going to a respectable venue in another district. She spread her wings by making
her own clothes and teasing her hair. She didn’t push hard at parental boundaries
(though even mild rebellions like high heels could cause friction), and the
prospect of actually having sex was too daunting.124 The Beat scene became a
site of love and friendship for her and others like her. The emotions generated
by music and dancing were intertwined with their feelings for the people with
whom they shared those experiences. Music venues became for many the source
of a lifetime’s friendships and vivid memories, as well as taste in music.125 “Love”
was (and is) a powerful term among the community of music fans: when fans
talk about the music they love, they are also defining themselves.126
Intense feelings of “love” also prevailed among fans who could only experience
the scene from a distance. Those who were too young, too far away, or just
forbidden to go to nightclubs participated in the fan community through media.
Magazines like BRAVO were consumed avidly in big cities and small villages
alike by nearly every social class outside the intellectual elite. In 1963–64 these
publications discovered Beat, opening it up to broader, vicarious participation.
While commentators tended to dismiss female fans as hysterics or dupes of
the culture industry, girls used pop culture for their own purposes. Bedrooms
served as private refuges for playing records, writing in their diaries, or making
collages of pictures of their heroes. Subordinated in other areas of life, girls
found in pop music fandom an outlet for their emotions and an arena in which
to assert their own demands.127 Fans relished having music that was “theirs” and
understood their power to “make” stars. They formed opinions and declared
allegiances, even if the world of music expertise remained a male preserve.128
A small minority formed bands themselves, though as we saw in Chapter 3
they faced many obstacles. Others went on to carve out jobs in photography or
fashion, ran fan clubs, or worked in music management.129
Perhaps the most commonly shared experience for female fans was the
encounter with eroticism rock and Beat facilitated. For those too young to have
had their first kiss or experienced a broken heart, music allowed them to feel as if
they had. Viv Albertine, a working-class Londoner who founded the all-female
punk band the Slits in the 1970s, recalled the fizzy intoxication and “funny
feeling between my legs” she felt first hearing the Beatles at age ten.130 Fantasizing
about pop stars became a safe way to discover their sexuality for both girls
and boys. While the screaming and moaning that accompanied Beatlemania
in particular earned fans the scorn of contemporary observers, more recent
takes interpret fan practices as an assertion of female power. Beat bands’ loose,
youthful personae allowed fans to imagine themselves as their mates. Teenage
girls fantasized less about sex than about being plucked out of the crowd by
a beloved musician to be “his girlfriend,” a trusted companion.131 Female
fans (and males too) also identified with groups like the Beatles because they
wanted to be like them—independent, witty, guilelessly sexy. Bands’ long hair
made identification easier by offering girls an alternative, less aggressive model
of heterosexual masculinity. Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Jacobs, and Elizabeth

Hess portray female fans’ uninhibited expressions of love as an unconscious act
of defiance against the era’s sexual repressiveness and double standard. They go
so far as to call Beatlemania the “first and most dramatic uprising of women’s
sexual revolution” of the 1960s.132
Ehrenreich et al. were writing about the United States, but their remarks
also have relevance for West Germany. Ingrid Noetzel, then a young teen in
a northern village, told me how music gave her an emotional sustenance that
has carried her through life ever since: “For girls, [the 1960s] were not a nice
time because girls weren’t allowed to do anything. Maybe they could do more if
they lived in Hamburg, but not us. We weren’t even allowed to wear trousers or
jeans or pegged pants.”133 But reading fan magazines, listening to records, and
later connecting with other fans rescued her from depression and allowed her
to imagine a life beyond her small town. Fans at a distance saw the Hamburg
scene as a refuge from boredom and a gateway to the bigger world, an escape
from German Spiessertum. For fans unable to actually travel there, fantasizing
about it was a way to “explode a sterile reality,” as Gabriele Huster put it. “The
Rock culture of the 1960s was salvation for many Economic Miracle kids like
me; it allowed the subversive side of me to survive, a piece of life that might
have otherwise died.”134 Fans at a distance tapped into the sounds and images of
liberation at the core of pop culture commodities.
The fan practices outlined in this section add new layers to our knowledge
of the dynamics of sex and gender in the early to mid-1960s. Fans experienced
music through the body, whether they were in the clubs or only imagined
themselves there. This was also a sexual experience. Sexy rock and Beat music,
and the fan practices that went with it, were part of a broader rethinking of sex
and gender relations during West Germany’s “Sex Wave” of the late 1950s to
mid-1960s when “sexual consumption went public.”135 Rock and Beat fandom
also gave young men and women new ways to express themselves through
commodities in a consumer economy that increasingly catered to them.
Their styles became transnational; Kirchherr’s fusion of multiple influences in
particular became important interventions in pop music’s evolution and the
creation of a global youth culture. Non-glamorous, ordinary fans also quietly
benefited from the informal, democratic ethos of Beat. But that ethos was often
more image than substance, especially when it came to gender; even as the
culture of restraint eroded, traditional gender norms endured. Yet this phase of
rock ‘n’ roll’s development was fluid enough to offer avenues through which fans
could question those categories through their practices and rituals.
The Star-Club News: A voice for fans136
The final contribution of the Hamburg scene to rock ‘n’ roll we will explore is
West Germany’s first ambitious magazine about the music, the Star-Club News.
Much of the pleasure of fandom comes from the “fan talk” it produces; the News
became an important medium for that talk in 1964 and 1965.137 It was modeled
after Mersey Beat, founded in 1961 by Bill Harry as a platform for Liverpool
musicians and fans to share information, express opinions, and establish a
distinct identity for the city’s music scene at a time when the mainstream
press ignored it.138 Exchanges between Liverpool and Hamburg musicians
eventually brought Harry into contact with Weissleder, who set out to create a
print presence for Hamburg Beat linked to fans across Germany, Britain, and
Europe. Weissleder’s interests were initially financial: he wanted a platform to
promote his Star Club empire. But he also saw rock and Beat as phenomena
of generational importance, and this publication reflected that. The Star-Club
News participated in the construction of youth as a consumer market while
simultaneously critiquing mainstream youth culture in West Germany. Through
articles on music and other topics, as well as its very style, the News interrogated
prevailing notions of respectability, authority, authenticity, and even citizenship
in terms of the everyday meanings of democracy.
Beatlemania induced Weissleder to capitalize on his club’s role in the band’s
history, depicting it not just as a nightclub but a contributor to the culture.139
In 1964 he launched “Star-Club” as a brand with its own record label, licensed
clubs in other cities, talent agency, radio station, and merchandise.140 The Star-
Club News was the publicistic arm of this empire. It launched in August 1964
as a four-page newsletter, then quickly grew to a 36-page monthly with a color
cover and lots of black-and-white photos, affordably priced at 50 Pfennigs.
Circulation hit nearly 100,000 in 1965, reaching readers in Scandinavia and
East Germany. While he had assistants, Weissleder was personally responsible
for the magazine’s content, using the News to promote his brand and his
opinions.141
The News was partly born out of frustration with the state of commentary on
rock and Beat in the mainstream media.142 When they noticed popular music,
mass outlets like Der Spiegel or Quick offered hot takes from bewildered adults.
BRAVO emphasized pop idolatry, Technicolor modernity, and the supremacy
of the top ten. Because its music coverage was chart-driven, BRAVO embraced
Beat in 1964, but squeezed the Beatles and other bands into a pre-fabricated
template of star worship, with articles on their favorite foods, girlfriends,
even a Beatle wig contest. While it did not use the demeaning language of the
tabloids or the boulevard press (which at times described rock and Beat in terms
reminiscent of Nazi-era rants about “degenerate music”), BRAVO deployed a
breathless, silly style designed for the broadest possible audience.143 This, plus
its role as entertainment industry shill, diminished its credibility among fans
that prized authenticity.144 Another venue for music writing was twen, a glossy
monthly known for its art photography and progressive tone on issues from
sex and race to Nazism. Its music coverage was steered by Joachim Berendt, an
influential champion of what he deemed “authentic” music, from Miles Davis to
Delta blues. His tastes, coupled with twen’s tilt toward a more upscale, twenty-
something readership, meant that twen initially treated rock ‘n’ roll as a vulgar,
pimply genre. For example, its first piece on the Beatles in May 1964 offered
a bemused take on their “hysterical” fans and assumed the music itself was
disposable.145
Weissleder intended the Star-Club News as an alternative. It was fan-oriented
because fans had made Beat a movement, not the press or the record industry.
They appeared in the News not as passive consumers but active shapers of the
scene. They were celebrated as “making” the stars. Readers’ letters appeared
at length in each issue. The News also treated them as collaborators, soliciting
their suggestions, critiques, and submissions from amateur journalists and
photographers. “Our young readers are not unworldly, pampered hothouse
flowers. They’re intelligent, modern, realistic. We reject the stupid, illiterate style
that the mainstream press thinks one has to use to address young people.”146
The News also spotlighted fans as creators of their own spectacular subculture.
A spread on denizens of Liverpool’s Cavern showed teens displaying their identity
through defiant poses and slogans scrawled on jackets proclaiming “Peace” and
“Ban the Barbers!” (In contrast, a piece on the Cavern in the New Left konkret
caricatured those same fans as the duped objects of media manipulation).147
Another photo-essay showed the view from the Star Club stage, signifying the
interconnectedness of performer and audience. This symbiosis also emerged in
articles conveying practical information about being in a band and advertisements
for instruments, stage wear, and other items for working musicians (or those
who just wanted to dress like one). The fan-musician symbiosis found its fullest
expression on the cover of the December 1965 issue, which used a photograph
of John Lennon—now the idol of millions—hounding his idol, Gene Vincent,
for an autograph in 1962. In the News, fans and musicians appeared as equals.148
The News presented the Beat scene as international and cosmopolitan. Pieces
introduced bands from across Europe, creating the sense of a transnational
outburst of creative activity among youths. It took pains to include East Germans:
a piece on an international “Beat Band Festival” declared, “We would be beside
ourselves with joy to be able to welcome our compatriots” (Landsleute) from the
GDR, “who pursue their Beat hobby under the most difficult conditions.”149 The
Liverpool connection was also central. Bill Harry wrote a column presenting
“authentic” news direct from the source, published in both German and
English. The Star Club and Liverpool also connected through tours starting in
1964 that brought Hamburg Beat fans to Liverpool and vice versa. Weissleder
organized these inexpensive excursions in part to build the Star Club brand,
but they also acquired significance as an example of “working through” the
Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). Liverpool’s mayor welcomed these
delegations and sent a message of goodwill to the people of Hamburg; the visits
also garnered favorable press in West Germany.150 Embraced as promoting
reconciliation and friendship under the sign of Beat music, these initiatives
show how issues of history and national identity were being reworked on the
terrain of popular culture.
The News also became a forum to debate other issues of identity, such as the
question of formal address. Its July 1965 issue debuted a new column by Ulla, the
seventeen-year-old staff typist. In contrast to Weissleder’s use of formal address
(Sie) in his editor’s remarks, Ulla’s “Halli-hallo” barges right into the familiarity
of Du (you) and teen slang. Her next column reveals that her piece had set off a
debate in the office over language. The “old man” initially objected to the “overly
familiar swine-herder manner” of other youth magazines, reflecting Weissleder’s
intention to elevate the discourse around Beat and his insistence that the News’
many readers over eighteen be addressed as adults. Reader letters continued the
discussion: one deemed Ulla’s informality a stain on the News’ “noble” style, but
another asked, “why we can’t drop the stiffness of ‘Sie’?” Weissleder ultimately
took Ulla’s side and even declared that anyone who wished could call him Du—
one indication of shifting attitudes and a harbinger of a future in which young
people would insist on informal address as a signifier of egalitarianism.151
In the News, respectability resided less in formalities than intelligence and
competence. As an advocate for fans and musicians, the News criticized inept
or corrupt institutions. One piece blasted the German music industry for being
more interested in novelty records than “real talent.” Greedy promoters, many of
whom were just yesterday “veg handlers and coal-Fritzes,” reaped a “golden rain”
of riches but passed little of that on to the artists. To expose the music press’s
complicity in this swindle, the News investigated the system through which
industry publications rigged the music charts. It called for a “record parliament”
that accurately reflected the tastes of record buyers, a bid for legitimacy for both
the News and for fans whose interests were not being served. The music press
was also skewered for its retrograde attitudes. A piece on the Liverbirds shows
the band laughing at an issue of Musikparade that assured readers that they were
in fact “girls.” In this and other ways, the News presented itself as a hip, forward-
thinking publication for a knowing audience.152
Style was another battleground. One piece “explained” Tony Sheridan’s new
hairstyle as camouflage for a gash wound inflicted by a small-town restaurateur
who objected to his female companion wearing trousers. In 1965, numerous
items in the News defended young men who wore long hair, as in one piece
blasting Hamburg’s Eppendorf Clinic for refusing treatment to a shaggy
24-year-old, or a tongue-in-cheek feature juxtaposing pictures of the “great
composers” in all their hairy glory with those of Beat musicians (“Beatles cuts
have been around forever!”). Another recounted situations where musicians
and fans came to the rescue while adults proved unwilling to help; it reminded
readers that “all Red Cross centers are taking blood donations, even from
mop-top wearers.”153
The News’ questioning of authority had political undertones. When one
reader asked why there were no longer Star Club shows for fans under sixteen,
Weissleder blamed city officials “who falsely view Beat music as a manifestation
of criminality.” When Ulla criticized Hamburg police for turning water cannons
on fans at a September 1965 Rolling Stones concert, she anticipated a broader
debate over crowd-control measures by police during the Beatles’ 1966 tour.154 In
a society suspicious of youth as a mass, such commentary raised questions about
young people’s right to public space before the student movement thrust them
onto the world stage in 1967–68. The News set itself up as an ally of youth. Again,
this was partly business-driven: Weissleder used the magazine to rail against
Hamburg authorities trying to shut down the Star Club as a “danger to youth.”
(More on this in Chapter 5.) But business alone cannot account for his solidarity
with Beat fans and musicians. In the News’ first issue Weissleder, then thirty-six,
spelled out his view of what was at stake in the clashes over youth culture:
To every sober thinking person, a Beatle haircut is better than the military crew
cut of our recent history. And electric guitars make a more pleasant sound than
the drums of the foot soldier or the newly revived fanfares of youth brigades
ready to once again march eastward. When these forces claim to be sounding
the call for freedom—a freedom in which your haircut or taste in music will be
dictated to you—they are lying. Still!155
This statement was both commentary on the recent resurgence of the extreme
right (marked by the founding of the National Democratic Party in 1964) and
a statement about Germany’s past. Weissleder had chafed as a teenager under
the Nazi yoke and embracing Beat may have been a way to recoup his own
youth.156 Now he used the News to speak out against authoritarianism at a time
when disapproving adults could be heard telling long-haired young men they
belonged in a “concentration camp.”157 Such interventions were not entirely new
for a pop publication. Maase has noted BRAVO’s subtle anti-militarism, part
of a larger process of West German distancing from its history of militarized
masculinity.158 Weissleder’s robust defense of individual rights was an extension
of that, offering further evidence of a gathering critique of authority and an
insistence on democratization in everyday life across the 1960s. The News linked
fan culture to these currents, giving it a political valence that later led some
participants to sustained activism.159
* * *
This chapter has explored how rock and Beat music figured in the lives of
fans and audiences in early 1960s West Germany. As listening to records and
attending concerts became increasingly common rituals for young people,
music became a site of intense experience and a way of seeing the world. Fans
used it to fashion identity, express emotion, and display competence in a sphere
they called their own. Boundaries of class, gender, and race became fluid within
fan spaces, creating possibilities for new kinds of belonging and visions of
a better world. Fan practices illustrated what David Chaney calls “a mode of
radical democratization that put pursuit of pleasure at the heart of citizenship,”
especially if we accept a definition of citizenship that encompasses the right to
speak through style and claim public space.160
But we should be wary of narratives of music as an easy vehicle of emanci
pation. Frith argued in his 1983 work Sound Effects that “music doesn’t challenge
the system but reflects and illuminates it.”161 Nightclubbing or losing oneself in
fan magazines were more often an escape from the world than a confrontation
with it. Affinities discovered on the dance floor could be fleeting, and people
who loved the same music might agree on little else. Communists, socialists, and
liberals historically distrusted pop culture because it took the rough edges off of
life, fostering complacency among the masses that consumed it. As we saw in
Chapter 1, entertainment was as compatible with fascist politics as democratic
ones. By the late 1950s, West German politicians and sociologists had come to
accept and even encourage youths’ consumption of American pop culture as a

social safety valve and a weapon against Communism.162
Rock and Beat music were also created and circulated as commodities
within the prevailing capitalist system. They were not a repudiation of
consumer culture but an expression of it, taking up advertising’s constant
call to “be yourself ” by choosing particular goods. Fans were linked by the
things they consumed. Unusual styles may have provoked stern reactions from
parents or teachers, but they usually did not produce serious conflict in the
postwar West. Most youths successfully combined a passion for music with
the demands of school or work, and Beat rarely became a vehicle for open
expression of political dissent before 1967. Participation in the music scene
also did not demand a fundamental rethinking of gender or sexual relations
of power. Some scholars argue that young people’s leisure consumption had
nothing to do with opposition, and that change remained limited to the
symbolic realm.163
Such assessments throw out the baby with the bathwater. In specific
historical contexts, fan practices had distinct transgressive effects. In West
Germany between 1959 and 1966, fans used rock ‘n’ roll’s messages of
freedom and pleasure to challenge the dominant values of industriousness
and propriety. Exi and Rocker styles interrupted the normalcy of bourgeois,
family-oriented “correctness” and the “upright” masculinity central to postwar
restoration.164 American pop culture brought empowering pleasure; as one
youth put it, America brought a “kick, not always having to say ‘jawoll.’”165 The
ways rock and Beat fans inhabited the body also worked against the culture of
restraint. Girls invested the music with their own meanings, using it to express
intense emotion and discover their sexuality.166 Music also allowed fans to
reimagine categories of nation, class, and race. Fans used Beat subculture to
lay claim to the democratic values preached by the West German state but
not always practiced by those in authority. Just beneath the surface of these
gestures was a distancing from the Nazi past and even Germanness itself.
During this key transitional phase in West Germany, the proliferation of new
voices through pop culture rebalanced social relations in favor of youth and
sped up the forces of de-traditionalization, modernization, and liberalization
in public and private life.167 Fans’ challenges to authority previewed the wider
“disaffiliation” that exploded in the late 1960s among young people, who
increasingly imagined themselves as a global community organized around
music.168
Finally, the social meanings of music fandom must take into account place
as well as time. In most settings, consuming rock and Beat music could be a
relatively harmless, limited form of rebellion. But in the particular setting of
St. Pauli it became cultural dynamite, for youths’ journey to their musical mecca
took them into the heart of Germany’s Sodom and Gomorrah. This set up a fight
between youths demanding the right to pursue their own leisure and authorities
who declared war on the Beat clubs of St. Pauli.
120
5
The Authorities1
The dirtiest mile in the world
In January 1965, one of West Germany’s most popular illustrated magazines,

Quick, ran a piece called, “Long Night in the Anchorage of Joy.”2 In it, comic
artist and travel writer Manfred Schmidt depicts his recent visit to St. Pauli’s
entertainment quarter. He describes running an unappetizing gauntlet of
aggressive barkers, Animierdamen pushing overpriced drinks, and outrageous
rip-offs, such as a clip joint that promised “dirty” movies (“Schweinefilme”) then
proceeded to show agricultural shorts on pig farming.3 He juxtaposes “female
entrepreneurs” soliciting sex near the harbor with a flower leaning “suggestively”
next to a trashcan and a carton of rat poison. While Schmidt’s column was meant
to be amusing, his remarks on St. Pauli painted a seriously gloomy picture:
And now I come to the strangest aspect of the “anchorage of joy”: never in my
life have I seen so many joyless, depressed, even desperate faces in one evening.
The only halfway contented face I saw was on a Malaysian shrunken head, on
sale for 48DM at a shop selling seamen’s booty. . . . [In one establishment at 3
a.m.] a customer overtaken by sleep put his head on the bar and began snoring.
The barmaid who was cleaning up came over to him unfazed, lifted his head
with her left arm, wiped the counter under him with her right, then let him plop
back down. It was the first time I laughed all night.
Similar stories of St. Pauli as a den of sleaze, scams, and violence had circulated
in the local press since the 1950s. By the early 1960s they went national as
periodicals such as Der Spiegel picked up the story. The tabloid BILD cried, “An
avalanche of rip-off parlors is ruining the Reeperbahn,” while Stern dubbed the
Reeperbahn “the dirtiest mile in the world.”4 Border guards in Denmark and
Sweden began distributing lists of establishments visitors should avoid. The
sensational trials of the “Black Gang” protection racket and films such as 1964’s
Polizeirevier [Police Station] Davidwache made the Reeperbahn increasingly

synonymous with crime, not fun.5
While St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn had drawn record levels of visitors since
the war’s end through the aggressive marketing of sexualized commodities and
raucous good times, anxiety grew among city leaders that bad press could drive
away the tourists on whom Hamburg’s harborside economy increasingly relied.
That fear drove a series of public and private initiatives in the late 1950s and 1960s
to constrain the district’s excesses in the name of protecting the tourist trade at
a time of broader concerns about West German tourism as a whole.6 Ironically,
just as Hamburg elites were fretting over a drop-off in tourism, thousands of
young people were flocking to St. Pauli for its music scene—a trend that alarmed
these same elites, who wanted to attract big-spending adults, not underage boys
and girls who not only didn’t spend much but had to be shielded from the
district’s vice. This chapter explores the responses to this complex situation by a
group I label “the authorities”: police, city officials, St. Pauli business leaders, and
social welfare agents. They sought to discipline “disreputable” entrepreneurs—
particularly Manfred Weissleder—as well as the young people drawn to this
unruly district and its music venues. Confrontations between these two sides
ultimately constituted a struggle over social discipline and the sexual morality of
youth, especially young women, in a place known for license and excess.
Attempts to tame St. Pauli were nothing new. As we saw in Chapter 1, the
district had long been regarded as Hamburg’s “bastard child.”7 During the
revolutionary days of 1919, the Bahrenfeld Freikorps cordoned off its streets,
going house to house to smoke out communist agitators. In the 1920s, the SPD
mayor of neighboring Altona, Max Brauer,8 sought to impose order in and
around the Grosse Freiheit by cracking down on beggars, peddlers, and other
unruly elements “contemptuous of authority.”9 Nazi officials, in their turn, sought
to “clean up” the area by reintroducing the brothel system and forcing prostitutes
into gated bordello streets such as Herbertstrasse. They targeted establishments
frequented by petty criminals and the “work-shy” while decimating the area’s
Chinese community under the pretext of rooting out spies and drug smugglers.10
Postwar governments11 ended the most coercive practices of their pre
decessors, but continued to view St. Pauli as a crisis district that could be
transformed through technocratic and welfare state interventions. City planners
regarded St. Pauli as a problem because of its haphazard aspect: they wanted
to rationalize urban space by separating residential from commercial zones,
but St. Pauli offered no clean separation of the two, nor had enough of the area
been bombed to offer a clean slate. When rebuilding of the area commenced
The Authorities 123
after 1947 it favored the interests of the entertainment business, traffic

modernization, and large-scale shipping. Damaged older housing was often
left to rot, then razed in the name of “slum clearance” and left as vacant lots in
order to reduce the population density in this crowded, increasingly welfare-
dependent district.12 Emblematic of this agenda of rationalization was a 1959 law
banning camper vans within city limits, spurred by the presence of 1,200 of them
on the Heiligengeistfeld. The law (typical of others passed around the country)
was part of the postwar normalization drive: it openly aimed to eradicate an
“unhygienic,” unruly element of refugees, foreigners, and Germans literally on
the fringes, unable or unwilling to integrate into the now booming society.13
The police also stepped up efforts in this period to corral street prostitution
and the growing sector of automobile-based solicitation into restricted areas
in the interest of “keeping the street scene clean.”14 These moves to discipline
St. Pauli were conceived at the intersection of business and political leaders’
desire to reorganize the area for commercial entertainment, tourism, and retail
development,15 accompanied by unease about its many inhabitants who refused
to conform to prevailing norms of hard work and sexual propriety. At the
same time, these leaders were liberal, pragmatic Hamburgers comfortable with
“respectable” sexual commerce.16 Many St. Pauli business owners profited from
selling sexual spectacle of one kind or another, and the city increasingly relied
on the tax revenue this generated. Everyone understood that visitors came to the
Reeperbahn for a walk on the wild side, but they also knew they had to provide
a safe nest for the goose that laid the golden egg.
The St. Pauli Bürgerverein, a business association led by powerful landlords,
many of whom (such as Willi Bartels) owned sex-themed businesses, saw the
souring of the entertainment quarter’s image primarily as a public relations
problem.17 To much media fanfare, in 1958 the group began pressuring
business operators to police themselves and awarded its “good star” to those
who adopted its fair pricing suggestions. Ironically, this campaign petered out
within a year as “good star” businesses saw their trade decline as customers
assumed they were unexciting. The problem of rip-offs still unsolved, some
in the Bürgerverein blamed inflated drink prices on what they claimed was a
shortage of Animierdamen and prostitutes, as women could now demand higher
pay or leave for good-paying jobs in the mainstream economy.18 In 1963, on
the eve of a major international garden exposition, the Bürgerverein produced
signage in German, English, French, and Swedish declaring that “St. Pauli is
here for everyone” (St. Pauli ist für alle da).19 Their partners at the Tourism and
Congress Center launched their own campaign, arguing that “ten percent” of
crooked establishments “don’t represent Hamburg as a whole,” while producers

of guidebooks strove to assure the public that they could enjoy a night on the
Reeperbahn without fear. Fodor’s, for example, declared that St. Pauli “is blazing
with light and places blazing with light are unpropitious to crime.”20
The economic interests behind tourism had only limited success with
p.r., so they also put their faith in city authorities and law enforcement to
“clean up” St. Pauli. Kurt Falck, head of central Hamburg’s Economic Office
(Wirtschafts- und Ordnungsamt, hereafter W&O), led the charge, supported by
future chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), who served as Hamburg’s interior
minister from 1961 to 1965.21 Schmidt’s ministry gave broad authority to Falck’s
bureau, which moved aggressively against “rip-off ” businesses (Nepplokale)
by conducting undercover surveillance, staging dramatic raids, and revoking
operating licenses.22 Ominously, from the perspective of young music fans, Falck
found another ally in his fight in Hamburg’s Youth Agency (Jugendbehörde).
Together they targeted establishments deemed “youth endangering,” which
in practice meant every business in St. Pauli’s entertainment quarter as the
district itself was by definition “youth endangering.” Falck, variously nicknamed
“Mr. Clean” and the “Iron Broom,” claimed his intent was merely to enforce the
law; he declared upon his retirement in 1984, “I never wanted to play moral
guardian.”23 But in his zeal to eradicate what he saw as a rogue element sullying
Hamburg’s reputation and despoiling its youth, he ended up doing just that.
Sex, violence, and youth-endangering places
Concern about the state of youth had long been a heated topic in Germany’s
modern history, but it took on new intensity after the war ended and thousands of
youths found themselves displaced. During the “hunger years” between 1945 and
1950, politicians and pedagogues across the political spectrum depicted youth as
victims of fate, twisted by Nazi indoctrination then robbed of their homes and
families by war. This resulted in teens that were wild, nihilistic, and defiant—
searching at best and aimless at worst. The buzzword was Verwahrlosung, which
translates roughly as “degeneracy,” both moral and physical, and observers
declared large segments of the youth population at risk.24 While the majority of
adolescents quietly reintegrated into what remained of their families when the
war ended, those left to fend for themselves fluctuated between desperate acts
of survival and frenzied hedonism.25 Their world made headlines in 1949 when
an expose in Die Welt revealed a colony of teens living in bunkers beneath the
The Authorities 125
Bismarck monument and the Trichter ruins at the east end of the Reeperbahn:
“Often barely seventeen,” they pair up under filthy blankets, “happy to love
freely.” In one bunker a pregnant girl lays in a heap by the door. Boys “who are
otherwise normally inclined” earn money as gay hustlers while “east zoners”
with no local roots fall into thieving.26 The piece sent shock waves through the
Hamburg Senate, resulting not only in the sealing up of the bunkers and the
hasty redevelopment of the Trichter site, but a surge in funding for the city’s
Jugendbehörde.27
That agency gained even more clout with the 1951 federal Law for the
Protection of Youth in Public, which replaced Nazi-era decrees. Driven by the
concept of Jugendschutz (youth protection), this sweeping law laid down new
age limits for alcohol consumption (no hard liquor until eighteen, beer and
wine allowed at sixteen), banned smoking in public for children under sixteen,
established age-specific movie ratings, barred minors from “morally dangerous
places” and “youth-endangering” performances, and set a 10:00 p.m. curfew
on visits to dance halls for those under eighteen.28 The law ran parallel with a
renewed debate over “smut and filth” as advocates of censorship rushed to fill
what they saw as a legal and moral void after the collapse of the Third Reich. This
national debate flowed from the widely shared notion that postwar liberation
had unleashed a tide of trashy, obscene images and texts that imperiled youths’
healthy development. (In St. Pauli, sexy magazines sold at kiosks and strip
club advertisements featuring photos of topless women were particular objects
of ire.) While the SPD’s approach to the problem stressed improving material
welfare and exposing youth to “quality” literature, the nationally ruling CDU
and their allies in the resurgent churches wanted simply to ban works they
deemed offensive. But now that the West German constitution protected both
free speech and freedom of commerce, social conservatives striving to present
themselves as good democrats crafted a law that didn’t ban materials outright,
but consigned them to a list of works (the “Index”) forbidden to be sold to
minors. This Law on Youth-Endangering Publications, which went into effect
in 1953, punished not children but the publishers and entertainment operators
who would exploit them, in line with the increasingly heard argument that
adults needed to reassert control over children and model good behavior in
order to restore public morality. As Dagmar Herzog writes, “The transition from
a morality concerned with the aftereffects of fascism to a morality concerned
above all with restriction of talk about and representation of sex was now well
underway.”29 Vulnerable youths “in need of protection” (schutzbedürftig) became
key objects of intervention.
As the material privations of the “hunger years” receded, debate shifted

to the effects of prosperity on youth. Commentators in the 1950s decried the
phenomenon of latchkey children left without supervision as both parents (or
mothers in the country’s many single-parent households) worked long hours
in order to afford the new consumer goods flooding the marketplace. West
Germans now grappled with how to reconcile indulgence in little luxuries—
which was touted as a social good under capitalism (as symbolized by the fat
belly of Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard)—with the moral and spiritual
danger to youth of unbridled materialism.30 This debate gained new urgency with
the Halbstarken riots of 1956–58. A narrative took hold in which the children
of prosperity were now in thrall to the entertainment industry, indulging in
mindlessly destructive and licentious behavior while their weak, distracted
parents left them to their own devices as they chased material goods. Youth
appeared here both as threat—to order, propriety, morality—and threatened—
by negligent adults and greedy producers of low entertainment who preyed on
their lack of impulse control.31
Entertainment became a battleground for the soul of youth—in itself nothing
new, as the effects of pop culture on impressionable youth had been debated
since at least the early twentieth century. But the terms of debate changed in the
late 1950s as young people began to enjoy unprecedented levels of disposable
income and mobility. In 1958, 80 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Hamburg were
earning money as white- or blue-collar employees or apprentices while still
living at home.32 Like their parents, they saw entertainment as a basic need
and right, and sought it out in droves on their precious weekends.33 They
constituted the vanguard of a new youth consumption, with many working-
class kids becoming avid fans of rock ‘n’ roll. As we saw in the previous
chapter, this music and the clubs in St. Pauli where it was played also attracted
growing numbers of middle-class youths for whom rock ‘n’ roll meant personal
liberation, as well as a rebellion against the sanitized culture foisted on them by
the pop culture industry and their parents. As the increasing number of clubs
catering to them after 1960 demonstrates, plenty of adults—from club owners
to the taxman to the cleaning lady—stood to make a living off these young
consumers.
This alarmed social welfare professionals. At a time when mass culture had
finally established itself as an irrefutable social force and the law guaranteed
leisure time for all workers, youth welfare authorities lamented the seemingly
unstoppable trend of young people choosing privatized or commercialized
leisure over formal organizations and traditional hobbies.34 Walter Becker, who
The Authorities 127
rose to prominence as head of both Hamburg’s Jugendbehörde and the national

organization Aktion Jugendschutz, wrote in 1958:
Few young people nowadays go to church, take walks with their parents, do
sports, or join a youth group. Many haven’t learned that life is ruled by rhythms
of both work and relaxation; many see their work only as a “job” to attain the
means for their leisure. Many are also passive and want someone else to shape
their leisure for them. This gives the leisure industry the chance to present
offerings that merely serve their own financial interests. We must say to every
boy and girl: define your own free time and find an interest so that you spend
your leisure not as an impatient, dissatisfied consumer but a creative, active
human being!35
Young people turning away from organized youth groups represented not only
a backlash against Nazi regimentation but an implicit rejection of bourgeois
notions of leisure activities as vehicles for self-improvement. Anxious adults
read this as a threat to the new state and a moral crisis. Hamburg’s chief senator
for Youth Policy, Paula Karpinski (SPD), wrote that youths needed places where
they could pursue diverse interests, places that “prepare the young citizen’s path
into our social and political life and ease their maturity process . . . in order to
secure our young democracy.”36 Democracy itself was at risk if the generation
meant to carry it forward could not grasp the responsible exercise of freedom.
This meant in part “appropriate” leisure consumption in safe spaces, hence
the Jugendbehörde’s establishment of Houses of Youth, movie clubs, and, in
an attempt to compete with rock ‘n’ roll, chaperoned dances featuring square
dancing or clean-cut jazz bands.37 Becker, Karpinski, and their allies used
this latest crisis of youth to build Hamburg’s Jugendbehörde into a formidable
agency and a national model for the youth protection movement.38 Their
mantra of “preventative youth protection”—catching youth before they fell into
degeneracy—spurred the formation of a new force to monitor public spaces
frequented by young people: the Youth Protection Squads (Jugendschutztrupps,
or “Trupps” for short).
Like the debate over the state of youth, the idea of monitoring urban spaces
where youths congregated was not new. Weimar-era police patrols rounded up
youths in St. Pauli “made wild” by revolution and hyperinflation, while Hitler
Youth and Gestapo agents combed the district for Swing Youths in the early 1940s.
British MPs and German police stepped up patrols during the area’s hedonistic
outburst immediately after the Second World War, while in 1956 police waged
a campaign against sexually suggestive nightclub advertisements.39 But the new
Youth Protection Squads were more systematic and better organized. Formed in
1958 as a joint effort of welfare authorities, the regular police (Schutzpolizei), and
the female police (weibliche Polizei), their mandate was to enforce the Law for
the Protection of Youth in Public. Patrols consisting of male and female police
officers plus a social worker made frequent rounds of the clubs, pubs, snack bars,
movie theaters, and gaming parlors where young people congregated.40 The unit
stepped up its patrols dramatically in 1961. In 1964 alone they monitored some
170 establishments citywide, trained over 400 police officers in youth protection
techniques, questioned some 8,000 youths, and arrested 1,024.41 The Trupps
patrolled in uniform and undercover, making rounds weekly or sometimes daily.
While they visited some establishments in the afternoon (such as Die Palette bar,
a haven for runaways and social dropouts [Gammler] immortalized in the novels
of Hubert Fichte),42 they tended to descend after 10:00 p.m. on establishments
serving alcohol in order to sweep up curfew violators. As thousands descended
on its Beat music clubs, St. Pauli came under intensified scrutiny in the wake of
anxieties about youths’ exposure to the vices the area showcased in abundance.
A reading of Trupp reports from 1961 to 196543 reveals that concomitant with
their mandate to protect youth in Germany’s Sodom and Gomorrah was a
suspicion of it, grounded in a view of youth as a social threat left over from the
Halbstarken era, as well as long-standing fears about moral decay and the threat
to youth posed by the city itself.
The Trupps observed everything from city parks to the art students’ annual
costume ball (which often took on a bacchanalian aspect).44 Patrons’ physical
appearance spelled the difference between being left alone or being harassed:
reports labeled establishments whose customers made a “neat and orderly”
impression, such as the Lido ballroom, “no further visits necessary,” while
others of a certain “cut” were immediately marked for closer scrutiny.45 The
Trupps searched for hooligans in leather jackets, despite the fact that this look
was largely passé by 1962. “Hanging out” (Herumtreiberei) furnished grounds
for suspicion, as did smoking, listening to transistor radios, or spontaneous
dancing.46 Trupp reports on the 1962 City Park summer jazz concerts reveal
an underlying disdain for the social habits of young people. One officer wrote
that youths hardly cared about the music, except for the “amateur dance groups”
(officialese for rock ‘n’ roll bands), and came out “merely to be seen.” Another
harrumphed that the caliber of these events was sinking because kids only went
there “to make random, indiscriminate contact” with each other.47
While parks and open-air concerts had their dangers, other types of places
were by definition “morally endangering.” Early reports on the Reeperbahn
The Authorities 129
Figure 5.1 A Youth Protection Squad on patrol in the Grosse Freiheit. Reprinted by
kind permission of K&K Ulf Krüger oHG Hamburg.
focused on slot parlors (Spielhallen), which the law put off-limits to those under
eighteen, as well as snack bars (Imbisse) where one could buy a beer to go with
their currywurst and fries. Here the Trupp’s practices were clearly gendered: it
was nearly always boys who were picked up in sweeps of these businesses.
Increasingly, the Trupps trained their focus on the dance clubs or “Twist
shacks” (Twistschuppen, later Beatschuppen in the reports) that proliferated after
1960. While they noted cases of underage drinking, the creeping consumption
of drugs like Preludin was largely not on their radar before 1967.48 The concerns
of the 1950s—violence by “leather jackets” and “smut”—also persisted into the
1960s. For example, patrols wrote up several establishments that had “indexed”
records on the jukebox and put strip clubs on notice for advertisements that
used pictures of topless women.49 But these issues appear less prominently in the
reports’ depictions of the threats to youth than concerns related to sex.
Such fears were to be expected in a district whose fortunes revolved around
selling sex. While notes about “dirty pictures” or lax enforcement of age limits at
the area’s many movie theaters intermittently appear, the over 160 Trupp reports
I surveyed show sustained and growing concern over teenage sexual activity. For
example, in 1962 a patrol ordered the young proprietors of Club o.k. (a short-
lived Grosse Freiheit venue frequently monitored by the Trupps) to remove two
condom machines from the men’s bathroom; at a time when the courts were
divided over where condom machines could be placed, the Trupps were creating
their own facts on the ground.50 The Trupps appeared less worried about young
people having sex with each other than about young people falling into sex
work, the ultimate signifier of degeneracy. They directed some of that concern
at teenage males. Between 1957 and 1965 Hamburg authorities simultaneously
cracked down on the city’s vibrant gay scene, as seen in a joint raid on the
Millerntor cinema, a well-known meeting place for teenage hustlers and johns.51
But overwhelmingly, in a line of continuity in police and welfare authority
thinking dating back at least to the 1920s, females were the main locus of fears—
and punitive action—when it came to sex. Indeed, while the authorities framed
boys’ illicit behavior in the language of crime and delinquency, they cast girls’ in
sexual terms.52
This appears, for example, in the way the reports discuss the teenage runaways
found all over St. Pauli. The federal Youth Welfare Law defined a runaway as any
minor absent from home without parental knowledge or permission, as well as
escapees from local reformatories.53 Fears about small-town youths running away
to the big city were as old as urbanization itself, but the authorities’ obsession with
runaways during the Economic Miracle years now factored in suburbanization
and youths’ physical mobility (St. Pauli was, after all, just a subway ride away
for anyone living in metropolitan Hamburg).54 A 1956 police memo singled out
truants from home or work as especially vulnerable to homosexual activity if
male or “willingness to tolerate sexual handling” if female.55 Rosamunde Pietsch,
head of the female police, spelled out her view of the problem in 1965:
The entertainment quarter St. Pauli is of particular cause for concern. . . .

Interrogations of girls rounded up there increasingly reveal that female youths,
who hitchhike to Hamburg to seek adventure and meet the big wide world, were
employed as Animierdamen or strippers. In 1962 police and welfare authorities
knew of roughly 100 such cases of girls aged thirteen to seventeen; one can
assume an even larger number of unreported cases.56
The Authorities 131
In response to such facts and fears, in 1966 the Hamburg Senate passed a law
allowing police to take runaways into custody against their will.
When the Trupps swept up runaway boys in a raid, the arrest was usually noted
without comment unless the offender was labeled a “drifter” (Umhertreiber). An
aimless young man represented a social problem because he was out of step
with the period’s emphasis on hard work (an Economic-Miracle variant on the
concept of “work-shy”).57 An aimless young woman in St. Pauli, in contrast,
represented a threat both to society and herself because she was potential fodder
for the sex trade. The press stoked these fears with a steady stream of articles in
the early 1960s about teenage girls lured by promises of easy money working
as models, strippers, or Animierdamen, with outright prostitution looming as
their inevitable destination. Jugendbehörde inspector Hermann Brandt claimed
that 80 percent of complaints under the Youth Welfare Law in St. Pauli in 1964
involved female runaways from reformatories—girls whose cases also frequently
involved violations of the laws on pimping and sexual solicitation, indicating a
high risk of sexual exploitation by adults. Becker declared that nothing less was
at work here than “a modern form of white slavery.”58
Parallel to these concerns about youth, the authorities perceived an explosion
in both the visibility and amount of prostitution in St. Pauli in this period.
Police noted a minimum of 3,500 unregistered and 1,400 registered prostitutes
in Hamburg, with numbers in St. Pauli swelling due to the 1963 International
Garden Expo and prostitutes’ displacement from St. Georg (near Hamburg’s
main train station) and gentrifying Neustadt.59 At a time of both heightened
media discussion of sex and the selling of St. Pauli for tourism purposes as a
place of “great freedom,” police officials saw Hamburg’s reputation for tolerance
as a problem because it made the city a magnet for prostitutes and vagrants.
The police stepped up their efforts to contain prostitution to keep it within
limits, consistent with the efforts of the local business association to channel
sexual spectacles into designated commercial spaces. Police treated suspected
prostitutes as potential carriers of venereal disease, subject to mandatory
physical exams.60 In light of widely circulated figures showing rising rates of
venereal disease among youth, the police also depicted these actions as part of
Jugendschutz.61 This set up the dynamic of the authorities perceiving youths as
both threatened and threat. While police and Trupp patrols saw themselves as
protecting youth, their actions in fact often constituted a violation of youths’
bodies. For example, if a female minor caught in a raid was not released back
to her parents (for whatever reason, including parents’ frequent refusal to take
the child back), she could be subject to forced examination for venereal disease
and confined to a girls’ reformatory.62 One such runaway, seventeen-year-old

