FC St. Pauli’s stadium its name.7
In the late seventeenth century the Hamburg Senate ordered that hospices and hospitals (Pesthof) be moved beyond the city’s ramparts to the area that today is the St. Pauli district. That is when the so-called ‘undesirables’ came, the many diseased and destitute who joined the area’s initial inhabitants. None were spared during the siege the Danish army subjected the area to at the end of that century. During the assault the church – built in 1682 and dedicated to Saint Paul – was totally destroyed. From then, as well as giving the neighbourhood its name, the church became an important symbol. It was rebuilt in the eighteenth century but suffered another disaster in 1814. This time it was by France’s Grand Armée during the War of the Sixth Coalition (1812–14). It was Napoleon himself who ordered burning ‘that suburb of ungovernable people’ to avoid enemy soldiers from hiding in St. Pauli homes and premises. Finally, in 1833, the conurbation adopted the name of the church, which that very year was rebuilt on the spot of its original construction. Around that time, St. Pauli’s 11,000 residents obtained civil rights and could enjoy advances such as the arrival of electricity and gas.
In the mid-nineteenth century the area went through enormous expansion and change. This was partly because of the ‘Great Fire’ that devastated central Hamburg on 5 May 1842, causing 51 fatalities and destroying 1,700 buildings.8 It was also due to a growth in industrialisation linked to the activities of the port.9 These two developments sparked a mass exodus to St. Pauli. It is calculated that as a consequence of the catastrophe and creation of new industries, around 20,000 people moved outside the city walls, seeking decent wages, to St. Pauli. The exodus produced urban crowding and sanitary deficiencies. This demographic growth, which transformed St. Pauli’s social structure, encouraged the emergence in the area of brothels,10 theatres, music halls and dancehalls.11 The increase in inhabitants led the Hamburg Senate to agree to open the Millerntorn gate at night, although, of course, anyone going through it after midnight had to pay (16 shillings).12 Most of the newcomers settled in the port and Reeperbahn areas that became a centre for nightlife at the end of century. As a result of industrial growth a working-class community emerged,13 turning St. Pauli into a left-wing stronghold.14 Many of the neighbourhood’s new residents were workers attracted to the chance of gaining a decent job and wage in trades such as carpentry, hemp rope making or warehousing. Indeed, these were the main occupations locally. The opening of shipyards such as HC Stülcken (in 1840), Blohm & Voss (1877) and Norderwerft (1906), thanks to the increase in transoceanic shipping, ended up giving the neighbourhood a marked proletarian tone.15
In the mid-nineteenth century there was a surge in local firms creating branches in different African and East Asian countries. As a result, in 1848 37 Hamburg trading companies had offices abroad. This commercial expansion obviously aided – along with the emergence of steamships – the development of local shipping.
The huge expansion of the workforce led to a kind of residential segregation. The better-off trading families began to move to the suburbs, settling in larger and more comfortable houses. The dwellings they left behind now housed the working families that had just moved to St. Pauli. Additionally work was done to expand the port area, ‘consisting of building new quays and railway stations on the south side of the river Elbe to be able to adapt the warehousing of goods’,16 as well as developing a complex of warehouses along the city centre’s canals (the Speicherstadt, built between 1884 and 1888). The port-renewal projects led to the demolition of 20,000 homes, greater numbers moving to the working-class ghettos (the Gängeviertel) and subsequent overcrowding. The additional destabilisation of living conditions in the slums was symbolised by haphazardly erected wooden buildings surrounded by mazelike alleys, the two-bedroom (and kitchen) houses into which six or seven people were squeezed and those residents who opted to share their living space by renting beds per hour. All of the difficulties described were consequences of the local authorities’ lack of interest in rehousing affected families.
Different protests took place in the district, such as the two months of protests when 15,000 casual port workers took on the security forces (in May 1890 and November 1896). The reason for this was the ‘unacceptable’ working conditions and wages they suffered. As well as resisting the police, pickets did other actions, such as cutting boats’ mooring so they would drift off, making leaks to sink steamships, attacking police-protected scabs going to work and besieging employment offices. This backdrop of tension did not end until 6 February when the trade unionists in the 1982 Dockers League (Verein der Schauerleute von 1982) put an end to the strike. The use of violence was condemned by the SPD, which repudiated the struggles taking place in the working-class districts. According to the Social Democrat leaders, their inhabitants were part of a lumpenproletariat inclined towards ‘violence, rebelliousness, drunkenness, prostitution, and unemployment’. Because of these stances, when the members of Social Democrat unions came to the neighbourhood to collect membership fees (on Sundays), they had to do so accompanied by plainclothes police and in the midst of insults and threats.
There was a lack of sanitation in the poorer suburbs. As a result of contaminated drinking water a cholera epidemic caused 8,000 deaths in Hamburg in 1892. This led the Town Hall to intensify the demolition programme it had begun. For the authorities the proletarian districts were a breeding ground for ‘moral hazard and social disorder’.
While, on the one hand, the port facilities were modernised to turn Hamburg into a nerve centre for international trade; on the other hand the authorities showed no interest in improving the popular classes’ living conditions. This increased the contrast between bourgeois and working class – including prostitutes’ – living conditions in Hamburg in a period of great social inequality (at the end of the nineteenth century). They two social groups lived in close geographical proximity, as did refined theatres and proletarian ghettos, but their lives were increasingly different.
In the district on the outskirts of Hamburg a handful of members of Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein, most of whom were also members of the local bourgeoisie,17 founded Sankt Pauli. The club did not play its first match until 1907,18 as until then it did not have enough players to form a team, even though the first references to its football date back to 1899 – coinciding with the beginning of football’s gradual popularisation in Germany. For four years its members – from the club’s games and sports section (created in 1896) – had been playing unofficial friendlies. However, obstacles emerged in the first matches. Games were played on an uneven pitch, across the middle of which passers-by walked while players were training or playing a match. Among the club’s pioneers were Henry Rehder, Amandus Vierth, Heini Schwalbe, ‘Papa’ Friedrichsen, his son Hans Friedrichsen and ‘Nette’ Schmelzkopf. One of this group – Amandus Vierth – encouraged his team to wear a dark-brown shirt and white bottoms for the first time on 21 May 1909. Since then, the club always has been identified with the braun-weiße colours.19 Financial problems also arose. In 1908 the group made a loss of 79 marks – a considerable figure in those days.
Despite beginning its activities in 1899, Sankt Pauli was not officially founded until 1910. (Relatedly the club’s official image today reads ‘non-established since 1910’.)20 Its first official match was in the Kreisliga Groß-Hamburg on 15 May 1910, in which it playing under the name St. Pauli Turnverein. It was not until 1924 that it definitively adopted the name FC St. Pauli, doing so because of regulations that forced football clubs to be separate from gymnastics associations when they registered. Regardless of this administrative issue, in the first half of the twentieth century the club’s activity focused on sports such as gymnastics and athletics.
Football came to Sankt Pauli a long time before taking concrete form as FC St. Pauli. In 1895, a year after St. Pauli was officially annexed by Hamburg, the first season of a league organised by the Hamburg-Altona Football Association (a body had been formed in 1894 by eight teams in the area) was played. League matches were held in Hamburg’s only suitably equipped spaces: the Exerzierweide,21 the Heiligengeistfeld