Heidi W. from suburban Lokstedt, appears in several reports in 1962. She first
aroused suspicion for “hanging around all night” in an after-hours establishment
without ID, then was reported to have moved to Schmuckstrasse, shorthand
for Chinatown and a clear step down the social ladder hinting at a slide into
prostitution. In her final appearance in the reports she was singled out for her
“dogged resistance” to being apprehended, but was eventually “subdued.”63
The Trupps found other female minors working behind the bar in Beat
shacks or strip clubs. This raised the ire of one inspector, whose 1961 comments
encapsulated a century of social reformers’ thinking about barmaids: “It’s clear
that when a young girl works in such a place for a long or even a short time, she
must without a doubt fall into prostitution.”64 Beat clubs also became the site
of anxieties about young women’s sexuality. Worried parents wrote or phoned
the clubs when their children went missing. During the busy summer of 1962,
a nighttime raid on the Star Club turned up seventeen-year-old Marita H., who
turned out to be carrying a portfolio of nude self-portraits.65 Just being in the
audience at a music club after curfew could bring an underage female under
suspicion and land her in a reformatory. The Trupps even monitored females
over eighteen, as the age of full majority was twenty-one and a 1964 tightening of
federal law banned persons under that age from working in “morally endangering
occupations.”66 A fear of girls visiting St. Pauli for entertainment then falling into
prostitution courses through these reports, growing more pronounced over time
as fears of Hamburg becoming a destination for “foreign” sex tourism rose.67
Explanations for this perceived increase in girls falling into bad sexual
behavior varied. Sometimes the causes were presented as economic. Holger
Hoffmann wrote in Die Tat that club owners paid good money to lure strippers
out of the mainstream economy and looked the other way when teens lied about
their age or lacked valid working papers. Other explanations blamed youths’
desire for excitement, lust for consumer goods, and lack of impulse control.68
Mady Manstein, columnist for the television guide Funk Uhr, vented her unease
at the way Beat clubs unleashed sexual feelings even among girls from “good
homes”: “when I imagine my own daughter falling to her knees and screaming”
over a group of musicians, “I get very uncomfortable. . . . Are we being too
tolerant?”69 Such talk betrays real anxiety that the line between “good” and “bad”
girls was blurring under the force of youth’s new mobility and economic power,
as well as the accelerating sexualization of the public sphere, displayed most
nakedly on the Reeperbahn but also present in consumer culture at large. A new
element slipped into the debate in 1963–64 with concerns about the increasing
The Authorities 133
presence of “foreigners”—not Brits or Scandinavians, but specifically men of

color. The working group “St. Pauli ist für alle da” urged businesses to “police
themselves” and keep an eye on Ausländer. Irma Keilhack (SPD and Karpinski’s
successor as Hamburg Youth Senator) linked mass tourism and entertainment
with the growing “problem of German girls’ associations with guest workers.”
Her comments illustrate just how deeply St. Pauli was a locus of fears about
youth’s moral degeneration, with the content of those fears cycling through a
shifting but persistent set of issues: from Weimar-era worries about public health
to Nazi obsessions with the health of “the race,” through postwar anxieties about
the reputation of German women to more recent fears about the corrupting
forces of aggressive consumerism and the lure of the “exotic.”70 The voices of
the women and girls who were the objects of these anxieties rarely appear in
these sources (or when they are, are presented to conform to the storylines
outlined above), but their persistent presence in these spaces bespeaks their
real attraction to the pleasures offered there. Some ran away from homes in the
suburbs, south Germany, or even Scandinavia to experience them. These young
women were claiming the same social, even sexual mobility as the adult men
to whom St. Pauli was marketed. While some of their stories ended unhappily,
enough of them found the kicks to be had worth the journey—all the more
worrying to authorities trying to interdict them.
However they justified their interventions, and despite their often rough
treatment of their charges, welfare authorities and police firmly believed that
their efforts were in the best interest of youth, and that they were succeeding.71
Yet their actions were also clearly motivated by a desire to maintain discipline
and social control. Youths were coming to the Kiez in growing numbers without
adult supervision. In their reports, the Trupps betrayed exasperation that they
had to step in and protect youths because other adults would not. While some
reports noted parental cooperation, parents more often appear as negligent or
downright delinquent themselves. One report, for example, gratuitously noted
that the parents of an underage suburban girl apprehended at the Top Ten club
were divorced, implying that they were too preoccupied with their own affairs
to notice what their daughter was up to. Other reports depicted parents as
indifferent to their children’s whereabouts. Some parents even abetted immoral
or illegal behavior, such as the “father of a friend” who ordered alcohol for
two teenage girls at Club 64, or another father who accompanied his underage
daughter on a night out with some sailors.72
Other adults undermined the Trupps’ drive to protect youth morals as
well as the city’s financial interest in making sure that Reeperbahn mischief
remained safely contained. Waiters at the music clubs were easily bribed into
letting minors hide during ID checks. Elderly doormen or matronly ticket takers
were no match for kids determined to sneak into slot parlors or movies rated
inappropriate for their age group (curiously, the Trupps seem completely to
have missed Tante Rosa, the Beat clubs’ beloved washroom attendant who also
dispensed amphetamines).73 But the chief obstacles from the authorities’ point
of view were the club owners and managers whose “lust for lucre” (Gewinnsucht)
constituted a severe danger to adolescents.74 The animus was mutual: club
owners increasingly resented the Trupps’ interference in their business and
frequently worked against them. Reports indicate that they often refused to
put up the house lights or stop the band playing when Trupp patrols swooped
in to conduct ID checks. Peter Denk of Club o.k. was prosecuted for violating
the Youth Protection Law by tipping off an underage girl during a raid, while
runaways hung out at the Hit Club “with management’s permission.” Peter
Eckhorn’s lack of cooperation at the Top Ten earned a special notation in his file:
“have the Finance Office look into this,” indicating that the Trupps had a direct
line to the W&O and Falck, who had the power to revoke licenses or pursue
back taxes as leverage with recalcitrant owners. Even Bruno Koschmider, who
otherwise seems to have enjoyed good relations with the police, vented his anger
at the Trupps one night in 1962, blaming the recent closure of the Kaiserkeller on
stricter and more frequent checks on the club, which generated complaints from
patrons and drove away business.75 But the club owner who gave the authorities
the biggest headaches was Star-Club-boss Manfred Weissleder.
The “Iron Broom”: Kurt Falck’s war on the Star Club
In the eyes of the youth authorities and their ally Falck, Weissleder epitomized
everything they were fighting against. Falck, exasperated with what he referred
to elsewhere as the “look-the-other-way” culture of local government,76 spelled
out what he thought needed to be done in a 1965 article, “Jugendschutz in
Hamburg-Mitte.” While never mentioning the Star Club or Weissleder by name,
this essay by the “Iron Broom” offered up a rationale for what in retrospect looks
like a war on both.
Falck began by declaring that for the W&O—whose purview included
business licensing, regulation of bars and restaurants, and taxation in the central
Hamburg district (which included St. Pauli)—youth protection began with the
club owners. His office measured its effectiveness by the degree to which it could
The Authorities 135
scare owners out of risking a violation and potentially losing their license, hence
the strategy of frequent random spot-checks. Falck also described the same
concerns we saw above about runaways and other “unstable youths” being lured
into the sex trade in central Hamburg’s entertainment districts, which contained
one of every one hundred bars and restaurants in all of West Germany.77 He also
blasted pubs that served as hangouts for aimless Gammler who met there to
plan illegal parties, exchange information about places to kip, or deal drugs (an
oblique reference to the Palette, which had recently closed under pressure from
the authorities). Falck rounded out his portrait of the threats to youth with an
attack on the Beat music clubs:
The so-called “Twist shacks” constitute another particular attraction for youths.
They operate under the principle “low prices, high turnover.” My office notes
annual earnings of one million DM or more for some of them, something that
should be taken into account when the claim is made that their offerings are put
forth “only in the interest of youth.” . . . These seedbeds of youth endangerment
should be abolished with all means at our disposal, and indeed now, so that
irreparable damage to youth can be avoided.78
While “these” refers to all youth-endangering places, from clip joints and strip
clubs to beatnik bars and Beat clubs, only one businessman’s portfolio contained
nearly all of these: Weissleder. When Falck wrote about “ruthless moneymakers”
who pretended to care about young females in particular, offering them lodging
and work in their clubs (as Weissleder often did), Weissleder was precisely
the type he had in mind. Here we see echoes of the “smut and filth” debate of
the 1950s, now with club owners as the exploiters of innocent youth. As one
conservative commentator wrote, “Behind the fanaticism of youth stands the
ice-cold calculations of the factory owner and the manager who earn a fortune”
selling them pop culture.79 As his moves against the Star Club and Weissleder
personally reveal, Falck made bringing down Weissleder one of his prime
objectives as newly minted head of the W&O. Weissleder, for his part, was quick
to defend himself and his hard-won empire in the courts, as well as the court
of public opinion. While he would win many skirmishes, over the long haul he
would lose the war.
How had it come to this? As we saw in Chapter 2, Weissleder’s rise began soon
after he came to Hamburg in 1956. The connections he made as an electrician
at Tabu helped him launch his own strip clubs. Famously thrifty, he parlayed
his nest egg into a small empire. During these golden years of St. Pauli when
seemingly anything sexy would sell, Weissleder’s clubs thrived; by the early
1960s they lined almost the entire western side of the Grosse Freiheit’s busiest
block. The electrician became a self-made businessman whose entertainment
offerings resonated with a knowing clientele. He became a presence in St. Pauli,
the flashy cars he bought with cash each year a visible sign of his success.80
Despite his accomplishments, this transplant from the Ruhr remained a
perpetual outsider within the local business community. Weissleder was a
complicated figure, capable of allying with local gangsters for protection and
simultaneously being forward-thinking in his vision—indeed, his enterprises
flourished while older establishments like the Jungmühle and Kaffeehaus
Menke struggled to stay current going into the 1960s. He was uneasy with the
Bürgerverein’s improvement projects, allying with forty other business owners
against the “good star” initiative, then later acquiescing to it.81 This suggests a
fundamental difference in vision: the Bürgerverein represented the St. Pauli
establishment who were increasingly selling nostalgia and desperate to hang
on to a “respectable” clientele. Most of these business leaders also sold sexual
entertainment, but were rendered respectable by their status as long-time locals.82
Weissleder, in contrast, chased the new in his ventures. He was also a generation
younger than business leaders like Menke and while there are no sources to prove
it, it’s possible he disliked the way some of them had accommodated themselves
to the Nazi regime. They, in turn, showed him no love. He was one of those Horst
Frank had in mind when he lamented the disappearance of “the old, honorable
St. Paulianers” in favor of new people “from all over” who just saw St. Pauli as
a lemon to be squeezed.83 When Bartels and the Bürgerverein teamed up with
Falck to “clean up” St. Pauli, Weissleder found himself vulnerable.
Even before Falck entered the picture, Weissleder’s clubs were often lumped
in with the broad critique of Nepplokale discussed at the start of this chapter.
For example, BILD fulminated against him charging a 20 percent service fee at
two of his clubs and insinuated that Weissleder was not passing that money on
to his employees (Weissleder shot back that this was his first price increase in
years and that he needed to pay his waiters more to keep them).84 Interestingly,
one of the earliest detailed descriptions of his clubs in print, in Horst Günther’s
guidebook Hamburg bei Nacht, defended Weissleder’s establishments. Günther’s
primer on how to enjoy St. Pauli without being swindled praised the Erotic Night
Club for the “touching” honesty of its pay-what-you-wish coat check, its lack of
aggressive Animierdamen, and the creativity of its shows. While he found the
homemade nude films amateurish, Günther enjoyed the Erotic’s artistic touch
of flanking the projection screen with a scrim that showed live silhouettes of
dancers as they dressed and undressed. At the end of his evening, when neither
The Authorities 137
the “exotic creature” at the coat check nor the doorman pumped him for a tip,
“I left, again reconciled with St. Pauli.”85 Günther, writing from the perspective
of an insider seeking culture in a realm written off as unkultur, offers an early
appreciation of Weissleder’s efforts to elevate debased commercial forms. In this
regard, he foreshadowed Weissleder’s later defenders in the Beat music scene.
Such considerations cut no ice, however, with the Hamburg police, who had
been building a dossier on Weissleder for years. Their file, labeled “immoral
pictures,” contained notes on old claims against him in Dortmund for petty fraud,
assault, and “suspicion of distributing obscene movies” (whether those charges
were fully pursued is not evident from the file).86 Already then, Weissleder
challenged the legitimacy of the system, arguing that he would not have been
charged at all had he been able to afford a lawyer. He brought that attitude with
him to Hamburg. Running afoul of the law at an early stage in his career made
him shrewder as he rose in St. Pauli. He hired top lawyers when he was brought
up on charges of indecency in 1960 over the films he and Ross made for his
nightclubs. His distrust of authority also caused him to become scrupulous
in complying with the letter of the law so that when disputes arose (as they
inevitably did in the sex and entertainment business), he could withstand them.
Weissleder’s management style was fully on display at the Star Club (a property
he originally acquired, as we know, to comply with the fire code). As Günther
noticed earlier, Weissleder had big ideas: if he were going to open a music club, it
had to be the best of its kind. Thus, he spared no expense when it came to décor
or equipment. He scrupulously complied with licensing requirements here as in
his other nightclubs.87 Even the Trupps were favorably impressed on their first
visit in May 1962:
Furnishings positively distinguished from those of other youth clubs like

Medallion or Club o.k. Unfortunate that this is now the third dance club in
Grosse Freiheit. Well attended at 11:15 p.m. Indescribably noisy in the main
hall; hard to believe people can stay in here for long. Currently only ‘Twist
bands’ playing. Majority of guests young people. Spot checks indicated no trace
of underage patrons.88
The honeymoon did not last, however. The club’s location in the Grosse Freiheit,
sandwiched between two transvestite bars and an erotic cinema, aroused concern
about young people gathering there.89 As the Star Club’s popularity exploded it
became hard to prevent minors from congregating on the sidewalk or staying
on in the club after the witching hour of ten o’clock. Indeed, this became a
game of cat and mouse as the Trupps intensified their patrols. Horst Jankowiak,
whose parents owned the tavern Gretel und Alfons down the street, said that
when Trupps raided the Star Club, kids would run into Gretel and Alfons and
pretend to be kitchen workers until the cops left.90 A week after their initial
inspection, the Trupps reported catching five youths after curfew, adding this
notation to the file: “Owner advised and did not complain, but shift advisor later
received complaint about the inspection via Weissleder’s lawyer, Dr. Muller.”91
By reminding them that he had a high-powered lawyer in his corner, Weissleder
was sending a signal that he would not tolerate harassment by the city.
The Trupps’ chief concern was with minors and runaways, not violence;
it was Falck who linked the violence long associated with rock ‘n’ roll to the
“youth-endangering” milieu of the Grosse Freiheit. Dealing with violence was
part of doing business for all music clubs (and indeed all businesses) in St. Pauli:
every place had employees responsible for keeping drunk patrons under
control. But Falck singled out the Star Club for its practice of using waiters to
keep order with their fists. As he told Der Spiegel, it didn’t matter to him why
there was hitting, only that there was hitting.92 The timing of Falck’s campaign
is significant: he became head of the W&O in December 1963 on the eve of the
sensational trial of the Black Gang of St. Paulchen. This was a violent criminal
ring that engaged in extortion, blackmail, assault, intimidation, and pimping.
They were notorious for brutally shaking down businesses for protection money
and generally beating the tar out of anyone who rubbed them the wrong way,
including random patrons in bars around the Reeperbahn. They gave St. Pauli a
black eye, literally and figuratively. The main defendant in the first Black Gang
trial was Paulchen Müller, nominally a waiter but in fact a gangster with ties to
none other than Weissleder.
Gangsters had long been part of the fabric of life in St. Pauli. They were
not remote figures but local guys who owned various nightclubs and partied
at others. They frequented the Star Club. Photographs show Wilifried “Frida”
Schulz (St. Pauli’s most powerful underworld boss of the 1960s) carousing at the
Top Ten in 1961 while the Beatles played.93 Even as youth culture established a
foothold there, St. Pauli was still ruled by these “strong men” and a business had
to reach some accommodation with them in order to survive. Weissleder played
this game too, even if the exact nature of his association with them is somewhat
murky. For example, in 1961 he testified in court to contributing several hundred
DM to a “bowling club” that was ostensibly an association of Grosse Freiheit
business owners, but which may have in fact been a front for criminal activity.94
Müller, a local “godfather” since the 1950s, is listed in various documents as one
of Weissleder’s partners; he became one of the people to whom Weissleder sublet
The Authorities 139
some of his strip clubs when he needed to raise funds to operate the Star Club. He
is named as the owner of Der Lachende Vagabund, where Fascher worked before
becoming involved with the Star Club, as well as business manager at fourteen
different St. Pauli establishments. A 1964 indictment lists Müller’s occupations
as waiter, owner of the Rote Katze (formerly a Weissleder enterprise), and one of
several business managers at Manfred Weissleder KG. Another document lists
him as a purchasing manager at the Star Club, which Fascher describes as an
ingenious “way to keep peace in [the] shop,” implying that this was mainly done
to placate the mob. There is no evidence that Müller perpetrated the kind of
brutality at the Star Club he practiced elsewhere, nor that he was even involved
with the Star Club after March 1963.95 Violence did, however, infiltrate the club
through other means, particularly its white-jacketed waiters.
Fascher managed the waiters, which he recruited from his circle of local
boxers. They were hired as much for their talent in crowd control as their ability
to serve drinks. Working for tips enhanced their aggressive manner (their slogan
was, “cola, beer, or out!”). Weissleder, Fascher claims, was giving these ex-cons a
second chance and “put great value on having his employees prevail physically,”
though he also demanded that in doing so they not become “totally stupid.”96
Fascher calls their judicious use of the fist “self-policing” designed to quell
disturbances quickly and keep the police from getting involved in what were
usually minor rows. Having been on the wrong side of it much of their lives,
these men knew the law. Gibson Kemp always knew a fight was imminent when
he saw the waiters remove their rings, since these could be construed in court as
a weapon.97 Violence was not indiscriminate but deployed according to a code.
Horst’s brother Fredi, himself a waiter at the Star Club, argues they used violence
to present a facade so tough no one would risk challenging it.98 Defenders of this
moral economy maintained that if fights were frequent, they were also brief:
as Jankowiak put it, they “ended with a drink, not like today where they fight
until someone’s dead.”99 Waiters directed their force at rowdy sailors, drunken
tourists, or customers fighting among themselves. Club regular Icke Braun
noted that it wasn’t hard to stay on the waiters’ good side as long as one tipped
well, while Reichel maintained that one was more likely to encounter trouble
outside the club than inside. Indeed, it was not in the waiters’ interest to go after
the fans that were their bread and butter—protecting them and the musicians
was part of “the code.” When Kemp was attacked by local thugs, Weissleder
sent out a posse of waiters to teach them not to mess with his drummer—or, by
extension, himself. According to the logic of St. Pauli, violence was a necessary
tool of doing business and winning respect.100
Weissleder himself was no pacifist. He once pushed Günter Zint down a

flight of stairs during an argument, and Ross later said he felt “sickened” by his
friend’s momentary lapses of control. Weissleder also made it known that he
carried a gun (though he appears to have only shot at typewriters and big game).
In September 1963 he made local headlines when photographer Uwe Laabs
accused him of smashing his camera and his face when he tried to take pictures
without permission. A witness stated to the Hamburger Echo, “Elements like
Weissleder have no business here in Hamburg. Their use of such primitive forms
of behavior can only damage the reputation of our city”—words that could
have been scripted by the Youth Agency or the Bürgerverein. The courts later
dismissed Laabs’ case for lack of evidence (though they did order Weissleder
to replace the camera), but the negative publicity fed an image of Weissleder as
a menacing outsider. This in turn buttressed the authorities’ case that the Star
Club was a danger to youth.101
Besides violence, taxes were Weissleder’s other vulnerability. City records show
that the club made monthly tax payments based on the number of admissions
throughout most of 1962. The first sign of trouble came that December when
Weissleder requested an extension on his tax bill: a string of recent shows by big
stars who commanded high fees (among them Fats Domino), combined with
slack business at some of his other nightclubs, left him with a cash flow problem.
A low-level bureaucrat at the W&O initially deemed this request reasonable, but
his superior overruled him and demanded immediate payment.102 This marked
the beginning of a vicious cycle in which the club sold thousands of tickets at
low prices, lured international talent with lucrative fees, then scrambled to close
the gap and pay the taxes. Weissleder began ransacking his other businesses to
support his music club to the point of subletting nearly all of them, so dedicated
to the Star Club had he become. By the summer of 1964, the W&O claimed he
owed the city over 200.000DM in back taxes.
Financial pressure on him intensified, as did scrutiny of the club. Before
the Beat clubs, relations in St. Pauli between businesses and the city were less
formal and bureaucratic, but as youths began streaming in, authorities began
enforcing regulations more vigorously.103 First they shut down the Star Club’s
Sunday afternoon concerts for fans under sixteen (who could not come out at
night) as a violation of the Youth Protection Law. Then the Trupps stepped up
their patrols, with ninety visits paid in 1963 alone. One raid at 2:30 a.m. on
June 18, 1963, by a hundred police officers resulted in the arrest of sixty patrons,
including numerous minors, runaways, Norwegian and Israeli tourists, and
twelve British musicians (including all of the Undertakers) whose work permits
The Authorities 141
had not yet arrived. A livid Weissleder told a reporter from BILD that the raid
was clearly “an act of revenge” because he had just won a hearing against the ban
on afternoon shows and was warned by the W&O that his establishments would
now be more closely scrutinized.104 Weissleder, who had always been fastidious
about keeping his businesses on the right side of the law, now became even
more so. He instructed employees to be more careful screening IDs. He even
checked with the city to make sure it was legal to move a piano across the street
on a Sunday. Still, Falck’s office continued to amass evidence against him, with
incidents like the Laabs scuffle fattening up the file.
Tensions came to a head as the weather turned warm in 1964 and Beatlemania
swelled the crowds making the pilgrimage to their old Hamburg haunts. A
premonition of trouble came on 15 May when a car intentionally rammed into
a Trupp patrol trying to disperse a crowd of youths outside the Top Ten.105 Then
Paulchen Müller’s trial reached its climax in early June. The explosion came on
June 15, 1964, when Falck ordered the shuttering of the Star Club, citing unpaid
taxes and “vigilante justice” by its staff. Headlines screamed, “Enough is enough!”
The local press and even Der Spiegel followed the story for weeks, painting it as
an epic showdown between Falck and Weissleder. Falck, whose national profile
rose dramatically, was quoted at length in the Hamburger Abendblatt:
The entire attitude of the man [Weissleder] reveals itself in the case of the
boxer [Norbert] Grupe, who was attacked at the Star Club by waiters. Back
then [Weissleder] wrote my office to explain that “my manager was justified in
hitting this guest.” He clearly agrees with these methods. . . . His most notorious
employee is the bruiser-king Paulchen Müller, recently sentenced to five years in
jail, who once served as business manager until the “boss” had to scale back his
empire of clubs because of unpaid taxes. The main goon and manager at the club
is boxer Horst Fascher, who was just charged in the St. Pauli trial and has a prior
conviction for manslaughter.106
Other articles depicted an outpouring of support for Falck’s crackdown from

the business community and Interior Minister Schmidt. The Morgenpost quoted
Dieter Blötz, member of the SPD and representative of the St. Pauli committee of
Hamburg-Mitte: “We are one hundred percent behind Mr. Falck’s moves to rid
St. Pauli of violence and rip-offs.”107
If the press gave Falck a megaphone, their portrayals of Weissleder
unwittingly presented him as a self-made working-class hero. Pictures of him
talking to barmaid Betti Darlien made him appear suave and sympathetic.
Articles chronicled his rise from electrician to “one of the great St. Pauli bosses”
and discussed his role both in nurturing the Beatles and making the Star Club
a world-class music destination.108 They also noted the expressions of sympathy
pouring into his office at the news of the club’s closure—a flood of support that
soon acquired a street presence. On the evening of June 23, 1964, between 200
and 500 fans blocked the Grosse Freiheit with a sit-down strike, chanting, “open
the Star-Club!” Some female fans brandished pacifiers—perhaps to argue that
they were harmless (as one writer suggested) or being infantilized, or maybe just
to baffle adults. Others jeered police commissioner Fiete Ott (who was himself
making a name as head of Germany’s most famous precinct, the Davidwache)
when he arrived on the scene. BILD dubbed the protest a “youth riot,” while the
Hamburger Morgenpost revived memories of the Halbstarken panic by portraying
the Star Club supporters as ill-mannered “leather jackets,” held only in check by
the “patience” and steely nerves of Ott. In fact, the protesters—hardly a leather
jacket among them—were peaceful. They dispersed without incident when
ordered to do so (indeed, the Abendblatt accused them of being too cowardly to
“mount the barricades for Weissleder”); the police exercised restraint and made
no arrests. Within days, the Star Club reopened under new management.109
It’s unclear whether the fans’ protests convinced the city to reconsider.
Surely the negative economic impact of the Star Club’s closure at the height of
Beatlemania played a role in inducing the parties to work out a deal. Weissleder
himself knew that shuttered doors meant big losses, so he agreed to an
arrangement in which he sacked twelve waiters, transferred the club’s license
to one of his partners (Hans Bunkenberg), and paid back taxes of 25.000DM.
The deal also banned Weissleder from the premises, along with Fascher (who
would soon be in jail anyway for his ties to the Black Gang), to “protect guests
from danger to life and limb.”110 Now forbidden from entering the club (though
still running it behind the scenes), Weissleder threw himself into marketing the
Star Club brand and publishing the Star-Club News. There he lashed out at the
Jugendschutz forces and Falck in particular, as in this article from 1965:
Bureaucrat Falck, celebrated court expert on proprietor executions and newly

minted knight of an order of fools, was not the cause this time as Lüneburg’s
Star-Palast was closed for violations of the Youth Protection Law. But no doubt
officials there took their cues from their good old neighbor Hamburg, where
dashing prosecutors have long taken aim, under any pretext, at the hated “Twist
shacks” (“Twist,” by the way, is just as much a misnomer as “shacks”).111
Weissleder presented himself as an ally of youth and strove to change the

narrative that the Beat scene was dangerous, noting that the Star Club had hosted
The Authorities 143
2.5 million guests in 1964–65 with only sixteen fights. (Becker countered that
Weissleder had done nothing good for youth and deserved no pity.) Weissleder
also continued to make headlines as his fight to get his license back and his
defamation suit against Falck wended their way through the courts. He even
won some of these skirmishes: he recovered his license in 1966, though the suit
against Falck was thrown out. Some officials belatedly came to his defense as the
club policed itself more peacefully. But as we will see in the next chapter, this
long fight sapped his energy and helped bring down his youth empire within a
few short years.112
Luster restored?
In 1965 city officials declared their efforts to rehabilitate St. Pauli’s entertainment
district a success: Weissleder had been put in his place, the Black Gang smashed,
and the rip-off clubs with their pushy barkers brought to heel. The conservative
daily Die Welt trumpeted, “St. Pauli’s luster has been restored.” After a spell of bad
headlines about gangsters and clip joints “come the friendly words of Minister
Helmut Schmidt: ‘St. Pauli—safer and more beautiful . . . . While we haven’t yet
reached the level of the Place Pigalle, authorities, police, Jugendschutztrupps, and
business committees are working to wipe away the last stains” on the quarter.113
Reporter Bernhard Wördehoff wrote that in 1964 the city had collected nearly
15,000DM in fines and revoked the licenses of fourteen establishments; in
December it received only one complaint over price gouging and assault while
hosting some 300,000 visitors. Even the lingering problem of unregistered
prostitutes seemed to have found a solution in Willi Bartels’ proposal to build
a new high-rise where they could conduct their business. The Hamburger
Morgenpost similarly argued that the authorities’ measures had all borne fruit,
so much so that reporters teased that the area would become too well-behaved
(to which Schmidt replied, “We don’t want a small town provincial atmosphere
in St. Pauli, nor do I think we have one”).114
Accompanying the Morgenpost article were pictures of the two who had
come to personify the struggle for St. Pauli: Falck, the man who “knows more,”
and Weissleder, who’s “in a jam.” The authorities pursued a vision of the area
that was more refined—the Bürgerverein dreamed of tourists flocking to
attractively lit streets bustling with hurly-burly—and nostalgic, a St. Pauli “as
it’s become known the world over through film . . . and popular song” with jolly
prostitutes of legal age in traditional roles under customary controls.115 They
were awakening to the age of American-style public relations in which St. Pauli

was increasingly sold as a concept. Here consenting adults could indulge in
bawdy pleasures, with prostitutes, strippers, and sailors as part of a colorful
tableau (as Schmidt put it, this “may perhaps be tinsel, but tinsel shines too
and many people like it”).116 Maintaining that touristic product required strict
regulation and increasing bureaucratization—a project in which city authorities,
businessmen, and the local press gladly collaborated. The Jugendschutztrupps
in particular, a marker of modernization within the city police force, became a
refined mechanism for disciplining businesses and youth within the parameters
of a robust welfare state. The real St. Pauli—a tough, gritty place that belonged
to the carpetbagger Weissleder as much as Paulchen Müller, Horst Fascher, and
Rosi Sheridan—remained a thorn in the city’s eye, stubbornly pursuing its own
agenda of survival enlivened by moments of unbridled physical pleasure. The
battle over St. Pauli in the late 1950s to mid-1960s was about class, culture, and
place. It was fueled by the anxiety continually churned up by this milieu, which
exploded anew in the early 1960s as youths from “good homes” (and some not-
so-good homes) descended on it in large numbers to claim their own share of
pleasure. Instead of viewing the success of the Star Club and the Beat music
scene as a sign of economic and cultural vibrancy, the authorities saw it as stain
to be scrubbed out.
This battle was also a story about the increasingly articulated concept of
the generation gap. This new generational conflict expressed itself largely
in questions of style and tone. The authorities’ ideal embodiment of St. Pauli
was the convivial maritime world simulated in Hans Albers films, not rock
‘n’ roll redoubts ruled by pugilistic waiters. It sounded like Freddy Quinn
crooning about his guitar and the sea, not Screaming Lord Sutch stalking
the Star Club stage dressed like Jack the Ripper. Conflicts between youth,
the Jugendschutztrupps, and Falck (who was born in 1919) exemplified the
generation gap in its purest form. Their reports leave no doubt that the Trupps
truly disliked the styles of entertainment, music, dress, dance—everything!—of
teenagers, particularly young women’s claims to equal access to these pleasures.
Manfred Weissleder and his complicated advocacy of young people’s right to
their own leisure embodied everything the authorities wanted to eradicate, not
least because his businesses brought together sex and youth in ways that were
still deeply unsettling in this conservative nation. While Weissleder was also
in business to make money, Zint (who experienced Weissleder’s negative side
firsthand) argues that the authorities targeted him because “anyone who put
himself out there for youth [was] automatically suspect, especially in the raw
The Authorities 145
milieu of St. Pauli.”117 There the struggle between youths demanding the right to
their own spaces for leisure and authorities seeking to regulate them under the
rubric of Jugendschutz, dramatized changing notions of what constituted a well-
ordered society, the proper role of the police, the boundaries of censorship, and
the tensions between commerce and sexual morality in a period torn between
social conservatism and dynamic capitalism. The Trupp reports, as well as the
Beat clubs’ very popularity, suggest that young people were busily constructing
their own vision of all these things, embracing the possibilities for individual
liberation offered by popular culture. They suggest a growing understanding
among youth of space as a right to be defended, part of ongoing struggles to
democratize West Germany within a transnational youth culture that had music
at its heart.118
Ironically, at least through 1966, Hamburg’s Beat music scene was not the
bacchanalian orgy youth authorities perceived it to be. Young men still wore
suit jackets and women skirts for a night in the clubs, sipping Cokes or maybe
popping a few amphetamines to stay awake. Few foresaw the impending wave
of hard drugs, violence, and social unrest that would make the early 1960s look
tame by comparison. That story, and the decline of the youth culture that had
crystallized around the Star Club, is the subject of the next chapter.
146
6
The End of the Hamburg Scene
One night in October 1966, Ian and the Zodiacs played a typical Beat number
on the Star Club stage, something they had done dozens of times before. After
they finished their song a bearded young writer in a purple shirt and tie stepped
to the microphone. He read from his forthcoming novel about the runaways,
misfits, gays, and beatniks that congregated in Hamburg’s subcultural niches.
Then the musicians returned. Beat and prose traded off like that for the next hour
while a packed house smoked, laughed, made out, and applauded. A few months
later, a black ex-GI who was all the rage in London stepped onto the same stage.
Playing his guitar left-handed, upside-down, behind his back and with his teeth,
he and his band created a wall of sound that was by turns aggressive, apocalyptic,
sexy, and sublime. The audience looked on in amazement while backstage, the
management fumed at this travesty of a rock ‘n’ roll show.
These two events symbolized the changes rocking the Hamburg scene as
it rolled into the late 1960s. The “Beat und Prosa” evening featuring Hubert
Fichte reading from Die Palette was Manfred Weissleder’s attempt to bring new
impulses and audiences into the Star Club. Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 show constituted
one of live rock ‘n’ roll’s most intense bodily experiences to date, but it also
polarized audiences. As rock’s forms multiplied, young people created new
forms of distinction around fine differences of style and taste. The audience itself
was changing: the Hamburg scene’s original fans were now in their twenties
and moving into adult life while younger fans were increasingly oriented to the
sounds of the dawning psychedelic era. The arrival of new types of recreational
drugs fed that changing sound and reshaped habits of “going out.” Young people
could now go to discotheques to make contact, score hash, and dance to pre-
recorded music under pulsating lights. Some existing clubs like the Top Ten
adapted to the competition from new venues in the Grosse Freiheit, Reeperbahn,
and other districts; the Star Club, however, saw its crowds shrink as it was
increasingly perceived to be old-fashioned. Fans no longer had to trek to St. Pauli
to find their music, which was now more widely available in shops, on radio and
even television. West Germany now had thousands of active bands.1 Beat style
seemed to be everywhere. What had started as subculture—literally beneath the
dominant culture—became mainstream. This success validated the early rock
‘n’ roll entrepreneurs’ instincts, but it also hastened the end of the Hamburg
scene. Besides changes in taste and generation, other material realities such as
surveillance, bureaucratization, and the rising cost of attracting top acts made
operating a venue like the Star Club increasingly difficult. Meanwhile the sexual
revolution increasingly oriented St. Pauli’s entertainment economy around sexual
commerce and little else. In this climate, the Hamburg scene could not survive.
Beat goes the media
Little of this was foreseen in 1964 when the scene hit its peak as thousands flocked
to the clubs where the Beatles had served their apprenticeship. The authorities
kept vigilant watch over the flows of young men and women in St. Pauli, but also
reached a détente with club owners. The Top Ten, Hit Club, and others did good
business offering live music and dancing, while the Star Club served as the scene’s
crown jewel. Weissleder, however, was officially banned from it under the terms
of the deal that allowed it to reopen after its brief closure in June 1964. This forced
him to find other ways to stay engaged in what had become his main business.2
He threw himself into building the Star Club brand through merchandising,
franchising, and new media ventures. He contracted with Phillips to release
live recordings on the Star Club label (Eckhorn made a similar arrangement
with Decca for the Top Ten). He planned to build a recording studio, something
Eckhorn had already done on a small scale at his nightclub. He licensed the
Star Club name to venues in West Germany, northern Europe, even Mombassa,
and he managed a roster of acts that included the Rattles and the Liverbirds.
These projects piggybacked on the Beatlemania juggernaut, which had brought
Beat music into households across the country and the world. Articles in the
mainstream press that praised Astrid Kirchherr for “inventing the Beatle-look”
or stamped the Beatles “made in Germany” elevated the Hamburg scene to the
status of national cultural asset.3 Weissleder capitalized on this, continuing his
efforts to elevate the quality of musical offerings for young people while keeping
these expensive undertakings profitable.
Weissleder understood the power of media. He regularly spoke to the
press about his projects and invested significant energy in the Star-Club News.
The End of the Hamburg Scene 149
We saw in Chapter 4 how the News served as a megaphone for his personal
opinions and business interests, as well as a voice for the fans who had “made”
the music scene. The News foreshadowed the kind of music journalism that
blossomed after 1968, which was more attuned to criticism and the insider tip
than what moved the most product. Although the News was small compared to
BRAVO or Musikparade, it gained the attention of media giant Heinrich Bauer
Verlag. Bauer acquired the News in 1965 with promises of boosting its reach,
but when distribution plans hit a snag (the German post refused to deliver it
at the discounted magazine rate because they considered it advertising, due to
its name), they put the News on ice. Then Bauer co-opted its style for its own
publication, the less socially critical OK. Weissleder could do little but battle it
out in court (again).4
Another ambitious media project was Weissleder’s attempt to set up a pirate
radio station. West German airwaves were still dominated by state-owned stations
whose programming tilted toward high culture and education. Some light
entertainment and youth-oriented shows had crept into their offerings since the
1950s (most notably Howland’s Saturday Club), but German fans of rock ‘n’ roll
had to turn to armed forces radio or static-ridden bursts of Radio Luxembourg
for their fix.5 By 1964 pirate stations emerged as a new option.6 The most popular
of these, Radio Caroline, broadcast from ships anchored in international waters
off the British coast. Funded largely by advertising, it circumvented the BBC and
the major labels’ grip on Radio Luxembourg’s playlist.7 Pirate deejays could play
what they liked (though payola from agents and competing labels surely swayed
some of their selections), and their shows soon became very popular among
young German listeners. Frustrated by West German radio’s refusal to give
airtime to Beat music and the bands he represented, Weissleder planned to start
his own “Star Radio 1,” broadcasting from a ship outside the three-mile zone off
the German coast in the North Sea.8 Programs would be recorded in Hamburg,
then the tapes transported to an offshore transmitter by boat or helicopter.
The station would broadcast across northwest Europe, England, and Denmark
(with Danish language programming a nod to St. Pauli’s Scandinavian Beat
contingent). Weissleder pledged to “do it right” and not interfere with existing
stations’ frequencies. The Hamburg press closely followed his moves to line up
advertisers and investors, a mark of Weissleder’s local notoriety at this point in
time. But the venture was abruptly scuttled by new international conventions
aimed at cracking down on the pirates, as well as pressure from Radio Bremen,
which was preparing its own youth programming.9 In 1965 Weissleder’s radio
hopes were reduced to a special broadcast on the BBC’s Saturday Club and
promises of a partnership with a Chicago station for a series of shows from the
Star Club.10
While Beat music was able to penetrate radio’s permeable airwaves,
television was a harder nut to crack. That changed in September 1965 with
the launch of West Germany’s first TV show devoted to the new music, Beat-
Club. The show’s original concept came from Ernest Borneman, an industry
veteran and jazz connoisseur who had created the Six-Five Special for the
BBC years earlier. His idea for a live, free-form show featuring different
genres of rhythmic music morphed in the hands of Michael Leckebusch into
a production resembling American Bandstand, with rock and Beat bands
performing before an audience of fashionable young dancers. Twenty-eight
year-old Leckebusch drew on his experience as a frequent visitor to the
Star Club, reproducing it at Bremen’s Twen Club, where the show was shot.
Weissleder jumped on this connection and took an active interest in the
show. He lined up the Liverbirds and Rattles for its first episodes, attended
sound checks, and negotiated with producers over the order in which his acts
would perform. Beat-Club also slotted in British and American bands already
booked at the Star Club or Top Ten, located just an hour north of Bremen.
Beat-Club became a vivid example of how impulses from St. Pauli’s Beat scene
fed the larger youth culture of the 1960s.11
Broadcast once a month on Saturday afternoons, Beat-Club was an instant
hit with millions of young viewers who dropped whatever they were doing
when the show was on. Its first episode began with a warning to parents that
they might not like the music they were about to hear. Indeed, along with heaps
of fan mail, complaints came in to Radio Bremen about the “noise” as well as the
show’s lack of a strong “German” profile. But the show’s programming reflected
the shifting tastes of the record-buying public: in 1963 the majority of records
sold in West Germany were sung in German, but from 1964 through the end of
the decade the balance tipped toward English.12 Leckebusch defended his show’s
Anglophone thrust and its use of German and British co-hosts, which reflected
England’s dominance within the rock scene. He shared the view among Beat
partisans that English was the music’s authentic language. He also argued that
folk song, operetta, and other “German” music already had a strong presence
on television: “Can’t we be tolerant enough to grant youth—or at least a portion
of it—thirty minutes a month for Beat?”13 As the Top Ten and Star Club had
done years before, Beat-Club proclaimed Beat’s ethos as anti-nationalistic and
internationally oriented, reflecting an “authentic generational habitus” as well as
a clever marketing strategy.14
Beat-Club was a milestone in West German media history. It spread the gospel
of Beat to the furthest corners of the Federal Republic, with additional viewers in
East Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK (whose New Musical Express
declared the show “the best of the bunch”), and later Chile.15 Its success led to
other shows such as 4-3-2-1 Musik für junge Leute, aimed at the teenybopper
demographic. Hessischer Rundfunk aired a thirty-minute documentary, Die
Beatles—Damals in Hamburg, in January 1967. This portrait of the Hamburg
scene took viewers behind the music at the Beatles’ old stomping grounds,
featuring interviews with Weissleder, Eckhorn, Betti Darlien, and Icke Braun. It
evoked the connection between Hamburg and Liverpool, presenting the music
scene as a product of the “open-minded” ethos of harbor cities.16 By 1967 German
media had jumped on the youth music bandwagon (though “bandwagon” is a
relative term, as this still only constituted a few hours of programming here and
there). Beat now sold millions of records and magazines and generated work
for a new cohort of writers, photographers, and other media professionals. This
changed the original scene. The music itself flourished, its creativity spinning
out in a hundred directions, but the early clubs had a harder time keeping up, as
Weissleder and Fascher’s hostile reaction to Hendrix would reveal. One no longer
had to go to St. Pauli to find Beat when clubs offering it live or in pre-recorded
form proliferated across the city and the country.17 It became an open question
whether the clubs that first incubated Beat culture could remain connected to
the energy fueling the new rock ‘n’ roll.
Art or entertainment? The taxman decides
On June 26, 1966, the Beatles returned to Hamburg for the first time since 1962
as part of a whirlwind tour of Europe and Japan. The “BRAVO Beatles Blitz tour”
brought them to the city for barely twenty-four hours. With the Rattles as their
opening act, they played two shows at the Ernst-Merck-Halle to over 10,000
people, including future chancellor Helmut Schmidt and easy-listening king
Bert Kaempfert (producer of their first recording session with Tony Sheridan).
Paul chatted backstage in German while John reconnected with Astrid. BRAVO
quoted them as saying the trip was like coming back to their “second Heimat”
and declaring the special place German fans had in their hearts.18 Yet the
band was now too big to even visit the Top Ten or Star Club, which could not
accommodate the crowds who wanted to see them, much less pay the huge
salary they now commanded. A limousine shuttled them between their show in
the city center and Tremsbüttel Castle, where they stayed with their entourage.
The Beatles never returned to St. Pauli.19
The Beatles had outgrown the sound forged during their Hamburg days.
Indeed, early Beat sounded tired by 1966. New bands emerged with harder-
edged, R&B-infused, or complex sounds, such as the Pretty Things and Cream.
Ironically, a key source of rock’s evolution beyond its primitive early sound of
teenage rebellion had been the coming together of artsy German fans and British
musicians starting in the Kaiserkeller. That cross-class, cross-national fusion
helped rock ‘n’ roll to blossom in the mid- and late 1960s. It became a garden of
many flowers, as even a cursory listen to records produced by both famous and
lesser-known acts reveals.20 The Top Ten, which had never clung tightly to any
one style, tried to keep things fresh with new acts such as the Monks, a group
of tonsured ex-GIs marketed as a “protest against the phony show biz of the
Beatles, Rolling Stones and other Mop Tops” (sample songs: “Shut Up” and “I
Hate You”).21 The Star Club landed some of the trendy, ambitious new hit makers
such as the Spencer Davis Group and the Walker Brothers. Yet while the club had
been booking fewer Liverpool groups for at least a year, it remained identified
with that sound and Liverpool bands dominated the bill at the Star Club’s fourth
anniversary show in 1966. The creeping force of nostalgia was already setting in.
Now that the world had caught up with what St. Pauli incubated, Weissleder
went outside the club’s confines to keep his brand going. These activities were
partly informed by his goal (articulated in the Star-Club News) not just to show
the value of the music but its fans. The Star Club began organizing what are
nowadays called benefit concerts. They put on dances at the botanical garden
Planten un Blomen in conjunction with the youth group of the Deutsche
Angestellten Gewerkschaft (DAG, a white-collar union). Proceeds benefited two
children’s homes in north Germany. In a pitch to Leckebusch asking Beat-Club
to televise one of these shows Weissleder wrote,
I find it exceptionally gratifying and valuable when young people who want
for nothing and have a relatively carefree childhood think about children who
don’t have it so good . . . I am certain that such a broadcast would resonate
well with the public to the benefit of today’s youth, who are often unjustly
maligned—not least because of Beat-Club. It would show that beneath their
Beatle haircuts are not anti-social ideas but an open-minded, helpful attitude
towards the issues of daily life, something many adults could learn from.22
It was smart business to partner with one of the most popular shows on TV
as well as a powerful labor union. But it was also consistent with Weissleder’s
oft-expressed disdain for elitist, authoritarian ideas about youth and youth
culture. He had already shown solidarity with young men who wore long hair.
Behind his anti-authoritarian streak was the memory of Nazism—the “carefree
childhood” he himself didn’t have. This distancing from Nazism was not political
in a conventional sense, but had political implications linked to fans’ use of Beat
for self-expression and identity formation. Working-class fan Michael “Bommi”
Baumann’s road to radical activism began when he grew his hair long and found
kindred souls in Beat clubs. Frank Dostal’s long hair provoked punitive responses
among the “hidden Nazis” who still ruled German classrooms, leading him to
quit school to play music.23 Weissleder put into words and concrete offerings
the connections between pop music and individual liberation. These offerings
in turn facilitated communications among youth that pushed pop beyond mere
escapism into a broader societal critique in the late 1960s.24
That same mix of branding with a cultural agenda was also the impetus
behind Beat and Prosa in 1966. The Star Club had long shouldered a heavy tax
load. Beat’s popularity brought increasing bureaucratization and regulation in
St. Pauli. Bands could no longer play without the proper work permits. The state
became more insistent in demanding that club owners pay not only taxes on
ticket sales but also wage taxes and social welfare contributions for performers.25
Weissleder tried to reduce his tax bill by arguing that certain Star Club events
should be designated “culture” (taxed at 10 percent of the take), as opposed to
“entertainment” (taxed at 20 percent). This two-tiered structure was a remnant
of the nineteenth-century bourgeois view that Kultur deserved financial
assistance because it was more ennobling than entertainment (Unterhaltung)—
an idea re-inscribed in West German law. Performers who straddled the line
between art and entertainment had long petitioned to be considered Kultur.26
In St. Pauli that definition was highly elastic, and officials evaluated such claims
within the context of the district’s current state. For example, in 1954 Kaffeehaus
Menke, a veteran purveyor of coffee and cake on the Reeperbahn, received a tax
break when officials decided it was making a cultural contribution by bucking
the trend toward sex-themed amusement (even though Menke’s was a known
spot for meeting “respectable” prostitutes).27 In 1966, with Beat approaching
mainstream respectability, Weissleder decided to make his own case for culture.
First, he fought to regain his operating license for the Star Club. At a hearing in
March police testified that Weissleder had been a cooperative and polite owner.
The local press contributed to his character rehabilitation. One article praised
him as possessing the “calm of an English golfer, the hardness of an American
businessman, and the earthy humor of a Bavarian.”28 Another presented him
as a hero who “broke a wall of silence” when he asked officials to bring charges
against six “Gypsies” (Zigeuner) who robbed patrons and workers in the Grosse
Freiheit. Such reporting remade Weissleder’s image from shady outsider to
defender of an implicitly white order.29 A sympathetic judge soon restored his
license, stating that Falck’s punishment had been too draconian.
Seizing on this uptick in his fortunes, Weissleder applied for the lower tax rate
on Kultur. He had already seen how the press treated Ray Charles’ shows in 1963
as a cultural event. He now sought the cultural designation for events such as a
“record parliament” debate (an idea first floated in the Star-Club News). He made
the same case for the 1966 International Folk and Beat Festival, which featured
musicians from twenty countries, organized in conjunction with the DAG
youth group and OK magazine. His lawyers argued that the festival contributed
to international understanding and conveyed a positive image of Hamburg to
foreign visitors. They also pointed to language in the tax code stating that any
virtuoso performance “regardless of musical style” could be considered culture.
The authorities, however, rejected this argument because patrons at these events
danced, and dancing was by definition “entertainment.” By this standard, pop
music events could never penetrate the canon of Kultur.30
Weissleder tried one more time with “Beat und Prosa.” This was not the first
event to combine literature and popular music. The Beatles had provided musical
accompaniment to poetry “happenings” while at art school in Liverpool. In 1964
an anti-nuclear event at Liverpool’s Cavern called “Bomb” featured Beat bands,
writers, and Pop artists. In West Germany, Joachim Berendt sought in the 1950s
to bring together jazz and poetry, an idea later realized in twen’s record series.
As recently as September 1966, Peter Rühmkorf and Michael Naura staged a
jazz-poetry event in a park near Hamburg City Hall.31 On October 2 Fichte, a
rising literary star from Hamburg read from his impressionistic novel about the
denizens of the Palette bar, with musical accompaniment by two Beat bands.
Television cameras captured the atmosphere in the packed house as Beat fans
shared their space with literati who had never set foot in a rock ‘n’ roll club. Icke
Braun, who moved in both worlds, called the evening “magnificent . . . it all fit
together beautifully.” Critics declared the event a literary sensation, a détente
in “the alleged schism between . . . the sub- and pop culture, which has its
own clothes, code, and customs, and . . . the serious, higher, dark-clothed ‘real’
culture.”32 Yet despite such positive, high-profile coverage, Weissleder’s request
that the event be classified a cultural performance fell on deaf ears at the tax office
(the bureau still headed by Kurt Falck).33 At a time when Pop Art, literature, and
Beat music itself were exploding the boundaries of what constituted “culture,”
Hamburg officials clung to a definition rooted in the imperial era. This latest
demoralizing defeat pushed Weissleder toward exiting the music business. The
rock and Beat music that was knitting young people together across the global
Sixties was on life support in its erstwhile mecca.
While culturally ambitious events crept onto the Star Club calendar, much
of its regular fare had not changed since 1962. On weeknights, house bands
still ruled the roost with rowdy sets that had more in common with traditional
forms of entertainment in St. Pauli than the “heavy” guitar gods rising in the
rock pantheon. While they still attracted their share of fans, box office figures
show that the ranks of those satisfied with this simpler beat were thinning. Club
veterans now in their twenties were moving on. The first generation of bands
that did not find major commercial success wearied of the grind and fell apart in
the mid-1960s. Kingsize Taylor hung up his spurs and went back to Liverpool,
where he prospered as a butcher. Gibson Kemp played in various groups in
both England and Germany before becoming an international A&R (artists and
repertoire) representative for Phonogram records in the 1970s. Tony Sheridan
left Hamburg in 1967 as his career (and his marriage) soured; he embarked
on a string of USO tours for American troops in Vietnam (with Fascher as his
manager), then resettled years later back in Hamburg. Some British musicians
stuck around but traded the club slog for steady work as session musicians.34
Some marriages were forged within the scene, such as Kirchherr and Kemp or
McGlory and Dostal. For women, marriage often limited their engagement with
music to the private sphere, though not always (McGlory, for example, became
active in music publishing while raising two children).35 Others dropped out
because they did not like the direction rock ‘n’ roll—increasingly referred to as
just “rock”—was taking.36 Fascher, who spent 1966 in jail for assault, was baffled
by acts like Jimi Hendrix and The Who, as was Weissleder. Meanwhile, younger
fans emerged who were more attuned to Bob Dylan than Gene Vincent. They
were less interested in dancing than attentive listening stimulated by marijuana,
not alcohol. Their tastes were reshaping the nightlife economy in St. Pauli.
St. Pauli in crisis—again
In 1965 the authorities breathed a momentary sigh of relief: the worst excesses
of the clip joints and gangsters seemed to have been tamed. The Hamburger
Abendblatt declared, “The Reeperbahn is no longer a street of fear.”37 Falck
soon won a promotion for his efforts. But where youth was concerned, the
authorities’ vigilance never abated and the expansion of rock music stoked a
new wave of anxiety by 1967. A piece published early in the year by the tabloid
BILD articulated the problem. “Schoolgirls dragged out of pub,” screamed the
headline, accompanied by an illustration of four girls wearing go-go boots and
book bags being served “another round” by a leering, mustachioed bartender.
Four 14-year-olds were apprehended at an establishment in west Hamburg; it
was also discovered they had been shoplifting on the orders of a 25-year-old
man. What makes the piece noteworthy is its linkage of vulnerable pubescent
females, the specter of pimping, and the teenage Beat hangouts “that in recent
months have sprung up all over Hamburg, even in solid bourgeois residential
areas.”38 It quoted Irma Keilhack, who restated the decade-old concerns of
welfare professionals about youths’ drift away from organizations and their
susceptibility to the dangers lurking in commercial establishments. A new
layer of concern was added by the recent appearance on West German streets
of unkempt young beatniks labeled Gammler. Gammler, a German variant of
the hippie, visibly rejected the dominant culture’s emphasis on cleanliness and
steady employment in favor of travel, free love, and drug use. Convinced that
a new crime wave was about to hit, police forces mobilized against these new
threats, becoming larger, more professionalized, and increasingly oriented
around data collection and preventative security.39 The confluence of Beat
music, youth, and drugs came to dominate discourse and police action going
forward.
As we saw in the previous chapter, illegal drugs were not originally the focus
of police surveillance of the music clubs. This changed after mid-decade. A 1966
article in Der Spiegel shined a spotlight on the circulation in “Germany’s Nepp
and nude paradise” of Preludin—legal by prescription as a diet pill but routinely
resold in the underground economy and abused as recreational speed.40 Pimps
called the pills “bombs,” and they were widely identified with the prostitute
milieu. This expose in the country’s most influential news magazine of what
Beat club visitors had known for some time pointed toward what historian
Rob Stephens identifies as a new chapter in German drug use. An existing
market in amphetamines converged with a new one for hashish transported by
wandering Gammler and, in separate circles, some guest workers. In 1964 to
1966 Hamburg was little more than a way station between larger drug scenes in
London, Copenhagen, and Stockholm; after 1967 it came into its own. Hamburg
police identified nineteen drug hubs, several of which were Beat music hangouts
in St. Pauli, including the Top Ten, Star Club, and the Mambo-Schänke. These
gathering places for youth incubated a drug scene around cannabinoids and later
LSD. By the time cheap heroin arrived around 1973, Hamburg’s drug trade had
coalesced around St. Pauli. The worlds of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll converged.41
The year 1967 was a milestone for St. Pauli in another respect: it saw the
grand opening of a new supermarket of prostitution, the Eros Center. This latest
attempt to discipline the youth-endangering milieu of the Kiez was a product
of the city’s ongoing push to contain unruly behavior by remaking physical
space. A year before, the drive for a more modern St. Pauli took concrete shape
with the building of a twenty-three story office tower at Reeperbahn 1 (once
the site of Ludwig’s Concerthaus, the Trichter, and Café Heinze). Commentators
hotly debated whether an office block could coexist with street prostitution
and St. Pauli became the object of yet another identity crisis for the city. Other
worrisome signs pointed to a winding down of the Economic Miracle. West
Germany entered a mild recession in 1966–67. Hamburg’s postwar population
growth peaked at just over 1.8 million in 1965; as central districts lost population
to the suburbs, downtown businesses stagnated and areas like St. Pauli became
poorer.42 Prostitution still generated millions of Deutschmarks in business—
more than shipping giant Blohm+Voss, by one estimate—but much of this
circulated outside the licit, taxable economy.43 Furthermore, worries about the
trade’s effects on youth and tourism persisted. The 1953 Law for the Prevention
of Venereal Disease had reaffirmed the decriminalization of prostitution under a
system of police registration and hygienic controls, but the majority of prostitutes
never officially registered. Police could arrest them for breach of the peace, public
indecency, vagrancy, or soliciting near schools or buildings housing children
under eighteen. Pimping or running a brothel remained illegal, but renting
rooms to prostitutes was not.44 In the early 1960s, with the rise of the “call girl,”
the growth of automobile-based solicitation on streets south of the Reeperbahn,
and the loss of traditional prostitution sites in Neustadt to gentrification, police
estimated the number of unregistered prostitutes in St. Pauli to be at least 1,500.
Federal courts used the yardstick of “community standards” to determine when
localities could curtail prostitution. In St. Pauli, community tolerance ended at
the point where other businesses began to suffer; residents’ concerns about its
effects on children also played some role. In the context of the larger campaigns
against violence, rip-offs, and the “menace” of transvestites and hustlers,
discussion intensified about how to tame streetwalkers and modernize St. Pauli
to protect tourism and real estate values. In 1964 the Hamburg Senate approved
construction of a dormitory to get prostitutes off the street.
Bartels, now head of the St. Pauli Bürgerverein and a close ally of Falck, freed
up land for this project by tearing down a row of his Grosse Freiheit properties:
the Jungmühle, Hippodrome, and Bikini, whose camel rides and lady mud
wrestlers no longer matched current tastes.45 Female politicians from the SPD
urged Bartels to build an “elegant” facility where prostitutes (overwhelmingly
women, though a few men would be permitted to use it) could work in a safe,
independent fashion—a shift in the discourse on prostitution from punishment
to professionalization and mitigating exploitation. Falck himself expressed
support for Bartels’ “sex palace.”46 The new complex would contain 260 “work
spaces,” a parking garage, an inner courtyard for initiating contacts, and a panic
button in each room. A medical clinic and hair salon served sex workers’ needs
on site (they were required to get physical checkups weekly). Prostitutes in turn
paid rent and housekeeping fees. Starting in 1969 they would also be required
to pay taxes, though doctors were not allowed to report their clients’ names to
tax officials or the police. The facility was so modern its name—“Eros Center”—
was trademarked. Hamburg’s tradition of a pragmatic approach to prostitution
reworked itself again: no one, including socialists or liberal feminists, argued for
prostitution’s eradication but rather its regulation and modernization with the
aim of benefiting both prostitutes and city coffers, not criminal gangs.47
The Eros Center opened to great fanfare in September 1967 (a similar venture,
the Palais d’Amour, opened the following year next to the Top Ten). But what
started with the intention to elevate the prostitute milieu became a spectacular
failure. Visitors found it sterile; one writer dubbed it a “lust barracks” (Lust-
kaserne). Eros Center workers became more vulnerable to exploitation because
Bartels rented blocks of the flats to “landlords,” who then sublet the apartments
to prostitutes, becoming de facto pimps in the process. Pimps could only be
prosecuted if a prostitute was willing to press charges—an unlikely scenario
under this inequitable power arrangement. This lent the Eros a desperate, even
fearful air. Newly empowered pimps began a series of turf wars that would rock
St. Pauli into the 1970s and 1980s. This had the effect of driving bourgeois johns
to more refined bordellos in other neighborhoods while St. Pauli’s reputation
became ever sleazier. The devastating effect of AIDS on the sex industry, as well
as the widespread availability of pornographic videos for home consumption,
sealed the end of the Eros Center experiment in 1988.48
The Eros Center opened just in time for the so-called sexual revolution. How
would St. Pauli fare in an era marked by the saturation of the visual landscape with
images of naked women, widespread adoption of the Pill, and the demolition of
what Dagmar Herzog calls the “post-fascist culture of sexual conservatism”?49
St. Pauli didn’t need the sexual revolution to bring sex into the open. Already
in 1964, strippers at the Moonlight bar revealed their pubic area for tips and
Figure 6.1 Palais d’Amour and the Top Ten club on the Reeperbahn, early 1970s.
Courtesy of Jens Wunderlich, Hamburg Bildarchiv.
the first simulated coitus onstage also occurred that year at the Haiha Safari
Club.50 But these were short-lived affairs, running to stay one step ahead of the
vice squad. The collapse of censorship really only came after Denmark legalized
porn in 1967, which brought a flood of explicit publications across the border.
This realignment of sexual center and periphery was bound to change the sexual
entertainment economy in St. Pauli. The peek-a-boo fetishism of striptease
did not correspond to the new “natural” nude aesthetic (to which the Salambo
would respond with elaborate, hippie-themed sex shows). Bartels summed up
the business community’s fear that St. Pauli would become irrelevant: “Why
pay for something you can get for free?”51 But rather than decreasing demand
for sexual amusement, the sexual revolution multiplied it. Porn shops shot up
like mushrooms along the Reeperbahn and its side streets. Sex was repackaged
with St. Pauli’s style becoming like a brand. Miniskirts and see-through blouses
became standard on the strip, whereas just in 1967 prostitutes could be arrested
for wearing them. In 1968 Grosse Freiheit cabarets Colibri, Tabu (where
Weissleder got his start), and Salambo began offering shows featuring live sex
acts or women engaging in coitus with objects.52 The number of prostitutes also
multiplied. A men’s guide from 1970 provided detailed maps of the trade in St.
Pauli and St. Georg, with tips on where to find “specialty” interests such as black
women, dominatrixes, or “schoolgirls.”53
Meanwhile, life in St. Pauli outside the sex industry felt increasingly
constricted. In September 1969 local parents organized a strike to demand
their children’s right to walk to school without having to witness prostitute
activity. (In response, in 1970 the federal government allowed Hamburg to
establish a zone restricting prostitution to Herbertstrasse and adjoining blocks
around Hans-Albers-Platz.) The district’s visual aspect suffered as several
old structures were torn down to make way for increased car traffic.54 Older
observers pined nostalgically for the human warmth they once found in
barfly haunts and the disappearing sailor bars.55 Meanwhile, St. Pauli’s cheap
rents attracted Turkish guest workers and their newly arrived families, who
established their own vibrant infrastructure of businesses and markets north of
the Reeperbahn. Police noted rising incidents of establishments refusing service
to Gastarbeiter in other parts of the city, but not generally St. Pauli.56 However,
whereas nightlife guides from earlier eras touted St. Pauli’s “exotic” faces as a
desirable part of the tourist experience, that faded under the casual racism that
now linked the growing foreign-born population with “ghettos,” urban decline,
and competition for jobs, particularly after the economic collapse of 1973.57 St.
Pauli became once again synonymous with crime and “low life.” A 1971 survey
commissioned by the city found that while nearly 30 percent of West German
respondents associated St. Pauli with “discotheques” and “jazz” (likely meaning
popular music generally), 70 percent identified it with rip-offs and smut—a
good place to “have fun,” but no place to take a respectable wife or girlfriend.58
The growing drug problem exacerbated the city’s fears that St. Pauli was losing
its luster as a destination. The presence of dealers at discos like the Top Ten or
Grünspan, the arrival of heroin, and violence between rival pimps solidified a
narrative of St. Pauli as a dangerous “foreign” enclave going in the 1970s.59 The
district’s image as Hamburg’s “wild west” returned with a vengeance. A majority
of tourists to St. Pauli were now men traveling alone, looking for down-market
sexual adventures.60 Beat music’s run as a key attraction, on the other hand, was
nearing its end.
The Beat moves on
In the last third of the 1960s the music scene was no longer the preserve of
a small clutch of smoky venues in St. Pauli frequented by the most passionate
fans. Just as the Top Ten and Star Club once built on the Kaiserkeller’s success,
new clubs across the city and the country built on the public’s desire for rock
music and dancing. A city guide for young people entitled Hamburg von 7
bis 7 mapped out this new terrain. Written from the perspective of an educated
middle-class male, its 1966 edition shows how central music had become to
youth tourism. It presents the Top Ten and Star Club—“the most famous Beat
shack not just in St. Pauli, not just in Hamburg, but the Federal Republic”—
as must-see destinations.61 But it also reveals the existence of dozens of other
clubs with live music or jukeboxes in the university quarter, around the Alster
lake, and in working-class districts like Barmbek.62 Entries indicate whether
an establishment catered to a gay clientele or was safe for women to visit on
their own; they also rated sex-themed shows according to their creativity and
refinement. The guide reveals how young tastes and lifestyles were differentiating
themselves more and more, just as rock itself was spinning off subgenres like folk
rock. Young men and women, it declared, were increasingly sophisticated and
discerning consumers of experiences: “Nowadays one is a nomad and changes
grazing spots when their ‘appeal’ no longer holds.”63 These consumers demanded
a bit of grit and authenticity, but were ultimately grateful for the law and order
measures of Falck (who is mentioned by name). As a snapshot of St. Pauli on the
eve of the sexual revolution, Hamburg von 7 bis 7 depicts a moment when Beat
music, sexual spectacle (consumed by discriminating young people of legal age),
and the forces of order appeared to coexist harmoniously. That was all about to
change.
The sexual revolution reshaped the music landscape in St. Pauli, as revealed
by another publication. The St. Pauli Nachrichten was founded in April 1968
by Günter Zint and Helmut Rosenberg, a local hippie and dealer in curiosities.
Aimed at young men who identified with the counterculture, it mixed left-
wing politics, culture, and erotica. It became a huge success particularly for its
pages of personal ads, which spanned a broad spectrum of straight and queer
proclivities (court battles over obscenity and the promotion of illegal acts
would heighten the paper’s notoriety). Early issues illuminate how St. Pauli’s
entertainment landscape changed in the new era of sexual openness. Images
of bare-breasted women were now de rigueur in nightlife promotion. Music
remained a mainstay (the Nachrichten had a regular column on rock and Beat)
but sex was now used to promote the scene, whereas Weissleder and his peers
had always kept them separate in official promotion. For example, an ad for a
club called the Blue Note promised “jazz a gogo—from New Orleans to Swing”
with the “shortest mini skirts.” A neighborhood map from the July 1968 issue
detailing sites of interest to readers (movie theaters, strip clubs, bowling alleys,
billiard halls, the police station, the Salvation Army) listed music clubs under
the heading “mini-girl dancing.” That list included the Top Ten and Star Club,
as well as new discotheques like Stahlnetz, Bird-Land (in the old Lido at Grosse
Freiheit 36), and, inexplicably, the tiny tavern Gretel & Alfons.64 Clearly, females
could enjoy themselves at these clubs, but the phrase “mini-girl dancing” frames
them as objects to be looked at, a shift in tone from the more open-ended
possibilities of female participation Beat once offered. This paralleled rock ‘n’
roll’s evolution into “rock,” which promoted the masculine guitar virtuoso over
the unpolished, sometimes female, amateur.65 The self-identified ’68ers of the
St. Pauli Nachrichten used rock to rework—and reaffirm—male mastery at the
intersection of the sexual revolution and youth culture.
The ’68ers claimed to have pioneered a “radical new start” in sex and gender
relations, with rock music a key transmitter of their desire for liberation.66 But
from the perspective of St. Pauli and the Hamburg music scene, 1968 was as
much the culmination of trends already underway as the start of something new.
Music clubs had brought together people and things that were formerly isolated,
generating what Baumann called a “great momentum” in the mid-1960s.67
Moments of bodily liberation in the Beat clubs helped break down the repressive
vibe that hung over sex before the sexual revolution. Even as this privileged
heterosexual men, female desire and queer sexualities also found expression in
an atmosphere that promoted tolerance. Hostile adult reactions to androgynous
Beat styles on young men evoked the specter of Nazism, which the ’68ers would
demand a full accounting of from their elders. As Richard Langston argues,
rock enabled the possibility of being “Germanless,” its “destructive character”
providing the “cathartic closure to the Third Reich so long forestalled by other
escapist forms of popular culture.”68 St. Pauli was an important incubator of the
“global sensitivity” that replaced the “isolation” of being bound to a particular
nation that marked late 1960s youth culture.69
Those who had done much to launch that culture were increasingly discon
nected from it. Bruno Koschmider (whose role had been strictly entrepreneurial)
left St. Pauli for Eimsbüttel after the Kaiserkeller went bust. There he ran the
Kaisersaal, a dance hall beloved among youths in west Hamburg. (Koschmider
would return to St. Pauli in the 1970s, becoming involved in erotic theaters as well
as the restoration of several historic movie palaces on the Spielbudenplatz.70) The
Hit Club trundled on at the far end of the Grosse Freiheit, but ran out of juice by
1968. Peter Eckhorn continued to run the Top Ten, whose Reeperbahn location
and large dance floor helped it maintain a steady popularity.71 While it continued
to book bands, it increasingly evolved into a discotheque.72 Discotheques became
the preferred method of nightlife consumption for many young people, as
illustrated by the rise of St. Pauli’s hottest new destination, Grünspan. Grünspan
came to life at Grosse Freiheit 58 in a structure built in 1889 as a “dance salon.”
In 1919, it was a movie theater, with other parts of the building serving as a
public bathhouse and one of St. Pauli’s many hippodromes. It survived the
Second World War to become the Ahoi Kino, but like the Star Club transitioned
to rock ‘n’ roll when cinemas became unprofitable. From 1963 to 1968 it was the
Hit Club, perpetually struggling to compete with the better-known Beat clubs
down the street. In 1968, however, the tables were turned. Grünspan opened
on August 9 as a discotheque and proceeded to siphon trade away from the Star
Club. A cultural shift was announced by its facade, a trippy mural by Dieter
Glasmacher and Werner Nöfer reflecting youth culture’s colorful new palette,
leaving behind early Beat’s sharp monochrome aesthetic. Crowds flocked to
Grünspan’s light shows synchronized to records by bands like early Pink Floyd
or Tangerine Dream. Its location away from the Reeperbahn facilitated trade in
the drugs that enhanced the psychedelic experience.73 Grünspan also hosted live
acts and helped nurture one of rock’s next waves in Germany: the experimental
German-language sound that came to be known as Krautrock.74
The Star Club tried to move with the changing times. Weissleder realized in
1967 that he was not the person to do it, however. The endless legal battles had
worn him out. The flats where he used to billet his bands had been torn down to
make way for the Eros Center. His experience with Hendrix seems to have been
the last straw. Keenly aware that big acts were now passing the Star Club by,
Weissleder had gladly hired the rising guitar whiz.75 He booked the Jimi Hendrix
Experience without first hearing them on the advice of Henri Henroid, a talent
agent with whom he had a long relationship. But the ear-splitting feedback
and guitar acrobatics that most in the audience found “amazing” (among them
McGlory) left Weissleder confused and angry.76 How could anyone dance to this
music? Was this some kind of joke? The club no longer felt like family—it was
time to get out. Weissleder sublet the venue to Hans Bunkenberg, who had run it
before when Weissleder lost his license. Whereas Weissleder had always striven
to be innovative, Bunkenberg jumped on the bandwagon of deejays and go-go
Figure 6.2 Exterior of Grünspan, Grosse Freiheit 58, late 1960s. Courtesy of Jens
Wunderlich, Hamburg Bildarchiv.
girls.77 The club also continued to book live rock and soul acts, including The
Creation and Ben E. King, but the days when young bands would give anything
to play there had faded.
Still, there remained fans unwilling to let the dream die.78 In February 1969
a trio of musician-fans took over from Bunkenberg and tried to restore the Star
Club’s luster. Achim Reichel and Frank Dostal, whose lucrative careers began
on that stage, ponied up the rent and booked the bands, while Kuno Dreysse
(of the Rivets) did everything from spin records to clean toilets. Through
their connections in the rock world they were able to attract some of the new
“progressive” bands like the Nice and Yes. Some British managers still viewed
the Star Club as a worthy proving ground for their acts. Don Arden sent over
Black Sabbath (then known as Earth), who played a four-night residency to
packed houses. Fans were still willing to turn up for popular acts and others
who were too young to have experienced the scene’s peak years still came to
soak up the atmosphere.79 But the reliable, everyday trade that had sustained
the club for so long was now seeking its bliss elsewhere. Some bands, such as
Free, didn’t respect the club enough to honor their contracts when a better offer
came along (as Dreysse put it, “the club was just so ‘out.’”).80 As the year went on,
the bills piled up. No one could afford to fix the heater, which hadn’t mattered
when the club was full of warm bodies; now the cold made it feel even emptier.
Overwhelmed by the financial burden the club had become, the inexperienced
young owners pulled the plug. Reichel and Dostal announced that the Star Club’s
last show would be on New Year’s Eve, 1969.81
Progressive rock duo Hardin & York, who had a strong German following,
were chosen as the final act (both Eddie Hardin and Pete York had played the
Star Club years earlier as members of the Spencer Davis Group). By all accounts,
the evening felt like a funeral.82 Hardin & York improvised a thirty-minute-long
requiem around the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and “Lady Madonna”—the
group whose music rang in the club’s first night rang out its last. This final mass
for the faithful did not even last until the club’s usual closing time of 6:00 a.m.:
time ran out at midnight. The last day of the 1960s was the last day of the Star
Club, its mission to free audiences from German “village music” with a blast of
rock ‘n’ roll fulfilled. It and the scene it came to embody now passed into the
domain of memory and legend, done in not by Falck or the Youth Protection
Squads but the cruel realities of St. Pauli’s entertainment economy.
166
Epilogue
On a cool Sunday evening in October 1986, thousands of fans wended their way
through the Grosse Freiheit on a pilgrimage to the Star Club. Their destination,
however, was a burned-out shell. Three years earlier a fire of mysterious origin
tore through Grosse Freiheit 39, which since 1970 had housed the Salambo
nightclub and its live sex shows. Now, a long train of mourners came to pay their
last respects before the gutted structure was demolished for good.1 I stumbled
across that procession by chance, having just arrived in Hamburg for the first
time as an exchange student. As an American who had grown up with the
Beatles (they broke up when I was five), I knew the venue’s name from rock
magazines and the bootleg recordings released in 1977 as The Beatles Live! At
the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany 1962. But I was unprepared for the size and
intensity of the crowd that day. One fan cried out, “They can’t tear down the Star
Club—the Star Club is us!”2 Part of this outpouring of emotion I put down to
Baby Boomer nostalgia, but the presence of others who were either too old or
too young to have been part of the original scene suggested something bigger.
Meeting people over time in Hamburg—including many my own age—who
passionately collected Beat records, artifacts, and fashions taught me about how
music creates community across social boundaries. Germans didn’t take this
music for granted. Why were they so invested in this cultural import? Was this
unique to Hamburg? What did rock ‘n’ roll even mean in the German context?
Those questions motivated me to write this book.
Hamburg’s role in the Beatles’ story secured its place among rock ‘n’ roll’s
legendary cities. The closure and demolition of the Star Club preserved it in
amber. It has become the stuff of nostalgia and myth.3 Memories of those who
actually moved through the scene have been gathered in books and exhibitions,
shared at reunion concerts, and relayed to visitors over a pint at Kemp’s Hamburg
pub. This book has been an attempt to situate those stories in their historical
context, using them to explore a different Germany than the one we usually read
about. This Germany was not terribly “German”: its music was Anglo-American,
played in a licentious outpost in Germany’s most liberal city where people from
“all over” passed through. It was built around amusement and the pleasures of
the body, not duty or discipline. It captivated the imaginations of young men and
women from across the country and the continent who trained or hitchhiked or
ran away from home just to experience it (or fantasized about doing so). At the
same time, it was as German as the Black Forest or Berlin. St. Pauli was a place of
work as much as a place of fun. It filled an important function as the national id.
Its entertainment offerings were as modern as those in London or Berlin but at
the same time were infused with local inflections and traditions. In the 1960s its
music scene gave many Germans a sense of pride in their country’s contribution
to the global phenomenon of Beatlemania.
This book put music at its center, exploring its social history and role in
people’s lives at a particular time and place. Popular music became part of
daily life to an unprecedented degree in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s,
particularly for boys and girls born during or just after the war. When they played
it at home or went out to see it performed, their main agenda was to experience
its physical and emotional pleasures. Whether or not they were aware of it, they
also used music to create identities and interpret the world. Music gave them
a way to communicate, make friends, and challenge adult rules. Some people
compartmentalized music within their lives; others made it the focus, even a
career. The material conditions of postwar recovery and the Economic Miracle
made these engagements with music possible. Youngsters with their own rooms
could play their own radios and instruments. Nonconformists found in rock
‘n’ roll sensations of difference and a respite from what sources depict as both
the boredom and the burden of being German. This rarely articulated itself as
a confrontation with the Nazi past, but that history hung over the early 1960s,
part of youth’s bundle of grievances against their elders. Determined to do things
differently, young Germans who embraced rock and Beat found new ways of
moving, talking, and dressing. Cultural products from the United States provided
raw material for their experiments, but contributions from Britain became
almost as important, particularly in Hamburg. American rock ‘n’ roll interpreted
by British musicians in St. Pauli offered young Germans foreign impulses that
expanded their perspective, whether or not it changed their worldview. What
began among a small clutch of musicians and fans in Hamburg later reverberated
across the globe. If music had once “made” the German nation, in the 1960s it
made Germans part of a transnational youth culture.
This book has also been informed by questions about how we organize the
story of German history. When people’s engagement with music is the focus,
certain frames emerge while others recede. The Cold War, for example, makes few
Epilogue 169
appearances in this story (the Star-Club News’ outreach to East Germans being
one) and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 hardly registers.4 The year 1964,
on the other hand, becomes a major turning point because of Beatlemania’s effects
on music’s circulation and availability. This book has also charted some of the
prehistory of 1968, that “moment of completion” when youth-defined pop culture
unquestioningly became the base culture of mass democracy.5 The Hamburg scene
previewed emerging ideas about the rights of youth, national identity, sex, and the
body.6 But 1959 through 1966 was also dynamic in its own right, especially in
the realm of daily life. That period’s dominant discourses and domestic policies
emphasized hard work and a return to respectability for the disgraced nation.
“Normalcy” after war and Nazism meant restoration of the nuclear family and
traditional gender roles. But the Economic Miracle also revved up a consumer
culture that encouraged a certain amount of hedonism for steadily employed
workers within the parameters of guaranteed leisure time. Their basic material
needs largely satisfied, adults could indulge during their time off in little luxuries,
from glossy magazines to Italian food to modest holidays. They managed their
stress and drowned the past in alcohol and entertainment, including the kind of
sexual entertainment that made St. Pauli such a popular destination in the 1950s.
Their children also consumed popular culture, which was increasingly
marketed directly to them. Teens and “twens” used it for fun, but it also became a
vehicle for emotions they were otherwise discouraged from expressing. Through
the things they chose and the ways they moved, young women and men subtly—
and sometimes loudly—bucked the culture of restraint, testing out modes of life
that felt looser and more honest. The Hamburg scene catered to those desires with
spaces free from the gaze of moralizing adults (at least when the Jugendschutztrupps
were not around). The scene took impulses already in the air and intensified them.
It elevated the limited licentiousness permitted by consumer capitalism into a way
of life, modeled by sexy young performers and their most devoted fans. It offered
contact with the desirable other and moments of freedom in a world governed by
rules and constraints.7 It promoted the trend away from a dominant culture rooted
in German national traditions toward an orientation to the West (unintentionally
complementing West German foreign policy during the Cold War). Those who
protested the Star Club’s 1964 closure or defended youth culture against its critics
were expanding the boundaries of everyday democracy by exercising their right
to speak and assemble as they chose.8
The Star Club, Top Ten, Kaiserkeller, and other sites of the Hamburg scene
were not the only places in West Germany to consume rock and Beat between
1958 and 1964, but they became the most significant—and not just because they
had the best publicity. The Hamburg scene not only cultivated rock ‘n’ roll at a
time when it had been driven out of the mainstream, it added new aesthetic,
stylistic, and social elements to it. It helped rock ‘n’ roll evolve from its proletarian
niche into a cross-class, transnational phenomenon, feeding off the energy of its
location in a cosmopolitan port district. There sex workers, seamen, and tourists
crossed paths with adventurous working-class kids, students, and artists who
found something more there than just escapism. Visitors like Voormann and
Kirchherr saw something authentic in these gritty commercial establishments
with their English kids “incompetent[ly] copying good American music.”9
As Kirchherr’s friend Ulrich Krause put it, “We knew right away this was . . .
something real . . . this is going to go somewhere.”10 Rock ‘n’ roll became a font
of the ambitious forms of art, writing, fashion, and living that splashed across
the 1960s and beyond, an explosion of creativity Jon Savage has called Pop
Modernism.11 This may not have pleased those for whom rock ‘n’ roll’s early
sound and style were already perfect, but it did enable the music to evolve and
spread. As it became transmitted after 1963 through mass media to those who
could not physically participate in the scene, it became a lifeline to girls and boys
who otherwise felt isolated.
The Hamburg scene reflected not only the era’s changes but also the limits
of change. What can appear in retrospect as a linear progression toward
emancipation was in fact a messy, uneven process in which liberalizing impulses
advanced in some areas but not others. This can be seen most starkly with regard
to sex and gender. Girls might have had more freedom to dress up and spend
their own money, but they were still expected to be guardians of respectability,
even if they were no longer lauded as future “mothers of the nation.”12 The
authorities policed their sexuality in light of intense anxieties about prostitution,
homosexuality, and “degeneracy.” While young women’s voices are not always
easy to find in the sources, their persistent presence in the “youth-endangering”
milieu of St. Pauli testifies to their attraction to the pleasures offered there.
They were availing themselves of the same mobility as their male peers and
the adult men to whom St. Pauli was marketed. Yet if the Beat scene offered
women and girls new avenues of musical and sexual expression, it was still
sexist and excluded them from full membership, especially as rock grew more
“serious.” Most women and girls themselves continued to desire monogamous
relationships and marriage, as reflected in the distinctions they made between
respectable girlfriends and slutty groupies.
This raises the question of whether the Hamburg scene represented a challenge
to the existing order or was merely the illusion of choice. After all, the scene
Epilogue 171
emerged out of capitalist relations that had long accepted that workers needed
leisure time to blow off steam. Weissleder, Eckhorn, and other entrepreneurs
may have facilitated something culturally significant, but they were also in
business to make money. Weissleder understood particularly well the “skeptical
generation” that were his customers; they liked goods and experiences that
felt authentic (so did he), so that’s what he sold them. He had no desire to toil
underground and fought to build a profitable, internationally recognized brand.
Successful musicians, for their part, converted the subcultural capital they
earned in St. Pauli into economic capital. Fans (particularly those old enough
to remember the lean 1940s) enjoyed the plentiful jobs and material security
that allowed them to buy records and go clubbing. They did not challenge
the economic system that enabled the scene’s very existence. Likewise, social
inequalities did not disappear just because participants indulged in fantasies of
classlessness or African-Americanophilia.
At the same time, the scene should not be dismissed merely as a new
conformism dressed in cool clothes. It does not fit the cliché of a calculating
culture industry manipulating an undiscriminating audience. Just because it
served the economic interests of producers doesn’t mean it didn’t also serve
the cultural interests of consumers.13 Weissleder in particular treated fans as
collaborators, working to elevate what was still considered a low cultural form.
The Hamburg scene generated its own modes of knowledge and values. Fans
engaged with music for their own reasons and with varying degrees of intensity.
While they did not set out to use music to solve social problems, the things they
did with music served to loosen the grip of sexual and emotional repression,
even the Nazi past. They eschewed bourgeois notions of leisure as a vehicle for
self-improvement. For fans, music felt like the difference between life and death
in a land of airless conformity and monumental psychic repression. Engaging
with the racial, sexual, or national other through music opened up possibilities of
seeing differently, questioning bigotry, and imagining other ways of organizing
life. It promoted tolerance as a social good in a country still in the early stages of
confronting its prejudices. This rarely articulated itself as organized opposition
or protest, thus it was not political in the conventional sense. However, youths’
engagement with pop culture served to advance processes of democratization
and liberalization in West German life, with “process” being the operative word
here—evolving, incomplete, and ongoing.
While the scene articulated no political agenda, meanings ascribed to it from
the outside had political implications. Viewing youth as a group inherently
in need of protection and adult guidance, the police and welfare authorities
saw youth’s healthy development—and by extension the health of German

democracy—as threatened by sites of commercial entertainment. These fears
focused in on St. Pauli, which is why place, as well as time, is an indispensible
lens for thinking about the Hamburg music scene. The authorities had worried
for decades about youths in St. Pauli, but those concerns shifted shape during
the new, more intense phase of modernity that set in after 1960. The explosion
of mass media, consumerism, mobility, and pop culture weakened older forms
of belonging rooted in political party or class, even as they offered new ways
for people to connect. This had political implications. In St. Pauli, the struggle
between youths demanding the right to their own leisure spaces and authorities
seeking to regulate them dramatized changing ideas of what constituted a well-
ordered society, the proper role of the police, the boundaries of censorship, and
tensions between commerce and sexual morality. Young people constructed
their own vision of all these things, embracing the possibilities for individual
and group identity music made available. Police and the state, for their part,
pushed back in some areas but eased up in others (as in the 1964 battle over the
Star Club), while never abandoning their ongoing project to “clean up” St. Pauli.
These battles over youth, space, and policing were also part of West Germany’s
uneven processes of liberalization.
Ultimately, pop culture is not by definition repressive or emancipatory—it can
be both or neither, depending on the context. To understand what culture does
at specific moments we must consider where it does it.14 That is why this book
has drilled down deep into the history of specific places in St. Pauli. Centering
the story on music has exposed spaces and social relations often overlooked
in German history.15 Entertainment spaces weren’t merely empty containers:
they helped mold what went on inside as people came together to work and
play. They reflected the vicissitudes of national life in peace and wartime. If
consumer culture had the power to legitimize political regimes, the same was
true of entertainment. But St. Pauli also served as a place to evade those forces
and live as if there was no tomorrow. As a red-light district, it opened up new
possibilities of sexual selfhood for females and males, straight and queer.16 Beat
music created another sub-world within what was already on the fringe. Fans
and musicians created alternative urban geographies, oriented around places to
experience music and all that went with it. This book’s attention to space has
also aimed to reveal the material realities of music’s production, which cannot
and should not be separated from its cultural effects.17 Rock ‘n’ roll came to St.
Pauli when a varied lot of entrepreneurs transformed spaces in transition—
failing movie theaters, old hippodromes, new postwar construction—into new
Epilogue 173
ventures they hoped would stand out from the competition. They provided work
for bartenders, waiters, cleaners, technicians, and musicians who could make
good money doing something they loved.
Charting the evolution of particular spaces also brings us back to the issue of
periodization. The history of specific addresses situates rock ‘n’ roll—something
new—in the long continuity of experimentation on the field of mass culture,
a story with echoes in Liverpool, New York, and other modern cities. In
Hamburg, a city always rushing forward to escape the past, that continuity of
uses is striking. A sophisticated infrastructure for selling popular entertainment
developed steadily since the nineteenth century, building on traditions of
“amusement” in St. Pauli that were already centuries old. The persistence of
sites of entertainment at the same addresses in the Reeperbahn or the Grosse
Freiheit from the Bismarck era through the Third Reich shows how notions of
entertainment as a basic need and right became anchored in German society.
While the Nazi era had distinct and cruel forms of repression for those that
violated its racial precepts, much of the business of entertainment continued on
across the dividing line of 1933. The bombings of 1943 through the war’s end
constituted a more significant disruption, though customers’ desire—indeed
need—for distraction persisted and intensified through the postwar hunger
years. For St. Pauli, the 1950s became the golden era in which the public came
in droves for dancing, drink, and striptease. The goal of maintaining a saucy but
safe tourist product for consenting adults united business and political leaders
across party lines. But they could not control public taste. The year 1960 appears
as a tipping point when the traditional entertainment regime of animal shows
and ballroom dancing faded for good, as symbolized by the transformation of
Eckhorn’s hippodrome into the Top Ten.
The histories of Reeperbahn 136, Grosse Freiheit 36, and other addresses have
also revealed growing audience desires for novelty and exoticism. Customers
wanted hot jazz or rock ‘n’ roll for dancing and sexual stimulation—appetites
that could not be met strictly out of Germany’s own national production.
Curiosity about the “foreign” and the blurring of borders have always been
intrinsic to mass culture; without American content in particular, modern mass
culture is hard to imagine. Exploring one locale’s engagement with it allows us
to write the transnational through the local. It illuminates larger processes of
cultural circulation and specific aspects of Germans’ ongoing engagement with
African-American culture in particular. Places like the Kaiserkeller or Cap Norte
catered to that subset of young people dissatisfied with Germany’s prevailing
pop culture. The African-American musics offered there conjured up a sexually
charged exoticism that fit both into St. Pauli’s long history of racialized display
and the modern entertainment landscape. They also offered licensed deviancy
from the norm, which, when adults indulged in it, was just “good business” in St.
Pauli. Young people claiming their right to these freedoms, however, set the stage
for confrontations with the authorities. That these processes occurred within
commercial spaces does not make the culture generated there less authentic.
Indeed, these spaces participated in the organic development of mass culture.
Looking at the material realities of these processes shows some of the workings
of how desires for difference and variety became normalized in a country that
had once viciously pursued an agenda of racial homogeneity.
The emergence of the Hamburg scene was unplanned, and the same cycles
of shifting tastes and social change that brought it to life also brought about
its end. It’s not that a “pure” subculture was corrupted by commercialization—
Beat was always inherently a commercial product (and no less genuine for
being so).18 It’s that it became less unique, less necessary in a world that had
caught up to it by the late 1960s. Beat music had built a community, which
in turn grew up and moved their engagement with music into other, usually
domestic spaces more compatible with the changing conditions of their lives.
St. Pauli also changed: still synonymous with entertainment, that entertainment
became more and more focused on sex, as symbolized by the transformation of
the Star Club into the Salambo. Rock’s vital impulses moved elsewhere—not just
to Grünspan but other districts and other cities. Rock’s center of gravity in 1970s
Hamburg was Eppendorf, where Onkel Pös Carnegie Hall nurtured homegrown
talents such as Udo Lindenberg.19 A new cohort of singer-songwriters, post-
psychedelic Krautrock groups, and politically minded rockers like Ton Steine
Scherben rebelled against the hegemony of English by singing in their mother
tongue. They re-invented rock in ways that made sense of their world, just as
their predecessors had done. This new authenticity had the effect, however, of
limiting their appeal outside the German-speaking lands.
Music never stopped shaping St. Pauli’s identity, however. While Fascher’s
“New Star Club” in Neustadt flopped in 1978, in 1985 a former schoolteacher
named Karl-Hermann Günther opened a venue called Grosse Freiheit 36,
reviving that storied address as a destination for live rock ‘n’ roll.20 The squatted
houses in the Hafenstrasse by the harbor made St. Pauli an important center of
German punk. A rejuvenation of the Reeperbahn began in the late 1980s with
a Broadway-quality production of Cats at the Operettenhaus aimed at bringing
“respectable” audiences back to the Spielbudenplatz. More significant, and
perhaps more in tune with St. Pauli’s history, was the 1988 opening of Schmidt’s
Epilogue 175
Tivoli, a velvet lounge whose mix of Weimar-style cabaret and transvestite

camp became one of the Reeperbahn’s hottest tickets (its shows were eventually
broadcast on German television). Co-founder Corny Littmann, a veteran of gay
rights struggles after 1968, became one of St. Pauli’s most beloved and influential
figures. He now promotes a twenty-first-century St. Pauli that’s both gritty and
high tech, a multicultural mecca of youthful nightlife and gay culture.21 Music
production (now Techno) and the avowedly anti-fascist football team FC
St. Pauli contribute to the district’s renewed vitality and the city’s reputation for
creativity and tolerance, though moments of aggressive policing (most recently
at the G20 riots in 2017) keep that reputation a perennial topic of debate.
It’s a story as old as St. Pauli itself: impulses from the fringe have come to
define the center. Nearly fifty years after the Beatles’ first arrival, the city of
Hamburg has finally recognized them: the intersection of Grosse Freiheit and
the Reeperbahn is now officially “Beatles-Platz,” complete with a set of life-size
sculptures that render the band in silhouette form. Now fans, ranging in age
from eight to eighty, flock there to pose for selfies and walk the same path as
those early Beat fans so many nights ago.
176
Notes
Introduction
1 Drummer Jim Capaldi (most famously of the group Traffic but also a member of
The Hellions, who played the Star Club in 1964) used that phrase in Ulf Krüger
and Ortwin Pelc, The Hamburg Sound: Beatles, Beat und Große Freiheit (Hamburg:
Ellert & Richter, 2006), 21. It is also conjured up by the subtitle of Alan Clayson’s
Hamburg—The Cradle of British Rock (London: Sanctuary, 1998). Star Club owner
Manfred Weissleder advertised his venue in 1964 as the “cradle of The Beatles.”
2 British promoters began using the phrase “Big Beat” around 1960 to distinguish
the evolving rock style from skiffle. Skiffle relied on acoustic instruments like the
banjo and washtub bass for rhythm, while post-skiffle bands brought back the drum
kit and electric bass—hence Big Beat or just Beat; Dave Haslam, Life After Dark: A
History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues (London: Simon & Shuster, 2015),
105. In Britain “Beat” could also denote rhythm and blues played by white artists;
Keith Gildart, Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth, and Rock
and Roll 1955-76 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), 58. German writers still
used the terms “rock‘n’roll” and “jazz” interchangeably in 1960. In 1961–63 “Twist”
became their preferred term while “Beat” circulated within the music scene. The
Beatles’ success cemented “Beat” as the German nomenclature for rock music after
1963. See Norbert Schneider, Popmusik: Eine Bestimmung anhand bundesdeutscher
Presseberichte von 1960 bis 1968 (Freiburg: Emil Katzbichler, 1978), 51–53.
3 The best of these include the 2006 Hamburg Museum exhibition catalog by Krüger
and Pelc, Hamburg Sound; the compilation discs Beat in Germany: Die Hamburg
Szene and Smash . . .! Boom . . .! Bang . . .! Beat in Germany. The 60s Anthology, both
on Bear Family records; and the oral history by Thomas Rehwagen and Thorsten
Schmidt, Mach Schau! Die Beatles in Hamburg (Braunschweig: EinfallsReich, 1992).
Krüger has produced several illustrated volumes based on his extensive collection
of memorabilia, including a walking tour guide, Beatles Guide to Hamburg
(Hamburg and Vienna: Europa Verlag, 2001); he also briefly ran a commercial
museum devoted to the music scene. An exhaustive account of The Beatles’
Hamburg days can be found in Mark Lewisohn, Tune In: The Beatles All These
Years Vol. 1 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2013). Ian Inglis’ Beatles in Hamburg
178 Notes
(London: Reaktion, 2012) focuses mainly on Hamburg’s role in the band’s musical
development. Their Hamburg years were dramatized in the movie Backbeat (dir.
Iain Softley: Channel Four Films, 1994). Documentary films include Die Beatles–
Damals in Hamburg (dir. Thomas Struck: Hessischer Rundfunk, 1966) and The
Beatles: Eight Days A Week—The Touring Years (dir. Ron Howard: Universal, 2016).
4 Such as Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
5 St. Pauli in general has almost no presence in the English-language historiography.
6 A good discussion of popular culture’s struggles for legitimacy in the historiography
is Alexa Geisthövel and Bodo Mrozek, “Einleitung,” in Alexa Geisthövel and Bodo
Mrozek (eds.), Popgeschichte. Band 1: Konzepte und Methode (Bielefeld: transcript,
2014), 9–14. See also Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte.
Die Bundesrepublik von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Hanser, 2009), 11–15;
Wilfried van der Wil, “The Functions of ‘Volkskultur,’ Mass Culture and Alternative
Culture,” in Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will (eds.), Cambridge Companion
to Modern German Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 168–69.
7 Two excellent recent volumes include Tobias Becker, Anna Littmann, and Johanna
Niedbalski (eds.), Die tausend Freude der Metropole: Vergnügungskultur um 1900
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); and Daniel Morat, Tobias Becker, Kerstin Lange,
Johanna Niedbalski, Anne Gnausch, and Paul Nolte, Weltstadtvergnügen. Berlin
1880-1930 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2016).
8 A classic study for the United States is David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall
of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1999). A comparative overview
of these developments in Europe is Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der
Aufstieg der Massenkultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1997).
9 Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York:
Oxford, 2013), 7. British historians have been particularly active in exploring
these spaces. Recent examples include Judith R. Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in
Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale, 2012); Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London
and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale, 2010); James Nott,
Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in
Britain, 1918-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
10 Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives
in Twentieth Century German History,” German History 19:4 (2001), 136. An
important early study of mass culture in Germany is Lynn Abrams, Workers’
Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westfalia
(London: Routledge, 1992).
11 On popular culture in the Nazi era, see Axel Schildt, “Jenseits der Politik? Aspekte
des Alltags,” in Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (eds.), Hamburg
im dritten Reich (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 249–303; Anne Berg, “In and Out of
Notes 179
War: Space, Pleasure and Cinema in Hamburg 1938-1949” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Michigan, 2011). For Weimar see Kara Ritzheimer, ‘Trash,’ Censorship and
National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016). A good discussion of popular culture and cosmopolitanism
is Morat, Weltstadtvergnügen, 14–19.
12 Cited in Kaspar Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, Americanization,
and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture,” in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle
Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 430.
13 This term refers to what West Germans saw as the “golden years” of economic
growth and shared prosperity from the 1950s through the late 1960s (its definitive
end came with the OPEC oil crisis in 1973). A useful discussion is Hanna Schissler,
“Writing About 1950s West Germany,” in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 3–15.
14 Summaries of the period’s contradictory impulses can be found in Dagmar Herzog,
Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth Century Germany (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 101–40; Elizabeth Heineman, Before Porn Was
Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011). On St. Pauli tourism see Julia Sneeringer, “‘Assembly Line of Joys’: Touring
Hamburg’s Red Light District 1950-1966,” Central European History 42:1 (March
2009), 65–96.
15 “Scene” denotes a group of popular music producers and audiences that coalesces
at a specific time and place, generating a recognizable “sound.” This concept is
discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. A good introduction is Sara Cohen, “Scenes,” in
Thom Swiss and Bruce Horner (eds.), Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 239–49.
16 Tony Waine, “Docker Adenoid’s Gastarbeiter,” Lancaster Comment, March 11, 1982.
The term “guest workers” normally referred to men from southern Europe and
Turkey who were recruited by the West German government from 1960 through 1973
to fill domestic labor shortages in construction, mining, and other blue-collar jobs.
17 Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy,” 428–32. See also essays in Robert G.
Moeller (ed.), West Germany Under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in
the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
18 George Melly, Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts (London: Penguin, 1970), 5.
19 Geisthövel and Bodo Mrozek, “Einleitung,” 12–14.
20 The oldest members of the scene were born in 1939–40. On youth as a historical
category see Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, “Introduction,” in Axel Schildt and
Detlef Siegfried (eds.), European Cities, Youth and the Public Sphere in the Twentieth
Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 1–2.
21 Key works include Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweisspiraten. Protestbewegung
jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Köln: Bund-Verlag, 1980); Elizabeth Harvey,
180 Notes
Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983); Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the
Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
22 Kaspar Maase, BRAVO-Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur der Bundesrepublik
in den fünfziger Jahren (Hamburg: Junius, 1992), 73–83; Detlef Siegfried, Sound der
Revolte: Studien zur Kulturrevolution um 1968 (Weinheim: Juventa, 2008), 50–55.
23 Simon Frith, “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,” in Richard Leppert and
Susan McClary, Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and
Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 142–43.
24 Geisthövel and Mrozek see this as a legacy of contemporary German historians’
fixation on “primary political” events and the emphasis on socioeconomic
structures promoted by the Bielefeld school, which has long dominated the German
historical profession. See their “Einleitung,” Popgeschichte, 18.
25 English-language histories of jazz in Germany include Michael Kater, Different
Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992); Jonathan Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American
Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
Intellectuals’ embrace of jazz as a cultural form also lent it scholarly respectability; a
prime example is historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose jazz writings from 1955 to 1965
are collected in his The Jazz Scene (London: Faber and Faber, 2014).
26 See Timothy S. Brown, “Music as a Weapon? Ton Steine Scherben and the Politics
of Rock in Cold War Berlin,” German Studies Review 32:1 (February 2009), 1–22;
Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a
Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). East German
works include Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs & Rock and Roll: Teenage Rebels in
Cold-War East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007); Michael Rauhut, Beat in der
Grauzone. DDR-Rock 1964-1972–Politik und Alltag (Berlin: Basisdruck, 1993).
27 “Talking around” from Celia Applegate, cited in Neil Gregor, “Why Does Music
Matter?” German History 34:1 (March 2016), 125–26. See also Geisthövel and
Mrozek, “Einleitung,” 14–22; Klaus Nathaus, “Auf der Suche nach dem Publikum.
Popgeschichte aus der ‘Production of Culture’ Perspektive,” in Geisthövel and
Mrozek, Popgeschichte, 127–28.
28 Martin Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place
(Oxford: Berg, 1997), 1–2.
29 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 2–10.
30 On these aspects of music broadly, see Angela McRobbie, “Thinking with Music,” in
Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (eds.), Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music
and Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 36–49.
Notes 181
31 Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy
of an Identity,” in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German
National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–35. Erik Levi’s
overview of “Music in Modern German Culture,” in Kolinsky and van der Will,
Cambridge Companion, 233–55, focuses almost entirely on classical composers.
While Applegate’s body of work focuses on classical, she has also critiqued music
historians’ insistence on rigid genre boundaries: “Of Sailors’ Bars and Women’s
Choirs: The Musical Worlds of Brahms’ Hamburg,” in Peter Uwe Hohendahl (ed.),
Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and National Culture: Public Culture in Hamburg
1700-1933 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopoi, 2003), 181–82.
32 Sven Oliver Müller, “Analysing Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe:
Towards a Musical Turn?” European Review of History 17:6 (December 2010),
835–59.
33 Gregor, “Why Does Music Matter,” 115.
34 This is a key aspect of what Timothy Scott Brown calls the “global sixties”: see his
West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On transnational consumer
culture broadly see Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization
and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
18–24. For a comparative take on rock ‘n’ roll in another national context see Eric
Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).
35 This foreshadowed the late 1960s counterculture’s flight from Germanness through
rock; Richard Langston, “Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s
Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany,”
in Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick (eds.), Sound Matters: Essays in the Acoustics of
Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 183–96.
36 Peter Wicke, Rockmusik (Leipzig: Reclam, 1987), 107.
37 Subculture theory is discussed in Chapter 4. See also Andy Bennett, “Subcultures
or Neotribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste,”
in Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee (eds.), The Popular Music Studies
Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 106–13.
38 Detlef Siegfried points toward this connection, but devotes only a few pages to the
Star Club in his monumental work on West German youths’ engagement with rock
music, Time Is On My Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur
der 60er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). See also Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit
of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976 (Oxford: Oxford
39 This is the central argument of Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution
in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (New York: Oxford
182 Notes
University Press, 1998). See also Detlef Siegfried, “Pop und Politik,” in Geisthövel
and Mrozek, Popgeschichte, 34.
40 A critique of the emancipation narrative is Klaus Nathaus, “Die Musik der weissen
Männer. Zur Kritik des popgeschichtlichen Emanzipationsnarrativs,” Mittelweg 36
25:4–5 (October 2016), 81–97.
Chapter 1
1 On Hamburg as counterweight see Hartmut Soell, Helmut Schmidt: Vernunft und

Leidenschaft, 1918-1969 (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003), 370.
2 David Blackbourn, Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of
Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 171. He was writing here about
the cultural meanings of lakes—tranquil, respectable—versus rivers in German
history.
3 “Low other” from Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American
Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 26.
4 Gisela Williams, “In a Perfectionist City, A Gritty Neighborhood Beckons,” New
York Times, October 9, 2005.
5 Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York: Berg, 2000), 44.
6 My thinking here is inspired by Mort, Capital Affairs, 6–7.
7 Ariane Barth, Die Reeperbahn: Der Kampf um Hamburgs sündige Meile (Hamburg:
Hoffmann und Campe, 1999), 14; Georg Walter, Hamburger Sittengeschichte
(Hamburg: Verlag Ernst Oehrlien, 1931), 88–90.
8 Made part of Denmark in 1640, then became Prussian land in 1864.
9 Busy roads brought a socially mixed public to taverns located along the way: see
Beat Kümin, “Public Houses and their Patrons in Early Modern Europe,” in Beat
Kümin and Ann Tlusty (eds.), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early
Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 51; traveler accounts in Henning
Berkefeld (Hrsg.), Hamburg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen (Düsseldorf:
Droste, 1990), 19–63. Hugenots, refugees from Holland’s economic crashes, and
those fleeing the French Revolution also came in various waves.
10 Ortwin Pelc, “Der sündige Stadtteil: Der Ruf St. Paulis und seine Entstehung,” in
Gisela Jaacks (Hrsg.), Hamburgs Geschichte: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Hamburg:
Ellert and Richter, 2008), 92. See also Stan Hugill, Sailortown (New York: Dutton,
1967), 41, 136–37.
11 Quoted in Walter, Hamburger Sittengeschichte, 34.
12 Helene Manos, Sankt Pauli: Soziale Lagen und soziale Fragen im Stadtteil St. Pauli
(Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1989), 115.
Notes 183
13 Landscape reference from Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture

and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-siecle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell, 2002), 171. See also
Eckart Kleßmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg (Hamburg: Die Hanse/Sabine
Gronewald Verlage, 2002 ed.), 305.
14 Katherine Aaslestad, “Paying For War: Experiences of Napoleonic Rule in the
Hanseatic Cities,” Central European History 39 (2006), 641–75.
15 Michael Grüttner, Arbeitswelt an der Wasserkante: Sozialgeschichte der Hamburger
Hafenarbeiter 1886-1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 22.
16 The zoo relocated to suburban Stellingen in 1907 and became one of the first to
display animals in expansive, “natural” settings. See Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s
Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).
Hamburg played a key role in German colonialism because of shipping as well as
its sites of colonial knowledge production, the Colonial Institute and the Institute
for Maritime and Tropical Diseases; Lars Amenda and Sonja Grünen, “Tor zur
Welt”: Hamburg-Bilder und Hamburg-Werbung im 20.Jahrhundert (München:
Dölling and Galitz, 2008), 22.
17 These became popular in cities across the West. See Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen,
62; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 94f.; Jon Stratton, The Desirable Body: Cultural
Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 98–99.
18 A good summary of these developments is Pelc, “Der sündige Stadtteil.”
19 The wall itself was dismantled starting in the 1820s and turned into a green belt
of trenches, but the gates were maintained and modernized; Yair Mintzker, The
Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 217–19.
20 For example, Portuguese Jews’ Brazilian connections helped Hamburg take a
leading role in Europe’s sugar and coffee trade. On the history of Jews in Hamburg
see Klessmann, 358–64; Rainer Liedtke, “Germany’s Door to the World: A Haven
for the Jews? Hamburg 1590-1933,” in David Cesarani (ed.), Port Jews: Jewish
Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Centers (London: Frank Cass, 2002),
75–86; Salomon Heine entry in Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1969), 291. On slang see Klaus Siewert, Hamburgs “Nachtjargon”: Die
Sprache auf dem Kiez in St. Pauli (Hamburg: Klaus Siewert, 2003), 25.
21 Wealth has its own hereditary aspect, which in Hamburg meant continuity in the
families that dominated politics and civic life, such as the Sievekings and Petersens;
see Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years,
1830-1910 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 560f.
22 Evans, Death in Hamburg, 90; Rene Martens and Günter Zint, St. Pauli: Kiez Kult
Alltag (Hamburg: Verlag Die Hanse, 2000), 11.
23 Quoted in Evans, Death in Hamburg, 80. Bebel represented Hamburg in the
Reichstag but lived in Dresden. Evans points out that the anti-SPD laws (1878–90)
184 Notes
were lightly enforced in Hamburg, which resented them as an intrusion of central

government power. On suffrage see Evans, 80–82; Madeleine Hurd, Public Spheres,
Public Mores and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870-1914 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000), 71–72. Income and residency qualifications
excluded nearly all working-class Hamburgers from voting for the Hamburg
legislature, though reforms after the cholera disaster did result in the election of
the first Social Democrat to the Bürgerschaft in 1901. Strikes and political protests
in 1906 brought more suffrage reform and expanded the SPD faction in the years
up to 1918; Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, 532–34.
24 Manos, Sankt Pauli, 92.
25 On disease rates see Evans, Death in Hamburg, 69, 117, 120, 132–44, 186. On
housing see Museum der Arbeit Arbeitskreis Hafenkante, St. Pauli—Von der
Wohnung zur Werft (Hamburg, 1985); Grüttner, Arbeitswelt an der Wasserkante,
102–03. On degeneracy see Dickinson, Politics of Child Welfare, 11–12.
26 Wohnung zur Werft. The FrauenFreieluftGalerie Hamburg murals near the
Fischmarkt today document the jobs women performed there historically.
27 Hans-Hermann Groppe and Ursula Wöst (eds.), Über Hamburg in die Welt: Von
den Auswandererhallen zur Ballinstadt (Hamburg: Ellert & Richter, 2007), 12.
28 Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, 175. See also Lars Amenda, Fremde—Hafen—Stadt.
Chinesische Migration und ihre Wahrnehmung in Hamburg 1897-1972 (Hamburg:
Dölling and Galitz, 2006), 47–55.
29 The first Trichter on this site dates to 1805; that refreshment pavilion was knocked
over by a wild ox and a larger one built in 1820 (Markus Schreiber and Hans
Walden, Zeitsprünge: Hamburg-St. Pauli [Erfurt: Sutton, 2008], 29). As David Nasaw
writes, “A mixed-sex audience is by definition a respectable one” (Going Out, 26).
30 For example, the story of Emma Thiele-Lundershausen, whose 1888 memoir
(Achtungsvoll die Direktion!) details her journey from singer to owner of the Neue
Welt music hall. The Neue Welt ultimately ruined her as she became enmeshed
in expensive competition for novelty. She ended up owning a bar in Heinestrasse
north of the Reeperbahn. In Walter, Hamburger Sittengeschichte, 82–84.
31 Carl-Heinz Thinius, Damals in St. Pauli: Lust und Freude in der Vorstadt
(Hamburg: Christians, 1975), esp. 93–102; Udo Pini, Zu Gast im alten Hamburg
(München: Hugendubel, 1987). Amusements’ earlier mission to also educate had
been jettisoned: Nasaw notes that dancing in particular was beloved by the masses
because it couldn’t be invested with educational content (Going Out, 118).
32 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 24; Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany,
179–83. On early cinemas see Michael Töteberg and Volker Reißmann, Mach Dir
ein paar schöne Stunden: Das Hamburg Kinobuch (Edition Temmen, 2008), 16–23.
33 On the rise of entertainment districts see Tobias Becker, “Das Vergnügungsviertel:
Heterotopischer Raum in den Metropolen der Jahrhundertwende,” in Becker, et al.,
Tausend Freude der Metropole, 147.
Notes 185
34 See Adolf Spamer, Tätowierung in den deutschen Hafenstädten (Bremen, 1934),

41–62; Stephan Oettermann, “On Display: Tattooed Entertainers in America
and Germany,” in Jane Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European
and American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). The 1932
Brachtschen Erlass outlawed displays of fully tattooed men and women.
35 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 24.
36 Beatrix Beneder, “Mädchenbedienung im Männerort,” in Ulrike Spring, Wolfgang
Kos, Wolfgang Freitag, Im Wirtshaus: eine Geschichte Wiener Geselligkeit (Wien:
Museum Karlsplatz, 2007), 246.
37 Kumin, “Public Houses.”
38 Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945
(New York: Oxford, 2010), 52–53.
39 Peter Bailey, “Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural
Prototype,” in Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay (eds.), Sexualities in History (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 222–46.
40 Ibid., 240. See also Paul G. Cressey’s 1932 study, “The Life-Cycle of the Taxi-
Dancer,” in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds.), The Subcultures Reader (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 28–39.
41 On use of this term see Michaela Freund-Widder, “Kleine Geschichte der
Prostitution in Hamburg,” in Elisabeth von Dücker (Hrsg.), Sexarbeit:
Prostitution—Lebenswelten und Mythen (Hamburg: Edition Temmen, 2005),
287. The area has long had male prostitutes too, but they have been far less
documented. Teen hustlers became objects of concern particularly after 1945 and
will be discussed in Chapter 5.
42 Walter, Hamburger Sittengeschichte, 15–20.
43 A typical formulation of the sailor connection is in Hugill’s Sailortown, 137. On
other clienteles see Pelc, “Sündige Stadtteil,” 102.
44 For example, in 1913 Hamburg as a whole had 1,088 registered prostitutes but
police arrested three times as many unregistered ones; Julia Roos, Weimar through
the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Women’s Emancipation, and German
Democracy, 1919-33 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 17. On
prostitution regulations see also Harris, Selling Sex; Manos, Sankt Pauli, 92;
Julia Staron, St. Pauli: Eine kritische Liebeserklärung (Hamburg: tradition, 2011),
8; Walter, Sittengeschichte, 32; Freund-Widder, “Kleine Geschichte,” 286; Julia
Brüggemann, “Through the Prism of Prostitution: State and Society in Hamburg,
1800-1914” (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1999).
45 Mattias Heck, “Zur Prostitutionsmigration nach Hamburg von 1807 bis 2005,” in
Sexarbeit, 120.
46 The 1891 guide St. Pauli: wie es leibt und lebt reveals the existence of a market for
city guides (Pelc, “Sündige Stadtteil,” 102). On the establishment of Hamburg’s
official tourist office see Amenda and Grünen,“Tor zur Welt”, 40. On the
186 Notes
development of a modern tourism industry and male sexual tourism see Koshar,
German Travel Cultures, 82f.
47 Pelc, “Sündige Stadtteil,” 100–02; on the Four Lions see Schreiber and Walden,
Zeitsprünge, 21.
48 Harris, Selling Sex, 114–15.
49 On shifts in mass culture in this period see Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial
Germany, 169–74.
50 Rudolf Allnach (owner of the Hammonia Varieté) to Polizeipräsidium, March 18,
1916, in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Gen IX C 1.
51 On this topic generally, see Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and
Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000). On Hamburg, see Volker Ullrich, Kriegsalltag: Hamburg im ersten
Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Prometh, 1982).
52 On the 1918 revolution see Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, 535–38;
Eberhard von Wiese, Hamburg: Menschen, Schicksale (Berlin: Ullstein, 1967), 167–
68. On the 1920 riots see Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics
and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998), 70.
53 Statistics in Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, 559.
54 In Töteberg and Reißmann, Mach Dir ein Paar schöne Stunden, 23.
55 1922 guide cited in Amenda, Das Tor zur Welt, 59. Sailors’ maxim in Hans Harbeck,
Das Buch von Hamburg: Was nicht im “Baedeker” steht (Munich: Piper, 1930), 81.
56 Töteberg and Reißmann, Mach Dir ein paar schöne Stunden, 253–62 offers a
comprehensive list.
57 Letter of Verein der Saalbesitzer von HH & Umgegend von 1895 e.V. to Hamburg
Senate, June 28, 1928, in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei Gen X N 1, Bd. 4.
58 Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Oxford, 2008), 51.
59 Wiese, Hamburg: Menschen, 193. See also Pascal Eitler, “Das Stripteaselokal,”
in Alexa Geisthövel, Habbo Knoch (Hg.), Orte der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.:
Campus, 2005), 248–53.
60 Documentation in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 33, Bd. 1: Arthur
Wittkowski.
61 Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 62–83. Cuneo on Davidstrasse opened in 1905, Hamburg’s
first Italian restaurant. Tourist publications did not spotlight the city’s status as
a bastion of working-class life, though a workers’ tourism group started in 1926
touted its progressive social policies.
62 Ludwig Jürgens, St. Pauli: Bilder aus einer fröhlichen Welt (Hamburg: Hans Kohler,
1930), 6–35.
63 Engelbrecht and Heller, “Opium Dens,” reprinted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay,
Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), 726–28; also Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 63.
Notes 187
64 It was technically part of Altona until its absorption in 1937 into Greater Hamburg.
65 “St. Pauli Strassenverzeichnis,” www.20359hamburg.de/strassenverzeichnis/index.
php, accessed July 18, 2014.
66 Harbeck, Buch von Hamburg, 86–87.
67 This was St. Joseph’s, built in 1738. Heavily damaged during the Second World
War, its facade was restored and it remains an active Roman Catholic parish.
68 On slumming see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian
London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 1–7. On Käppen Haase
see Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 22–23. That bar, which dates from the 1890s, morphed
into Harry’s Hafenbasar, which still exists.
69 Albers was born in Hamburg-St. Georg. His rise to national stardom starting in the
late 1920s has been well documented. After his death in 1960, a square in St. Pauli
was named for him; its memorial statue by Jörg Immendorf draws on his iconic
image as a sailor with accordion.
70 Jens Huckenriede and Angelika Müller, An de Eck steht ‘n Jung mit’n Tüdelband:
Gebrüder Wolf, Hamburger Gesangshumoristen und Revuestars von 1895 bis 1953
(Hamburg: Kunstwerk e.V., 2003).
71 Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 94. A prime example is the radio program Hamburger
Hafenkonzert, which since 1929 has broadcast live sounds from harbor boats every
Sunday night at six.
72 Kurt Tucholsky, “Auf der Reeperbahn, nachts um halb eins 1927/28,” in Berkefeld,
Hamburg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 229.
73 More on Abel in Harris, Selling Sex, 116–47. On other critics see Roos, Weimar,
49, 177.
74 Harris notes that these women quickly found new residences (p. 99).
75 “Der Nacktfleisch-Skandal Hamburger Ballhäuser,” Abel’s Nachtpost, April 19, 1926;
also Abel article from June 1926 in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B33 Bd. 1.
76 “Das Dirnengesindel am Silbersack und bei Dietrich Menke,” Abel’s Nachtpost,
March 19, 1927.
77 Harris, Selling Sex, 107.
78 See documents in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 29, Bd. 3: Menke,
Reeperbahn 34/35; StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Gen IX D 7: Zur Schaustellung
nackter Körper (esp. 25 October 1928 memo from Krim. Oberwachtmeister Kunze).
79 In 1932 Wittkowski requested permits to expand his bar Zur Giraffe to compete
with others who had “done the same”; letter of 23 Dec. 1932 in StaHH 376-2
Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 33 Bd. 2. Willi Bartels, in contrast, claimed “the
Depression meant nothing cooking in St. Pauli”: Ilsemarie Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels:
Ein Leben für St. Pauli (Hamburg: Interessensgemeinschaft St. Pauli e.V., 1994), 15.
80 McElligott, Contested City, 187. Evans, Death in Hamburg, 92, notes this long
history of brawling.
81 In Martens and Zint, Kiez Kult Alltag, 10.
188 Notes

83 Schildt, “Jenseits der Politik,” 250, 257; St. Pauli Archiv e.V., Im Schatten des grossen
Geldes: Wohnen auf St. Pauli (Hamburg: St. Pauli Archiv, 1990), 43.
84 Kerstiens, “Die polizeiliche Vorschriften zur Bekämpfung der öffentlichen
Unsittlichkeit,” Die Polizei, 5 June, 1933 (in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Gen IX
D 7). In the Nazi period waitering became seen as a job suited to female “nature,”
unfit for “Aryan” men; Beneder, “Mädchenbedienung im Männerort,” 246.
85 Gaby Zürn, “Von der Herbertstraße nach Auschwitz,” in Angelika Ebbinghaus
(Hrsg.), Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus
(Nördlingen: Greno, 1987), 91–101; Freund-Widder, “Kleine Geschichte,” 287.
86 Clayton Whisnant, Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution
and Freedom 1945-69 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 19–21; Bernhard
Rosenkranz, Ulf Bollmann, and Gottfried Lorenz, Homosexuellen-Verfolgung in
Hamburg 1919-1969 (Hamburg: lambda, 2009), esp. 63–69.
87 Less than 4 percent of Hamburg Jews lived in St. Pauli Nord and Süd at this point;
Frank Bajohr, Aryanization in Hamburg (New York: Berghahn, 2002), 308. Emily
J. Levine charts the pre-1933 relationship of wealthy Jews to Hamburg’s elite in
Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). By 1933 Hamburg’s heterodox,
assimilationist Jewish community was only Germany’s fourth largest. St. Pauli’s
population as a whole was roughly 57,800 in 1937, down from 72,000 in 1894 (Monika
Sigmund et al., “Man versuchte längs zu kommen, und man lebt ja noch . . .” Frauenalltag
in St. Pauli in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit (Hamburg: St. Pauli-Archiv e.V., 1996), 6.
88 Deutsch-Jüdische Gesellschaft Hamburg e.V., Wegweiser zu den ehemaligen Stätten
jüdischen Leidens und Lebens in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1982), 21–26.
89 Bajohr, Aryanization in Hamburg, 297–98.
90 Frank Bajohr, “Von der Ausgrenzung zum Massenmord: Die Verfolgung der
Hamburger Juden 1933-1945,” in Hamburg im dritten Reich, 485–86. Ludwig Wolf
would celebrate his fiftieth anniversary onstage at the Alkazar in 1946; he died in
1955.
91 Töteberg and Reissmann, Mach Dir ein paar schöne Stunden, 257. I have tried
to determine whether Ada was the theater owner remembered by several Order
Policemen in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 105.
Browning links her to the Millerntor-Theater, but Töteberg and Reissmann show
no Jewish ownership there. Jürgen Sielemann and Paul Flamme, Hambürger
jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 1995)
does not list the Lachmanns.
92 Amenda, Fremde—Hafen—Stadt, 108–42 and 258–81; Helmut Ebeling, Schwarze
Chronik einer Weltstadt: Hamburger Kriminalgeschichte 1919 bis 1945 (Hamburg:
Matari, 1968), 172–87. On the Finkenbude see Pini, Zu Gast, 174.
Notes 189
93 Schildt, “Jenseits der Politik,” 260–63. The war scuttled Nazi plans for a glittering
new harbor, though Allied bombing did its part to clear some of the land they had
earmarked for clearance anyway.
94 Berg, In and Out of War, 82. Officials and many business owners viewed the
entertainment districts as full of broken-down establishments in need of renewal;
October 13, 1933 memo from Verein der Saalbesitzer to Reichseinheitsverband
des deutschen Gaststättengewerbes e.V. Bezirk Hamburg, in StaHH 376-2
Gewerbepolizei, Gen X N 1, Bd. 4 (1928–34): Tanzlustbarkeiten.
95 On guidebooks see Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys.” On foreigners see Schildt,
“Jenseits der Politik,” 254. On entertainment’s compatibility with local Nazism see
Berg, In and Out of War, 21–36.
96 Correspondence in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 20.
97 Ibid., especially Wilhelm Menke letter of 18 February, 1935. Wilhelm took over the
family business when his combative brother Dietrich—with whom Abel tangled—
died in 1930. It is not clear that he was actually a member of the NSDAP. He ran
the business until his retirement in the 1960s.
98 15 Feb. 1939 assessment of Aryan status of all owners at Reeperbahn 1, in StaHH
135-1 Staatliche Pressestelle I-IV, Nr. 2077.
99 StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Gen X N 1, Bd. 4, correspondence of Verein
der Saalbesitzer von Hamburg und Umgegend, esp. October 13, 1933 memos.
Interestingly, the Verein didn’t get their wish as officials never defined clearly who
could offer dancing and Häfker’s beautification plan even included granting dance
permits to anyone that requested them (Berg, In and Out of War, 81).
100 StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 33, Bd. 1: Regional Food Team Major
Jakeman to Wittkowski, August 2, 1946 and police report of May 5, 1946. He claimed
membership in the national-liberal Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) from 1930 to 1932.
101 StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 33, Bd. 2, especially Wittkowski appeal of
May 28, 1943 and letter of April 21, 1943. Also Pini, Zu Gast, 160.
102 Senator Schmidt, “Alkazarfiliale in Rissen,” Altonaer Nachrichten, July 5, 1933. See
also “Mit den Fäusten,” Hamburger Anzeiger, October 24, 1933.
103 Fuhlsbüttel was an existing prison the Nazis began using as a concentration camp
in fall 1933; Wittkowski later claimed political prisoner status as a result. He played
all sides of this issue, claiming in 1941 to have always been pro-Nazi, then after
1945 claiming that he lost his empire due to anti-Nazi views. He played coy after
1945 about whether he was in fact a Jew, arguing that the fact that people thought
he was constituted evidence of persecution—claims restitution courts rejected in
the 1950s. See materials in StaHH 424-20 Rechstamt Altona, B 6, 213-11 L0688/33;
and 213-13 7762 Bd. 1. See also Eberhard von Wiese, “Ein Mann, der das Rad der
Zeit zurückdrehen wollte,” March 8, 1960, and “In der Glanzzeit war er der König
der Reeperbahn,” March 4, 1960, both in Hamburger Abendblatt. Staron provides a
popular history in St. Pauli: Eine kritische Liebeserklärung, 39.
190 Notes
104 Shelly Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Maase, Grenzenloses
Vergnügen, 212. On KdF in Hamburg see Schildt, “Jenseits der Politik,” 282–84.
105 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 21–23.
106 See Barth, Reeperbahn, 75. Zürn notes that only a third of registered prostitutes
lived in the gated bordello streets (“Vom Herbertstrasse zur Auschwitz,” 94).
107 Horst Fascher’s memoir mentions a locally known abortion doctor who had been
practicing since the Nazi era; Let the Good Times Roll. Der Star-Club-Gründer
erzählt (Munich: Heyne, 2007), 138.
108 Marcel Feige claims thousands of fully tattooed people were sent to concentration
camps: Tattoo-Theo: Der Tatöwierte vom Kiez (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf,
2001), 52–54; Ein Tattoo ist für immer: Die Geschichte der Tatöwierung in
Deutschland (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2003), 109. See also
Oettermann, “On Display,” 211. Human “freaks” could face forced sterilization.
109 Corey Ross, “Radio, Film and Morale: Wartime Entertainment between
Mobilization and Distraction,” in Corey Ross, Pamela Swett, Fabrice d’Almeida
(eds.), Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 154–76;
Berg, In and Out of War; Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 15–16.
110 Kater, Different Drummers; Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity,
Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale, 1984). A rich first-
person account is Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi
Germany (New York: W. Morrow, 1999), 159–62.
111 Kater, Different Drummers, 105; Pini, Zu Gast, 149.
112 Otto Bender, Swing unterm Hakenkreuz in Hamburg 1933-1945 (Hamburg:
Christians, 1993), 17.
113 Memo from Gestapo Hamburg to Herrn Polizeipräsidenten, March 2, 1942, in
StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X C 3: Kurt Paul Weise, Gastwirtschaft Gr.
Freiheit 36 (“Cap Norte”), Darbietungen von verbotenen Musik.
114 Complete file in StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz X C 3. On Jugendschutz in this
period see Schildt, “Jenseits der Politik,” 302–03.
115 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 218. See also Barth on criminal youth gangs
during the war’s last year (Reeperbahn, 87–88).
116 Recounted in Hans-Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, translated by Joel
Agee (University of Chicago Press, 2004; originally published in 1947). See also
Ursula Büttner, “‘Gomorrah’ und die Folgen der Bombenkrieg,” in Hamburg
im 3.Reich, 613–20; Gordon Musgrove, Operation Gomorrah: The Hamburg
Firestorm Raids (London: Jane’s, 1981). After Gomorrah, one Gestapo officer
testified, “wherever one went lay corpses”—in Joachim Szodrzynski, “Die
‘Heimatfront’ zwischen Stalingrad und Kriegsende,” in Hamburg im 3.Reich, 660.
The dead were buried and rubble cleared by prisoners from nearby Neuengamme
concentration camp.
Notes 191
117 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 25–27; Barth, Reeperbahn, 90. Bartels’ father kept a stash
of carefully stored wines for “better” guests.
118 Töteberg and Reißmann, Mach Dir ein Paar schöne Stunden, 85. On war-related
closures of bars and clubs see StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Gen X B 7. On the
“end of times” mood see Szodrzynski, “Die ‘Heimatfront,’” 672–76; Herzog, Sex
after Fascism, 59f.
119 Szodrzynski argues that Kaufmann made this decision in order to build a postwar
legacy as the city’s “savior” and a moderate—a move that largely succeeded (“Die
‘Heimatfront,’” 678–80).
120 Wolf Strache, “Verschlossenes Tor zur Welt,” in Berkefeld, Hamburg in alten und
neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 241. See also Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 17.
121 Peacetime caloric intake for an adult female was around 2000. Figures in Jerram,
Streetlife, 146; Alan Kramer, “Law-Abiding Germans? Social Disintegration, Crime
and the Re-imposition of Order in Post-War Western Germany,” in Richard J.
Evans (ed.), The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History
(New York: Routledge, 1988), 240.
122 Kramer, “Law-Abiding Germans,” 243; Sigmund, “Man versuchte,” 17–21.
Photographs of black market activity in Germin (Gerd Mingram), Improvisierter
Neubeginn: Hamburg 1943-53 (Hamburg: ergebnisse, 1989).
123 Both men were free of Nazi taint. Petersen, a businessman, was classified a half-Jew
under Nazi race laws; he claimed no direct Nazi persecution but was restricted
in his business activities. Brauer had been Altona’s mayor from 1924 to 1933. He
ended up in 1934 in the United States working for the American Federation of
Labor. There, he frequently lectured on the Nazi menace, including anti-Semitism.
His return from American exile made him unique in West German politics.
He was Hamburg’s mayor in 1946–53 and 1957–61. On both men see Franklin
Kopitsch and Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.), Hamburgische Biographie—Personenlexikon
Band 2 (Hamburg: Christians, 2003).
124 “Two years after the collapse of the Third Reich, the German people has effaced
with patience and unspeakable suffering a good deal of the guilt that burdened
it by its government during those twelve years of cruel dictatorship. It is high
time to forget the past.” Petersen quoted in Michael Wildt, “Continuities and
Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950s,” in Richard
Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and
Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge
125 Frank Bajohr, “Hochburg des Internationalismus. Hamburger ‘Aussenpolitik’ in
den 1950er und 1960er Jahren,” in Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg 2008, 26–28; Soell,
Helmut Schmidt, 370.
126 Wolfgang Berkefeld, “Dank und Anspruch an Hamburg,” in Berkefeld, Hamburg in
alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 249.
192 Notes
127 Examples include Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz, Hamburg: Ein Wegweiser für Fremde
und Einheimische (Hamburger Fremdenverkehrsverein, 1951), 19; Hamburg:
Gesicht einer Weltstadt (Hamburg: Verlag Das Topographikon Rolf Müller, n.d.).
On rebuilding see Arnold Sywottek, “Hamburg seit 1945,” in Werner Jochmann
(ed.), Hamburg: Geschichte der Stadt und Ihrer Bewohner. Band 2—vom Kaiserreich
bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1986), 386–88, 406–07;
Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 50.
128 Sigmund, “Man versuchte,” 22–27; Im Schatten des grossen Geldes, 50–51.
129 Berg, In and Out of War, 22; correspondence in n. 131; Im Schatten des grossen
Geldes, 44–49. The Communist Hamburger Volkszeitung railed in 1947 against
this diversion of resources while proletarian families still huddled in unwinterized
lodgings (Martens and Zint, Kiez Kult Alltag, 150).
130 Töteberg and Reißmann, Mach Dir ein Paar schöne Stunden, 91–96. Helmut
Käutner’s film was made on Prague soundstages in 1943–44 to boost morale, but
Goebbels found it too anti-heroic and banned it for German audiences in March
1945. It was only released by British authorities in late 1945; Berg, In and Out of
War, 180–94.
131 Massaquoi, Destined to Witness, 308.
132 Willi Bartels quoted in Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 29.
133 Ibid., 13; Im Schatten des grossen Geldes, 49–50. A 1952 map of St. Pauli in StaHH
reveals the continuity in usage of sites marked for entertainment purposes. The
Trichter briefly reopened as an improvised dance hall in the remains of its dressing
rooms (StaHH 376-2 Gewerbepolizei, Spz IX C 3: Ballhaus Trichter); it was
eventually razed and rebuilt as a brutalist-style bowling alley and parking garage.
134 Feige, Tattoo-Theo, 71–81.
135 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 28–31. Bartels also acquired or built residential buildings
in St. Pauli, Barmbek, and other neighborhoods—over 1,000 apartments in total.
136 Hamburg Police report of August 5, 1946, Wittkowski to Gewerbepolizei, February
25, 1946, and Major Jakeman to Wittkowski, August 2, 1946, in StaHH 376-2
Gewerbepolizei, Spz X B 33 Bd. 1.
137 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 64–66. Massaquoi writes, “had the British foreseen the
far-reaching effects of their air attacks, they could hardly have thought of a more
fitting name for their handiwork than their code name Gomorrah” (Destined to
Witness, 432).
138 Weibliche Polizei memo, June 12, 1945, and letter from Botanical Garden Director
to Hamburg Police, May 19, 1945, both in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde I, Abl.
2/40.67 (Standort MEG 149B 5/2). Compare Jennifer V. Evans, “Bahnhof Boys:
Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi Berlin,” Journal of the History of Sexuality
12:4 (October 2003), 605–36.
139 Hamburger Echo clippings June 29, 1946 and 7 October 7, 1947 in Forschungsstelle
für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg Archive (hereafter FZH), Nr. 256-5 Frauen-Stellung
Notes 193
in der Gesellschaft/Prostitution. The British arrested ten times as many women

in November 1945 than the Germans had in November 1944; Michaela Freund-
Widder, “Women, Venereal Disease and the Control of Female Sexuality in Postwar
Hamburg,” in Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (eds.), Sex, Sin, and Suffering:
Venereal Disease and European Society Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2001), 210.
140 Michaela Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle: Prostitution und ihre staatliche
Bekämpfung in Hamburg vom Ende des Kaiserreichs bis zu den Anfängen der
Bundesrepublik (Münster: LIT, 2003), 222.
141 Freund-Widder, “Women, Venereal Disease and the Control of Female Sexuality,”
205–19; Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle, 190–222; Nicole Musolf,
“Käthe Petersen als Fürsorgerin und NS-Sozialpolitikerin und die Prostitution
in Hamburg,” in von Dücker, Sexarbeit, 300–01. Guardianship and involuntary
registration of suspected prostitutes remained on the books in Hamburg until 1978.
142 For an overview see Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek, “‘Reconstruction’ and
‘Modernization’: West German Social History during the 1950s,” in Moeller (ed.),
West Germany Under Construction, 413–43.
143 Axel Schildt, “‘Die kostbarsten Wochen des Jahres’: Urlaubstourismus der
Westdeutschen 1945-1970,” in Hasso Spode (ed.), Goldstrand und Teutongrill:
Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland 1945-1989 (Berlin:
Moser, 1997), 73. Three-quarters of West Germans polled in 1955 said they liked
traveling. Two-thirds of those who took a holiday 1958–61 reportedly stayed in
West Germany; only in 1958 did a boom in travel abroad begin. See Elisabeth
Noelle-Naumann, The Germans 1947-66 (Allensbach: Verlag für Demoskopie,
1967), 47–50; Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 172.
144 Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys,” 71–73. Surveys of German impressions of
Hamburg listed St. Pauli and “amusement” as the second most popular association
with the city; Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 38.
145 FC St. Pauli played on provisional fields until its Millerntor stadium was completed
in 1961. On the period’s wrestling craze see Martens and Zint, Kiez Kult Alltag, 54.
146 Amenda, Tor zur Welt, 106f.; Noelle-Naumann, The Germans, 47.
147 Alon Confino, “Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method: Why Did Some
Germans Think of Tourism after May 8, 1945?” in Bessel and Schumann, Life after
Death, 330.
148 Hamburg: Ein Stadtführer (Frankfurt a.M.: Wofe-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1959), 143.
149 Fodor’s Modern Guides: Germany (London: Newman Neame, 1959), 282.
150 Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in Peter Fritzsche and Alon
Confino (eds.), The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society
and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 62–66. See also Fred Davis,
Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 1–6.
151 Horst Günther, Hamburg bei Nacht (Schmiden bei Stuttgart: Franz Decker
Verlag, 1962), 91. See also Azio de Franciscis, “Das Vormodell eines deutschen
194 Notes
Republikanertums,” Die Neue Zeitung (Frankfurt a.M.), September 5, 1951;

Herbert Dombrowski, Das Herz von St. Pauli. Fotographien 1956 (Hamburg:
Dölling & Gallitz, 1997), 12–13. Albers’ July 1960 funeral became an orgy of
nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing “old St. Pauli.” A history of container shipping
is Christoph Strupp, “Im Bann der ‘gefährlichen Kiste’. Wirtschaft und Politik im
Hamburger Hafen,” in Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (Hg.), 19
Tage Hamburg. Ereignisse und Entwicklungen der Stadtgeschichte seit der fünfziger
Jahre (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz, 2012), 129–44.
152 “Quinn” was the surname of his father, with whom he lived in West Virginia as a
child. Schooling there left him fluent in English and he later tried passing as an
American to the GIs who liberated the Hungarian town he’d been evacuated to in
1945. Before landing in Hamburg, Quinn worked as a musician (including gigs in
GI bars in south Germany), acrobat, and deck hand on ships. See Elmar Kraushaar,
Freddy Quinn—Ein unwahrscheinliches Leben (Zürich: Atrium Verlag, 2011).
153 An excellent introduction to this theme is Frank Biess, “Survivors of
Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Reconstruction of Masculine
Citizenship in West Germany, 1945–55,” in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 57–82.
154 See “Heimweh nach St. Pauli?” Stern, November 18, 1962; Monika Burzik, “Von
singenden Seemännern und Musikern vom Sirius. Die Musik der 50er Jahre,” in
Werner Faulstich (Hrsg.), Die Kultur der Fünfziger Jahre (München: Fink, 2002),
249–62; Rainer Moritz, Und das Meer singt sein Lied (Hamburg: Mare, 2004), 31;
Timo Heimerdinger, “Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7: Zur Popularität eines Filmes zwischen
Musik, Milieu und Melodramatik,” Kieler Blätter zur Volkskunde 34 (2002): 183–204.
155 Hugill, Sailortown, 137.
156 Kurt Grobecker and Christian Müller, Die Stadt im Umbruch: Hamburg in den
60er Jahren (Hamburg: Kabel: 1998), 153–54; Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 32–34;
advertisement for Eckhorn’s hippodrome in Dombrowski, Das Herz von St. Pauli,
46. Earlier hippodromes in Thinius, Damals in St. Pauli, 115–16.
157 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 101–40.
158 Allensbach surveys, for example, found that men were three times more likely than
women to prefer watching a live spectacle, such as a circus (Noelle-Naumann, The
Germans, 47).
159 These were noted in guidebooks such as Lennart Schönkopf, Hamburg Dag och
Natt (Malmö: Framtiden, 1955), 23–24; see also Walter Pogge von Ranken and
Dirks Paulun, St. Pauli (Flensburg: Christian Wulff, 195-?), 8. Tourism officials
pushed for regulations to allow Danes to export alcohol duty-free after a 72-hour
stay; Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys,” 73–74.
160 Examples in Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 108; Dombrowski, Das Herz von St. Pauli,
12; 50 Jahre “Zum Silbersack” 1949-1999: Die Geschichte einer Kneipe auf St. Pauli
(Hamburg: Christians, 1999).
Notes 195
161 Mondo Cane (1962), dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti, Italy, Cineriz. “Cemeteries” refers in
part to the film’s previous segment on Rome’s catacombs, but by introducing the
German segment with the sound of marching jackboots, it also openly references
the Nazi past.
162 A brilliant discussion of this is McKinney, Magic Circles, 28–29.
163 Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys,” 77–78. “Joys” rendered here as “Freude,” the
centuries-old euphemism for sexual delights.
164 Tax office files, for example, show various businesses trying—and failing—to offer
non-sexual amusements such as shooting booths and mocha bars to compete
in the 1950s: Kontrollbericht March 19, 1953 and license application November
26, 1957 for Club Tabu, in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92/15/4;
August 24, 1954 memo from Pönisch on Firma Dietrich Menke OHG, in StaHH
442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92/15/6 Bd. 1. See also Günther, Hamburg
bei Nacht, 209.
165 Elizabeth Heineman, “The Economic Miracle in the Bedroom: Big Business and
Sexual Consumption in Reconstruction West Germany,” Journal of Modern History
78 (2006), 846–77.
166 Summary of current law in “Einschreiten gegen weibliche Prostituierte,” in StaHH
331-1 II Polizeibehörde II Abl. 2/40.67. See also in the same file memo from Police
President Buhl, 31 August 1961; Kriminaloberkommandant Kluender, “Sittenbild
in St. Pauli,” March 12, 1957.
167 Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle, 200–01, 240. See also “Hast Du noch ein
Bratenstück mehr? Ein ehemaliger Seemann erzählt,” in von Dücker, Sexarbeit,
158–59.
168 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 133.
169 Strippers and Animierdamen sharply distinguished themselves from prostitutes:
F. H. Miller, St. Pauli und die Reeperbahn: Ein Bummel durch die Nacht (Rüschlikon:
Müller, 1960), 9, 41–44.
170 Club Tabu, for example, offered shows of naked women posing as statues; see
Kontrollbericht 15 Sept. 1952, in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte,
95.92/15/4. Other sources show confusion over how much flesh could be displayed.
The 1953 Law on Youth-Endangering Publications (GjS) and §184 of the Legal
Code regulated print matter and advertising, hence ads for strip clubs featuring
topless women were banned. Government commentary on the GjS stated that
while the naked body was neither immoral nor obscene, a “majority of the German
people rejected uninhibited displays [ungeniertes Zurschaustellen]” of nudity
as hazardous especially to youth; Stephan Buchloh, ‘Pervers, jugendgefährdend,
staatsfeindlich: Zensur in der Ära Adenauers als Spiegel der gesellschaftlichen Klimas
(Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2002), 81–90. On the “English solution” see Günther,
Hamburg bei Nacht, 174.
196 Notes
171 Another forerunner of striptease was Little Egypt, a belly dancer who debuted
at the 1893 Chicago Exposition. Stratton, The Desirable Body, 100–01; Lucinda
Jarrett, Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing (London: Pandora, 1997),
169–71; Eitler, “Das Stripteaselokal,” 251–56; Barth, Der Reeperbahn, 95.
172 Miller, St. Pauli und die Reeperbahn, 49–52.
173 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 84.
174 On the family as site of generational conflict in the 1950s see Biess, “Survivors of
Totalitarianism,” 70–72.
175 See Hanna Schissler, “Normalization as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender
Relations in West Germany during the 1950s,” in The Miracle Years, esp. 359–66.
176 See photographs in Miller, St. Pauli, photos 12–14, 29, 99; Dombrowski, Das Herz
von St. Pauli, 48, 51, 63, 82–84.
177 Heineman; Dorothee Wierling, “Mission to Happiness: The Cohort of 1949 and the
Making of East and West Germans,” in The Miracle Years, 115.
178 Paragraph 175, which was retained postwar and even reaffirmed by the
constitutional court in 1954 despite arguments that it only targeted men and
violated guarantees of equal rights. A 1969 reform decriminalized homosexuality
among consenting males; the age of consent was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1973.
Total repeal only came in 1994. Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 114–41.
179 Nasaw, Going Out, 46.
180 Pogge von Ranken, St. Pauli, 62; Günther, Hamburg bei Nacht, 133–40.
181 Rudolf Leonhardt’s international bestseller, X-mal Deutschland, described
Hamburg as “contain[ing] more of the world in its walls than any other city in
Germany . . . .” Quote from the English translation, This Germany: The Story Since
the Third Reich (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Publishers, 1964), 303.
Original published by Piper in 1961.
182 Wofe’s Hamburg: ein Stadtführer, 141; italics mine. On the internationalization
of cuisine see Michael Wildt, Vom kleinen Wohlstand: Eine Konsumgeschichte der
fünfziger Jahre (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996), 198–202.
183 Pogge von Ranken, St. Pauli, n.p.
184 Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys,” 88–89; Rosemarie K. Lester, Trivialneger: Das Bild
des Schwarzen im westdeutschen Illustriertenroman (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag
H.D. Heinz, 1982), 35–55; Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American
Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002), 92; Heide Fehrenbach, “Of German Mothers and ‘Negermischlingskinder’:
Race, Sex and the Postwar Nation,” in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 180; Tina Campt,
Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the
Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 222.
185 A city roundly denounced from Heine through Brahms as “ruled by philistines”
(Evans, 27, 36).
Notes 197
186 Confino, “Regimes,” 151.

187 Mort, Capitol Affairs, 6. He is describing London’s Soho.
188 Prompting the oft-heard refrain, “the old St. Pauli—a thing of the past” (Miller,
St. Pauli, 6).
Chapter 2
1 On this history of music and dancing, see Walter, Hamburger Sittengeschichte,

88–90; Alexa Geisthövel, “Das Tanzlokal,” in Geisthövel and Knoch, Orte der
Moderne, 141; Hugill, Sailortown, 139; Dombrowski, Das Herz von St. Pauli, 12.
2 On the “global Sixties” more broadly see Brown, West Germany and the Global
Sixties, 3–12.
3 Sara Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music: Beyond The Beatles
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 35. See also John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound
Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–3.
4 Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 45f.
5 Peter Bargstedt and Ingrid Klenk, Musik zwischen Wirtschaft, Medien und Kultur
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1987), 87; Ortwin Pelc and Carsten Prange, Hamburg: Die
Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Convent, 2002), 136.
6 “Schlager” means “hit.” A good discussion of the genre is Ed Larkey, “Postwar
German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi
Heimat,” in Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity, 235–36.
7 Reproduced at www.hamburg-bildarchiv.de/XBA2371.jpg (accessed December
27, 2016). Compare ad for “Das Golgosky Quartett, Dunkles Afrika–Neger-Show:
Jazz, Tempo, Rhythm,” Hamburger Anzieger, September 26, 1953 (FZH archive, Nr.
322: Hamburg Stadtteil Geschichte).
8 Peter Bailey, “Jazz at the Spirella,” in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters
(eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964 (New York: Rivers
Oram Press, 1999), 25. On jazz’s increasing acceptance see Poiger, Jazz, Rock
and Rebels, 137–67; Heinz-Hermann Krüger, “‘Exis, habe ich keine gesehen.’ Auf
der Suche nach einer jugendlichen Gegenkultur in den 50er Jahren,” in Heinz-
Hermann Krüger (ed.), ‘Die Elvis-Tolle, die hatte ich mir unauffällig wachsen lassen’:
Lebensgeschichte und jugendliche Alltagskultur in den 50er Jahren (Opladen: Leske
+ Budrich, 1985), 146–49.
9 Andrew Wright Hurley, The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West
German Cultural Exchange (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 60. Similar notions
surfaced during jazz’s first German run in the 1920s, as seen in Ivan Goll’s 1926
plea for “Negro blood” to reinvigorate an old, withered Europe: “The Negroes are
Conquering Europe,” reprinted in Kaes, Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 559–60.
198 Notes
10 On jazz versus dance music see Uta Poiger, “Searching for Proper New Music:
Jazz in Cold War Germany,” in Agnes C. Mueller (ed.), German Pop Culture: How
‘American’ Is It? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004), 83–87. “Real feeling”
from Bailey, “Jazz at the Spirella,” 32.
11 Krüger, “Exis, habe ich keine gesehen,” 129–30; Hurley, Return of Jazz, 15.
12 Günther, Hamburg bei Nacht, 177.
13 Miller, St. Pauli, 33.
14 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 93–94, 276; Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial
Germany, 180–85.
15 Stefan Kursawe, Vom Leitmedium zum Begleitmedium: Die Radioprogramme des
Hessischen Rundfunks 1960-1980 (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), 42.
16 Schildt and Sywottek, “‘Reconstruction’ and ‘Modernization,’” 414–39.
17 Nearly 80 percent of 15-year-olds in Hamburg in 1958 earned full-time wages as
workers or apprentices while still living at home; Axel Schildt, “Eine Großstadt
nach dem Dritten Reich. Aspekte des Alltags und Lebensstils im Hamburg der
fünfziger Jahre,” in Peter Reichel (Hrsg.), Das Gedächtnis der Stadt: Hamburg im
Umgang mit seiner nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit. (Hamburg: Dölling and
Galitz, 1997), 85.
18 The classic study is Ruth Münster, Geld in Nietenhosen: Jugendliche als Verbraucher
(Stuttgart: Forkel, 1961). See also Siegfried, Sound der Revolte, 37–40; Kaspar
Maase, “Körper, Konsum, Genuss: Jugendkultur und mentaler Wandel,” Aus Politik
und Zeitgeschichte B45/2003, 9–16; Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy,” 429;
Rainer Gries, “Generation und Konsumgesellschaft,” in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and
Claudius Torp (Hg.), Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890-1990 (Frankfurt
a.M.: Campus, 2009), 190–200.
19 It’s worth noting that the military stations did not play rock all day long or even
most of the day.
20 “Elvis, the Pelvis,” Der Spiegel 50 (12 December), 1956. A trenchant analysis of
that piece and its use of race and gender codes is Poiger, Jazz Rock and Rebels,
170–71.
21 Comp. Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture,
(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010), which sees the proliferation of
jukeboxes in Britain as an end-run around the BBC’s refusal to play rock ‘n’ roll.
22 Rüdiger Bloemeke, Roll Over Beethoven: Wie der Rock‘n’Roll nach Deutschland
kam (St. Andrä-Worden: Hannibal, 1996), 13–20, 37–38; Peter Zimmermann,
“Aufwachsen mit Rockmusik--Rockgeschichte und Sozialisation,” in
Ulf Preuss-Lausitz (Hg.), Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder: zur
Sozialisationsgeschichte seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Weinheim, Basel: Beltz, 3rd
edn. 1991), 107–13. In East Germany, the ruling party demonized rock ‘n’ roll,
thus it had no presence on state media except in negative reports about the West.
Notes 199
But it did seep across the border via western radio and developed an underground
following; Timothy W. Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford, 1990), 19–34.
23 Poiger, Jazz Rock and Rebels, 168–85.
24 Thomas Grotum, Die Halbstarken: Zur Geschichte einer Jugendkultur der 50er Jahre
(Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1994), 77–144; Günther Kaiser, Randalierende Jugend:
Eine soziologische und kriminologische Studie über die sogenannten ‘Halbstarken’
(Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer, 1959), 175–78. Kaiser’s text is an example of the
German conflation of rock ‘n’ roll and “jazz.”
25 “Saat der Gewalt,” Der Spiegel 45 (5 November), 1958.
26 Hamburg show described in Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 65–66; “Saat der
Gewalt” on promoter Kurt Collien, who happened to be the scion of one of St.
Pauli’s venerable theater-owning families. The riots also made for Cold War fodder,
as seen in an East German piece depicting rock ‘n’ roll as a US weapon of youth
indoctrination: “Bill Haley und NATO,” Neues Deutschland, October 31, 1958.
27 Hanau developed a particularly lively scene: see 2002 documentary by Daniel
Siebert, Hanau a Go-Go; Monica Bielesch, “Multikulti im Sündenpfuhl,”
Frankfurter Rundschau, January 20, 2009; Rainer Schulze, “Helmut Wenskes
drei Leben zwischen Rock‘n’Roll und Malerei,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
November 18, 2004; Hans-Jürgen Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over: Die Beatmusik in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1963-1967 (Düsseldorf: High Castle, 2001), 27. An
account of GIs in Gelnhausen who formed a rock band is Thomas Edward Shaw
and Anita Klemke, Black Monk Time (Carson City, NV: Carson Street Publishing,
1993). On GI bars generally see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, 85–125.
28 Fascher names the Semmelhack bar off the Reeperbahn in Let the Good Times Roll,
85. See also Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 84; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 70-1; Thomas Ziehe, “Die alltägliche Verteidigung der Korrektheit,” in Willi
Bucher (Hg.), Schock und Schöpfung: Jugendästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart:
Deutscher Werkbund, 1986), 252–57; Rüdiger Articus, Die Beatles in Harburg
(Hamburg: Christians, 1996), 13–19. On the Dom see Knut Hartmann’s memoir,
Maschine Mühle Malesche: Rock Around the Clock (Norderstedt: Books on Demand
GmbH, 2002), 109–10.
29 Bloemeke, Roll Over Beethoven, 41.
30 Ibid., 17. See also Zimmermann, “Aufwachsen mit Rockmusik,” 111–12.
31 In 1950 there were 15 cars per 1,000 Hamburg residents, in 1960 95; Axel Schildt,
“Hamburg: Versuch einer zweiten Moderne,” in Klaus von Beyme and Hans Berger
(Hg.), Neue Städte aus Ruine: deutscher Städtebau der Nachkriegszeit (München:
Prestel, 1992), 95. Bartels now owned nearly all properties on the east side of the
Grosse Freiheit’s busiest block; listings in Hamburger Adressbuch from 1961, as well
as Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 28.
200 Notes
32 It closed in January 1961. See StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92-

15/7. Jugendschutztrupp report in StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehorde II, Abl.
16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1, Bericht uber die Streife Nr. 179 am 15.10.1961.
Mörschel diverted some of the stolen funds into the New Orleans; he was
eventually sentenced to nine months in jail.
33 Advertisement in Hamburger Anzieger, September 26, 1953 (in FZH archive, Nr.
322: Hamburg Stadtteil Geschichte). On its Swing era see Julia Braune, “Swing
gegen den Gleichschritt,” Szene Hamburg Geschichte 2014, at https://www.torial.
com/en/julia.braune/portfolio/47630 (accessed February 16, 2016).
34 The German term was “Sittenfilm.” This establishment at Paul-Roosen-Strasse
33 dates to 1908 as a dance hall and “Saalkino,” a space without fixed seating
where early motion pictures were projected. In the 1930s, it was Seidel’s Club and
Ballhaus. Damaged during the war, it later reopened as the Luna, then the Bambi
Kino; Töteberg and Reissmann, Mach Dir ein paar schöne Stunden, 255. Operating
licenses in StaHH Gewerbekartei K3975.
35 On the Indorockers, see Lutgard Mutsaers, “Indorock: An Early Eurorock Style,”
Popular Music 9:3 (October 1990), 307–20; George Lipsitz, American Studies in a
Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 313.
36 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 72, 86; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound,
104; Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt,
1997), 61; Ulf Krüger, Star Club: Der bekannteste Beat-Club der Welt (Höfen:
Hannibal, 2010), 31.
37 Phrase from Waine, “Docker Adenoid’s Gastarbeiter.”
38 “Tony, Peter, Rick & Colin,” Star Club News 2000 (Bremen: Kultur-Buch, 2000);
“The Beatleg Project: The Jets, The Beatles and Hamburg,” www.bootlegzone.com
(accessed December 10, 2015).
39 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 72. This version is widely invoked in popular
sources, though Fascher’s memoir fudges the issue (Let the Good Times Roll, 85).
See also Inglis, Beatles in Hamburg, 19.
40 Sheridan quoted in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 57.
41 Miller, St. Pauli, 33.
42 Accounts in Pete Best and Patrick Doncastle, Beatle! The Pete Best Story (London:
Plexus, 1985), 31; “Tony, Peter, Rick and Colin.”
43 Williams’ version of events in Allan Williams and William Marshall, The Man Who
Gave The Beatles Away (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 100–61. See also Rehwagen
and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 72–73; Miles, Paul McCartney, 58. Jürgen Vollmer
called the Indra “a dump that couldn’t be saved even with an English rock group”;
Rock‘n’Roll Times: The Style and Spirit of the Early Beatles and Their First Fans (New
York: Overlook Press, 1983), n.p.
44 For example, the fully tattooed pimp “Tattoo-Theo”; Feige, Tattoo-Theo, 119.
Notes 201
45 Accounts in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 38, 97, 121. See also Miles, Paul
McCartney, 62.
46 An account of “mak show” in Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, John
Lennon: For the Record (New York: Bantam, 1984), 83–88.
47 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 96.
48 Hardy argues he paid well enough for John Lennon to be able to buy his first
Rickenbacker guitar (“Beatleg Project”). Waiter Fred Fascher wryly notes that
on Byrne’s birthday Koschmider gave them four bottles of sparkling wine and
a thirty-five-minute break instead of thirty (Mach Schau! 71)! Stuart Sutcliffe
called him a “cold fish” but a wily businessman; Pauline Sutcliffe, The Beatles’
Shadow: Stuart Sutcliffe and His Lonely Hearts Club (London: Sidgwick &
Jackson, 2001), 87.
49 Writer Alan Clayson describes his physicality this way: “Almost as broad as he
was long . . . . No neck, a button nose, bushy eyebrows and lavishly whorled hair
punctuated a countenance like a bag of marshmallow” (Hamburg Cradle, 56).
Koschmider’s English was poor and he relied on Fascher to translate for him.
50 This is the infamous (in Beatle lore) incident in which Best and McCartney, after
being hired away by another club, snuck into the Bambi Kino to recover their
belongings. Some accounts say that in the dark room, they lit up an object—a scrap
of cloth? a condom?—so they could see; others say they nailed a condom to the
wall and set it on fire as an intentional act of vandalism. Either way, they spent the
night in Davidwoche police station and their work permits were revoked, ending
their first stint in Hamburg; the charges were later dismissed. Accounts in Hunter
Davies, The Beatles (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 87; Best and Doncastle, Beatle!
68; Lewisohn, Tune In, 384–85.
51 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 44, 96.
52 The Kaiserkeller’s first iteration closed in January 1962; the name was revived in
1985 for a rock venue at the same site that still exists.
53 Bartels, in contrast, expressed socialist sympathies; no evidence suggests he did
more than the minimum to comply with Nazi authorities. See Ben Witter, “Der
Millionär,” Die Zeit, April 5, 1968.
54 Details in StaHH 324-1 Baupolizei, K515 and Feuerkasse IIId / A28022. The small
bar was called in 1930 the Hippo-Klause; by 1962 it was the Casanova, offering
striptease and managed by C. Kasten (ad in Hamburg Vorschau, July 1962). Else,
the family matriarch, lived on the property into the 1960s.
55 A portrait of the last days of St. Pauli’s hippodromes in Günther, Hamburg bei
Nacht, 104, 193.
56 Studio X was on the top floor of Grosse Freiheit 36. Fascher arranged this gig for
Sheridan, and the Beatles camped out there to watch him play during breaks at the
Kaiserkeller.
202 Notes
57 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 41–44, 73; “Tony, Peter, Rick and Colin”;
Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 89–92; Krüger, Beatles Guide to Hamburg, 31.
58 The Beatles’ unbilled jam session breached their contract with Koschmider and
precipitated the events described in note 50.
59 Cynthia Lennon, John (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 69. Ansin in Krüger
and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 86–89. Tourism figures in Amenda and Grünen, Tor
zur Welt, 107. See also “Ein Abend in Hamburg zu zweit zwischen 2 und 100
Mark,” twen, March 1965; W. Stahl and D. Wien, Hamburg von 7 bis 7 (Hamburg:
Seehafen Verlag Erik Blumenfeld, 1966), 265–66.
60 This was the “My Bonnie” session, on which they were billed as the Beat Brothers;
Articus, Beatles in Harburg, 114f. Eckhorn also began taping shows at the club and
in 1965 installed a recording studio on the premises. He signed a deal with Decca/
Teldec to distribute recordings.
61 Impressions of Eckhorn in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 45; Sutcliffe,
Beatles’ Shadow, 121; Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 86; Andy Babiuk, Beatles Gear:
All The Fab Four’s Instruments, from Stage to Studio (New York: Hal Leonard Corp.
2002), 39–44; 2001 interview with Roy Young, Ottawa Beatles site [beatles.ncf.ca]
62 Lennon, John, 69.
63 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 41, 134; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 100.
64 In 1961 Gerd Mingram was sent by the labor publication Einigkeit to photograph
the scene: his images of the Beatles on stage also captured underworld boss
Wilfried Schulz and his entourage; Günter Zint, Zintstoff: 50 Jahre Deutsche
Geschichte. Fotos von Günter Zint (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007), 104. See also David
Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History (New York, Hyperion,
1998), 43; McCabe and Schonfeld, John Lennon: For the Record, 83–88.
65 Impressions of Eckhorn in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 42, 75; Miles,
Paul McCartney, 74; Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 61, 82–85; Fascher, Let the Good
Times Roll, 101. Fascher (p. 94) also notes that jukeboxes then weren’t very loud,
thus live bands were the only way for the club to provide “loud and proper” music
for dancing.
66 He died of kidney failure, likely related to amphetamine abuse. Christa Eckhorn
kept the club open, though business suffered in part due to subway construction
outside its front door; it closed in April 1980 and was eventually sold. See “Er
prägte die Musik-Szene,” Hamburger Abendblatt, May 25, 1978; “Wiedergeburt in
Lila,” Hamburger Abendblatt, July 15, 1978; StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt HH-Mitte,
Abl. 2004/01 Nr. 59.
67 See Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 32–86; Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 114. See
also David Caldwell, “Horst Fascher and Germany’s Lifeline to International
Culture,” http://www.unomaha.edu/esc/2006Proceedings/Caldwell_Fascher.pdf
Notes 203
68 Ironically, “Der Lachende Vagabund” was also the name of a 1958 Schlager sung by
Conny Froboess.
69 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 17–18.
70 List of his holdings as of December 1962 in StaHH, 442-1 Steuerakten Bezirksamt
HH-Mitte, 95.92 – 15.9 Bd. 1, December 17, 1962 memo by Pönisch. Biographical
details in Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 212f; Günter Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39:
Vom Beat zum Bums, vom Star-Club zum Salambo (München: Heyne, 1987), 27.
Weissleder’s first club, upstairs at the Tabu, was in a building owned by Willi Bartels.
71 Frank Mort describes a similar phenomenon in Soho in “Striptease: The Erotic
Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-twentieth-century London,”
Social History 32:1 (February 2007), 43.
72 A landmark in this regard was 1956’s . . . And God Created Woman, in which
Brigitte Bardot performed the first striptease in a mainstream film; Jarrett,
Stripping in Time, 178.
73 Manfred Schmidt, “Strip-Strip-Hurra!” Quick 43 (27 October), 1963. See also
Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys.”
74 Comp. Elizabeth Fraterrigo, “The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy’s Urban Lifestyle,”
Journal of Urban History 34:5 (July 2008), 747–74.
75 This began a long partnership; interview with Ross in Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg
Sound, 56-61. Ross became known as the “Reubens of the Reeperbahn” for his
murals of voluptuous women commissioned by sex-themed businesses. These
came to dominate the street-level face of St. Pauli; local activists are now working
to preserve them from gentrification and the effects of weather.
76 “Nur mit einem Lächeln bekleidet—Erotikfilm auf St. Pauli,” BILD, 28 July 1960.
77 Memo from Bezirkswirtschaft to Weissleder, June 9, 1958, details what the club was
allowed to show (in StaHH, 442–1 Steuerakten Bezirksamt HH-Mitte, 95.92 – 15/8).
On the proliferation of Sittenfilme see Kluender, “Sittenbild in St. Pauli”; memos in
StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II Abl. 2/40/71—Unzüchtige Bilder 1953–62.
79 In StaHH 442-1 Steuerakten Bezirksamt HH-Mitte, 95.92 – 15/8.
80 For example, he painstakingly rebutted an article that claimed he distributed
pornography and that his dancers appeared fully nude, accusing the writer of
impugning the morals of his employees and insisting that “my business is exactly
as clean and correct as any other in the general economy”; Weissleder to Wolfgang
Wehner, letter of December 1, 1958, in Sammlung Zint, Star Club files 2.
81 In this regard, he resembled erotica entrepreneur Beate Uhse, subject of
Heineman’s Before Porn Was Legal.
82 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 50–59; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau!
76, 148. Home address listed in 1963 city directory. He bought himself a new car
each year, such as a 1958 Mercedes 190D and a 1960 Chevrolet Impala; receipts in
Sammlung Zint, Star Club files 2; see also Krüger, Star Club, 46.
204 Notes
83 Building’s history in Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 9–24; Bender, Swing unterm
Hakenkreuz, 67; Braune, “Swing gegen den Gleichschritt”; Töteberg and
Reissmann, Mach Dir ein paar schöne Stunden, 112, 259. On Westerns see Uta G.
Poiger, “A New, ‘Western’ Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s,”
Signs 24:1 (Autumn 1998), 148.
84 Deaths occurred mainly in Wilhelmsburg on the Elbe’s south bank, though high
water reached spots downtown; St. Pauli was relatively unscathed. See Hans Bütow,
Die grosse Flut in Hamburg: Eine Chronik der Katastrophe vom Februar 1962
(Hamburg: Hamburg Schulbehörde, c. 1962).
85 Attendance figures from tax documents in StaHH 442-1 Steuerakten Bezirksamt
HH-Mitte, 95.92 – 15.9, Bd. 1. Visitors came and went throughout the evening (the
club could not hold 4,000 people at one time). See also Fascher, Let the Good Times
Roll, 103–08; Dieter Beckmann and Klaus Martens, Star-Club (Reinbek: Rowohlt,
1980), 132–39; Grobecker and Müller, Stadt im Umbruch, 151.
86 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 118. This could only have been possible in
St. Pauli, where business was augmented by walk-ins and night owls on a non-
residential block where they could make noise at will.
87 He told Der Spiegel he had never danced the Twist: Peter Brügge, “Wer twistet wird
gestempelt,” Der Spiegel 6 (6 February), 1963.
88 The Star Club revived Vincent’s career in particular; he played sixty dates there
1962–65, to the delight of fans like Lennon; Julia Sneeringer, “John Lennon,
Autograph Hound: The Fan-Musician Community in Hamburg’s Early Rock &
Roll Scene, 1960-65,” Transformative Works and Cultures, March 2011, http://
journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/228; see also Musik-
Parade to Weissleder, June 27, 1962, in Sammlung Zint, Star Club files 2. Everlys
reference in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 182. Only Elvis got away because manager
Colonel Parker’s demands were too outrageous (a $50,000 fee just for himself!);
Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 193–96.
89 On Charles’ concert see “Ray war in Hochform,” Hamburger Morgenpost, May
13, 1963; Werner Burkhardt, “Ray Charles reisst sie alle mit,” Die Welt, May 13,
1963; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 147; Fascher, Let the Good Times
Roll, 176–78. For early general articles on the Star Club see Werner Sillescu, “Der
Krawall ist harmlos und findet jetzt im Saale statt,” Hamburger Abendblatt, May 29,
1963; “Wer twistet wird gestempelt.”
90 Siegfried emphasizes this as key to the Star Club’s role as transmitter of subcultural
impulses into the mainstream: Sound der Revolte, 132, and Time Is On My Side,
209–10.
91 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 142–43. The agent was Henri Henroid.
92 Berry incident in Ibid., 192. See also Krüger, Star Club, 46, 129; Mary McGlory
interview with Spencer Leigh, BBC Radio Merseyside, May 2011, http://
www.4shared.com/audio/2BI056HL/Talking_with_Mary_McGlory_of_t.html.
Notes 205
Albert Goldman’s error-ridden Lennon biography caricatures Weissleder as “a

crop-headed Starker who looked and acted like a sergeant in the SS”; The Lives of
John Lennon (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 119.
93 Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 30–38; Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 229. StaHH 442-1
Bezirksmat Hamburg-Mitte 95.92-15/9 Bd. 3 contains many articles on these
plans, such as “Star Clubs bald in 20 Städten?” Welt am Sonntag, August 2, 1964;
“Weissleder hat grosse Pläne,” Welt am Abend, August 31, 1964; “Star Radio ab
Dezember?” Hamburger Morgenpost, November 19, 1964. These will be discussed
in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4.
94 A claim Inglis makes about him, as well as Eckhorn and Koschmider, in Beatles
in Hamburg, 20. Counter views of Weissleder as “progressive” in Krüger and Pelc,
Hamburg Sound, 50; Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 214.
95 Lennon, John, 85; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 34, 42, 138; Krüger and
Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 91.
96 Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 24–26. On generation see Siegfried, Time Is On My Side,
213; Sarah Thornton, “The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital,” in Gelder and
Thornton, Subcultures Reader, 206. Nazi reference in Fascher, Let the Good Times
Roll, 209.
97 On the Ahoi-Kino (1919–63) see Töteberg and Reißmann, Mach Dir ein
paar schöne Stunden, 258. It would later become the hippie discotheque
Grünspan. Building history in Jan Freitag, “Gruenspan: Krautrockschuppen im
Gründerzeitglanz,” Die Zeit, October 14, 2014.
98 Menke documents in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksmat Hamburg-Mitte 95.92-15/6 Bd.
1, esp. October 3, 1957 Kontrollbericht on opening of “Existentialist cellar”
Hummelkoje (it closed April 1963). Its Beat club opened in October 1964: “Zwei
neue Twist-Schuppen,” Hamburger Morgenpost, October 2, 1964. Braune notes that
Menke also offered jazz during the 1940s in “Swing gegen den Gleichschritt.”
99 Comp. Mort, Capital Affairs; Walkolwitz, Nights Out; Nasaw, Going Out; Luc Sante,
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage, 1992).
100 Müller, “Analysing Musical Culture,” 852.
101 See Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 277–78; David Chaney, Cultural Change and
Everyday Life (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 146–47.
102 Siegfried, Sound der Revolte, 57; Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy,” 428.
103 Krüger and Pelc write that the media “dozed through” club openings after
1959, even the Star Club’s; Hamburg Sound, 195. Beat music had no presence in
Hamburg guides or promotional publications like Hamburger Blätter or Hamburg
Vorschau, where the music scene registered as “jazz” even through Beatlemania
year 1964. See also Beckmann and Martens, Star-Club, 132.
104 “Not Germany” from Tony Sheridan, “40 Jahre Beat auf dem Kiez,” Star-Club News
2000; fist and the knife from Beckmann and Martens, Star-Club, 132.
105 “Crucible” from Detlef Siegfried, quoted in Horn, Spirit of ’68, 33.
206 Notes
Chapter 3
1 These critiques will be discussed in Chapter 4.

2 Compare Sarah Thornton, “Social Logic of Subcultural Capital,” 200–09; Peter
Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular
Culture,” in Simon Frith (ed.), Popular Music: Music and Society, Volume 1
(London: Routledge, 2004), 15–42.
3 A classic example is anthropologist Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians: Music-
Making in an English Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Gildart makes the case for studying musicians through the lens of social history in
his Images of England, 2–3.
4 Howard Becker, “The Culture of a Deviant Group: The ‘Jazz’ Musician [1963],” in
Gelder and Thornton, Subcultures Reader, 55–65.
6 Marwick, The Sixties, 11. Music surpassing film from Maase, Grenzenloses
Vergnügen, 258.
7 Henri Murger described this idea of “urban zones” already in his 1840 Scenes de la
vie de Boheme: in Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York:
Viking, 2007), 14.
8 See Marwick, The Sixties, 13; Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 129f. on Hamburg’s
role as West Germany’s media capital, which allowed subcultural impulses there to
enter the national media.
9 Bargstedt, Musik zwischen Wirtschaft, Medien und Kultur, 35–36.
10 Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes
in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies 5:3 (1991), 368–88.
11 Cohen, “Scenes,” 239–42; Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, 35.
12 On generational history see Philip Jost Janssen, Jugendforschung in der frühen
Bundesrepublik: Diskurse und Umfragen (Köln: Historical Social Research/
Historische Sozialforschung, 2010), 10–57.
13 Key contributions to this literature include Heide Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger
(eds.), Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in
West Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn, 2000); Reiner Pommerin (ed.),
The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence: Berghahn, 1997);
Axel Schildt, “Beyond the 60’s—Finally Arrived in the West? Notes on the
Americanization of Culture in West Germany,” German Historical Institute
conference papers (1999), http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/p/2005/ghi_12/
www.ghi-dc.org/conpotweb/westernpapers/schildt.pdf; Mueller, German Pop
Culture.
14 A representative sample, the Star Club Programm-Vorschau, lists all acts, home
city and number of days played April 13 to August 31, 1962. While most acts came
Notes 207
from London, Liverpool (one-tenth London’s size) provided nearly as many. In

StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92-15/9, Bd. 9.
15 A Scouser is a person from Liverpool who speaks Scouse dialect. They may also
eat a dish called scouse—whose name, interestingly, derives from Labskaus, a
traditional Hamburg dish of meat and potato hash. The Star Club housed the
Liverpool contingent while the Top Ten became a redoubt for acts from other cities
and Scotland.
16 See descriptions in Daniel Farson’s 1963 television documentary, Beat City (dir.
Charles Squires, GB. Associated Rediffusion Television); Cohen, Decline, Renewal
and the City, 10–32; Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora, Utopia and the Critique of Capitalism
[1987],” in Gelder and Thornton, Subcultures Reader, 340–49; Andrew Lees, The
Hurricane Port: A Social History of Liverpool (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2011),
23–52.
17 See images in Colin Wilkinson, Picture Post On Liverpool (Liverpool: Bluecoat
Press, 2011); Lees, Hurricane Port, 123–25.
18 Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 38; Michael
Brocken, Other Voices: The Hidden Histories of Liverpool’s Music Scenes 1930-
1976 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 31. Liverpool’s recovery collapsed with
deindustrialization in the 1970s.
19 Burtonwood was a key US base during the Second World War and serviced planes
used in the Berlin Airlift. After 1965 the United States scaled back its presence and
closed the base in 1993.
20 Aldon P. Ferguson, Royal Air Force Burtonwood (Reading, UK: Airfield
Publications, 1990).
21 Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, 31. See also oral histories collected in Pamela
Russell, Liverpool’s Children in the 1950s (Stroud: The History Press, 2012), 126.
A skeptical take on the Cunard Yanks’ influence is Brocken, Other Voices, 29–30.
22 Brocken notes that American music had been popular in Liverpool since the 1800s
and traces the growth of its jazz scene since the early twentieth century; Other
Voices, 55–60.
23 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the
Fifties and Sixties (Boston: Gambit, 1970), 159. Children of the early 1950s would
have been well acquainted with rationing: sugar rationing only ended in 1953,
meat in 1954. Impressions in Russell, Liverpool’s Children, 24–29.
24 Ian Whitcomb, Rock Odyssey: A Musician’s Chronicle of the Sixties (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1983), 11–12.
25 The BBC’s light programme, in contrast, restricted the playing of records in order
to provide work for British musicians. Any records they did spin were more likely
to be UK covers of US hits in order to promote British production; Brocken, Other
Voices, 136, 218–19.
208 Notes
26 The Six-Five Special was conceived of by Ernest Borneman, a refugee from Nazism
who also went on to invent West Germany’s first TV show for rock music, Beat-
Club, in 1965; Detlef Siegfried, Moderne Lüste. Ernest Borneman—Jazzkritiker,
Filmemacher, Sexforscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), esp. 117–20. Memories of
early rock and roll in Russell, Liverpool’s Children, 112–23.
27 “Schlocky-wet” from Whitcomb, Rock Odyssey, 17.
28 Brocken, Other Voices, 20. See also Billy Bragg, “Go Lonnie Go,” The Guardian, 20
June 2004.
29 Bill Harry of Mersey Beat insists the art school nexus has been overplayed and that
most bands were working class. See Gildart, Images of England, 74–76.
30 Brocken, Other Voices, 31, 65–75, 136–37; Russell, Liverpool’s Children, 125;
Marwick, The Sixties, 69. On art schools as seedbeds of rock culture in Britain see
Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art Into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987).
31 Colorful, embellished versions of these events in Williams, The Man Who Gave The
Beatles Away. Brocken argues that Liverpool contained several mini scenes divided
between north and south, and only appears as a coherent whole in retrospect
(Other Voices, 84–91).
32 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 111. Hines founded the Jets and later became
the Star Club’s stage manager.
33 “Thirty-six hours of discomfort, disappointment and frustration, enlivened
occasionally by a few laughs, a song or two and a touch of carnival”: Best and
Doncastle, Beatle! 31.
34 Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won (New York: Routledge, 2007), 66.
35 Lennon, John, 69. Cynthia Powell Lennon was John’s girlfriend and later first wife.
36 Interview with the author. The only Beatle to have been abroad before was
Harrison, who had relatives in Ireland. See Marwick, The Sixties, 59, on British
youths’ lack of geographic mobility.
37 Sue Miles, a Los Angelino who moved to England in 1961, states, “a more grey and
dreary place you’d never seen”; in Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the
English Underground, 1961-71 (London: Pimlico, 1998), 23. See also Whitcomb,
Rock Odyssey, 3ff.
38 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 112–13. See also Kemp interview; Lewisohn,
Tune In, 576; Lennon, John, 69.
39 Quoted in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 51; see also Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 39. Herzog deflates the myth of Nazi sexual repressiveness in her Sex After
Fascism, 10–63.
40 Lewisohn, Tune In, 411, 604.
41 On Black see Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 126; Lewisohn, Tune In (p. 593) notes
she was also forbidden to tour US bases in France with the Hurricanes. On
Marsden see Joe Flannery with Mike Brocken, Standing in the Wings: The Beatles,
Notes 209
Brian Epstein, and Me (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2013), 198–200. See also
Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul
(London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 94–95.
42 On age and parental control see Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin,
1970), 38.
43 Best and Doncastle, Beatle! 29. She herself had a child out of wedlock around this
time with one of her son’s friends, Neil Aspinall. The pragmatic turn in British
sexual attitudes since the 1940s is discussed in Weeks, World We Have Won, 34–55.
44 See Alan Clayson, Beat Merchants: The Origins, History, Impact, and Rock Legacy
of the 1960s British Pop Groups (London: Blandford, 1995), 80; Brocken, Other
Voices, 81; Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, 21; Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow,
16, 26; Gibson interview; Young interview; Stefanie Lohaus, “51 Jahre später—die
Liverbirds sind zurück!” Missy, October 2, 2010.
45 £2.50, minus Williams’ ten percent commission. See Miles, Paul McCartney,
57; Brian Epstein, A Cellarful of Noise (New York: Pocket Books, 1998 ed. [orig.
1967]), 103. Lewisohn details their wages across all Hamburg stints in Tune In, 531,
549, 753.
46 Based on an average monthly income of 975DM for a family of four in 1963;
figure from Robert P. Stephens, “Drugs, Consumption, and Internationalization
in Hamburg, 1960-1968,” in David F. Crew, Consuming Germany in the Cold War
(New York: Berg, 2003), 181. See also Miles, Paul McCartney, 74.
47 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 112; see also Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 65.
48 While jukeboxes were common by this time, they couldn’t play loud enough to fill
a club with sound, hence the continued reliance on live musicians. Advancements
in sound technology would change this by the late 1960s.
49 See Alan Clayson, Beat Merchants, 78–79; Kemp interview; Pritchard and Lysaght,
The Beatles, 44; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 46; Fascher, Let the Good Times
Roll, 102. Eckhorn, who found the British bands “very industrious,” provided them
Preludin; Die Beatles – Damals in Hamburg.
50 Compare the mid-1960s friendship between the Pretty Things (a London band
also popular in Hamburg) with the Kray brothers, kings of the Soho underworld.
Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 122.
51 Compare Pete Townshend, who became famous for smashing guitars; Who I
Am (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 72. Townshend was born in post-Blitz
London in May 1945 and suffered sexual abuse as a boy.
52 This has led to claims that he was the first to smash a guitar onstage, not
Townshend. His flashes of violence landed him in court on several occasions. See
“St. Pauli-Prozess: Tony Sheridan sorgt für Heiterkeit,” Hamburger Abendblatt,
April 23, 1965; “Seit heute morgen neuer St.-Pauli-Prozess,” Hamburger Abendblatt,
April 22, 1965; Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 115.
210 Notes
53 On violence see Kemp interview; Lewisohn, Tune In, 303; Clayson, Hamburg
Cradle, 113–21; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 59, 118–19; Fascher, Let the
Good Times Roll, 97. On Koschmider see Best and Doncastle, Beatle! 71.
54 Young interview. Taylor told me he once admired a leather jacket Weissleder was
wearing—Weissleder gave it to him on the spot. He also gave Young, the Star
Club’s house engineer and keyboardist, a Ford Taunus and a piano with his name
emblazoned on it. Similar comments from other employees in Rehwagen and
Schmidt, Mach Schau! 138–40.
55 Cavanagh was an American soldier who ended up singing with several bands at
the Top Ten and Star Club in the early 1960s. Few details about him exist outside of
references to him from musicians like Sheridan (see Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 63);
fan reminiscences have an unfortunate tendency to refer to him as “Neger Tony”
(example in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 133). Liverpooler Derry Wilkie
of the Seniors had an African father and a Welsh-Jewish mother; Cohen, Decline,
21. Dennis Busby, manager of the strip club Salome, often invited the Beatles
for drinks; he later became a renowned jazz club owner. From 1963 to 1966,
Indonesian Jonky Pelupessy drummed with Mama Betty’s Band; Articus, Beatles in
Harburg, 89.
56 Taylor interview; Young interview; Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 98; Rehwagen
and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 38, 90, 101; Best and Doncastle, Beatle! 51. This did
not preclude musicians from remaining connected to their biological families.
“Family” seems to have been an important value for Liverpoolers in particular.
57 Contemporary German takes on Beat music stressed its “spirit of Eros”; Jürgen
Seuss, Gerold Dommermuth’, and Hans Maier, Beat in Liverpool (Frankfurt
a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965), 37; Dieter Baacke, Beat–Die sprachlose
Opposition (Munich: Juventa, 1968), 80f.
58 Lennon, John, 12. National service ended in 1960. Ironically, being in a touring band
had much in common with military service: travel, adventure, and “life experience”;
Jon Savage, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (London: faber & faber, 2016), 11.
59 Kemp interview.
60 In the early 1960s Britain had a million more single persons between the ages
of 15 to 24 than a decade earlier. See Weeks, World We Have Won, 66; Marwick,
The Sixties, 61. Mark Abrams wrote in 1959, “teenagers more than any other
section of the community are looking for goods and services which are highly
charged emotionally”; in David Buckingham, “Selling Youth: The Paradoxical
Empowerment of the Young Consumer,” in David Buckingham, Sara Bragg, and
Mary Jane Kehily (eds.), Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 202–21.
61 Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Reproduction
1800-1975 (New York: Oxford, 2004), 244–64; Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and
Notes 211
Marriage in Britain 1918-60 (New York: Oxford, 2006), 193f. On the US compare
Fraterrigo, “Answer to Suburbia.”
62 Green, Days in the Life, 32.
63 “Cloak” from Whitcomb, Rock Odyssey, 104. See also Marwick, The Sixties, 74–76;
Peter Kuhnert and Ute Ackermann, “Jenseits von Lust und Liebe? Jugendsexualität
in den 50er Jahren,” in Krüger, Elvis-Tolle, 64.
64 McCartney called sex with strippers “members of the entertainment business
getting together for social reasons” (Miles, Paul McCartney, 71). See also
Beckmann and Martens, Star-Club, excerpt at http://www.rockarchiv.infopartisan.
net/starclub/sc03.html (accessed July 13, 2017).
65 Examples in Best and Doncastle, Beatle! 53–56; Young interview; Lewisohn, Tune
In, 432, 620; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll (an unrelenting compendium of
sexual exploits). The Kuppeleiparagraph (“pimping” statute) forbade the facilitation
of “immoral” activity (Unzucht) among persons under twenty-one, punishable
by up to five years in jail. Upheld by the constitutional court in 1954 (and only
reformed in 1972), it could be applied by police at will to unmarried couples in any
setting, which is why club owners tried to stop bands from having female guests
in their quarters; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 116. See also Freund-Widder,
Frauen unter Kontrolle, 253; Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal, 42; Eva-Marie
Silies, Liebe, Lust und Last. Die Pille als weibliche Generationserfahrung in der
Bundesrepublik 1960-1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 52.
67 Silies, Liebe, Lust und Last, 14.
68 This explains the low rates of illegitimacy. The Pill came on the West German
market in 1961 but was only distributed to married women before mid-decade
(only 6–8 percent of university students surveyed by Hans Giese in 1966 used it;
Hans Giese and Gunther Schmidt, Studentensexualität: Verhalten und Einstellung
[Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1968]). See also Silies, Liebe, Lust und Last, 51-61; Frevert,
“Umbruch der Geschlechterverhältnisse? Die 60er Jahre als geschlechterpolitiscer
Experimentierraum,” in Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Christoph Lammers
(eds.), Dynamische Zeiten. Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Staaten (Hamburg:
Christians, 2003), 654; Herzog, Sex After Fascism, 124f.; Noelle-Naumann, The
Germans, 66. West Germany saw some one million illegal abortions at this time.
69 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 80.
70 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 40–47; Howard Sounes, Fab: An Intimate
Life of Paul McCartney (New York: Da Capo, 2010), 73; Miles, Paul McCartney, 71;
Lennon, John, 69; Lewisohn, Tune In, 358.
71 Hamburg’s reputation for tolerance attracted transvestites, who often ended up
working as prostitutes or Animierdamen in this corner of St. Pauli. A crackdown
on dishonest businesses (Nepplokale) bought them under intensified police
212 Notes
surveillance and persecution in the early 1960s as heterosexual male tourists

complained about the “deception” of men posing as women. See Rosenkranz,
Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, 130–32. Fascher enjoyed “fooling” visiting musicians
with transgender men who’d had hormone treatments but still had male genitals;
Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 47.
73 I have not found other sources to corroborate Fascher’s story. Fascher writes of
his own willingness to be fellated by Little Richard, which did not compromise his
heterosexual self-image because he retained the “masculine” position (he was also
clearly star-struck); Let the Good Times Roll, 155, 157–63.
74 Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 128. The Roxa also appears in sources as the Roxi.
75 This ran along generational lines. Young gays and lesbians in the 1960s tended
to prefer rock and Beat to the Schlager often played at gay bars (Rosenkranz,
Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, 193). On music and the gay bar landscape see
Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 157–63.
76 Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 80–81. Lewisohn writes that the bisexuality of poet
Royston Ellis, who ran in the same Liverpool art circles, was an “eye-opener” for
them; Tune In, 329.
77 On St. Pauli and tolerance see Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys.”
78 All of the Beatles, for example, were treated for sexually transmitted disease in
Hamburg, which they likely caught from fans, not sex workers; Sounes, Fab, 64.
Men’s memoirs discuss sex as purely genital and penetrative; as Mike Warner of
the New Stars put it, “I just wanted to fuck as many girls as possible” (in Klitsch,
Shakin’ All Over, 64).
79 This “simultaneity of the unsimultaneous” was characteristic of the early 1960s
“Sex Wave,” a time of growing media attention to issues like teen marriage and
abortion, as well as an increase in “sexy” advertising content, even if full nudity was
still taboo. See Sibylle Steinbacher, Wie der Sex nach Deutschland kam (München:
Siedler, 2011), 295–316; Heineman, Before Porn was Legal, 14f, 102–05.
80 Lennon stated it was in Hamburg that they began to “make our own music”;
“Schräge Musik Made in Hamburg,” Hamburger Abendblatt, November 11, 1963.
On the effects of their Hamburg style in Liverpool see Lewisohn, Tune In, 584–85.
81 Emulation took the form of haircuts, clothes, and forming bands. In Liverpool,
the Beatles’ success after 1963 led many to view Beat music as a vehicle of social
advancement; see Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 24–25; Jürgen Holtkamp, “In Liverpool
ist jeder Beatle,” konkret 6 (June) 1964. On Adorno’s dismissal of the Beatles as a
manifestation of a “dirigistic mass culture” see Baacke, Beat, 46–48. Of the “Mersey
sound” identified with the British Invasion of 1964, Taylor called it “really the
Hamburg sound,” brought back to Britain “after being polished in Germany”;
Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 17.
Notes 213
82 Material evidence of musicality and class status can be seen, for example, at
McCartney’s childhood home on Forthlin Road, now restored as a historic site.
Its parlor was decorated with mismatched strips of wallpaper and a rug made of
carpet remnants—signs of lower middle-class frugality. Also prominent are an
upright piano and a bakelite phonograph. Lennon lived in suburbia with his Aunt
Mimi, who distanced herself from working-class culture and did not encourage
John’s musical interests; it was his free-spirited mother Julia (a fan of jitterbug and
rock ‘n’ roll) who first taught him chords on the banjo and ukulele.
83 On Afro-Americanophilia broadly see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface
Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1995); Thaddeus
Russell, A Renegade History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 2011),
40–41. For Germany see Moritz Ege, Schwarz werden: “Afroamerikanophilie”
in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), esp. 156–57;
Detlef Siegfried, “White Negroes: The Fascination of the Authentic in the West
German Counterculture of the 1960s,” in Belinda Davis, Wilfried Mausbach, and
Martin Klimke (eds.), Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest
and Collective Identities in West Germany and the US in the 1960s and 1970s
(New York: Berghahn, 2010), 191–214. On Lennon’s grandfather see Andre
Millard, Beatlemania: Technology, Business and Teen Culture in Cold War America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 54.
84 Lees, Hurricane Port, 133.
85 Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 120.
86 McCartney: “We were all reading Ginsburg and that stuff, everyone was”; Green,
Days In The Life, 46. On simultaneous developments in other cities see Eric
Burdon, I Used to Be an Animal, But Now I’m Alright (London: faber and faber,
1986), 19f; Townshend, Who I Am, 55f. Poet Royston Ellis showed the Beatles how
to extract benzadrine from Vick inhalers; Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 68.
87 Phil Bowen, A Gallery to Play To: The Story of the Mersey Poets (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1988), 50. Events combining Beat poetry and music
continued into the Sixties, such as “Bomb,” an anti-nuclear event at the Cavern in
1964; Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 18.
88 Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 88.
89 John Lennon, “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles,” Mersey
Beat, July 6–20, 1961, reprinted in Bill Harry (ed.), Mersey Beat: The Beginnings
of The Beatles (New York: Quick Fox, 1977), 17. See also Davies, Beatles, 77–80;
Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 102; Lewisohn, Tune In, 338–66. For their part, West
Germans surveyed in the postwar period viewed British (and French) soldiers as
less friendly than Americans; in Maase, BRAVO Amerika, 87.
90 Miles, Paul McCartney, 63. Also Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 29; Davies,
Beatles, 85.
214 Notes
91 McCartney had studied German at school and was willing to practice in Hamburg,
unlike Lennon; Best had an O-level in German. One of the few British Beat
musicians to speak it fluently was Spencer Davis, who majored in German at the
University of Birmingham.
92 McCartney wryly recalled that he fancied himself “a real working lad” then,
“though I was really just a college pudding”; Davies, Beatles, 89–90.
93 He studied with Eduardo Paolozzi at Hamburg College of Art; an overview
of his work is Matthew H. Clough and Colin Fallows (eds.), Stuart Sutcliffe: A
Retrospective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). He died of a cerebral
hemorrhage caused by a blow to the head, perhaps received during a fight after a
Liverpool gig in 1961. While his sister Pauline’s book, Beatles’ Shadow, indulges in
unprovable speculation about this and other issues, its extensive quotes from his
letters still make it a useful resource; see pp. 83, 102, 135. Compare Cook, Long
Sexual Revolution, 186, on growing British acceptance of non-normative sexualities.
94 Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles, 41.
95 Erika Wohlers, for example, claimed in 1964 that he had fathered her baby Bettina
(see “Sein Vater ist ein Beatle,” BILD, 21 Feb. 1964; “Wenig Ähnlichkeit,” Kölner
Stadtanzeiger, February 25, 1964—reprinted in Bernd Matheja, Internationale
Pilzvergiftung: Die Beatles im Spiegel der deutschen Presse 1963-1967 [Hambergen:
Bear Family, 2003], 64). Such claims, as well as the taint of Paul’s 1960 arrest, kept
the band out of Germany after 1962. Prior to their 1966 West German tour, Epstein
paid Wohlers hush money and set up a trust for Bettina, even though her claim
was not watertight. He reckoned it was better to pay such claims rather than risk
scandal; even if each case was likely not true, the Beatles had been such libertines
that pregnancies were entirely possible. See also Sounes, Fab, 43, 63, 101–07.
96 Meister in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 152. See also pictures in the same,
105; Philip Norman, Shout! The Beatles in their Generation (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1981), 91; Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 101; Clayson, Beat Merchants, 77;
Lewisohn, Tune In, 430.
97 Recounted in Doncastle and Best, Beatle! 46; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 118;
Die Beatles—Damals in Hamburg.
98 Epstein’s take on this in Cellarfull of Noise, 96–98. This evolution toward
professionalism was underway before their April 1962 Hamburg residency, but the
first Star Club gigs were something of a relapse into their Indra-era raucousness.
99 Bill Harry quoted in Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 54.
100 Astrid wore the style in 1960 and soon cut Sutcliffe’s hair the same way, much to
the amusement of his bandmates, who still sported greasy Elvis quiffs. Lennon and
McCartney, however, adopted it in 1961 when in Paris visiting Vollmer: French
women did not like the Rocker look, so they asked him to cut their hair like his
own. Jürgen Vollmer, Wie ich John Lennon die Haare schnitt, vor Romy Schneider
Notes 215
davonlief und Catherine Deneuve zum Lachen brachte. Erlebnisse eines Fotografen
(Hamburg: edel, 2013), 29–33.
101 Frevert, “Umbruch,” 658. See also Siegfried, “White Negroes,” 204–05, on long hair.
102 Phrase from Brown, Global Sixties, 6.
103 McKinney, Magic Circles, 4.
104 Ibid., 3 and 32.
105 Ibid., 47–48.
106 Compare Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock
(London: Constable, 1983), 239.
107 An example of the gendering of rock instruments is an early 1960s ad that shows
a young man holding a guitar. His face is cut out and the viewer is encouraged
to insert his (sic) own into the image (the caption reads, “und das sind SIE
mit Ihrer Baldwin-Burns Gitarre”); in Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 61. On the
masculinization of electric guitars see Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire:
The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001). One of the few female rock guitarists was the Duchess
(Norma-Jean Wofford), who played rhythm for Bo Diddley—deceptively billed
as his sister—from 1962 to 1968; “Bo Diddley,” Star-Club News (hereafter SCN),
August 1965. Sister Rosetta Tharpe pioneered the use of electric guitar in her
gospel performances, which were an important source of early rock ‘n’ roll.
The Liverbirds may have seen her on Granada television in the 1964 special
Blues and Gospel Train.
108 The American band Goldie and the Gingerbreads hit the United States and the
United Kingdom in 1965, gaining a visibility that fostered the oft-repeated claim
that they were rock’s first all-female group. Flannery, who had dealings with both
them and the Liverbirds, refutes that in Standing in the Wings, 242. A few other
all-female bands surfaced in the mid-1960s, such as the Selenes from Belgium.
109 See Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Emma Webster, The History of Live Music in
Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967 (London: Routledge, 2016), 92–104.
110 McGlory’s take in “The Liverbirds. ‘Girls with Guitars? That’ll never work,’”
Liverpool Beat, www.liverpoolbeat.com/rocknroll/the-liverbirds-girls-with-guitars-
thatll-never-work-john-lennon-1963/ (June 20, 2016); McGlory interview with
Spencer Leigh. See also Mick Patrick liner notes, The Liverbirds from Merseyside to
Hamburg: The Complete Recordings, Big Beat records, 2010; Paddy Shennan, “John
Lennon was Wrong,” Liverpool Echo, November 16, 2010; Flannery, Standing in the
Wings, 239–66.
111 “Liverbirds. Girls with Guitars?”; Brocken, Other Voices, 150–53.
112 Flannery, Standing in the Wings, 243f.; see also Brocken, Other Voices, 79–80. In
early 1964 the Beatles’ international ascent was just beginning.
113 Patrick, The Liverbirds from Merseyside to Hamburg.
216 Notes
114 Interview with Leigh; “Liverbirds. Girls with Guitars?” The club devised a logo
stencil to paint on bands’ gear so they could prove they had played there; Zint,
Grosse Freiheit 39, 28.
115 Weissleder set up a record label under a licensing agreement with Philips.
116 “The Liverbirds,” SCN, September 1964.
117 “Rolling News,” SCN, June 1965.
118 Lohaus, “51 Jahre später.” Male rockers’ “neutrality” from Simon Reynolds and
Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock‘n’Roll (Cambridge: Harvard
119 Birch had an affair with Lee Curtis; Flannery, Standing in the Wings, 248f. Members
of the group were treated for venereal disease in 1964; receipts in Sammlung Zint,
Star-Club files.
120 They also sold well in Switzerland, Denmark, and Japan. Being unknown in the UK
at the height of the Beat wave rendered them invisible in rock’s collective memory
until recently. For example, Viv Albertine of the female punk band the Slits writes
that when she picked up the bass in the late 1970s, she asked, “who’d done it before
me?” See Clothes Clothes Clothes, Music Music Music, Boys Boys Boys: A Memoir
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2014), 49. They are missing from both editions of O’Brien’s
She Bop, though they do rate a mention in Colin Larkin’s Encyclopedia of Popular
Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
121 When Brocken interviewed locals decades later for his book on Liverpool music
cultures, he still heard comments that the Liverbirds were “crap girls who couldn’t
play”; Other Voices, 153.
122 Spencer Leigh, “Pam Birch: Guitarist and Lead Singer Who Helped to Break the
Mould with the Sixties All-Girl Beat Group the Liver Birds,” The Independent,
December 3, 2009.
123 One exception is Gildart, who makes the case for studying musicians through
the lens of social history in his Images of England. There are too many bands to
list here. A good overview is Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over. Extant recordings can be
found on Beat in Germany: Die Hamburg Szene; Smash…! Boom…! Bang…! Beat in
Germany; and Pebbles Volume 24: The Continent Lashes Back. Garage, Beat & Psych
Rarities, AIP records (released 1988).
124 Finnegan, Hidden Musicians, 130.
125 “Pathway” from Finnegan, Hidden Musicians, 303–39. Meeting “girls” is a
recurrent motivation in musicians’ memoirs; an example is Hartmann, Maschine,
131–33.
126 One exception was the long-lived Mama Betty’s Band. On skiffle see Krüger and
Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 98–102 (on Lady Crackers), 139; Articus, Beatles in Harburg,
13–17, 123.
127 Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 369.
Notes 217
128 Tarrach in Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 376; Rascals profile in Articus, Beatles in
Harburg, 132-38; Krüger interview with the author. See also Krüger and Pelc,
Hamburg Sound, 150–52.
129 Beckman and Martens, Star-Club, 134–37; Lewisohn, Tune In, 628. Dostal was in
the Faces, then in 1966 joined the Rattles.
130 Weissleder licensed the Star Club name for 1000DM a month to venues in other
cities. They were required to book acts through his office, allowing him to spread
work around for his growing stable of bands. On other regional clubs see Articus,
Beatles in Harburg, 119f.
131 Weisslder letter to Bernhard Mikulski, October 23, 1962, in Sammlung Zint, Star
Club files 1.
132 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 107. Weissleder told Mersey Beat in late 1962 he
would henceforth book only one Liverpool band at a time because they sounded
too much alike.
133 Ulf Miehe, “Beat,” in Carl-Ludwig Reichert (Hg.), Fans Gangs Bands: Ein Lesebuch
der Rockjahre (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 97.
134 His family—“realists”—didn’t stop his musical pursuits; his grandparents had been
clown performers and his father a seaman. See Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 175–76; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 136–40; Achim Reichel, Blues in
Blond (München: dtv, 1995), 12–16; http://www.achimreichel.de/the-rattles.html
(accessed July 2016).
135 Their first manager, Manfred Woitalla, appears frequently in Beat scene memoirs
as an unscrupulous character who financially exploited young bands. He became
proprietor of Kiel’s Starpalast and other clubs. Examples in Krüger and Pelc,
Hamburg Sound, 139; Don Powell and Lise Lyng Falkenberg, Look Wot I Done:
Don Powell of Slade (Music Sales Group, 2013), n.p.
136 One sees this in photos from the 1966 tour where they are clearly part of the
group’s entourage. On sex see also Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 65–67.
137 Among the other notable bands were the Lords and the Rivets. West Germany
also produced an all-female group, the Rag Dolls from Duisburg (1965–69). See
Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 30; Heike Mund, “Women, Power, Music—Remembering
the Rag Dolls,” Deutsche Welle, August 20, 2013 (http://www.dw.com/en/women-
power-music-remembering-the-rag-dolls/a-17025943).
138 For example, the withering review of the Rattles by Hubert Fichte, a young novelist
identified with the new pop literature, in his record review column in konkret;
Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 530–31.
139 One sees ample evidence of the dominance of English in compilations of
international Beat music, such as the Pebbles series and the CD box set Nuggets
II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969 (Rhino,
2001).
218 Notes
140 John Weinzierl quoted in David Stubbs, Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a
Revolution (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015), 93. Weinzierl was a member of the
experimental group Amon Düül starting in the late 1960s.
141 Articus, Beatles in Harburg, 123–27; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 176;
Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 115–17.
142 On the dynamics of local rock production and national identity see Motti Regev,
“Rock Aesthetics and Musics of the World,” Theory, Culture and Society 14:3
(1997), 125–42. On black sounds and Beat see Dostal quoted in Lewisohn, Tune
In, 628.
143 On the impact of military service on other groups see Articus, Beatles in Harburg,
131; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 144.
144 Kemp interview.
145 Articus, Beatles in Harburg, 127.
146 Cf. Brocken, Other Voices, 105.
147 Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, 37.
148 McKinney, Magic Circles, 13. See also Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 11.
150 Bob Wooler in Mersey Beat in 1961, quoted in Marwick, The Sixties, 70.
151 Mort, Capital Affairs, 6–7.
152 Adorno’s critique, for example, discussed in Baacke, Beat–Die sprachlose
Opposition, 49.
153 In Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 30.
154 Cf. Detlef Siegfried, “Pop und Politik,” 42.
155 On the effect of the Profumo scandal, for example, see Whitcomb, Rock Odyssey, 113.
156 Weeks, World We Have Won, 58. See also Frevert, “Umbruch,” 660.
157 Another example of this was the New Beat Sisters, two Ukranian-Germans who
began singing with local Beat bands but faced limitations because it was “unseemly”
for females to ask bands if they needed a singer; Articus, Beatles in Harburg, 142–43.
Chapter 4
1 Dieter Baacke’s youth surveys of 1966 (when Beat had reached mainstream
popularity because of the Beatles) found that 37.2 percent of respondents had
attended a concert or club; Baacke, Beat–Die sprachlose Opposition, 176. Figures
before this year would have been lower.
2 Small, Musicking, 8.
3 Ian Inglis, “Introduction: History, Place and Time—The Possibility of the
Unexpected,” in Ian Inglis (ed.), Performance and Popular Music: History Place and
Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), xiv. See also Hurley, Return of Jazz, 6–7.
Notes 219
4 Ellen Willis characterized rock ‘n’ roll’s power as always intimately connected with
the paradoxical possibilities of mass freedom and collective individuality. See her
“Crowds and Freedom,” in Kelly and McDonnell, Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky,
153–59.
5 Mark Duffett, “Introduction,” in Duffett (ed.), Popular Music Fandom: Identities,
Roles and Practices (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1.
6 Theodore W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” orig. 1941, reprinted in Richard D.
Leppert (ed.), Theodore W. Adorno: Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 437–69.
7 Poiger, Jazz Rock and Rebels, 95–98; Hurley, Return of Jazz, 37–38. See also Julia
Sneeringer, “Meeting The Beatles: What Beatlemania Can Tell Us About West
Germany in the 1960s,” The Sixties 6:2 (2013), 172–98.
8 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London:
Penguin, 2009), 221. See also Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and
Things (London: Routledge, 1988), 50–51; Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson,
Jane Shattuck (eds.), Hop On Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 30–32. In West Germany, notions of
mass manipulation through pop culture and advertising drew heavily on the work
of Vance Packard and David Riesman; Siegfried, “Pop und Politik,” 35–36.
9 But not always: much pop music was (and continues to be) well-crafted and complex.
10 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xiii–xvii.
11 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring
Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992), 30.
12 In Wicke, Rockmusik, 115.
13 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992). See also John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London:
Routledge, 1989), 10.
14 On the history of fan studies see Duffett, “Introduction”; Jonathan Gray, Cornel
Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, “Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Jonathan
Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, (eds.), Fandom: Identities and
Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007),
1–18. A landmark volume in the field is Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience.
Key texts of the subculture school include Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson
(eds.), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subculture in Postwar Britain (London:
Routledge, 1976) and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London:
Routledge, 1979); a feminist response is Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth
Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen (London: McMillan, 1991).
15 Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, “I’m Buffy and You’re History: Putting Fan
Studies into History,” Transformative Works and Cultures 6 (2011), http://journal.
transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/272/200.
220 Notes
16 Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the
Empowerment of Everyday Life [1984],” in Gelder and Thornton, Subcultures
Reader, 477–93. See also Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, 2; Tia DeNora,
Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
17 Recent examples include Sven Oliver Müller, Das Publikum macht die Musik:
Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19.Jahrhundert (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2014); Daniel Morat (ed.), Sounds of Modern History:
Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2014).
See also Gregor, “Why Does Music Matter?” 113–30.
18 That is, studying pop is more easily justified if it can be invested with political
content, a dynamic discussed in Geisthövel and Mrozek, “Einleitung,” 14–22.
19 Exceptions to this include Leonard Schmieding, ‘Das ist unsere Party’: HipHop in
der DDR (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014) and Jeff Hayton, “Culture from the Slums:
Punk Rock, Authenticity, and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany”
(PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2013).
20 Applegate in Gregor, “Why Does Music Matter,” 125–26.
21 Schildt and Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte, 245–48. On youth spending
broadly see the classic study of British youth, Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer
(London: London Press Exchange, 1959); also Thornton, “Social Logic of
Subcultural Capital,” 206.
22 Schildt, “Eine Großstadt,” 85.
23 Katrin Pallowski, “Wohnen im halben Zimmer: Jugendzimmer in den 50er Jahren,”
in Schock und Schöpfung, 286.
24 Frank Biess, “Feelings in the Aftermath: Toward a History of Postwar Emotions,”
in Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller, Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the
Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 33–36.
25 Wierling, “Mission to Happiness,” 111. See also Biess, “Survivors of
Totalitarianism,” 72; Krüger und Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 176; Ingeborg Weber-
Kellermann, “Kindheit der fünfziger Jahre,” in Dieter Bänsch (Hg.), Die Fünfziger
Jahre: Beiträge zu Politik und Kultur (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1985), 163–70. On the
specter of nuclear annihilation and its cultural effects see Nuttall, Bomb Culture.
26 “Skeptical” refers to sociologist Helmut Schelsky’s influential 1957 study of the
“skeptical generation.”
27 Joachim Berendt quoted in Hurley, Return of Jazz, 39.
28 Bailey, “Jazz at the Spirella,” 23. On international impulses in West German
consumer culture see Wildt, Vom kleinen Wohlstand, esp. 87–100.
29 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 274. On nightclubs as sites of German cultural production
see Schildt and Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte, 188, 267. See also Klitsch,
Shakin’ All Over, 63.
Notes 221
30 They closely resembled contemporary British groups also called Rockers, profiled
in Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1972). They are not identical with the
criminal motorcycle gangs labeled Rockers by German police and sociologists in
the late 1960s; Klaus Weinhauer, “The End of Certainties: Drug Consumption and
Youth Delinquency in West Germany,” in Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (eds.),
Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies,
1960-1980 (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 388–90.
32 Vollmer, Rock and roll Times, n.p. See also Davies, Beatles, 83; Articus, Beatles in
Harburg, 123.
33 Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 17, 32; Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 74; Maase, BRAVO
Amerika, 102-03; Zimmermann, “Aufwachsen mit Rockmusik,” 113.
34 This belies the notion of “Americanization” as a one-way street; a useful summary
of the Americanization debate is Poiger, Jazz Rock and Rebels, 11f.
35 Maase, BRAVO Amerika, 12–16, 120–21; see also Thomas Ziehe, “Alltägliche
Verteidigung der Korrektheit,” 252. On James Dean see Heinz-Hermann Krüger,
“‘Es war wie ein Rausch, wenn alle Gas geben’: Die Halbstarken der 50er Jahre,” in
Schock und Schöpfung, 270; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization
and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 46.
36 Maase, BRAVO Amerika, 74.
37 Harald Schlüter, “Zur Lage der Arbeiterjugend in Hamburg, 1950-1960,” in Klaus
Tenfelde (Hg.), Arbeiter im 20.Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 629–52.
38 Maase, BRAVO Amerika, 103; see also Uta G. Poiger, “Popkultur und
Geschlechternormen. Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit in der Bonner Republik,” in
Geisthövel and Mrozek, Popgeschichte, 57–78.
39 Gildart makes a similar argument for British Rockers in Images of England, 29–43.
40 Peter Kaschel, “Die Beatles in Hamburg – eine private Vorgeschichte,”
erdbeerfelder.de (http://www.lmw-28if.de), accessed February 25, 2016.
[Translation mine]
41 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 119–21.
42 This label was applied by outsiders; participants generally rejected it.
43 My translation. This was written forty years after the event, though various
versions appeared earlier, starting in 1968 with Davies’ Beatles, 81–84. Voormann
understands its mythic quality and accords it a prominent place in his memoir,
“Warum spielst Du Imagine nicht auf dem weissen Klavier, John?” Erinnerungen an
die Beatles und viele andere Freunde (München: Heyne, 2002), 39–40.
44 Her accounts in Matthew H. Clough and Colin Fallows (eds.), Astrid Kirchherr: A
Retrospective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 43–44; Pritchard and
Lysaght, The Beatles, 47–49. “Riff-raff ” from Pete Best; Best and Doncastle, Beatle! 63.
222 Notes
45 Vollmer, Wie ich John Lennon die Haare schnitt, 11–14; Best and Doncastle, Beatle!
63–66. Voormann later designed the cover of the Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver and
played bass for Lennon, Starr, and Harrison in the 1970s. Vollmer first cut Lennon’s
and McCartney’s hair into the famous “mop top.” Kirchherr’s effect on the band’s
style is discussed below.
46 Vollmer and Kirchherr admired the Rockers’ look from afar; Vollmer, Rock
and roll Times, n.p.; Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 44. In 1961 Vollmer
photographed Rockers in Paris (published in Rock and roll Times). See also Sabine
von Dirke, All Power to the Imagination: The West German Counterculture from the
Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 21.
47 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 236. On “bourgeois” appreciation see Fiske,
Understanding, 90.
48 The discotheque—a space where people met to dance to records, not live bands—
was invented at Paris’ Chez Regine in 1960; Jerram, Streetlife, 237–38. These were
not common in West Germany until mid-decade. Reeperbahn 136 has been the
site of a disco almost continuously since the Top Ten.
49 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 133–35; Davies, The Beatles, 102. Ansin in
Krüger und Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 88.
50 Peter Kirchberger, then performing at Club o.k., told me that when the Star Club
opened, “you felt it—everybody left.”
51 “Rohentwurf–Der Star-Club Story,” February 13, 1963, Sammlung Zint, Star-Club
files. See also Krüger und Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 27; Beckmann and Martens, Star
Club, 132; Weissleder correspondence with Berlin Friends of Bill Haley Club,
August to September 1962, Sammlung Zint, Star Club files; see also Martens
and Zint, Kiez, Kult, Alltag, 68. Attendance figures in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt
Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92 – 15.9, Bd. 1: Kontrollberichte 13.4.62-31.12.63.
52 “Deutschlands ungewöhnlichster Treffpunkt,” Harburger Anzeigen und
Nachrichten, November 16, 1963, reprinted in Articus, Beatles in Harburg, 117.
53 See Siegfried, Sound der Revolte, 129–32; “Wer twistet wird gestempelt”; “Die
Gastspiele im Star-Club gehen weiter,” BRAVO Nr. 19 (12–18 May), 1963; Clayson,
Hamburg Cradle, 210. On Star Club tourism see Miles, Paul McCartney, 139; Stahl
and Wein, Hamburg von 7 bis 7, 282. On 1960s youth tourism generally see Axel
Schildt, “Across the Border: West German Youth Travel to Western Europe,” in
Schildt and Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca-Cola, 151.
54 Bloemeke, Roll Over Beethoven, 42–43.
55 Similar memories of seeing “real” rock ‘n’ roll at the Star Club fostering a desire to
become a musician is Hartmann, Maschine, 124; Hans Heyer fan questionnaire,
Sammlung Zint.
56 Liverpool musicians in particular often amassed respectable collections of
American records from retail outlets like NEMS; Millard, Beatlemania, 75.
Notes 223
57 Stephan Pennington notes this for jazz, and it applies to Beat too; “Reading
Uncle Bumba and the Rumba: The Comedian Harmonists and Transnational
Youth Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 140:2 (2015), 378.
58 Christine Jacqueline Feldman, ‘We Are the Mods’: A Transnational History of a
Youth Subculture (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 70. Some 1,000 Turkish men
worked at the Blohm+Voss shipyard alone. See also Ulrich Herbert and Karin
Hunn, “Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From
the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until its Halt in 1973,” in Miracle Years, 199f.
In the early 1960s, foreign-born persons from all countries were 1.2 percent of
Hamburg’s population; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 176.
59 Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 369.
60 Caldwell, “Horst Fascher”; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 131. Compare Britain,
which outlawed racist door policies with the 1965 Race Relations Act; Haslam, Life
After Dark, 92.
61 For a discussion of race, as well as male homosexuality, in this regard see
Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys.”
62 In the 1960s that meant Nazi racism and anti-Semitism, not Germany’s colonial past.
63 On popular culture and cosmopolitanism see Morat et al., Weltstadtvergnügen,
18–19; compare Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the
Normalisation of Difference (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). On West German
discourses of race in the 1950s see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins; Heide Fehrenbach,
“German Mothers and ‘Negermischlingskinder,” 164–86. On German youths’
identification with the US civil rights struggle see Maria Höhn, “The Black Panther
Solidarity Committees and the Voice of the Lumpen,” German Studies Review
31:1 (February 2008), 133–54; “Wenn Hitler wiederkäme,” Quick Nr. 13 (31
March) 1963. Cf. Gildart on London and Liverpool, Images of England, 7, 69–72.
On British Blues’ fetishization of blackness see Ulrich Adelt, “Trying to Find an
Identity: Eric Clapton’s Changing Conception of ‘Blackness,’” Popular Music and
Society 31:4 (2008), 433–52.
64 Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 248–50; Axel Schildt, “Einführung. Lebensstile im
Wandel,” in Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus, Karl Teppe (Hg.), Demokratisierung und
gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch. Die sechziger Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 577–86.
65 See Beckmann and Martens, Star Club, 132–36; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 143f.; Hartmann, Maschine, 125. Zint quoted in Bye-Bye Star-Club.
Compare Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 35, on how subcultures convert surveillance
into the pleasure of being watched.
66 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 22; Bärbel Niewohner, interview with the author;
Haitmann Sheridan quotes in Rehwagen und Schmidt, Mach Schau! 44, 119–21,
224 Notes
and Sounes, Fab, 41. Voormann says that waiters did like his friends because they
didn’t just order “one drink”; Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 139. On the
“fantasy of classlessness” see Thornton, “Social Logic of Subcultural Capital,” 204.
67 Dostal in Beckmann and Martens, Star Club, 134. My translation. See also Seuss,
Beat in Liverpool, 32.
68 Beckmann and Martens, Star Club, 139. See also Haslam, Life After Dark, x.
69 Thornton, “Social Logic of Subcultural Capital.” This is a play on Bourdieu’s concept
of “social capital,” which focuses on how distinction operates in the bourgeois world
of high culture; summary in Fiske, “Cultural Economy of Fandom,” 30. “Moral
region” from Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human
Behavior [1915],” in Gelder and Thornton, Subcultures Reader, 27.
70 An excellent take on the postwar dance hall generally is Geisthövel, “Das
Tanzlokal,” 148–49.
71 “Hässlichkeit verkauft sich gut,” BRAVO, Nr. 41, 1964; Jürgen Holtkamp, “In
Liverpool gibt’s 1000 Beatles,” konkret June 1964; “Bindet die Stuhle an!” Quick 37
(12 September), 1965.
72 Hamburg households owned more radios than the national average in 1960. Home
tape recorders came on the West German market in 1957; prices eventually came
down, though the machines available to consumers were still bulky in the early
1960s. Half-inch cassettes came on the market in 1964–65. See Axel Schildt, “Das
Radio und sein jugendliches Publikum von den Zwanzigern zu den Sechziger
Jahren. Eine Skizze,” in Inge Marßolek und Adelheid von Saldern (Hg.), Radiozeiten.
Herrschaft, Alltag, Gesellschaft (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1999), 265f.
73 Memories of acquiring records in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 175;
Tessnow in Bloemeke, Roll Over Beethoven, 38, 42–43; Hartmann, Maschine,
61–62; Peter-Paul Zahl, “Body & Soul,” in Fans Gangs Bands, 142; Volker Böge,
Ausser Rand und Band. Eimsbütteler Jugend in den 50er Jahren (Hamburg: Dölling
und Gallitz, 2009), 90–91. Ulf Krüger, interview with the author. On youths’ use
of media see Konrad Dussel, “Medienkonsum als Ausdruck sozialen Lebensstils.
Überlegungen zu Entwicklungen in den sechziger und frühen siebziger Jahren,” in
Frese, Demokratisierung, 659–62.
74 Bailey, “Jazz at the Spirella,” 32. On this phenomenon in West Germany see Hurley,
Return of Jazz.
75 Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 153. An example of condescension is Whitcomb, Rock
Odyssey, 87. A take on this in British punk and indie circles is Lavinia Greenlaw,
The Importance of Music to Girls (London: faber & faber, 2007), 172.
76 This “knowingness” illustrates Certeau’s notion of empowerment through pop
culture; see Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning.” See also Langston, “Roll Over
Beethoven!” 184; Fiske, “Cultural Economy of Fandom,” 36–43; Müller, Publikum
macht die Musik, 11f.
Notes 225
77 See Chapter 6 on Michael Leckebusch’s justification for the lack of German-

speaking acts on Beat-Club.
78 In Eckhard Schumacher, “‘In Case of Misunderstanding, Read On!’ Pop as
Translation,” in Mueller, German Pop Culture, 113–29.
79 This was helped by the expansion of English instruction in schools, often starting
at age ten. 37 percent of West German youths aged 16 to 21 could speak it
passably by 1966; Detlef Siegfried, “Auf dem Weg zu einer zivilen Kultur. Die
Westdeutschen zwischen Traditionalismus und ‘Erlebnisgesellschaft,’” in Eckart
Conze and Gabriele Metzer (Hg.), 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), 257.
80 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 129–30.
81 Heyer questionnaire.
82 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 65. See also Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg
Sound, 81.
83 Quoted in Feldman, We Are the Mods, 70.
84 Langston dates this to Hans-Magnus Enzensberger’s 1964 essay “Am I A German?”
(“Roll Over Beethoven,” 183).
86 Reichel quoted in Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 218. This presaged punk’s ethos by
over a decade.
87 “Local authentic” from Regev, “Rock Aesthetics,” 126.
89 Rosi Sheridan later told an interviewer that many probably didn’t understand
exactly what was being said because they were drunk. “After the war we knew
nothing [about the Nazis]. Our parents were too ashamed to tell us anything.
Nothing was said at school. We young people were just happy the war was over and
the Economic Miracle had come.” Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 46.
90 Lennon, John, 129; Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 99, 122; Sounes, Fab, 44; “Heimweh
nach St. Pauli,” BRAVO Nr. 12, 1966.
91 Marwick, The Sixties, 71.
92 Dostal specifically mentions the Beatles’ “special mixture of rock‘n’roll and black
music that was more or less unknown to German audiences. In Germany you
could not get records by black groups like the Shirelles, nobody knew of them.” In
Lewisohn, Tune In, 628.
93 Sclater in Krüger, Star Club, 262; Pretty Things in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 218;
Miehe, “Beat,” in Fans Gangs Bands, 97; Raven in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 147;
Little Richard in Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 157–58.
94 Examples in Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 26 and 158–64. Robby Günther
began his career in photography as a teen sneaking backstage into the Star Club to
take pictures; Robby Günther questionnaire, Sammlung Zint.
226 Notes
95 John Baxendale, “‘. . . Into Another Kind of Life in Which Anything Might
Happen . . .’ Popular Music and Late Modernity, 1910-1930,” Popular Music 14:2
(May 1995), 137–54.
96 Baacke called Beat the “symbolic expression of an Eros-driven counterworld”;
Beat–Die sprachlose Opposition, 142–43.
97 Cf. Geisthövel, “Das Tanzlokal,” 149.
98 Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 143, 230; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 136. On
Beat as sexually diffuse see Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 28.
99 Local fan Bobby Brown quoted in Lewisohn, Tune In, 585.
100 Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Time Is On My Side: Die Beat Ära,” in Schock und
Schöpfung, 220. On long hair see also Sutcliffe, Beatles’ Shadow, 148; Krüger, “Exis,”
267; Zimmermann, “Aufwachsen mit Rockmusik,” 116.
101 See Schlüter, “Zur Lage der Arbeiterjugend,” 640; Frevert, “Umbruch,” 644–50;
Joachim Drescher, “Wirtschaftsentwicklung, berufliche Fortbildung und sozialer
Aufstieg: Eine Studie am Beispiel Hamburgs,” in Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek
(eds.), Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er
Jahre (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1993), 242–68. Hamburg had more apprentice slots for
girls than applicants in this period.
102 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 122. See also Weeks, World We Have
Won, 73; Claire Langhamer, “The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain,” Journal
of Contemporary History 40:2 (2005), 359.
103 Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subcultures [1975],” in Subcultures
Reader, 117.
104 “Unfall-Ursache: Twist,” Quick, February 17, 1963. On chores see Maase, BRAVO
Amerika, 77.
105 Maase, BRAVO Amerika, 81–82.
106 Pallowski, “Wohnen im halben Zimmer,” 289–90; Wierling, “Mission to
Happiness,” 115. On consumption and female empowerment see Erica Carter, How
German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
107 Frith and Horne, Art Into Pop, 90.
108 Ellen Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” The New Yorker, October 23, 1971.
109 Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 51. On fashion before the late 1960s see
von Dirke, All Power, 21–22. On girls, bricolage, and the power of style see Fiske,
Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), 150–51.
110 Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 156. Kemp and Kirchherr were married
from 1967 to 1974.
111 Kirchherr felt an aesthetic affinity with Wolf and later Brian Epstein, who hired her
as a visual consultant after he became the Beatles’ manager in 1961. This linkage
Notes 227
of gay aesthetics and 1960s youth culture has been noted for Britain but not West
Germany; examples in Osgerby, Youth in Britain, 43, and Jon Savage, “Tainted
Love: The Influence of Male Homosexuality and Sexual Divergence on Pop Music
and Culture Since the War,” in Alan Tomlinson (ed)., Consumption, Identity, and
Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure (London: Routledge,
1990), 103–08. On Wolf see Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 35–36, 44;
Michael Koetzle and Angelika Beckmann, Twen: Revision einer Legende (Munich:
Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1995), 16. On style exchanges with the Beatles see Miles,
Paul McCartney, 77; Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles, 47–49.
112 Michael Bracewell in Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 14–17.
113 In Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 99–100.
114 Vollmer belongs in this category too. Frith and Horne, Art Into Pop, 2, 78–79.
115 On companionate experiments in the 1950s see Heineman, “Economic Miracle.”
116 Cf. Mort, Capital Affairs, 310, on young women going to London in this period.
117 An intelligent discussion of groupies is Lisa L. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women
and Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 139–44.
In Hamburg, Star Club barmaid Betti Darlien occupied that space between friend
of the bands and groupie; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 140, 153.
118 Sample accounts in Doncastle and Best, Beatle!; Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll;
Burdon, I Used to Be an Animal, 147f. See also Icke Braun’s comments in Rehwagen
and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 121; Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 64–68.
119 And who needed the lessening of female restraint for their own adventures; Cook,
Long Sexual Revolution, 185. Recollections in Miles, Paul McCartney, 70; Fascher,
Let the Good Times Roll, 113. Best marveled that a “nice girl” like Kirchherr would
even come to the Kaiserkeller; Doncastle and Best, Beatle! 66.
120 On abortion, contraception, and marriage see Herzog, Sex After Fascism, 126–28;
Frevert, “Umbruch,” 644–54; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 40–41; Fascher,
Let the Good Times Roll, 137–38. On youth sexual activity see Kuhnert and
Ackermann, “Jenseits von Lust und Liebe,” 79.
121 “Mrs. Sheridan wird 70 Jahre alt,” January 4, 2011, Hamburger Morgenpost;
Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 46. With Hamburg’s housing shortage,
marriage was the surest way for young people to score an apartment: “Eine
Großstadt,” 87. Sheridan ultimately gave her son to her sister to raise when he was
one year old. Rosi and Tony wed in 1965 after his first marriage in England was
dissolved.
122 See fan questionnaires, Sammlung Zint.
123 “Freunde von damals,” taz hamburg, April 24, 1996.
124 Interview with the author. Compare Böge, Ausser Rand und Band, 175–82.
125 Haslam, Life after Dark, vii.
126 Duffett, “Introduction,” 11.
228 Notes
127 In “On Popular Music” Adorno wrote, “He who is never permitted to conquer
in life conquers in glamor” (449). A discussion of critical takes on early Beatles
fans is Sneeringer, “Meeting The Beatles.” Sympathetic takes on girls’ use of pop
culture include McRobbie and Garber, “Girls and Subcultures,” 115–20; Fiske,
Understanding Pop Culture, 147–51. Bracewell calls bedroom collages a form of
“early Pop art” that reflect upon the period’s mass media; in Clough and Fallows,
Astrid Kirchherr, 22.
128 Nathaus, “Musik der weissen Männer,” 93–97; Waksman, Instruments of Desire,
12–13. Also Greenlaw on being a female rock fan in the 1980s in Importance of
Music to Girls, 172.
129 One woman’s journey from fan to Beatles fan club manager is told in the
documentary Good Ol’ Freda (dir. Ryan White, 2013). Ingrid Noetzel, one of my
interviewees, took on the task of unofficial secretary for the Star Club veterans,
organizing reunions and concert events until recently.
130 Albertine, Clothes Clothes Clothes, 16–17. See also Greenlaw, Importance of Music
to Girls, 89.
131 This actually happened to Maureen Cox, a fan whose relationship with Ringo Starr
began after she asked him for an autograph at the Cavern; Davies, The Beatles, 154.
See also Albertine, Clothes Clothes Clothes, 16–17, 44–49; Gabriele Huster, “Ich
Habe Mick gesehen,” in Eckhard Siepmann (ed.), CheShahShit: die sechziger Jahre
zwischen Cocktail und Molotow (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1984), 125–29.
132 Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: Girls Just
Want to Have Fun,” in Lewis, Adoring Audience, 85. See also McKinney, Magic
Circles, 53–57.
133 Ingrid Noetzel, interview with the author. A similar take on small-town life is
Feldman, We Are the Mods, 69.
134 Huster, “Ich Habe Mick gesehen,” 129. Compare Maase, Grenzenloses
Vergnügen, 243.
135 Heineman, Before Porn was Legal, 105.
136 Portions of this section originally appeared as “John Lennon, Autograph Hound.”
137 “Fan talk” from Fiske, “Cultural Economy of Fandom,” 38.
138 Heinz Bamberg, Beatmusik: Kulturelle Transformation und musikalische Sound
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1989), 78–80; Gildart, Images of England, 76.
139 Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 227. The timing was also shaped by Weissleder’s
dispute with the city over his operating license, which is discussed in detail in
Chapter 5.
140 “Star Clubs bald in 20 Städten?” Welt am Sonntag, August 2, 1964; Siegfried,
Time Is On My Side, 213–16; Detlef Siegfried, “‘Underground’: Counter-Culture
and the Record Industry in the 1960s,” in Karl-Christian Führer and Corey Ross
(eds.), Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth Century Germany (New York:
Notes 229
Palgrave, 2006), 51–56; Krüger, Star-Club, 158–59, 187–89. Weissleder’s attempt to

establish a radio presence for the Star Club is discussed in Chapter 6.
141 See comments by his assistant Dieter Radtke in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 148; also a short notice on “people about town” in BILD, 24 August, 1964.
142 Weissleder engaged regularly with the press: he often wrote to reporters he felt had
misrepresented him or his clubs. He also praised those whose coverage he liked, as in
this October 16, 1962 letter to BRAVO thanking them for their “accurate” coverage of
a Haley show: “You distinguish yourselves from other publications that sadly deviate
from the truth. It’s nice to know that not all journalists tailor their writings around
whether they’re given dinner or whiskeys.” Sammlung Zint, Star Club file 2.
143 For examples of racist animal metaphors for the Beatles in the press see Matheja,
Internationale Pilzvergiftung, 8ff.
144 Sneeringer, “John Lennon, Autograph Hound”; Maase, BRAVO-Amerika, 104–09;
Siegfried, Sound der Revolte, 75–76.
145 The magazine’s history in Koetzle and Beckmann, twen; see also Hurley, Return
of Jazz, 149. They would later revise this view, particularly as the Beatles became
more artistic.
146 “Liebe Star-Club Freunde!” SCN, June 1965. See also “Wer schreibt, der bleibt,”
SCN, February 1965; “Jugendpresse!”; letters to the editor (“Nicht verzagen—
Manfred fragen!”), SCN, September 1965. Ads were also placed in the April and
May 1965 issues asking for submissions from readers, and a column entitled
“Leser-Report” ran briefly in August 1965. Günter Zint recalls responding to calls
for submissions in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 181.
147 “Members of the Cavern Club Liverpool,” SCN, May 1965; “So sehen Beatbands
ihre Fans!” October 1965. Contrast Jürgen Holtkamp, “In Liverpool gibt’s 1000
Beatles,” konkret, June 1964; by 1966–67 konkret revised its view of pop culture.
148 “Autogrammjäger,” SCN, December 1965. While the Beatles were important
in raising the Star Club’s profile, the News actually ran few pieces on the band,
reasoning that they were already getting lots of press elsewhere. It did run a signed
photo of them in August 1965 specifically because it was addressed “to everybody
at the Star Club!! And everybody in Hamburg, all the best from your old mates!”
149 “2.Internationales Beat-Band-Festival,” SCN, August 1965.
150 Liverpool mayor’s message in Gildart, Images of England, 83–84. German accounts
in Max Scheler, “Beatles wie Sand am Meer,” Stern 18 (3 May), 1964; “Yeah Yeah
Yeah—74 Beatles Fans aus Hamburg eroberten Liverpool,” BILD, 5 March, 1964;
Star Club ad in BILD, November 18, 1964; “Beat-Musik und 92 Deutsche Fans,”
Bayreuther Tageblatt, December 18, 1965 (in Matheja, Internationale Pilzvergiftung,
112). See also Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 247.
151 “Intern,” SCN, August 1965; letters page, SCN, September 1965. Interestingly,
informal address was already being used in ads for the Star Club record label
230 Notes
(“Eure Musik ist da!”), consistent with the established advertising tactic of
appealing to consumers through familiarity.
152 On the Liverbirds see “Rolling News,” SCN, June 1965. On bands and managers
see “Kollaps . . . und Hoffnungen,” SCN, April 1965. On the charts see “Kampf
der Hitparaden,” SCN, June 1965; “Schallplattenparlament,” SCN, July 1965. Also
“Liebe Star-Club Freunde!” SCN, April 1965; “Chruschtschows Abschiedslied,”
SCN, May 1965; “Ei, ei!!!” SCN, June 1965.
153 September 1965 letters to the editor; “Holzhammer-Methoden,” SCN, May 1965;
“Mopp-Kopp,” SCN, June 1965; “Hilfe abgelehnt,” SCN, November 1965; “Pilzköpfe
gab es schon immer,” SCN, December 1965.
154 Sneeringer, “Meeting The Beatles,” 172–98. Compare “Bindet die Stuhle an!” Stern,
September 12, 1965.
155 “Die haben‘s gerade nötig!” SCN, August 1964. See also Siegfried, “Vom Teenager
zur Pop-Revolution,” 602–04.
156 This view was articulated by Fascher (Let the Good Times Roll, 209) and Erwin
Ross; Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 27. Weissleder’s fiery reaction to being called a Nazi
by Lennon (discussed in Chapter 3) also buttresses this view. See also Thornton,
“Social Logic of Subcultural Capital,” 206.
157 Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things quoted in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 127. See also
“Schalom aliechem: Gammler in Deutschland,” Der Spiegel 39/1966; Siegfried,
Time Is On My Side, 412; Siegfried, “White Negroes,” 333–40.
158 Maase, BRAVO-Amerika, 155. See also Moeller, “Remasculinization of West
Germany,” 106; Till van Rahden, “Fatherhood, Rechristianization, and the Quest
for Democracy in Postwar West Germany,” in Dirk Schumann (ed.), Raising
Citizens in the Century of the Child: Child-Rearing in the United States and German
Central Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 141–64.
159 The case of Zint has already been mentioned. Michael “Bommi” Baumann wrote
that Beat clubs (in his case in West Berlin) brought together youths who shared
their frustrations and forged a consensus that “everything against the current
order” and its “petit bourgeois mediocrity” was good. Baumann soon moved into
radical leftist politics as a founder of the Second of June (1967) Movement and the
Commune II (Kommune II). See his Wie alles anfing, 3rd edn. (Hamburg: Rotbuch,
1998), 22–23. See also Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 28.
160 Chaney, Cultural Change, 145. See also Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, 15f.
Seuss essentially made this argument in 1965 in Beat in Liverpool, 36.
161 Quoted in Gildart, Images of England, 7.
162 Poiger, Jazz Rock and Rebels, 210–14. See also Hurley, Return of Jazz, 37–39; Maase,
Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 152–54; Chaney, Cultural Change, 144.
163 Peter Wicke, “Music, Dissidence, Revolution, and Commerce,” in Schildt and
Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca-Cola, 114–15; Nathaus, “Musik der weissen
Männer,” 81–97; Marwick, The Sixties, 42; Frith and Horne, Art Into Pop, 17.
Notes 231
164 Maase, BRAVO-Amerika, 206–13; von Dirke, All Power, 21–26.

165 Maase, BRAVO-Amerika, 183.
166 Compare Susan Fast, “Rethinking Issues of Gender and Sexuality in Led Zeppelin,”
in Bennett, Popular Music Studies Reader, 363–69. She criticizes the notion that
rock fandom is masochistic for females because of rock’s phallocentrism. She
rejects the idea that rock’s meanings are fixed and that women are incapable of
reading other, empowering messages into it.
167 Schildt and Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte, 245–48; Schildt, “Eine Großstadt,”
98. On the early sixties more broadly see Weeks, World We Have Won, 63–65.
168 Von Dirke, All Power, 21. See also Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 7;
Horn, Spirit of ’68, 15; Langston, “Roll Over Beethoven,” 191.
Chapter 5
1 Portions of this chapter originally appeared as “Sites of Corruption, Sites of

Liberation: Hamburg-St. Pauli and the Contested Spaces of Early Rock‘n’Roll,”
Contemporary European History 26:2 (May 2017), 313–37. Copyright Cambridge
University Press 2016; reprinted with permission.
2 Manfred Schmidt, “Lange Nacht am Ankerplatz der Freude,” Quick, January 13, 1965.
3 Schmidt wasn’t the first to invoke this apocryphal story about Schweinefilme—for
example, see “St. Pauli: Angst im Nacken,” Der Spiegel 24 (June 12, 1963).
4 BILD cited in Christian Müller, 1899–1999: 100 Jahre Fremdenverkehrsverband
(Hamburg: Hamburger Fremdenverkehrsverband, 1998), 23; Stern cited in “St.
Pauli: Angst im Nacken.” See also “Alles wurde teurer,” Der Spiegel 32 (6 August)
1958, and “Der grosse Nepp,” Der Spiegel 6 (1 February) 1961. For local press
see Claus Lafrenz, “Stirbt die Reeperbahn?” Welt am Sonntag, May 1, 1960; press
clippings in FZH archives, Nr. 322 (Hamburg Stadtteil Geschichte).
5 A good summary of the first “Black Gang” trial is “Hörst du es klirren?” Der Spiegel
23 (3 June) 1964. A 1960 Allensbach survey of 6,000 West Germans found their
main associations with Hamburg to be first harbor city and “gateway to the world,”
and second St. Pauli and entertainment. Local officials were pleased but also
worried about a growing sense of Hamburg as “grubby” (schmuddelig). Their sense
of crisis was more about perception in the early 1960s than any significant drop in
tourism numbers; see Amenda and Grünen, Tor zur Welt, 38, 117.
6 For an example see “Ist Deutschland keine Reise wert?” Quick, May 12, 1963.
7 In the words of St. Pauli club owner Heinz-Henning Schneidereit; in Heinrich
Klaffs, “Mit dem Saubermann über die Reeperbahn,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 26.-
27.5.1984.
8 Bauer was later Hamburg’s mayor from 1946 to 1953 and 1957 to 1960.
9 According to a local police chief; McElligott, Contested City, 68–78.
232 Notes
10 More details in Chapter 1.

11 Usually led by the SPD, though the CDU had the mayor’s office from 1953 to 1957
under Kurt Sieveking.
12 Im Schatten des grossen Geldes. In a May 1961 speech, SPD mayor Paul Nevermann
declared a need to “reduce the population densities of the past” as a way to foster
“urban hygiene, living culture,” and car traffic; St. Pauli Gestern Heute und Morgen:
Ein Beitrag zur kommunalpolitischen Arbeit Hamburigscher Burgervereine, StaHH
general collection. In 1960 the population of St. Pauli was 46,289. It had the
second-highest population density of any Hamburg neighborhood; Statistisches
Jahrbuch der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Jg. 1960 (Hamburg, 1961). On the
history of overcrowding in the area north of Grosse Freiheit and plans to eradicate
these slums see McElligott, Contested City, 57, 67.
13 Joachim Schroeder, Bildung im geteilten Raum: Schulentwicklung unter
Bedingungen von Einwanderung und Verarmung (Münster: Waxmann, 2002), 187.
For contemporary reporting on people still living in trailers and the hostility they
faced from local authorities see “Ab in den Wohnwagen,” Der Spiegel 21 (25 May)
1950; “Gegen Wohnwagenübel,” Hamburger Abendblatt May 16, 1959. On Weimar-
era campaigns against caravan owners in this area see McElligott, Contested City,
76–77.
14 Kriminal-Kommissariat report on prostitution in Hamburg, January 11, 1963, in
StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67 MEG 149B 5/2. This report was
shared with Interpol in Paris. Prostitution was itself decriminalized but one could
be arrested under BGB §361.6 for “disturbing the peace.”
15 And, of course, shipping, which was now moving decisively toward less labor-
intensive mechanized container shipping. Those representing the shipping
industry were a different set of players than those in the entertainment business,
and the two do not interact or overlap in my sources.
16 Compare Beate Uhse’s successful trade in erotica, marketed in this period in a
“respectable” way as part of a “healthy” marriage; Heineman, Before Porn was
Legal, esp. ch. 3.
17 Documents from one of their sub-groups state as much; see January 15, 1963
letter from Horst Raczynski (lawyer for Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘St. Pauli ist für
alle da’) to Helmut Schmidt, in StaHH 136-1 Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 2251
Gaststättengesetz.
18 “Fehlen auf St. Pauli eintausend Animierdamen? Sorgen eines Bürgervereins,”
Die Welt, 7 April 1960. Most sources claim the opposite, with refugees from East
Germany swelling the ranks of Animierdamen and unregistered prostitutes before
August 1961; an example is “Heimweh nach St. Pauli?” Stern, November 18, 1962.
19 “St. Pauli: Angst im Nacken.” See also protocols of Aktionsgemeinschaft “St. Pauli
ist für alle da,” StaHH 231-10 Vereinsregister, B1977-66.
Notes 233
20 Fodor’s Modern Guides: Germany, 282–86; the 1964 edition recycled this line.
Cooperation between guidebook producers and the Bürgerverein is evident in
the forward of Günther’s Hamburg bei Nacht. See also Uwe Bahnsen and Kerstin
von Stürmer, Stürmische Zeiten: Hamburg in den 60er Jahren (Hamburg: Convent,
2006), 48–49; Grobecker and Müller, Stadt im Umbruch, 157-58; A.R. Luft,
Fremdenverkehrs- und Kongress-Zentrale Hamburg e.V., “Was ist mit der Hamburger
Reeperbahn, was ist mit St. Pauli los?” May 5, 1960, FZH archives Nr. 322.
21 Falck became a regular presence at Bürgerverein meetings after he became
head of the Wirtschafts- und Ordnungsamt Hamburg-Mitte; StaHH 442-1
Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 70.02-1 Bd. III (Ausschüsse auf dem Gebiet des
Wirtschaftswesens, Sonderausschuss St. Pauli 1965–66).
22 Falck’s campaign was even noted in the American press: “Reform on the Raper,”
Time, June 12, 1964. On Schmidt’s practice of giving street-level control to district
offices see Soell, Helmut Schmidt, 393–94.
23 “Mit dem Saubermann über die Reeperbahn.”
24 This term dates back to late-nineteenth-century psychological and social welfare
discourses, used to denote persons whose mental and physical capabilities fell
below the norm and who exhibited deviant behavior. A discussion of postwar
usage is Julia Fontana, Fürsorge für ein ganzes Leben? Heimerziehung in den
Biographien von Frauen (Leverkusen: Buddrich, 2006), 57f.
25 Doris Foitzik, Jugend ohne Schwung? Jugendkultur und Jugendpolitik in Hamburg
1945-1949 (Hamburg: ergebnisse Verlag, 2002), 7–12. For postwar accounts of
young women engaged in prostitution see Weibliche Polizei memo of June 12,
1945, and May 19, 1945 letter from director of Botanische Garten to the police—
both in StaHH 331-1 Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67 (MEG 149B 5/2) Prostituierte.
On young male prostitutes in postwar Berlin see Evans, “Bahnhof Boys,” 605–36.
26 “‘Transithotel’ der Verwahrlosten,” Die Welt, September 8, 1949.
27 Im Schatten des grossen Geldes. The Jugendbehörde had resumed work already in
June 1945.
28 This replaced Himmler’s 1940 Police Order for the Protection of Youth, which,
among other things, banned persons under eighteen from dance halls without an
adult; the new law allowed attendance for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds until ten
o’clock. Specifics of the 1951 law in Münster, Geld in Nietenhosen, 34–35; Aktion
Jugendschutz pamphlet “Was will das neue Jugendschutzgesetz,” FZH archives
Nr. 257-2 (Jugendpolitik allgemeines 1945–60); for a leftist critique see “Erst
mit 16 Jahren auf der Strasse rauchen,” Aufwärts: Jugendzeitschrift des Deutschen
Gewerkschaftsbundes 15:4 (July 26, 1951). On Nazi attempts to keep alcohol away
from youth see Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 144–47. On other Nazi-era decrees on youth in public
see Ralf Blank, Jörg Echternkamp, and Derry Cook-Radmore, German Wartime
234 Notes
Society 1939-45 IX/I: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 136.
29 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 114. Unlike the Weimar-era Schund und Schmutz
debate, West German moralists ceded that popular “trivial literature” was
relatively harmless, not to mention unstoppable. On the 1953 law see Heineman,
Before Porn was Legal, 31–60; Adelheid von Saldern, “Kulturdebatte und
Geschichtserinnerung: Der Bundestag und das Gesetz über die Verbreitung
jugendgefährdender Schriften (1952/53),” in Georg Bollenbeck und Gerhard Kaiser
(Hg.), Die janusköpfigen 50er Jahre. Kulturelle Moderne und bildungsbürgerliche
Semantik (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000), 98–99; Whisnant, Male
Homosexuality, 105–07.
30 On West German debates about prosperity and youth see Robert P. Stephens,
Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007), 46–55.
31 Stephens, Germans on Drugs, 48–53; Schildt, “Eine Großstadt,” 89; Klaus
Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: zwischen Bürgerkrieg und innerer
Sicherheit: die turbulenten sechziger Jahre (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 281–82.
32 Schildt, “Eine Großstadt,” 85.
33 On entertainment as a basic “need” and right see Heinemann, “Economic Miracle
in the Bedroom,” 846–77; Sneeringer, “Assembly Line of Joys,” 95–96.
34 On declining membership in youth organizations see Peter Liebes,
“Ideologiemüdigkeit der Jugend,” Neue Zeitung (München), June 4, 1949; Hans-
Otto Wolf, “Warum ich nicht organisiert bin,” Hamburgische Freie Presse, August
4, 1951. The classic formulation of this is Schelsky’s “skeptical generation.”
Axel Schildt notes that nearly half of Hamburg youths still belonged to a club,
usually sports-related: “‘Heute ist die Jugend skeptisch geworden’: Freizeit und
Jugendförderung in Hamburg in den 50er Jahren,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für
Hamburigsche Geschichte 82 (1996), 209–54.
35 Walter Becker, “Man gestalte mir meine Freizeit!” Rheinischer Merkur (Köln), 14
November, 1958. On the state of youth as a “matter of fate” see Steinbacher, Wie
der Sex nach Deutschland kam, 351.
36 Speech of November 10, 1961, in StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 1590.
An interesting contrast with Weimar social workers, who advocated youth centers
to keep young men in particular from radical politics. Louise Schroeder, a pioneer
in social worker training, exhorted her students to be practitioners of republican
democracy by becoming good workers and citizens; McElligott, Contested City, 85.
37 Schildt, “Eine Großstadt,” 97. Karpinski claimed these dances attracted 2,000
attendees on average; press conference of March 16, 1960, in StaHH 135-1 VI
Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 1590. On jazz’s growing respectability see Poiger, Jazz
Rock and Rebels, 137–67.
Notes 235
38 1962 manuscript “Die Jugendbehörde Hamburgs: Entwicklung, Organisation und

Aufgaben,” FZH archives Nr. 257-3 (Hamburg Jugendpolitik). Hamburg had long
been Germany’s center of social worker training.
39 McElligott, Contested City, 82; Foitzik, Jugend ohne Schwung, 208f.; Massaquoi,
Destined to Witness, 286ff.; Kriminal-oberkommandant Kluender, “Sittenbild
in St. Pauli,” March 12, 1957, in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67
Prostituierte.
40 On the unit’s history see Rosamunde Pietsch, “Die Jugendschutztrupps,” in Herbert
Schaefer (ed.), Grundlagen der Kriminalistik: Bd. 1—Jugendkriminalität (Hamburg:
Steintorverlag, 1965), 126–36; Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 158; Stephens,
Germans on Drugs, 54.
41 Senator Irma Keilhack, Bericht der Jugendbehörde in Hamburg: Bericht über die
Lage der Jugend und die Bestrebungen auf dem Gebiete der Jugendhilfe (1964), FZH
archives Nr. 257-3; Pietsch, “Die Jugendschutztrupps.”
42 Hubert Fichte, Die Palette (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1968). History of the bar in Jan-
Frederik Bandel, Lasse Ole Hempel, and Theo Janßen, Palette Revisited: Eine Kneipe
und ein Roman (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2005). Surveillance of Die Palette
(which was not in St. Pauli but about two miles away in Neustadt) in StaHH 354-5
II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1, Bericht über die Streife Nr.
87, 6 June 1962; same file, Bd. 2, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 26, February 25, 1963.
43 Reports run from the detailed to the clinical, becoming noticeably terser after June
1963 when a new Trupp was formed; by 1966 they become so sparse as to reveal
little.
44 Descriptions of nudity and revelry in Grobecker and Müller, Stadt im Umbruch, 148.
45 Lido reports in StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd.
1, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 179, October 15, 1961. Contrast the report on Club
Medallion, which opened in the former Kaiserkeller: “majority young people, surely
many underage; put under immediate watch” (StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II,
Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 34, March 8, 1962).
46 StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 2, Bericht
über die Streife Nr. 128, 11 Juli 1962; same file Bd. 4, Streifenbericht des
Jugendschutztrupps von September 30, 1964; same file Bd. 5, Streifenbericht des
Jugendschutztrupps von 14 Mai 1965. Spontaneous dancing also played a role in
the recent crackdown on youths in the streets in Munich’s Schwabing district. See
Gerhard Fürmetz (ed.), ‘Schwabinger Krawalle’: Protest, Polizei und Öffentlichkeit
zu Beginn der sechziger Jahre (Essen: Klartext, 2006), esp. 25–57; Brown, West
Germany and the Global Sixties, 58–62.
47 StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1, Bericht über
die Streife Nr. 112 am 28 Juni 1962; same file, Bd. 2, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 122
am 5 Juli 1962 and Nr. 130 am 12 Juli 1962.
236 Notes
die Streife Nr. 60 am 5 Mai 1962 on drinking; same file, Bd. 5, Streifenbericht des
Jugendschutztrupps am 17 Sept. 1965 on Preludin. Several reports on Die Palette
noted the presence of marijuana; see note 42. Also Stephens, Germans on Drugs, 11.
die Streife Nr. 119 am 1 Juli 1962 and Nr. 128 am 11 Juli 1962. Interestingly, a brawl
between patrons of the Star Club and the Hit Club in December 1964 appeared not
in the Trupp files but tax office files; “Klub gegen Klub,” Hamburger Morgenpost, 28
December, 1964 (Sta HH, 442-1 Bezirksamt HH-Mitte 95.92 – 15/9 Bd. 3,
Erhebung der Vergnugungssteuer vom Star-Club Juli 1964-Mai 1965).
die Streife Nr. 137 am 18 Juli 1962. The report of 4 January, 1962 (same file, Bd. 1)
describes owners Peter Denk and Heinrich Henkel as “Recht jung” (Denk was then
twenty-one according to his business license application). Denk’s paper trail also
reveals that he moved into businesses as Koschmider vacated them, namely Grosse
Freiheit 64 (the Indra) and Paul-Roosen-Strasse 33 (Bambi-Kino). On the legal
debate over condom machines see Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal, 106–13.
die Streife Nr. 26 am Februar 2, 1962. Police sought to restrict what had been
West Germany’s liveliest gay scene to a small number of locales; Whisnant, Male
Homosexuality, 112-65. Walter Becker was part of this and spoke frequently of
homosexuals as a “danger to youth”; Rosenkranz et al., Homosexuellen-Verfolgung
in Hamburg 1919-1969, 126–48.
52 This is reinforced by the local press, which cast slot parlors as “breeding grounds
of criminality”; Eberhard von Wiese, “. . . und ich habe ein fabelhaftes Abendkleid:
legaler Mädchenhandel/Orient-Traum,” Hamburger Abendblatt, November 3, 1956.
See also Fontana, Fürsorge für ein ganzes Leben? 57.
53 Hermann Brandt, “Entwichene Zöglinge in einer Großstadt,” in Herbert Schaefer
(ed.), Grundlagen der Kriminalistik: Bd. 1—Jugendkriminalität (Hamburg:
Steintorverlag, 1965), 174–75. The Jugendwohlfahrtsgesetz dated back to 1924 with
significant updates in 1961.
54 On youth mobility see Stephens, Germans On Drugs, 56. On anxieties about youth
and cities in an earlier era see Bettina Hitzer, “Amid the Wave of Youth: the innere
Mission and Young Migrants in Berlin c. 1900,” in Schildt and Siegfried (eds.),
European Cities, 8–26.
55 Richtlinien für die Behandlung von Kindern und Jugendlichen bei der Polizei
(1956): StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 21/1981, 41.10, Jugendschutz und
-kriminalitat.
56 Pietsch, “Die Jugendschutztrupps,” 126.
57 Contemporary sources usually claimed that youth crime was down because of full
employment; an example is the television report Die Beatles—Damals in Hamburg.
Notes 237
58 Becker quoted in von Wiese, “. . . und ich habe ein fabelhaftes Abendkleid”; see
also Holger Hoffmann, “Nachwuchssorgen in St Pauli,” Die Tat, February 21, 1960;
“Krüger fand viele ‚Photomodelle,’” Die Welt, August 1, 1963; Brandt, “Entwichene
Zöglinge,” 175–78. “Ich war ein unmoralisches Mädchen,” Quick 39 (27 September)
1964, discussed this in Munich and Vienna.
59 Memo by Dittmer, “Bekämpfung der Gewerbsunzucht,” April 19, 1962, in StaHH
331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67, Prostituierte; Polizeibehörde memo,
August 31, 1961, in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67 MEG 149B 5/2.
“Hamburg’s ‘leichte Mädchen’ streiten,” Die Tat, October 18, 1959. “Heimweh nach
St. Pauli” claimed a decrease in prostitutes with the building of the Berlin Wall, but
any decline appears to have been only temporary.
60 A practice upheld by federal courts in 1960; Freund-Widder, Frauen unter
Kontrolle, 283.
61 “Einschreitungen gegen weibliche Prostituierte” in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II,
Abl. 2/40.67. VD figures in Ulrike Lindner, Gesundheitspolitik in der Nachkriegszeit:
Grossbritannien und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Vergleich, (Oldenbourg
Verlag, 2004), 364.
62 Where she could again be subject to sexual abuse. This abuse in youth homes was
rarely aired in public at this time. The press were in fact asked to keep such stories
under wraps, as in a 1959 case involving a home director named Sawallisch; in
StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 1606.
die Streife Nrs. 200 [September 18, 1962], 224 [September 27, 1962], and 225
[2 Okt. 1962]. See also same file, Bd. 2, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 148 am August 1,
1962. Forced exams for suspected prostitutes continued into the 1970s; Michaela
Freund-Widder, “Historische Aspekte der Reglementierung,” in Sexarbeit, 244–45.
die Streife Nr. 175 am 6.-9. Okt. 1961. A 1957 police report (“Sittenbild in St.
Pauli”) claimed prostitutes sought johns in “almost all St. Pauli bars.” On barmaids
generally see Bailey, “Parasexuality and Glamour,” 222–44.
die Streife Nr. 138 am 19 Juli 1962.
66 See the case of twenty-one year-old Hannelore Muskat from Memel; StaHH 354-5
II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 2, Bericht über die Streife
Nr. 201 am 20 Sept. 1962. The Verordnung über das Verbot der Beschäftigung
von Personen unter 21 Jahren mit sittlich gefährdenden Tätigkeiten vom 3.April
1964 forbade women under twenty-one from working as “naked dancers, beauty
dancers, veil dancers . . . either fully or partially unclothed,” Animierdamen, table
dancers, or barmaids; establishments hiring such women could be fined. Barmaids
under twenty-one were grandfathered in at the Star Club and could work there
with parental permission.
238 Notes
67 Reports are numerous. One from 1965, noted two Asian “foreigners” found
“in conversation” with two girls aged eleven and thirteen; StaHH 354-5 II
Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 5, Streifenbericht des
Jugendschutztrupps von September 23, 1965.
68 Pietsch, “Die Jugendschutztrupps”; Miller, St. Pauli, 25–28. Similar arguments were
made about women during the Economic Miracle; Robert G. Moeller, Protecting
Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140–41.
69 Mady Manstein, “Noch immer wogt die Beatle-Welle,” Funk Uhr 39, 1964, in
Matheja, Internationale Pilzvergiftung, 86. Kurt Falck expressed similar sentiments
in an interview with Martin Morlock: “Läuterung,” Der Spiegel 28 (8 July) 1964.
70 Irma Keilhack, “Bericht über die Lage der Jugend und Bestrebungen auf dem
Gebiete der Jugendhilfe,” 1964, FZH Archives, Nr. 257-3. See also meeting of
Aktionsgemeinschaft “St. Pauli ist für alle da,” January 24, 1963, in StaHH 136-1
Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 2251 Gaststättengesetz; Hoffmann, “Nachwuchssorgen in
St Pauli”; von Wiese, “. . . und ich habe ein fabelhaftes Abendkleid”; memo from
Polizeipräsident Walter Buhl, August 31, 1961, in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II
Abl. 2/40.67; Herzog, “Sex after Fascism,” 133.
71 Pietsch, “Die Jugendschutztrupps.” Karpinski lauded social workers’ commitment,
caring, and expertise: “Die Kraft der Hingabe ist entscheidend,” July 20, 1961, in
StaHH 1351-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle, Nr. 1606. “Richtlinien für die Behandlung
von Kindern” reminded officers their first mandate was to protect and even
empower the child.
die Streife Nr. 176 [13 Okt. 1961]; same file, Bd. 2, Bericht über die Streife Nr. 125
[6 Juli 1962] and Nr. 248 [31 Okt. 1962]; same file, Bd. 3, Streifenbericht von 6
Marz 1964, notes students on a field trip left to wander unsupervised; same file, Bd.
4, Streifenbericht von 10 Juli 1964 and 31 Okt. 1964.
73 Reports often noted the age of doormen, such as seventy-year-old Hermann
Westphal; StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1,
Bericht über die Streife Nr. 230 am 18 Dez. 1961. On Tante Rosa see Rehwagen and
Schmidt, Mach Schau! 104–05.
74 Jugendschutzwoche speech by Karpinski, April 24, 1961, in StaHH 135-1 VI
Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 1591.
75 StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 1, Bericht
über die Streife March 23, 1962, May 5, 1962. Denk violation in same file, report
of June 2, 1962. Eckhorn in same file, report of January 5, 1962; Bd. 2, August 9,
1962 and September 12, 1962; Bd. 4, September 5, 1964; Bd. 6, January 15, 1965.
Koschmider complaint in same file, report of January 4, 1962. Hit Club comment
in StaHH 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/41.10 Jugendschutz & -kriminalitat.
Notes 239
76 Grobecker and Müller, Die Stadt im Umbruch, 156.

77 This added up to roughly 1,700 establishments, 800 of which were in St. Pauli or
St. Georg. Kurt Falck, “Jugendschutz in Hamburg-Mitte,” in Herbert Schaefer (ed.),
Grundlagen der Kriminalistik: Bd. 1—Jugendkriminalität (Hamburg: Steintorverlag,
1965), 161.
78 Ibid., 163.
79 Quoted in Detlef Siegfried, “Vom Teenager zur Pop-Revolution.
Politisierungstendenzen in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur von 1959 bis 1968,” in
Dynamische Zeiten, 589.
80 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 50–59; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau!,
76, 148. A list of Weissleder’s business holdings circa December 1962 is in StaHH,
442-1 Bezirksamt HH-Mitte, 95.92 – 15.9, Bd. 1.
81 Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 106. The Bürgerverein charged businesses hundreds of
Deutschmarks to rent the “good star” banner, which may have caused some of
Weissleder’s initial resistance; rental contract in Sammlung Zint, Star-Club files 2.
82 Length of residency mattered: Willi Bartels was actually born in the Harz region
and moved to St. Pauli as a teen in the 1920s. Wilhelm Menke’s forebear Dietrich
was accused in the 1920s of making his money off of “whores and pimps,” as seen
in Chapter 1.
83 Frank played St. Pauli gangsters in dozens of films in the 1960s; quoted in Grobecker
and Müller, Die Stadt im Umbruch, 158. See also Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 38–40.
One marker of Weissleder’s outsider status is his omission from the long list of
invitees to a 1965 meeting of St. Pauli businessmen on future plans for the district; in
StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt HH-Mitte 70.02-1 Bd. III: Ausschüsse auf dem Gebiet des
Wirtschaftswesens, Sonderausschuss St. Pauli, protocol of January 14, 1965 meeting.
84 “Neu auf St. Pauli—20% Bedienung!” BILD, May 15, 1962.
85 Günther, Hamburg bei Nacht, 82–88.
86 StaHH, 331-1 II Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.71.
87 Business licenses on file in StaHH Zentral Gewerbekartei 741-1 Fotoarchiv, K4027
and K4119.
die Streife Nr. 67, May 16, 1962.
89 A police campaign against the “transvestite scourge” was underway precisely at
this time, dovetailing with Jugendschutz and the police harassment of gay bars.
See StaHH 136-1 Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 1792 (Bekämpfung des Transvestiten-
Unwesens); Rosenkranz, et al., Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, 129–32.
die Streife Nr. 67, May 23, 1962.
92 Morlock, “Läuterung.”
240 Notes
93 Mingram photographs in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 109–11.

94 The German term is Ringvereine because members wore special rings. Ringvereine
flourished during the Weimar era—for example, the Sparclub Fidelio e.V. was
the Ringverein of St. Pauli pimps. Weissleder testified only that he donated to the
Kegelklub, not that he was a member. See “Die Sensation im St. Pauli-Prozess:
Freispruch!” Hamburger Morgenpost, November 1961; Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 60.
95 Material on Müller in Abschrift des Prüfungsberichts bei der Firma Manfred
Weissleder KG, Sammlung Zint, Star-Club files 5; Fascher, Let the Good Times
Roll, 139; “Vor Gericht ganz harmlos. Der Schlägerkönig von St. Pauli,” Hamburger
Abendblatt, May 22, 1964; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 199 n.17. “Hörst
Du es klirren?”
96 Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 139.
97 Kemp interview.
98 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 143. Fredi Fascher was eventually fired for
violating another aspect of the “code”: having an affair with a gangster’s wife.
99 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 101–02. Jankowiak also made pains to point
out that the waiters were respectful to his mother, even to the point of beating up a
local “big shot” who insulted her. Jankowiak himself spent five months in jail in 1962
for hitting a customer who turned out to be a provincial policeman while working at
the bar Jahnke’s Eck. Jankowiak claimed at trial to be a victim of mistaken identity,
but the judge deemed all his witnesses unreliable because they were St. Paulianers.
100 Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 112, 133, 176. Kemp interview.
101 “Twist-Club-Chef schlug Fotoreporter nieder,” Hamburger Echo, September 30,
1963; “Auf der Buhne im Star-Club: Jazz und Prugel,” Hamburger Morgenpost,
September 30, 1963; “Anzeige gegen St Pauli-Chef,” BILD, September 30, 1963;
“Dänischer Küß,” Hamburger Morgenpost, April 25, 1964.
102 StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92 – 15/9, Bd. 1. Weissleder operated
on a cash basis in all of his businesses.
103 Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 34–36.
104 “100 Polizisten im Twist-Club,” BILD, 19 June, 1963; see also “Heute früh—Razzia
im Star-Club,” Hamburger Abendblatt, June 18, 1963.
105 StaHH 354-5 II Jugendbehörde II, Abl. 16.1.1981, 356-10.05-1 Bd. 3,
Streifenbericht des Jugendschutztrupps von May 15, 1964.
106 “Bezirksamt Mitte entzieht Lizenz für Star-Club,” Hamburger Abendblatt, June 15,
1964.
107 “Verbot fur den Star-Club-Boss,” Hamburger Morgenpost, June 15, 1964. See also
Bartels’ memories of the case in Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 38–40.
108 “Verbot fur den Star-Club-Boss,” “Bezirksamt Mitte entzieht Lizenz für Star-Club”;
also Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 37. Dieter Radtke called his boss a real “Ruhrpott-
Kumpel” who never put on airs; Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 148.
Notes 241
109 Coverage in “Bezirksamt Mitte entzieht Lizenz für Star-Club”; “Verbot für den
Star-Club-Boss”; “Demonstranten vor dem Star-Club,” Hamburger Morgenpost,
June 24, 1964; “Twens und Fans betrauern die Star-Club Schliessung,” Hamburger
Echo, June 24, 1964; “Jugend-Krawalle vor dem Star-Club,” BILD, June 24, 1964;
“Star-Club Fans waren einsichtig—kein Krawall,” Hamburger Morgenpost, June
26, 1964. Press estimates of the number of protesters vary; no police report on the
incident has yet surfaced in the archive to corroborate numbers.
110 Files in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92 – 15/9, Bd. 2 and 3. Also
Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 38.
111 “Palast-Revolution,” SCN, April 1965.
112 “Star-Club Chef kämpft um seine Konzession,” Hamburger Abendblatt, January
12, 1965; “Runde für Weissleder,” Hamburger Morgenpost, January 19, 1965; letter
from Weissleder to Bezirkssteueramt, May 14, 1965, in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt
Hamburg-Mitte, 95.92 – 15/9, Bd. 3.
113 Bernhard Wördehoff, “St. Paulis Glanz wird aufpoliert,” n.d., in FZH archives,
Nr. 322.
114 “Nanu! Wird St. Pauli endlich zahm?” Hamburger Morgenpost, January 13, 1965.
115 “St. Paulis Glanz wird aufpoliert.” Falck told Morlock he did not just want to
be seen as a stodgy civil servant, but just wanted a “more refined” St. Pauli;
“Läuterung.”
116 “St. Paulis Glanz wird aufpoliert.”
117 Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 34–36.
118 Compare Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 3–12.
Chapter 6
1 Between two and five thousand, according to Beat-Club producer Michael

Leckebusch; Leckebusch letter to Werner Knoche, October 13, 1966, Radio
Bremen Beat-Club files (hereafter RB BC).
2 He had since sublet nearly all his strip clubs to other operators. The rent he
collected from those arrangements became his most stable source of income.
3 Examples in “Vier Liverpudel,” Der Spiegel 9 (26 February) 1964; “Schräge
Musik Made in Hamburg,” Hamburger Abendblatt November 11, 1963. See also
Sneeringer, “Meeting The Beatles”; Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 250.
4 OK’s editors (aged 46 and 26) claimed the magazine represented an alternative to
the “old fuddy-duddy snow job” of BRAVO and Musikparade; “Ausgebufte Jungs,”
Der Spiegel 47 (17 November) 1965. Zint, who worked for both OK and the SCN,
begs to differ; Grosse Freiheit 39, 44. The Star-Club News ceased publication with its
December 1965 issue.
242 Notes
5 Radio Luxembourg was not always easy to pick up, despite a signal boost in 1957.
Still, its weekly German audience tripled from 5.2 million in 1959 to 15.5 million in
1967. Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 48; Detlef Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen.
Populäre Jugendkultur in den Medien 1963 bis 1971,” in Monika Estermann and
Edgar Lersch (eds.), Buch, Buchhandel und Rundfunk. 1968 und seine Folgen
(Berlin: Otto Harassowitz, 2003), 83–107; Richard Nicholls, Radio Luxembourg: The
Station of the Stars (London: W.H. Allen, 1983), 83–131.
6 The first European pirate station was Radio Veronica, launched by Dutch
radio retailers. Its signal was weak, though it nibbled at the edges of Germany
and even began German-language programming in 1963. Overview of pirate
radio in Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen,” 87–88; Schildt, “Das Radio,” 263–65;
Ansgar Jerrentrup, Entwicklung der Rockmusik von den Anfängen bis zum Beat
(Regensburg: Bosse, 1981), 119. Another newcomer was DT64, which broadcast
youth-oriented programming across East Germany; early history in Rauhut, Beat
in der Grauzone, 80–85.
7 American labels also used pirate radio to break into the European market.
Competing labels supplied the pirates with records and equipment. Konrad
Dussell, “The Triumph of English-Language Pop Music: West German Radio
Programming,” in Schildt and Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca-Cola, 127–48.
8 The February 1965 issue of SCN noted that the Rattles had become popular across
Germany without the benefit of radio airplay.
9 Local press accounts in “Schnulzen-Sender in der Elbmundung?” BILD, August
31, 1964; “Starclub—Twist auf heisser Welle,” Hamburger Morgenpost, August 31,
1964; “Weissleder hat grosse Pläne,” Welt am Abend, August 31, 1964; “Das wird
der Piratsender,” BILD, September 2, 1964; “Piraten-Sender Star Radio 1 Start in
14 Tagen,” BILD, September 7, 1964; “Platzt der Piratensender?” BILD, September
15, 1964; “Star Radio ab Dezember?” Hamburger Morgenpost, November 19, 1964.
See also Siegfried, Time Is On My Side, 229. Gathering opposition to pirate radio
in “Disc Jockeys Pirating the Airwaves are a Problem,” The Daily Record (Hayward,
CA), December 10, 1964. The convention in question is the Strasburg Treaty, which
West Germany signed in 1965. British law ended Radio Caroline and others for
good in 1967; the BBC established Radio One to appeal to youth, borrowing ideas
and personnel directly from the pirate stations.
10 “Star-Club im Radio,” BRAVO 46 (November) 1964. See also “Im Stenogramm,”
SCN, May 1965; Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 38; Kemp interview. It’s not clear the
Chicago broadcasts actually happened.
11 An exhaustive account of Beat-Club’s genesis and cultural significance is Siegfried,
Time Is On My Side, 335–54; see also Siegfried, Moderne Lüste, 119–20. Weissleder’s
involvement with the show is detailed in memos dated May 6, 1965 and October 21,
1965, in RB BC files.
Notes 243
12 Dussell, “Triumph of English-Language Pop Music,” 130–31. It is entirely possible

that at least some record buyers (more likely females) consumed both kinds of
records: a 1968 survey found that 58 percent of West German teens preferred foreign-
made music while 57 percent liked Schlager; Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen,” 89.
13 Leckebusch to Jakob Kann, April 4, 1966, in RB BC files. Beat-Club would later
expand to forty-five, then sixty minutes per show.
14 Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen,” 101.
15 Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen,” 96; Uwe Nielsen, 40 Jahre Beat-Club (Berlin:
Parthas, 2005), 11f. A fan recalls watching the show in Chile on the Internet Movie
Database user reviews page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239161/reviews?ref_=tt_
urv (accessed June 30, 2017).
16 Die Beatles—Damals in Hamburg.
17 A snapshot of Hamburg establishments offering Beat in 1966 is Hartmann, Maschine,
156–58. Also see below for discussion of the tourist guide Hamburg von 7 bis 7.
18 “Heimweh nach St. Pauli,” BRAVO 12 (1966). This and related articles carry a strong
whiff of hype and it’s possible these quotes were embellished or even fabricated. See
also BRAVO 27 (1966); Matheja, Internationale Pilzvergiftung, 230–32.
19 They did later return as individuals, however, when they were on tour or promoting
new projects. Harrison and Kirchherr strolled the Reeperbahn incognito in 1977,
and McCartney held a press conference at the Kaiserkeller during his 1989 tour.
Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 183–84.
20 Jon Savage makes a compelling case for this period as rock’s most creative, socially
important phase in his 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded.
21 Karl-H. Remy (manager of the Monks) to Leckebusch, March 10, 1966, in RB BC
files. The Monks enjoyed a burst of German notoriety then sank into obscurity.
Their proto-punk sound was, however, rediscovered in the 1990s when British
group The Fall covered some of their songs.
22 Weissleder to Leckebusch, September 25, 1966, RB BC collection. Beat-Club did
broadcast one of the Planten un Blomen shows in January 1967, featuring the
Rattles, the Lords, The Who, and Eric Burdon.
23 Baumann, Wie alles anfing, 15–22; Dostal in Klitsch, Shakin’ All Over, 379.
24 Compare Siegfried, “Sound der Revolte,” 132; Wicke, “Music, Dissidence,
Revolution, and Commerce,” 115. Siegfried emphasizes the cross-generational
aspects of this, which belie notions of a hard generation gap; “Don’t Trust Anyone
Older Than 30? Voices of Conflict and Consensus between Generations in 1960s
West Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40:4 (2005), 727–44.
25 This applied mainly to acts contracted for stints lasting more than one night.
Enforcement was spotty, however, and some musicians later found themselves
without pensions or liable for back taxes; Sheridan in Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach
Schau! 42.
244 Notes
26 For example, the Baier Ice Ballet argued successfully in 1951 that they were not only
artistic but a “dam” against the invasion of less artistic foreign troupes. Eisballet
Maxi und Erst Baier to Finanzbehörde Steueramt Dr. Koester, June 17, 1951, in
StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 1429.
27 Memo from Pönisch to Menke, July 24, 1954, in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt
Hamburg-Mitte, 95/92-15/6 Bd. 1.
28 “Polizisten sagen, Wir kamen gut mit Weissleder aus,” Hamburger Abendblatt,
March 2, 1966.
29 “Gastwirt durchbricht Mauer des Schweigens,” BILD, March 14, 1966. Weissleder’s
language as quoted in the article does not racialize these incidents, but the piece
subtly does, noting that the Zigeuner youths hailed from a nearby trailer colony.
While the entertainment zone accommodated and even welcomed people of African
descent, “Gypsies” were widely scorned as troublemakers who were bad for business.
30 Documents in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95/92-15/6 Bd. 5.
31 See Bandel, Palette Revisited, 130; Siegfried, “Draht zum Westen,” 92. On “Bomb”
see Seuss, Beat in Liverpool, 18.
32 Anthony Edward Waine, Changing Cultural Tastes: Writers and the Popular in
Modern Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 109. Braun in Bandel, Palette
Revisited, 127. Fichte worked the event into the finished version of the novel,
published in 1968.
33 Documents in StaHH 442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte, 95/92-15/6 Bd. 6. Falck
does not appear directly in the documents related to this case.
34 A list of musicians who stayed in Hamburg is in Clayson, Hamburg Cradle, 106–08.
35 On marriages see Rehwagen and Schmidt, Mach Schau! 46–47, 140.
36 Returning to the Star Club in 1967 after a year in jail, Fascher looked around and
said, “the people looked stupid and so was their music”; Let the Good Times Roll,
212. See also Krüger, Star-Club, 247–49, 281. On the backlash against the new rock
see also Siegfried, “Vom Teenager,” 617.
37 “Die Reeperbahn ist keine Strasse der Angst mehr,” Hamburger Abendblatt, August
3, 1965.
38 “Mädchen-Klasse aus der Kneipe geholt,” BILD, January 3, 1967.
39 Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei, 43, 343–45.
40 “Preludin – Bomben auf St. Pauli,” Der Spiegel 8 (14 February), 1966.
41 Stephens, Germans on Drugs, 66–67, 178, 194–98, 204; 1968 report on the drug
crisis (“A small minority”) and January 6, 1969 press release “Jugendschutz im
Jahre 1968,” in StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressstelle VI, Nr. 1591; StaHH 331-1 II
Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 21/1981 41.10, Bd. 2 (1967–70).
42 Jürgen Friedrichs and Allen C. Goodman, The Changing Downtown: A Comparative
Study of Baltimore and Hamburg (Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 1987),
38–40; police memo “Sittenbild in St. Pauli,” March 12, 1957, in StaHH 331-1 II
Polizeibehörde II, Abl. 2/40.67 Prostituierte.
Notes 245
43 On the economic impact see Rolf B. Alexander, Prostitution in Sankt Pauli

(München: Lichtenberg, 1968), 225.
44 Overview of the law in Freund-Widder, “Kleine Geschichte,” 287.
45 Grobecker and Müller, Stadt im Umbruch, 153. Animal rights activists also
protested the hippodrome for animal cruelty.
46 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 41–44; Detlef Uebben, “Polizei und Prostitution:
Bekämpfung der kriminellen Ausbeutung—nicht der Prostitution!” in Sexarbeit,
246; Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 110–12.
47 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 41–45; Alexander, Prostitution in Sankt Pauli, 22–24, 221–
25; “Möglichst anheimelnd,” Der Spiegel 15 (3 April) 1967; reports on prostitution
in StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressstelle VI, Nr. 793.
48 The building was divided into a regular hotel and a hostel for asylum seekers. Barth,
Die Reeperbahn, 111–12, 159.
49 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 141–47. See also Heineman, Before Porn was Legal,
129–41.
50 Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 107; Eitler, “Das Stripteaselokal,” 253.
51 Pfeiffer, Wilhelm Bartels, 45.
52 See Grobecker and Müller, Stadt im Umbruch, 148; Alexander, Prostitution in Sankt
Pauli, 44–47; Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 112–16. On the idea of co-opting established
sexual subcultures and repackaging them as consumer culture compare Mort,
Capital Affairs, 6–11.
53 Der Strich: ein Führer zum Nutzen des ‘Fremdenverkehrs,’ 8th edn. (Flensburg:
Stephenson, 1970), 149–66. The latter was no doubt a reference to the popular soft
porn film series, Schoolgirl Report.
54 StaHH Feuerkasse IIId files on Grosse Freiheit 42/44 (A41049) and 54/56
(A39948). Several tiny streets just north and west of Grosse Freiheit were wiped
off the map. At the end of the block housing the Star Club, Simon-von-Utrecht
Strasse was widened to accommodate more car traffic, cutting off the northern
end of Grosse Freiheit from the rest of the street. A good visual record of these
changes is Arnold Kludas, Hamburg, wie hast Du dich verändert (Hamburg:
Kabel, 1996).
55 Hugill, Sailortown, 142; Anders Petersen, Café Lehmitz (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel,
2013 reprint), 8–12.
56 StaHH 136-1 Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 2251 and Nr. 2253.
57 A good illustration of this is Der Spiegel’s cover story, “Die Türken kommen—rette
sich, wer kann” (issue 31/1973).
58 StaHH 135-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle VI, Nr. 793.
59 See memos from Mueller-Dieckert to Interior Ministry, September 13, 1971, and
Staatsanwaltschaft Paulsen to Interior Ministry, September 8, 1971, both in StaHH
136-1 Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 2253. On the pimp wars see Barth, Die Reeperbahn,
120–38. On developments in the 1970s and 1980s see Im Schatten des grossen
246 Notes
Geldes, n.p.; John Vinocur, “Glitter Starts to Wear Off the Sex Business Along
Hamburg’s Boardwalk of Bordellos,” New York Times, April 5, 1980.
60 Amenda and Grünen, Tor zur Welt, 122–24.
61 Stahl and Wien, Hamburg von 7 bis 7, 275.
62 Ibid., 169–300.
63 Ibid., 214.
64 “Wo liegt was?” St. Pauli Nachrichten I:4, 1968.
65 Compare Waksman, Instruments of Desire, 223.
66 Frevert, “Umbruch,” 643; Maase, “Körper, Konsum, Genuss,” 12.
67 Baumann, Wie alles anfing, 18.
68 Langston, “Roll Over Beethoven!” 191.
69 “Global sensitivity” from Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann, quoted in Schumacher, “In Case
of Misunderstanding,” 119. See also Brown, “Music as a Weapon,” 18.
70 Those were the Union and Knopf ’s; Töteberg and Reissmann, Mach Dir ein Paar
schöne Stunden, 253–56. Description of the Kaisersaal in Stahl and Wien, Hamburg
von 7 bis 7, 291. The Kaiserkeller itself went through many iterations, including
strip club and gay disco. The opening of a mid-sized rock venue called Grosse
Freiheit 36 and the Kaiserkeller are discussed in the epilogue.
71 It was still popular enough in 1967 to be cited for fire code violations due to
overcrowding. Interior Ministry reports of April 9 and May 2, 1967 plus court
summaries in StaHH 136-1 Behörde für Inneres, Nr. 2253.
72 Christa Eckhorn carried on the club after Peter’s death in 1978. In 1980 she
declared, “we’re the only ones who survived”: “Erst waren die Beatles da—später
kam der Burgermeister,” Welt am Sonntag, September 7, 1980. Hamburg von 7
bis 7 described the Top Ten as “less authentic” than the Star Club (pp. 265–66).
The site has seen a succession of dance clubs ever since, most recently a gay disco
called 136.
73 On the building’s history see Jan Freitag, “Gruenspan: Krautrockschuppen im
Gründerzeitglanz,” Die Zeit, October 14, 2014; Töteberg and Reissmann, Mach Dir
ein Paar schöne Stunden, 258.
74 On Grünspan’s role in Hamburg’s music history see Albrecht Schneider (ed.),
MusikerInnen, Übungsbunker, Szene-Clubs. Zur Infrastruktur der Popularmusik in
Hamburg (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 27. On Krautrock in Hamburg see Stubbs,
Future Days, 209–42. Krautrock had several hubs in West Germany, including
Düsseldorf and Munich.
75 “Kein Saal für den Beat,” Hamburger Abendblatt, January 22, 1966; Krüger, Star-
Club, 218.
76 Weissleder’s reaction in Fascher, Let the Good Times Roll, 201–02. Positive reactions
in McGlory interview with Leigh; Robby Günther fan questionnaire.
77 Krüger, Star-Club, 275–78.
Notes 247
78 Donovan was quoted in the St. Pauli Nachrichten, “Unter all dem Mist hier glänzt
fast immer ein goldener Kern” (“under all the crap still shines a golden kernel”);
St. Pauli Nachrichten, May 1968.
79 Inge Viett, who later joined the radical Red Army Fraction, wrote that when she
went there, the Beatles’ days were long past but the Star Club was still the most
“notorious and thrilling” Beat club in Hamburg, a place “respectable people”
feared for its spontaneity and derided as a seedbed of wayward youth. Inge Viett,
Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007), 56. See also Karlheinz Burandt
questionnaire, Sammlung Zint.
80 Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg Sound, 148–49.
81 Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 46, 81–90.
82 See “Aus den Löchern,” Der Spiegel 3 (12 January) 1970; Krüger and Pelc, Hamburg
Sound, 148–49.
Epilogue
1 “Bye Bye, Star-Club!” Hamburger Abendblatt, October 10, 1986. A new structure
was built on the site that houses several undistinguished bars and eateries.
A plaque commemorating the club was erected in 2002, paid for by private
donations.
2 In Zint, Grosse Freiheit 39, 151.
3 Udo Lindenberg gently skewered this sentiment in his 1978 song, “Reeperbahn.”
The narrator claims to have been one of the first fans, hanging out every night with
ladies in negligees and Ringo from Liverpool—“very cool.” Ingrid Noetzel told me
it would have been physically impossible for the Star Club to accommodate all the
people who claim they were there “back then.”
4 Police and writers of guidebooks thought the Wall might decrease the numbers of
prostitutes in Hamburg, for example, but this did not turn out to be the case.
5 Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy,” 428–29.
6 Compare Jacques Attali’s claim that music “prefigures social history” as the forms
of one era herald the social processes of the next. In Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and
Music, 24.
7 Beckmann and Martens, Star-Club, 139.
8 In this they resembled the young people who “rioted” in Munich’s Schwabing
district in summer 1962. See Fürmetz, “Schwabinger Krawalle,” 25–57; Brown,
West Germany and the Global Sixties, 58–62. On the limits of this comparison see
Sneeringer, “Sites of Corruption,” 313–15.
9 Kemp interview.
10 Quoted in Bendel, Palette Revisited, 128.
248 Notes
11 In Clough and Fallows, Astrid Kirchherr, 100. Compare John Gennari’s comments
on rock ‘n’ roll’s similarities with jazz in this regard, in Siegfried, Moderne Lüste,
44–45.
12 The refrain of the Nazis, as well as the non-Marxist political parties during the
Weimar Republic. See Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and
Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002),
271–77.
13 See Fiske, Reading the Popular, 118; Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, 20–42.
14 Jerram, Streetlife, 177.
15 Compare Geoff Eley, “How and Where is German History Centered?” in Neil
Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (eds.), German History from the Margins
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 268–86.
16 Compare London’s Soho in Mort, Capital Affairs, 11.
17 McRobbie, “Thinking with Music,” 40.
18 On commercialism and authenticity see Simon Frith, “The Industrialization of
Music,” in Popular Music Studies Reader, 231.
19 Onkel Pö was also part of Hamburg’s live jazz scene, which is outside the scope of
this book.
20 Barth, Die Reeperbahn, 261–63. That venue is still alive and well in 2017; its
basement houses a black-box club called the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider had no
involvement with either venue. Weissleder, in contrast, gave Fascher permission to
use the Star Club name in 1978. Weissleder died in 1980.
21 St. Pauli, particularly its northern edge with its streets of nineteenth-century
apartment blocks (known as the Schanzenviertel), is now routinely named one of
the most desirable and expensive residential districts in Germany. An example is
Tom Dyckhoff, “The Five Best Places to Live in the World, and Why,” The Guardian,
January 20, 2012.
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources
Archives
Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH) archive
Radio Bremen, Beat-Club archive
Sammlung Günter Zint, Sankt Pauli Museum
Staatsarchiv Hamburg:
135-1 VI Staatliche Pressestelle VI
136-1 Behörde für Inneres
231-10 Vereinsregister
324-1 Baupolizei
331-1 II Polizeibehörde II
354-5 II Jugendbehörde II
376-2 Gewerbepolizei
424-20 Rechtsamt Altona
442-1 Bezirksamt Hamburg-Mitte
741-1 Fotoarchiv
Gewerbekartei
Hamburger Feuerkasse
Films
Backbeat (1994). Dir. Iain Softley, UK: Channel Four Films.
Beat City (1963). Dir. Charles Squires, UK: Associated Rediffusion Television.
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week–The Touring Years (2016). Dir. Ron Howard, US: Universal.
Die Beatles–Damals in Hamburg (1966), Dir. Thomas Struck, West Germany:
Hessischer Rundfunk.
Good Ol’ Freda (2013). Dir. Ryan White, US/UK: Tripod Media.
Mondo Cane (1962), Dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti, Italy: Cineriz.
Musical Recordings
The Liverbirds. The Liverbirds from Merseyside to Hamburg: The Complete Recordings.
Big Beat CDWIKD 290.
Various artists. Beat in Germany: Die Hamburg Szene. Bear Family BCD 16460.
250 Select Bibliography
Various artists. The Hamburg Sound. Beatles, Beat & Grosse Freiheit. BCD 16811.
Various artists. Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-
1969. Rhino R2 76787.
Various artists. Pebbles Volume 24: The Continent Lashes Back. Garage, Beat & Psych
Rarities. AIP AIP-10043.
Various artists. Smash…! Boom…! Bang…! Beat in Germany. The 60s Anthology. Bear
Family BCD 16456.
Periodicals
BILD (Hamburg edition)
BRAVO
Hamburger Abendblatt
Hamburger Morgenpost
Hamburger Vorschau
Hermann Abel’s Nachtpost
konkret
Quick
St. Pauli Nachrichten
Der Spiegel
Star-Club News
Stern
Die Tat
Twen
Die Welt
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Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus, edited by Angelika Ebbinghaus, 91–101.
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274
Index
Abel, Hermann 25, 29, 187n. 73 art schools, as seedbeds of rock

Abel’s Nachtpost 25 culture 79, 208n. 30
Abrams, Lynn 178n. 10, 184n. 32, 186n. 49 Ashes and Diamonds (Cybulski) 80
Abrams, Mark 210n. 60, 220n. 21 Aspinall, Neil 209n. 43
Ackermann, Ute 227n. 120 Association of Dance Hall Owners 29
Adelt, Ulrich 223n. 63 Attali, Jacques 247n. 6
Adenauer, Konrad 4, 36, 38
Adorno, Theodore 93, 212n. 81, 218n. Baacke, Dieter 210n. 56, 212n. 81, 218n.
152, 228n. 127 1, 218n. 152, 226n. 96
Afro-Americanophilia 213n. 83 Babiuk, Andy 202n. 61
Ahoi Kino 163, 205n. 97 Baby Boomers 67
Albers, Hans 24, 34, 38, 55, 187n. 69, Bahnsen, Uwe 233n. 20
194n. 151 Bahrenfeld Freikorps 122
Albertine, Viv 111, 216n. 120, 228n. 131 Baier Ice Ballet 244n. 26
Albrecht, Jochen 100, 106 Bailey, Peter 19, 20, 220n. 28, 224nn. 74,
alcohol and drinking 39–40 76, 237n. 64
Alexander, Rolf B. 245nn. 43, 52 Bajohr, Frank 27, 188n. 87
Alkazar 23, 29, 34, 35, 45, 188n. 90 Ballhaus Cheong Sing theater 24
Allen, Robert Clyde 183n. 17 Bambi Kino 52, 54, 64, 80, 200n. 34,
Allensbach surveys 194n. 158, 231n. 5 201n. 50, 236n. 50
Allotria 29, 30 Bandel, Jan-Frederik 244n. 32
Alster lake 161 Barber, Chris 47, 71, 85
Altona 12, 14, 15, 22, 26, 28 Bardot, Brigitte 203n. 72
Amenda, Lars 183n. 16, 185n. 46, 186nn. barmaids 19, 76, 121, 132, 141, 227n. 117,
55, 61, 187nn. 68, 71, 193n. 144, 237nn. 64, 66
202n. 59, 231n. 5 Barmbek 161, 192n. 135
American Bandstand 150 Barrett club 47
Americanization 69, 221n. 34 Bartels, Willi 30, 35, 38, 51, 123, 136, 143,
American pop culture 118 157, 158, 187n. 79, 191n. 117, 192n.
Amerika-Bar 19 135, 199n. 31, 201n. 53, 203n. 70,
Ames, Eric 183n. 16 239n. 82, 240n. 107
Amey, Ian “Tich” 78 Barth, Ariane 190nn. 106, 115, 196n. 171,
Amon Düül 218n. 140 239n. 81, 245nn. 48, 52, 59
Animierdamen 19, 26, 40, 121, 123, 130, Barthes, Roland 41
131, 136, 195n. 169, 211n. 71, Basie, Count 31
232n. 18 Bauer Verlag, Heinrich 149, 231n. 8
Ansin, Horst 56, 64, 99 Baumann, Michael “Bommi” 153, 162,
Applegate, Celia 181n. 31 230n. 159
Arden, Don 62, 164 Beat-Club 83, 150–2, 242n. 11,
Articus, Rüdiger 199n. 28, 202n. 243n. 22
60, 216n. 126, 217nn. 130, 132, Beatlemania 1, 63, 79, 93, 106, 111, 112,
218nn. 143, 157 113, 141, 142, 148, 168, 169
276 Index
Beatles, The 2, 9, 54, 56, 58, 62, 68, 71, 74, Birch, Pam 83, 84, 216n. 119
78–82, 87, 89, 90, 98, 101, 105, 109, Bird-Land 162
111, 113, 138, 142, 151–2, 165, 167, Birmingham 56, 74
177n. 2, 201n. 56, 202nn. 58, 64, Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary
210n. 55, 212nn. 78, 81, 213n. 86, Cultural Studies 94
214n. 95, 215n. 11, 222n. 45, 225n. Black, Cilla 73
92, 227n. 111, 229nn. 143, 145, 148, Blackboard Jungle 49
247n. 79 Blackbourn, David 11, 182n. 2
Beatles, The: Eight Days A Week Black Gang of St. Paulchen 121, 138,
(documentary) 178n. 3 231n. 5
Beatles Live! At the Star-Club in Hamburg, blackness 79, 223n. 63
Germany, The 1962 167 and cultural authenticity 102
Beatles-Platz 175 Black Revue 23
Beat music. See individual entries Black Sabbath 164
Beatnik scene 76 Blank, Ralf 233n. 28
Bebel, August 16 Blauer Peter 52
Becker, Howard 67 Blockhütte pub 58
Becker, Paul 51 Bloemeke, Rüdiger 50, 101, 224n. 73
Becker, Tobias 178n. 7, 184n. 33 Blohm+Voss 157, 223n. 58
Becker, Walter 126–7, 131, 143, 234n. 35, Blötz, Dieter 141
236n. 51 Blumensäle hall 50
Beckmann, Angelika 227n. 111, Böge, Volker 224n. 73
229n. 145 Bond, Isabella 57
Beckmann, Dieter 204n. 85, 211n. 64, Booker, Christopher 70, 207n. 23
223n. 65 bordello 20, 26, 158, 190n. 106
Bender, Otto 204n. 83 Borneman, Ernest 150, 208n. 26
Beneder, Beatrix 188n. 84 Bowen, Phil 213n. 87
Benjamin, Walter 93 Box 51
Bennett, Andy 181n. 37 Bracewell, Michael 228n. 127
Berber, Anita 23 Brandt, Hermann 131
Berendt, Joachim 47, 114, 154 Brandt, Willy 49
Berg, Anne 178n. 11, 189nn. 94–5, Brauer, Max 33, 122, 191n. 123
192nn. 129–30 Braun, Icke 97, 99, 139, 151, 154, 227n.
Berghahn, Marion 100–1 118
Berkefeld, Henning 182n. 9 Braune, Julia 200n. 33, 204n. 83, 205n. 98
Berkefeld, Wolfgang 34 BRAVO 49, 101, 111, 113–14, 117, 149,
Berlin 2, 4, 24, 36, 46 151, 229n. 142
Berndt, Günter “Cisco” and the BRAVO Beatles Blitz tour 151
Dynamites 85 Bremerhaven 17
Berry, Chuck 63, 83 Brietzke, Dirk 191n. 123
Best, Mona 71, 73, 209n. 43 Bristol 56, 69
Best, Pete 54, 73, 79, 201n. 50, 209n. 43, Britain 7, 33, 53, 56, 62, 64, 69–72, 75,
210n. 53, 211n. 65, 214n. 91, 227nn. 78–82, 94, 149, 151, 168, 223n. 60
118–19 green youths from 77
Bielefeld school 180n. 24 British Forces Network (BFN) 49, 50,
Bielesch, Monica 199n. 27 96 103
Biess, Frank 194n. 153, 196n. 174 British Invasion 2
BILD (newspaper) 64, 121, 136, 141, 142, Brocken, Michael 207nn. 22, 25, 208nn.
155, 156, 231n. 4 31, 41, 216n. 121
Index 277
Brown, Timothy Scott 181n. 34, 197n. 2, Collien, Kurt 199n. 26

235n. 46, 247n. 8 Colyer, Ken 71
Browning, Christopher 188n. 91 Concerthaus Concordia 17, 31
Brügge, Peter 204n. 87 Confino, Alon 178n. 10
Bruggemann, Julia 185n. 44 consumerism, 2, 42, 133, 172
Buchloh, Stephan 195n. 170 modern sexualized 19–20
Buckingham, David 210n. 60 Cook, Hera 76, 214n. 93, 227n. 119
Bunkenberg, Hans 142, 163 Cook-Radmore, Derry 233n. 28
Burandt, Karlheinz 247n. 79 Copenhagen 156
Burdon, Eric 213n. 86, 243n. 22 Corrigan, Paul 93
Burkhardt, Werner 204n. 89 cosmopolitanism 43, 102, 179n. 11,
Burtonwood air base 70 223n. 63
Busby, Dennis 210n. 55 Cox, Maureen 228n. 131
Bütow, Hans 204n. 84 Crazy Horse nightclub 41
Büttner, Ursula 190n. 116 Cream 152
Byrnes, Johnny 54 Creation, The 164
Crew, David F. 209n. 46
Café Heinze 31, 32, 45, 157 Cuban Rhythm Orchestra 47
Café Keese 109 Culmbacher’s Bierhaus 17
“Ball Paradox” 42 Cunard Yanks 70, 207n. 21
Caldwell, David 202n. 67, 223n. 60 Cuneo restaurant 186n. 61
Canclini, Nestor Garcia 181n. 34 Curtis, Lee 216n. 119
Capaldi, Jim 177n. 1 Cybulski, Zbigniew 80
Cap Norte 31, 51, 173
Captagon 81 dance halls 21. See also individual
Carlebach, Joseph 27 entries
Carter, Erica 226n. 106 Darlien, Betti 75, 110, 141, 151,
Casanova 201n. 54 227n. 117
Casbah club 71, 79 Davidstrasse 21, 60, 186n. 61
Cavanagh, Tony 75, 210n. 55 Davies, Hunter 201n. 50, 214n. 92,
Cavern club 71, 74, 87, 114, 154 221n. 43, 228n. 131
Chaney, David 117 Davis, Belinda J. 186n. 51
Chants, The 83 Davis, Miles 114
Charles, Ray 63, 154, 204n. 89 Davis, Spencer 214n. 91
Chocolate Kiddies 23 Dawkins, Joe 47
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 4, Day, Tanya 82
125, 232 n. 11 Dean, James 80, 97
Clayson, Alan 177n. 1, 201n. 49, 202n. Decca 148
61, 202nn. 65, 67, 204n. 88, 208n. de Certeau, Michel 93
41, 209nn. 50, 52, 210nn. 53, 55, Dee, Dave 106
212n. 74, 224n. 75, 244n. 34 Dee, Joey 63
Clough, Matthew H. 214n. 93, 224n. 66, de Franciscis, Azio 193n. 151
227n. 111, 228n. 127, 248n. 11 Delta blues 114
Club 64 133 democratization 2, 9
Club Medallion 235n. 45 Denk, Peter 64, 134, 236n. 50
Club o.k. 64, 85, 130, 134, 137, 222n. 50 Denmark 121, 149, 151, 159, 182n. 8,
Cohen, Sara 179n. 15, 207n. 16, 210n. 55 216n. 120
Cohen, Stanley 221n. 30 de Rheydt, Cilly 23
Colibri cabaret 160 Der Lachende Vagabund 59, 139
278 Index
Der Spiegel (magazine) 49, 101, 113, 121, Ege, Moritz 213n. 83
138, 141, 156, 204n. 86, 231n. 4, Ehrenreich, Barbara 112
245n. 57 Eimsbüttel 162
Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft Einigkeit 202n. 64
(DAG) 152 Eitler, Pacal 196n. 171
Deverson, Jane 76 Elbe river 11, 12, 16
Dickinson, Edward Ross 180n. 21, electric guitars, masculinization of 82,
184n. 25 215n. 107
Diddley, Bo 87, 215n. 107 Ellington, Duke 31
Die Beatles– Damals in Hamburg Ellis, Royston 212n. 76, 213n. 86
(documentary) 151, 178n. 3 Elvin, Carol 82
Diederichsen, Detlef 104 Engelbrecht, Ernst 23
Die Palette (novel) 147 Engels, Friedrich 16
Die Tat (newspaper) 132 Eppendorf 174
Die Welt 124, 143 Eppendorf Clinic 116
discotheque 99, 147, 160, 162–3, 222n. 48 Epstein, Brian 62, 83, 209n. 45,
Dixieland jazz 47, 50, 71 214nn. 95, 98, 226n. 111
Dombrowski, Herbert 194nn. 151, 156, Erdmann’s leather shop 58
196n. 176, 197n. 1 Ernst-Merck-Halle 151
Domino, Fats 63 Eros Center 157, 158, 163
Dominoes, Kingsize Taylor and the 74 Erotic Night Club 60, 62, 136
Dommermuth, Gerold 210n. 56 Evans, Jennifer V. 233n. 25
Doncastle, Patrick 201n. 50, 209n. 43, Evans, Mike 89
210n. 53, 211n. 65, 227nn. 118–19 Evans, Richard J. 16, 183–4n. 20,
Donnegan, Lonnie 70, 71 184nn. 23, 25
Dortmund 137 Exis 98, 99, 118
Dostal, Frank 84, 86, 100, 101, 103, 153, conflict with Rockers 102–3
155, 164, 165, 218n. 42, 225n. 92
Dreysse, Kuno 164 Falck, Kurt 124, 134, 143, 144, 154, 155,
Drugs 79, 81, 129, 135, 145, 147, 156–7, 157, 158, 161, 233nn. 21–2, 238n. 69,
163, 244 n. 41 239n. 77, 240n. 115, 244n. 33
DT64 242n. 6 war on Star Club 134–43
Duffett, Mark 219n. 14 Falkenberg, Lise Lyng 217n. 135
Dussel, Konrad 224n. 73, 242n. 7, 243n. 12 Fallows, Colin 214n. 93, 224n. 66,
Düsseldorf 246n. 74 227n. 111, 228n. 127, 248n. 11
Dyckhoff, Tom 248n. 21 fans 91–3, 219n. 14, 231n. 166
Dylan, Bob 81, 155 creation, in West Germany 95–101
fandom, sex, and gender and 105–13
Echternkamp, Jörg 233n. 28 forms of belonging and distinction
Eckhorn, Christa 55, 202n. 66, 246n. 72 and 101–5
Eckhorn, Herbert 55 as problem 93–5
Eckhorn, Peter 45, 54–9, 62, 64, 74, 75, voice from 113–17
86, 151, 163, 171, 173, 194n. 156, Farson, Daniel 207n. 16
202nn. 60–1, 64, 205n. 94, 209n. 49 Fascher, Fredi 139, 201n. 48, 240n. 98
Economic Miracle 3, 5, 9, 36, 38, 45–6, Fascher, Horst 53, 55–9, 62–4, 74, 75, 78,
48, 51, 60, 88, 95, 107, 112, 130, 157, 81, 102, 104, 110, 139, 141, 142, 144,
168, 169, 225n. 89, 238n. 68 151, 155, 174, 190n. 107, 199nn.
Eden beer hall 19 26, 28, 200n. 39, 201nn. 49, 56,
Edwards, Ian 104 202nn. 65, 67, 204nn. 85–6, 88–9,
Index 279
210n. 53, 211n. 65, 212nn. 71, 73, Geißler, Lothar 110
227nn. 118–20, 230n. 156, 244n. 36, Geisthövel, Alexa 178n. 6, 180n. 24,
246n. 76, 248n. 20 197n. 1, 220n. 18, 224n. 70
Fast, Susan 231n. 166 Gell, Valerie 73, 83, 84
Fehrenbach, Heide 206n. 13, 223n. 63 Gelnhausen 199n. 27
Feige, Marcel 190n. 108, 200n. 44 gender 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 36, 38, 42, 43, 68, 73,
Feldman, Christine Jacqueline 223n. 58, 82–4, 90, 92, 94, 97, 104, 117, 118,
228n. 133 129, 162, 169, 170, 198n. 20, 215n. 107
Femininity 19–21, 82–4, 106–8, 111–2, confusion 41
116, 118, 130–3, 156, 170 fandom, sex, and 105–13
Fichte, Hubert 128, 147, 154, 217n. 138, Generation X (Hamblett and
244n. 32 Deverson) 76
Film Kurier 22 Gennari, John 248n. 11
Finkenbude 27, 188n. 92 German Empire 15–21
Finnegan, Ruth 85, 206n. 3, 216n. 125 Germanness 11, 28, 87, 104, 181n. 35
Fisher, Kate 76 Gerry and the Pacemakers 56
Fiske, John 93, 224nn. 69, 76, 226n. 109, Gestapo 31
228n. 127 Giese, Hans 211n. 68
Flamme, Paul 188n. 91 Gildart, Keith 177n. 2, 206n. 3, 208n. 29,
Flannery, Joe 73, 83, 208n. 41, 215n. 108, 216n. 123, 229n. 150
216n. 119 Gilroy, Paul 207n. 16
Fodor’s 124 Girl Scouts 101
Foitzik, Doris 233n. 25 Glasmacher, Dieter 163
Fontana, Julia 233n. 24, 236n. 52 Glitter, Gary 105
Four Lions 21 globalization 8, 162
4-3-2-1 Musik für junge Leute (TV global sixties 9, 45, 66, 69, 89, 118, 155,
show) 151 181n. 34, 197n. 2
Francis, Connie 104 Glover, Roger 74
Frank, Horst 136 Gnausch, Anne 178n. 7
Frankfurt 19 Goebbels, Joseph 33, 192
Frankland, John 73 Goldie and the Gingerbreads 215n. 108
Fraterrigo, Elizabeth 211n. 61 Goldman, Albert 205n. 92
FrauenFreieluftGalerie Hamburg Goll, Ivan 197n. 9
murals 184n. 26 Gray, Jonathan 219n. 14
Free 164 Green, Jonathon 208n. 37, 213n. 86
Freikorps 22 Greenlaw, Lavinia 224n. 75, 228n. 128
Freitag, Jan 205n. 97, 246n. 73 Gregor, Neil 220n. 17
Freund-Widder, Michaela 185nn. 41, 44, Gretel and Alfons 58, 75, 106, 138. 162
193n. 139, 211n. 65, 237nn. 60, 63, Gries, Rainer 198n. 18
245n. 44 Grobecker, Kurt 194n. 156, 204n. 85,
Frevert, Ute 211n. 68, 227n. 120 233n. 20, 235n. 44, 239n. 83, 245nn.
Frith, Simon 6, 93, 117, 208n. 30, 220n. 45, 52
29, 227n. 114, 248n. 18 Grosse Freiheit 1, 8, 15, 16, 23–4, 28,
Fuhlsbüttel 189n. 103 30, 31, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 50–2,
Fürmetz, Gerhard 235n. 46, 247n. 8 58–61, 64, 73, 78, 84, 96, 100, 122,
129, 136–8, 142, 147, 154, 157, 160,
Gammler 156 162–4, 167, 173–5, 199n. 31, 232n.
Garber, Jenny 107, 228n. 127 12, 236n. 50, 245n. 54, 246n. 70
Gastarbeiter (guest workers) 101–2, 160 Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 (film) 34, 38
280 Index
Groupies 110 Harry’s Hafenbasar 187n. 68

Grünen, Sonja 183n. 16, 185n. 46, 202n. Hartmann, Knut 103, 199n. 28,
59, 231n. 4 216n. 125, 222n. 55, 223n. 65,
Grünspan 160, 163, 164, 174, 205n. 97, 224n. 73, 243n. 17
246n. 74 Harvey, Elizabeth 179n. 21
Grupe, Norbert 141 Haslam, Dave 177n. 2
Grüttner, Michael 184n. 25 Hayton, Jeff 220n. 19
guerilla marketing 62 Hebdige, Dick 96, 219n. 14, 223n. 65
Günter, Horst 48 Heiligengeistfeld 22, 34, 37, 109, 123
Günther, Horst 136–7, 193n. 151, “Heimweh” (Homesickness) 38
195nn. 164, 170, 201n. 55, 233n. 20 Heimweh nach St. Pauli 38
Günther, Karl-Hermann 174 Heine, Salomon 183n. 20
Günther, Robby 225n. 94, 246n. 76 Heineman, Elizabeth 40, 179n. 14,
Gutschow, Konstanty 26, 28 203n. 81, 211n. 65, 212n. 79,
227n. 115, 232n. 16, 234nn. 29, 33,
Hafenstrasse 174 236n. 50
Häfker, Johannes 28 Heinemann’s custom tailors 58
Hagenbeck, Carl 14 Heinestrasse 184n. 30
Hagenbeck, Gottfried 14 Hendrix, Jimi 52, 147, 155, 163
Haifischbar (television show) 38 Henkel, Heinrich 64, 236n. 50
Haiha Safari Club 159 Henroid, Henri 83, 163, 204n. 91
Haley, Bill 4, 49, 63, 70 Herbert, Ulrich 223n. 58
Hall, Stuart 219n. 14 Herbertstrasse 30, 122, 160
Hamblett, Charles 76 Herzog, Dagmar 125, 158, 179n. 14,
Hamburg Bierpalast 23 192n. 137, 208n. 39, 211n. 68,
Hamburg bei Nacht (Günther) 136 227n. 120, 234n. 29
Hamburger Abendblatt Hess, Elizabeth 112
(newspaper) 141, 155 Hessischer, Rundfunk 151
Hamburger Berg 11, 14, 20 Heyer, Hans 104, 222n. 55
Hamburger Echo (newspaper) 140 Hildebrandt, Herbert 87
Hamburger Hafenkonzert radio Hiller, Leo 23
program 187n. 71 Hines, Ian 53, 72, 208n. 32
Hamburger Morgenpost 142, 143 hippodrome 38, 51, 55, 58, 163,
Hamburg Museum 2 194n. 156, 201n. 55, 245n. 45
Hamburg. See individual entries Hippo-Klause 201n. 54
Hamburg Sound 7 Hit Club 64, 148, 163
Hamburg von 7 bis 7 161 Hitler, Adolph 29, 31, 33, 73
Hanau 199n. 27 Hitzer, Bettina 236n. 54
Hannover 58 Hobsbawm, Eric 3, 180n. 25
Hans-Albers-Platz 160 Hoffmann, Holger 132
Harbeck, Hans 24, 186n. 55 Hoggart, Richard 93, 97
“Harbor Rock” (Hafenrock) 50 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe 181n. 31
Hardin & York 165 Höhn, Maria 199n. 27, 223n. 63
Hardy, Rick 53, 201n. 48 Holstein-Pinneberg, Ernst von
Harrington, C. Lee 219n. 14 Schaumburg 23
Harris, Victoria 25, 185n. 44, 187nn. 73–4 Holtkamp, Jürgen 212n. 81
Harrison, George 54, 56, 79, 208n. 36, homegrown sounds 84–90
243n. 19 homosexuality 27, 41, 42, 54, 78, 81,
Harry, Bill 71, 113, 115, 208n. 29 101, 108–9, 125, 130, 147, 161,
Index 281
175, 196n. 178, 212n. 75, 223n. 61, Jugendschutz (youth protection) 26, 125,
226n. 111, 236n. 51, 239n. 89 131, 142, 145, 239n. 89
Horn, Adrian 198n. 21 Jugendschutztrupps (youth protection
Horn, Gerd-Rainer 181n. 38 squads) 128–34, 137, 138, 140,
Horne, Howard 208n. 30, 227n. 114 143, 144, 169
Hotel Pacific 83 jukeboxes 49, 50, 52, 55, 59, 74, 198n. 21,
Howland, Chris 50, 85, 149 202n. 65, 209n. 48
Hugill, Stan 185n. 43, 197n. 1 Jungmühle cabaret 30, 136
Hunn, Karin 223n. 58 Jürgens, Ludwig 23, 27
Hurd, Madeleine 184n. 23
Hurley, Andrew Wright 197n. 9, 224n. Kaempfert, Bert 151
74, 229n. 145 Kaffeehaus Menke 25, 64,
Hurricanes, Rory Storm and the 80 136, 153
Huster, Gabriele 112, 228n. 131 Kaiser, Günther 199n. 24
Kaiserkeller club 1, 4, 8, 52, 53, 55, 56,
Iderhoff, Jethelda 61 58, 59, 64, 78, 80, 85, 96–8, 108, 134,
Immendorf, Jörg 187n. 69 152, 161, 162, 169, 173, 201nn. 52,
Indra club 4, 41, 52, 53, 58, 79, 200n. 43 56, 227n. 119, 243n. 19, 246n. 70,
Inglis, Ian 177n. 3, 205n. 94 248n. 20
International Folk and Beat Festival Käppen Haase 24, 187n. 68
(1966) 154 Karpinski, Paula 127, 133, 234n. 37,
Israelitisches Krankenhaus 27 238n. 71, 74
Ivy Benson’s All-Girl Orchestra 51 Kaschel, Peter 97, 99
Kastanienallee 58
Jacobs, Gloria 112 Kasten, C. 201n. 54
Jacopetti, Gualtiero 195n. 161 Kater, Michael H. 180nn. 21, 25
“Jailhouse Rock” (Presley) 50 Kaufmann, Gauleiter Karl 26, 33,
Jakeman, Major 189n. 100, 192n. 136 191n. 119
Janice the stripper 71 Käutner, Helmut 192n. 130
Jankowiak, Horst 137–8, 240n. 98 Kefford, Chris “Ace” 74
Janssen, Philip Jost 206n. 12 Keilhack, Irma 133, 156
Japan 151, 216n. 120 Kelly, Brian 81
Jarrett, Lucinda 196n. 171, 203n. 72 Kelly, Karen 219n. 4
jazz 4, 6, 23, 30, 31, 42, 45, 47–8, 52, Kemp, Gibson 72–5, 88–90, 109, 139,
64, 65, 68, 71, 93, 96–9, 104, 106, 155, 167, 210n. 53, 226n. 110
108, 128, 150, 154, 160, 173, 177n. Kienast, Kai 85, 86, 88
2, 180n. 25, 197nn. 8–9, 198n. 10, Kiez (red-light district) 74–5, 81, 83, 102,
199n. 24, 205nn. 98, 103, 207n. 22, 133, 157
210n. 55, 223n. 57, 234n. 37, 248nn. Kinder der Nacht 23
11, 19 King, Ben E. 164
Jazzbuch (Berendt) 47 Kinks, The 83
Jefferson, Tony 219n. 14 Kirchberger, Peter 222n. 50
Jenkins, Jennifer 183n. 13 Kirchherr, Astrid 9, 80, 81, 84, 89, 98,
Jerram, Leif 178n. 9, 191n. 121, 222n. 48 108–9, 112, 148, 151, 155, 170, 214n.
Jerrentrup, Ansgar 242n. 6 100, 222n. 45–6, 226nn. 110–11,
Jets, The 53 227n. 119, 243n. 19
Jews 15, 27, 183 n. 20, 188 n. 87 Klaffs, Heinrich 231n. 7
Jugendbehörde (Youth Agency) 124, 125, Kleine Paris 59
127, 140, 233n. 27 Klemke, Anita 199n. 27
282 Index
Klessmann, Eckart 183nn. 13, 20, 184n. Law for the Prevention of Venereal Disease
23, 186n. 52 (1953) 40, 131, 157
Klitsch, Hans-Jürgen 199n. 27, 212n. 78, Law for the Protection of Youth in Public
215n. 107, 216n. 123, 217nn. 136–7, (1951) 5, 125–35, 128, 140, 233n. 28
220n. 29, 227n. 118 Law on Youth-Endangering
Kludas, Arnold 245n. 54 Publications 125, 195n. 170
Knoche, Werner 241n. 1 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases
Knopf ’s 33, 246n. 70 (1927) 25
Koetzle, Michael 227n. 111, 229n. 145 Leadbelly 71
Kopitsch, Franklin 191n. 123 Leckebusch, Michael 150, 152, 225n. 77,
Koschmider, Bruno 4, 45, 52–4, 59, 62, 241n. 1
72, 74, 79, 80, 86, 105, 134, 162, Lee, Brenda 63
201nn. 48–9, 202n. 58, 205n. 94, Leigh, Spencer 204n. 92, 215n. 110,
210n. 53, 236n. 50, 248n. 20 246n. 76
Koshar, Rudy 178n. 10, 186n. 46 Leipzig 19
Koven, Seth 187n. 68 Lennon, Cynthia Powell 56, 72, 75, 202n.
Kraft durch Freude (KdF) program 30 59, 208n. 35
Kramer, Alan 191n. 121 Lennon, John 56, 64, 71, 72, 74, 78–81,
Kraus, Peter 50 83, 84, 105, 106, 114, 151, 201n. 48,
Krause, Ulrich 170 204n. 88, 210n. 58, 212n. 80, 213nn.
Kraushaar, Elmar 194n. 152 82–3, 214n. 100, 230n. 156
Kraushaar, Wolfgang 106 use of Nazi references 80–1, 105
Krautrock 163, 246n. 74 Leonhardt, Rudolf 196n. 181
Kray brothers 209n. 50 Leopold, Georg 29
Kriminal-Kommissariat Levi, Erik 181n. 31
report 232n. 14 Levine, Emily J. 188n. 87
Krogmann, Carl 26 Lewis, Jerry Lee 63, 105
Krüger, Ulf 103, 177nn. 1, 3, 199n. 28, Lewis, Lisa A. 219n. 14
202n. 59, 203nn. 75, 82, 204n. 92, Lewisohn, Mark 177n. 3, 201n. 50, 208n.
205nn. 94, 103, 210n. 53, 212n. 81, 41, 209n. 45, 211n. 65, 212nn. 76,
216n. 126, 217nn. 134–5, 218n. 143, 80, 218n. 42, 225n. 92
223n. 58, 224n. 73, 242n. 5 liberalism 2, 9, 11, 17, 43, 44, 47, 76,
Kuhnert, Peter 227n. 120 170–2
Kultur 153–4 Liebes, Peter 234n. 34
Kümin, Beat 182n. 9 Liedtke, Rainer 183n. 20
Lindenberg, Udo 174, 247n. 3
Laabs, Uwe 140 Lipsitz, George 200n. 35
Lachmann, Ada and Isidor 27 Little Egypt 196n. 171
La Conchita 41 Littman, Corny 175
Lady Crackers 85 Littmann, Anna 178n. 7
“Lady Madonna” (Beatles) 165 Liverbirds 82–4, 109, 116, 148, 150,
Lafrenz, Claus 231n. 4 215nn. 107–8, 216n. 121, 230n. 152
Lallemand, Ruth 76, 78 Liverpool 7, 53, 56, 62, 64, 69–71, 72, 75,
Landungsbrücken 14 78–82, 87, 89, 90, 103, 106, 109, 113,
Lange, Kerstin 178n. 7 115, 151, 152, 154, 155, 173, 207nn.
Langston, Richard 162, 181n. 35, 15, 22, 208n. 31, 212n. 76, 212nn.
224n. 76 80–1, 216n. 121, 222n. 56, 229n. 150
Larkey, Ed 197n. 6 Beat scene 83
Larkin, Colin 216n. 120 Liverpool Cotton Exchange 74
Index 283
Lohaus, Stefanie 216n. 118 Mau, Harold 102, 104

London 69, 156 Mäuschen Bar 47
Lords 217n. 137, 243n. 22 Maycock, George 59
Lott, Eric 213n. 83 Meister, Hans 81
Luft, A. R. 233n. 20 Melly, George 5
Luna. See Bambi Kino Menke, Wilhelm 29, 55, 189n. 97
Lüneburg 103 Mersey Beat 71, 80, 83, 113, 208n. 29,
Lutheran church 15 217n. 132
Lysaght, Alan 202n. 64, 227n. 111 “Merseybeat festival” 71
Miehe, Ulf 105
Maase, Kaspar 96, 117, 178n. 8, 183n. Miles, Barry 200n. 43, 202n. 65, 209nn.
17, 184n. 32, 190n. 115, 198n. 18, 45–6, 211n. 64, 222n. 53, 227nn.
213n. 89 111, 119
McCabe, Peter 201n. 46, 202n. 64 Miles, Sue 76, 208n. 37
McCartney, Paul 54, 75, 76, 79–81, 106, Millard, Andre 213n. 83, 222n. 56
110, 151, 201n. 50, 211n. 64, 213nn. Miller, Frank H. 41, 42, 48, 196n. 176
82, 86, 214nn. 91–2, 95, 100, Millerntor 13
243n. 19 Millerntor-Theater 188n. 91
McDonnell, Evelyn 219n. 4 Mingram, Gerd 191n. 22, 202n. 64,
McElligott, Anthony 186n. 52, 231n. 9, 240n. 93
232nn. 12–13, 234n. 36 Mintzker, Yair 183n. 19
McFall, Ray 71 “Miss Pullover” 51
McGlory, Mary 73, 83, 84, 155, 163, modernity 24, 65, 70, 94, 109, 113, 172
204n. 92, 215n. 110, 246n. 76 modernization 12, 17, 33, 46, 118, 123,
McKinney, Devin 82, 195n. 162 144, 157, 158, 183n. 19
MacMillan, Harold 72 and prostitution 20
McRobbie, Angela 107, 180n. 30, 219n. Moeller, Robert G. 238n. 68
14, 228n. 127 Mondo Cane (documentary) 39
Maier, Hans 210n. 56 “Money(That’s What I Want)”
Mama Betty’s Band 210n. 55, 216n. 126 (Strong) 83
Mambo-Schänke 58, 156 Monika-Bar 78
Manchester 69 Monks, The 152, 243n. 21
Manfred Weissleder KG 139 Morat, Daniel 178n. 7, 179n. 11, 220n.
Manos, Helene 185n. 44 17, 223n. 63
Manstein, Mady 132 Morlock, Martin 238n. 69, 240n. 115
maritime romanticism 38, 144 Mörschel, Werner 51, 52, 200n. 32
Marsden, Beryl 73, 82, 208n. 41 Mort, Frank 44, 89, 178n. 9, 182n. 6,
Marshall, William 200n. 43, 208n. 31 203n. 71, 227n. 116, 245n. 52
Martens, Klaus 204n. 85, 211n. 64, 223n. Mrozek, Bodo 178n. 6, 180n. 24, 220n. 18
65 Müller, Christian 194n. 156, 204n. 85,
Martens, Rene 192n. 129, 193n. 145 231n. 4, 233n. 20, 235n. 44, 239n.
Marwick, Arthur 76, 88, 181n. 39, 206n. 83, 245nn. 45, 52
8, 208n. 36, 210n. 60 Müller, Paulchen 63, 138–9, 141, 144
masculinity 38, 42, 63, 73, 75, 81–2, Müller, Sven-Oliver 94, 220n. 17
96–7, 102, 106–8, 112, 117–8, 131 Mund, Heike 217n. 137
Massaquoi, Hans 34, 192n. 137 Munich 246n. 74, 247n. 8
mass taste 3, 43, 93 Münster, Ruth 198n. 18
Matheja, Bernd 214n. 95, 229n. 143, Murger, Henri 206n. 7
243n. 18 Musgrove, Gordon 190n. 116
284 Index
musical automatism 93 Nott, James 178n. 9

Musical Box 71 nudity 25, 26, 30, 40–1, 60, 195n. 170,
musicking 7, 94, 105 212n. 79, 235n. 44
Musikparade 83, 116, 149, 204n. 88 Nuttall, Jeff 96, 209n. 42, 220n. 25
Muskat, Hannelore 237n. 66
Mutsaers, Lutgard 200n. 35 Oberdorffer, Manfred “Toni” 85, 102
O’Brien, Lucy 209n. 41, 216n. 120
Nasaw, David 178n. 8, 184nn. 29, 31 Oettermann, Stephan 190n. 108
Nathaus, Klaus 182n. 40, 228n. 128 OK magazine 154, 241n. 4
National Socialist Theater Owners’ Onkel Pös Carnegie Hall 174
Cell 27 Operation Clean Reich 27
Naura, Michael 154 Operation Gomorrah 32
Nava, Mica 223n. 63 Operettenhaus 174
Nazi era 25–33, 35, 36, 48, 55, 94, 95, Optisch Belwider 14
122, 125, 135, 162, 173, 191n. 124 Osgerby, Bill 227n. 111
Nazism 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 33, 35–6, 44, 49, Ott, Fiete 142
58, 73, 90, 93, 104, 108, 114, 115,
117, 118, 124, 127, 133, 153, 162, Packard, Vance 219n. 8
168–9, 171 Page, Jimmy 71
NEMS 71, 103, 222n. 56 Page, Larry 83
Netherlands, the 72, 151 Palais d’Amour 158, 159
Neu-China theater 24 Palette bar 128, 135, 154, 235n. 42,
Neue Dröge eatery 23 236n. 48
Neue Operettentheater 24, 27 Paolozzi, Eduardo 109, 214n. 93
Neue Welt 184n. 30 Paradieshof 61
Neustadt 27, 174 Park, Robert E. 224n. 69
Nevermann, Paul 36, 232n. 12 Parker, Colonel 204n. 88
New Beat Sisters 218n. 157 Patrick, Mick 215n. 110
New Colony Club 71 Paul-Roosen-Strasse 236n. 50
New Musical Express 70, 151 Paulun, Dirks 194n. 159
New Orleans club 47, 51, 56 Pelc, Ortwin 177n. 1, 177n. 3, 183n. 18,
New Star Club 174 185nn. 43, 46, 199n. 28, 202n. 59,
New York 173 203nn. 75, 82, 205nn. 94, 103, 210n.
New York Times 11 53, 212n. 81, 216n. 126, 217nn.
Nice, The 164 134–5, 218n. 143, 223n. 58, 242n. 5,
Nicholls, Richard 242n. 5 244n. 36
Nidl, Manfred. See Quinn, Freddy Pelupessy, Jonky 210n. 55
Niedbalski, Johanna 178n. 7 Pennington, Stephan 223n. 57
Niewohner, Bärbel 110 Petersen, Dr. Käthe 36
Noelle-Naumann, Elisabeth 193n. 143, Petersen, Rudolf 33, 191n. 123
194n. 158, 211n. 68 Peukert, Detlev 179n. 21
Noetzel, Ingrid 112, 228nn. 129, 133, Pfeiffer, Ilsemarie 187n. 79, 194n. 156,
247n. 3 199n. 31, 239n. 83
Nöfer, Werner 163 Philips, Harold. See Woodbine, Lord
Nolte, Paul 178n. 7 Pietsch, Rosamunde 130, 235n. 40,
“Norwegian Wood” (Beatles) 165 238n. 68
Nossack, Hans-Erich 190n. 116 Pigalle club 47
nostalgia 37, 38, 44, 78, 136, 152, 160, Pini, Udo 184n. 31, 188n. 92, 189n. 101
167, 194n. 151 Pink Floyd 163
Index 285
Planten un Blomen 152 Rebel without a Cause (film) 48

Playboys, The 105 Reeperbahn 1, 12–15, 17, 22–3, 27, 32–4,
Pohl, Gustav 27 36, 37, 39–43, 45, 47, 50, 51, 55, 57,
Poiger, Utah 6, 198nn. 10, 20, 204n. 83, 58, 61, 62, 72–4, 79, 90, 99, 122–5,
206n. 13, 221n. 34, 234n. 37 128, 132, 133, 138, 147, 153, 155,
Polizeirevier [Police Station] Davidwache 157, 159, 160, 163, 173–5, 189n. 98,
(film) 122 199n. 28, 222n. 48, 243n. 19
Pommerin, Reiner 206n. 13 Regev, Motti 218n. 42
pop culture 5–6, 8, 38, 92–5, 97, 104, 109, Rehwagen, Thomas 177n. 3, 199n. 28,
111, 112, 117, 118, 126, 135, 154, 200nn. 39, 43, 202nn 61, 65, 203n.
169, 171–3, 219n. 8, 224n. 76, 228n. 82, 204n. 89, 210nn. 54–5, 212n. 71,
127, 229n. 147 217n. 134, 223n. 65, 224n. 73, 225n.
Pop Modernism 170 89, 227nn. 117–18, 120–1, 229nn.
Potter, Pamela 181n. 31 141, 146, 238n. 73, 243nn. 19, 25,
Powell, Don 217n. 135 244n. 35
Preludin 81, 156 Reichel, Achim 86–7, 100, 139, 164, 165,
Presley, Elvis 49, 50, 53, 204n. 88 217n. 134
Preston, Billy 75 Reich Music Chamber 31
Pretty Things, The 105, 152, 209n. 50 Reissmann, Volker 184n. 32, 186n. 56,
Pritchard, David 202n. 64, 227n. 111 188n. 91, 191n. 118, 192n. 130,
Proctor, Robert 233n. 28 200n. 34, 204n. 83, 205n. 97
prostitution 20–1, 25–7, 35, 42, 78, 122, Rheinterassen café 29
123, 131, 156–60, 170, 185nn. 41, Rhodes, Lisa L. 227n. 117
44, 190n. 106, 193n. 141, 195n. 169, Richard, Little 63, 105, 212n. 73
211n. 71, 232n. 14, 233n. 25, 237nn. Riesman, David 219n. 8
59, 63–4 Ringo Starr 72, 80, 228n. 131
decriminalized in urban areas 40 Ritzenecke 76, 77, 110
modernization and 20 Ritzheimer, Kara 179n. 11
Rivets 217n. 137
Quast, Johannes 29 Roberts, Ralph Arthur 24
Quick 113, 121 Rock‘n’Twist Club 64
Quinn, Freddy 38, 45, 101, 144, “Rock Around the Clock” 49
194n. 152 “Rock Island Line” (Leadbelly) 71
Rolling Stones 71, 83, 87, 152
Raczynski, Horst 232n. 17 Roos, Julia 185n. 44, 187n. 73
Radio Bremen 149, 150 Rosa, Tante 75, 134
Radio Caroline 149, 242n. 9 Rosenberg, Helmut 161
Radio Luxemburg 49, 50, 70, 96, 149, Rosenkranz, Bernhard 212n. 71, 236n. 51
242n. 5 Ross, Erwin 60, 62, 137, 140, 203n. 75,
Radio One 242n. 9 230n. 156
Radio Veronica 242n. 6 Rote Katze 59, 139
Radtke, Dieter 229n. 141 Rotthoff ’s instrument store 58
Rag Dolls 217n. 137 Roxa bar 78, 212n. 74
Rascals 85 Royal Caribbean Steel Band 53
Rattles 86, 87, 100, 148, 150, 151, 217n. Rubestein, Anne 94
138, 242n. 8, 243n. 22 Rühmkorf, Peter 154
Rauhut, Michael 242n. 6 Russell, Pamela 207nn. 21, 23, 208n. 26
Raven, Paul. See Glitter, Gary Russell, Thaddeus 213n. 83
Reagin, Nancy 94 Ryback, Timothy W. 199n. 22
286 Index
St. Georg 160 Schneider, Albrecht 246n. 74

St. Pauli Bürgerverein 123, 136, 140, 143, Schneider, Norbert 177n. 2
157, 233nn. 20–1, 239n. 81 Schneidereit, Heinz-Henning 231n. 7
St. Pauli: wie es leibt und lebt 185n. 46 Schofield, Michael 76
St. Pauli district 1–5, 9. See also Schonfeld, Robert D. 201n. 46, 202n. 64
individual entries Schönkopf, Lennart 194n. 159
entertainment history in 11–44 Schreiber, Markus 186n. 47
St. Pauli Nachrichten 161, 162 Schroeder, Joachim 232n. 13
St.-Pauli Theater 38 Schroeder, Louise 234n. 36
Salambo cabaret 159, 160, 167, 174 Schulz, Wilifried “Frida” 138, 202n. 64
Salome club 210n. 55 Schulze, Rainer 199n. 27
Sandvoss, Cornel 219n. 14 Sclater, Graham “Sandy” 105
Saturday Club 103, 149 Scouse 69, 72, 207n. 15
Saunders, Sylvia 83, 84 Seidel’s Club. See Bambi Kino
Savage, Jon 109, 170, 206n. 7, 210n. 58, self-policing 74–5
227n. 111, 243n. 20 Semmelhack bar 199n. 28
scenes 1–2, 4, 7–9, 31, 42, 46, 47, 50, 56, Seuss, Jürgen 210n. 56, 212n. 81,
67–9, 75, 76, 83, 84, 87–90, 92, 96–8, 213n. 87
100–3, 106, 108–14, 118, 122, 123, sex 9. See also individual entries
125, 130, 137, 142, 144, 145, 147–65, commodified 12
167–72, 174, 177, 179nn. 15, 20, violence, and youth-endangering
199n. 27, 202n. 64, 205n. 103, 207n. places 124–34
22, 208n. 31, 217n. 135, 236n. 51, sex for hire 19, 20
248n. 19 sexual abuse 237n. 62
Schanzenstrasse 58 sexual consumption 42
Schanzenviertel 248n. 21 sexual freedom 75–8, 84
Scheler, Max 229n. 150 sexual revolution 2, 3, 40, 76–8, 112, 148,
Schelsky, Helmut 220n. 26, 234n. 34 158, 159, 161, 162
Schildt, Axel 178nn. 6, 11, 179n. 20, sex wave 4, 112, 212n. 79
189nn. 93, 95, 193nn142–3, 198n. Shaw, Thomas Edward 199n. 27
17, 199n. 31, 206n. 13, 220nn. 21, Shennan, Paddy 215n. 110
29, 222n. 53, 224n. 72, 231n. 167, Sheridan, Rosi Haitmann 54, 78, 103,
234nn. 34, 37, 242n. 6 110, 144, 225n. 89, 227n. 121
Schissler, Hanna 179n. 13 Sheridan, Tony 53–7, 62, 64, 68, 73, 74,
Schlager 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 59, 62, 65, 104, 78, 86, 106, 110, 116, 151, 155, 201n.
197n. 6, 212n. 75, 243n. 12 56, 210n. 55, 227n. 121
Schmidt, Gunther 211n. 68 Siegfried, Detlef 178n. 6, 179n. 20, 181n.
Schmidt, Helmut 124, 143, 144, 151, 38, 182n. 39, 198n. 18, 203n. 70,
232n. 17, 233n. 22 204n. 90, 205n. 94, 206n. 8, 208n.
Schmidt, Manfred 121 26, 213n. 83, 217n. 138, 220nn. 21,
Schmidt, Thorsten 177n. 3, 199n. 28, 29, 225n. 79, 231n. 167, 242nn. 5–6,
200nn. 39, 43, 202nn. 61, 65, 203n. 11, 243nn. 12, 24, 244n. 36
82, 204n. 89, 210nn. 54–5, 212n. 71, Sielemann, Jürgen 188n. 91
217n. 134, 223n. 65, 224n. 73, 225n. Sieveking, Kurt 232n. 11
89, 227nn. 117–18, 120–1, 229nn. Siewert, Klaus 183n. 20
141, 146, 238n. 73, 243nn. 19, 25, Sigmund, Monika 188n. 87
244n. 35 Silies, Eva-Marie 211nn. 65, 68
Schmieding, Leonard 220n. 19 Sillescu, Werner 204n. 89
Schmuckstrasse 1, 28, 50, 74, 132 Silver Beetles, The 53, 79
Index 287
Simon-von-Utrecht Strasse 245n. 54 Storm, Rory 54, 72, 80

Sittenfilm 136–7, 200n. 34, 203n. 77 Stranz, August 28–9
Six-Five Special (BBC show) 70–1, 150, Stratton, Jon 183n. 17, 196n. 171
208n. 26 striptease 41–2, 60
skiffle 50, 71, 82, 85, 177n. 2, 216n. 126 Strong, Barrett 83
Slits, the 111, 216n. 120 Strupp, Christoph 194n. 151
slumming 24, 98, 103, 187n. 67 Studio X 55, 201n. 56
Small, Christopher 7, 92, 94 subcultural capital 103
Sneeringer, Julia 179n. 14, 189n. 95, subculture theory 8, 30, 43, 58, 67, 71, 83,
193n. 144, 194n. 159, 195n. 163, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 107, 114,
204n. 88, 212n. 77, 221n. 43, 223n. 118, 147, 148, 171, 174, 181n. 37,
61, 228n. 127, 234n. 33, 241n. 3, 219n. 14, 223n. 65, 245n. 52
247n. 8, 248n. 12 Sutcliffe, Millie 73
social capital 224n. 69 Sutcliffe, Pauline 201n. 48, 202n. 61,
Social Democrats 15 212n. 76, 213n. 86, 214n. 93
Soell, Hartmut 182n. 1, 233n. 22 Sutcliffe, Stuart 73, 78, 79, 80–1, 89, 108,
Soho 73 109, 201n. 48, 214nn. 93, 100
Sound Effects (Frith) 117 Sweden 121
Sounes, Howard 212n. 78, 214n. 95 Swing music 30, 34
Spain 84 Switzerland 216n. 120
Speke 70 Sywottek, Arnold 193n. 142
Spencer Davis Group 152, 165 Szodrzynski, Joachim 190n. 116, 191nn.
Spielbudenplatz 14, 24, 163, 174 118–19
Stahl, W. 202n. 59, 222n. 53
Stahlnetz 162 Tabu strip club cabaret 59, 60, 160,
Star Club 1, 58, 59, 62–4, 66, 69, 72, 74–7, 195nn. 164, 170, 203n. 70
80, 83, 84, 86–8, 91, 100–3, 105, 109, Tangerine Dream 163
132, 152, 153, 156, 161–3, 165, 174, Tanzpalast Lido 51
181n. 38, 204nn. 88, 90, 207n. 15, Tanzpalast Resi hall 50
210n. 55, 214n. 98, 222nn. 50, 53, Tarrach, Dicky 86
225n. 94, 229n. 140, 237n. 66, 244n. tattooing 18, 23, 30, 35, 39, 185n. 34,
36, 247nn. 3, 79 190n. 108
Falck’s war on 134–43 Taunus, Ford 210n. 54
Star-Club News 8, 83, 92, 113–17, 142, taverns 13, 19, 28, 85, 138, 162, 182n. 9
148–9, 152, 154, 169, 215n. 107, Taylor, Ted “Kingsize” 72, 73, 74, 155,
241n. 4 210n. 54, 212n. 81
Starkey, Richard. See Ringo Starr Teddy Boys 101
Staron, Julia 185n. 44, 189n. 103 Teldec 49
Star Radio 1 149 Tessnow, Manfred 103, 224n. 73
Steedman, Carolyn 107 textual poaching 94
Steinbacher, Sibylle 212n. 79, 234n. 35 Thälmann, Ernst 61
Stephens, Robert P. 156, 209n. 46, Tharpe, Rosetta 215n. 107
234n. 30, 235n. 40, 236n. 48, Theresienstadt 27
236n. 54, 244n. 41 Thiele-Lundershausen, Emma 184n. 30
Stern (newspaper) 121, 231n. 4 Thinius, Carl-Heinz 184n. 31, 194n. 156
Sternensaal building 61 Third Reich. See ‘Nazi era
Stern-Kino 61–2 Thompson, Billy 23
Stockholm 156 Thornton, Sarah 103, 220n. 21, 224nn.
Stokes, Martin 247n. 6 66, 69, 230n. 156
288 Index
Tielman, Andy 52 von Saldern, Adelheid 234n. 29

Tivoli ballroom 51, 52, 175 von Stürmer, Kerstin 233n. 20
tolerance 8, 15, 20, 24, 25, 42–4, 56, 78, von Wiese, Eberhard 186n. 52, 189n. 103,
90, 101, 104, 130, 131, 138, 157, 162, 236n. 52
171, 175, 211n. 71, 212n. 77 Voormann, Klaus 80, 98, 106, 170, 221n.
Tommy Star 87 43, 222n. 45, 224n. 66
Tonics 85 voyeurism 40–1
Ton Steine Scherben band 6, 174
Top Ten club 1, 55–8, 62–4, 66, 74, 85, Wahrlich, Christian 30, 35
86, 99, 106, 133, 135, 138, 142, 147, Waine, Tony 4, 179n. 16, 244n. 32
148, 151, 152, 156, 158, 160–3, 169, waitering 188n. 84
173, 207n. 15, 210n. 55, 222n. 48, waitresses 19
246n. 72 Waksman, Steve 215n. 107, 228n. 128
Töteberg, Michael 184n. 32, 186n. 56, Walden, Hans 186n. 47
188n. 91, 191n. 118, 192n. 130, Walker Brothers 152
200n. 34, 204n. 83, 205n. 97 Walkowitz, Judith R. 178n. 9
Townshend, Pete 209nn. 51–2, 213n. 86 Walter, Georg 184n. 30, 185n. 44, 197n. 1
transvestites 27, 77–8, 101, 157, 211n. 71 Warner, Mike 212n. 78
show 1, 41, 51, 58, 78, 175 Washigton Bar 38
“transvestite scourge” 239n. 89 Weeks, Jeffrey 209n. 43, 210n. 60,
Tremsbüttel Castle 152 231n. 167
Trichter 17, 25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 125, 157, Wehner, Wolfgang 203n. 80
184n. 29, 192n. 133 Weimar Republic 3, 6, 22–6, 29, 36,
Tucholsky, Kurt 25 40, 47, 48, 127, 133, 175, 179n. 11,
Twen Club 150 180n. 21, 232n. 13, 240n. 94,
2I’s Coffee Bar 53 248n. 12
Weinhauer, Klaus 221n. 30, 234n. 31,
Uhse, Beate 203n. 81, 232n. 16 244n. 39
Ullrich, Volker 186n. 51 Weinzierl, John 218n. 140
Unilever 70 Weise, Luise 31
Union-Theater on the Spielbudenplatz 27 Weissleder, Manfred 8, 45, 59–64, 72, 74,
United States 5, 105, 112, 168, 191n. 123 75, 81, 83, 86, 87, 100, 105, 113–17,
urban zones 68, 206n. 7 122, 134–44, 147, 148, 150–5, 162,
US armed forces radio (AFN) 49, 96 163, 171, 177n. 1, 203nn. 70, 77, 80,
USS Essex 57 204n. 88, 205nn. 92, 94, 210n. 54,
216n. 115, 217n. 130, 228n. 139,
van der Wil, Wilfried 178n. 6 229nn. 140, 142, 230n. 156, 239nn.
Viennese cafes 21 80–1, 83, 240nn. 94, 98, 242n. 11,
Viett, Inge 247n. 79 244n. 29, 246n. 76, 248n. 20
Vincent, Gene 53, 63, 71, 81, 101, 114, Westdeutsche Rundfunk 50
155, 204n. 88 Whisnant, Clayton 42, 196n. 178, 212n.
Vinocur, John 246n. 59 75, 234n. 29, 235n. 40, 236n. 51
Voigt, Uwe 110 Whitcomb, Ian 70, 208n. 37, 218n. 155,
Vollmer, Jürgen 98, 99, 106, 200n. 43, 224n. 75
214n. 100, 222nn. 45–6, 227n. 114 Who, The 155, 243n. 22
von Dirke, Sabine 222n. 46, 226n. 109 Wien, D. 202n. 59, 222n. 53
von Hess, Jonas Ludwig 20 Wildt, Michael 191n. 124, 196n. 182,
von Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul 22 220n. 28
von Ranken, Walter Pogge 194n. 159 Wilkie, Derry 73, 210n. 55
Index 289
Williams, Allan 53, 71, 79, 200n. 43 Yes 164

Willis, Ellen 108, 219n. 4 Young, Roy 56, 73, 202n. 61
Wipplinger, Jonathan 180n. 25 youth, definition of 5–6
Wirtschafts -und Ordnungsamt (W&O) Youth Protection Law. See ‘Law for the
124, 134, 135, 138, 140, 141 Protection of Youth in Public
Witter, Ben 201n. 53 Youth Protection Squads. See
Wittkowski, Arthur 23, 25, 29–30, 35, Jugendschutztrupps
187n. 79, 189n. 100–1, 103, 192n.
136 Zahl, Peter-Paul 103, 224n. 73
Wohlers, Erika 214n. 95 Zauberflöte tavern 28
Woitalla, Manfred 217n. 135 Ziehe, Thomas 199n. 28
Wolf, Hans-Otto 234n. 34 Zille, Heinrich 24
Wolf, Ludwig 188n. 90 Zint, Günter 64, 102, 140, 144, 161, 192n.
Wolf, Reinhard 108, 109 129, 193n. 145, 202n. 64, 203n. 70,
Wolf Brothers 22, 24, 27 204n. 83, 229n. 146, 230nn. 156,
Woodbine, Lord 53, 71 159, 241n. 4
Wördehoff, Bernhard 143 Zolov, Eric 181n. 34
World War One 21–2 Zur Giraffe 187n. 79
Wurst, Peter. See Tommy Star Zürn, Gaby 190n. 106

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A Social History of Early

Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany

Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2018

Copyright © Julia Sneeringer, 2018

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3438-9

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List of Illustrations viii

Introduction: Days in the Life of Rock ‘n’ Roll in St. Pauli 1

1.1 Refreshment pavilion on the Reeperbahn, c. 1820 13

target demographic for St. Pauli amusements outside of movies—indeed, under-

ties into a particular kind of emotional turbulence, when issues of individual

Historical studies of popular music in twentieth-century Germany tend to

attention to music’s production, reception, and circulation. A useful concept

notions of authority and defended young people’s right to express themselves.

A Brief History of Entertainment in St. Pauli

reveals St. Pauli as an imagined space, a culturally significant repository of myths

Hamburg’s “Wild West”

By the late eighteenth century, enterprising locals sowed the seeds of a

Figure 1.1 Refreshment pavilion on the Reeperbahn, c. 1820.

penchant for violence, as well as solidarity in the face of tough conditions.12

Ancillary trades employed thousands more. Next to Bremerhaven, Hamburg

Figure 1.2 Operettenhaus on the Spielbudenplatz, 1905.

Entertainment for some, work for others

independence: “mistress of the situation,” she was not required to be invisible

Figure 1.3 Map of St. Pauli in 1909.

“No breaks during the break!”

The Nazi era: Sin under wraps

Figure 1.4 Ruins of the Trichter site on the Reeperbahn, 1945.

Getting a piece of the peace

in Hamburg’s traditional self-image as a bastion of internationalism within

Other entertainment sites didn’t wait for permission or a settled economy to

The gift of laughter and forgetting

Entertainment establishments along the Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit

increasingly became stock characters experienced through entertainment.

Figure 1.5 Grosse Freiheit at night, c. 1955.

immune Moral Good.”173 Striptease or prostitute encounters offered men in

something Germany can no longer afford. To be truly hip—a desirable attribute

The Birth of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Clubs

Miracle—modernizing impulses that percolated on the fringes of Germany’s

Rock ‘n’ roll comes to Germany

The emergence of commercial popular music is inextricably bound up with

Hamburg-based labels were most adept at producing classical music, that

Besides being an expression of the libidinal energy of the working-class

Rock ‘n’ roll comes to St. Pauli: Bruno Koschmider

Grosse Freiheit 36, a block north of the Reeperbahn at the corner of

He found them in England, as Germany did not yet have a crop of

From hippodrome to twist shack: Peter Eckhorn

If Bruno Koschmider represents the outsiders who sought their fortune in

The era of village music is over! Manfred Weissleder

In addition to illuminating the histories of emotion and generation,12

“Uncle Manfred’s Home for Lost Scousers”:

Musicians in Hamburg’s Beat music scene hailed from London, Bristol,

Dreams of Hamburg, dreams of freedom

unknown (and barely competent) Beatles with the parsimonious Koschmider

visible in the Grosse Freiheit before a crackdown in 1964, exerted particular

St. Pauli and the making of The Beatles

The Beatles were undoubtedly the most famous musicians to apprentice in

beatnik impulses. Encounters with young Germans broadened their worldview.