(Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD). This became known as the Hamburg Uprising. The communists wished to capitalise on the discontent of workers by imposing a strategy aimed at taking the latter’s demands beyond the factory. They wanted the streets to become a common space where workers’ struggles would come together with the demands of the unemployed masses. One of the party’s leaders was Ernst Thälmann,31 from the KPD’s most left-wing section. He ‘personified the communist ideal of the revolutionary worker’ and ‘was the extreme opposite of an intellectual’.32 The failure of the workers’ insurrection meant, as well as a hundred fatalities, that Communist Party members were repressed and the organisation banned. That year was the first in which the Weimar Republic managed to lessen the impact of the First World War on society. From then on, the country enjoyed a period of political and economic stability. The ‘Golden Twenties’ benefited from the devaluation of the mark and an inflow of foreign capital.
But despite the economic boom nationally, St. Pauli was typified by poverty and insecure living conditions, which resulted from hyperinflation. As if that were not enough, the 1929 New York stock exchange crash then hit the German economy. Withdrawal of North American capital from the country left many companies without credit. Factories had to reduce production, which led to an increase in unemployment.33 Hamburg suffered from a big decline in the circulation of goods through its port. A collapse of different local industries and a shortage of food and fuel worsened people’s plight. In a country once again plunged into an economic and political crisis – made worse by increased unemployment and the war reparations imposed on Germany by the victorious side in Versailles – many citizens chose to shun the traditional moderate parties and vote for extremist parties such as the Nazi National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) or KPD, which thanks to Thälmann became the ‘party of the unemployed’. This was shown by the strong electoral growth enjoyed by both organisations in the interwar years.34
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1. In August 1899, Reese chose to experiment with practising two sports until then unheard of at the club: football and volleyball. Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 82.
2. Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein was created on 1 April 1862 out of the merger between MTV Hamburg (founded 7 September 1852) and St. Pauli Turnverein (created 7 September 1860). Once created, the club’s promoter’s looked for and found land – near to Feldstraße – to set up in. Its headquarters – opened that same month – had some of the biggest sports halls in the period: 12,671 square metres located at the junction between Glacischaussee and Eimsbütteler (streets that today form Budapest Straße). It was one of the two gymnastics clubs in the area, along with Turnverein St. Pauli und vor dem Dammthore von 1860. The city’s leading sports club had been built in 1816 (Hamburger Turnerschaft von 1 816) but three years later its activity was suspended because the authorities suspected that the sportsmen’s ideas were too liberal. This prohibition lasted until 1842. Today a few minutes away from the Millerntor stadium is Turnerstrasße – the street that included St. Pauli Turnverein von 1862’s first head office.
3. The city the mountain was named after was founded in 808 and initially called Treva. It took its name from its first building: a castle built to defend a baptistery built in 810 by order of Emperor Charlemagne. The fort was raised on top of the rocky patch of a marsh between the rivers Alster and Elbe, a key strategic point for resisting attacks by Slavic peoples. The castle was named Hammaburg (‘Mamma’ probably derives from ‘woods’ and ‘burg’ from ‘castle’). After 1189, the city gained the right to trade freely and its ships were exempted from paying customs duties, a prerogative awarded by King Frederick I of Hohenstaufen (1122–90, popularly known as ‘Red Beard’). This allowed Hamburg to have free access to the sea, be economically independent and govern itself. That is, it was a de facto ‘free’ and autonomous city with its own diplomatic and military policies. This is reflected today in its official name Freie und Hansestadt Mamburg (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg). It kept these privileges when in 1871 it became a member of the German Reich.
4. St. Pauli’s geographical location explains why it became a place for leisure. It was here that the inhabitants of Altona, a conservative town that had preserved the puritanism of the Hanseatic spirit, relaxed. The area’s first wooden theatres were built in the very centre of St. Pauli. These Spielbuden hosted the wildest shows. Also, unsurprisingly, the district had a red-light district where sailors coming offshore at the port would go for a drink and some company. The place gradually began to urbanise in 1864 when Altona was annexed to Prussia. This led to a curve in construction and demographic growth – as was shown by the 72,000 inhabitants counted in 1894. But it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that Sankt Pauli became a significant urban hub with its own workers’ community. This happened under the wing of several newly established factories which located there due to lack of space inside the city walls. Alongside this growth, St. Pauli progressively became Hamburg’s red-light district.
5. Curiously, the German word ‘tor means ‘goal’. N. Davidson, Pirates, Punks and Politics. FC St. Pauli: Falling in Love with a Radical Football Club (York: Sport Books, 2014), p. 25.
6. The gate’s opening also encouraged the first theatres and dancehalls to be opened in the area. Also, there were the kneipen (taverns), then frequented by prostitutes. According to the socialist theoretician Kautsky, these were ‘the proletariat’s only bastion of political freedom’. N. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici: FC St. Pauli tra calcio e resistenza (Lecce: Bepress Edizioni, 2015), p. 24.
7. In 1963 the club built the ground, which seven years later was named the Wilhelm Koch Stadion in honour of St. Pauli’s president over two periods (193145 and 1948–69). Yet after fans discovered he had been a Nazi Party member they put a motion to the club’s General Assembly in 1997 to remove his name from the stadium. A year later, in October 1998, the resolution was narrowly passed. From the 1999–2000 season the venue was renamed Millerntor Stadion. In 2007, St. Pauli members agreed that its name would not be used for commercial purposes nor would it be sold to any company or sponsor.
8. The fire happened on 5 May 1842, beginning in a cigarette factory at 42 Deichstraße. It spread fast due to drought and strong winds. Also affected were 100 wine cellars, two synagogues and around 60 schools and public buildings – among them the Bank of Hamburg and the city’s Town Hall itself. The authorities even pulled down some buildings to create firewalls. Half of Hamburg’s population – about 70,000 people – fled in panic, while 20,000 residents were left homeless. Economic losses have been estimated at 100 million marks.
9. The city’s port grew in strength. An increase in transoceanic expeditions, its strategic position and the will of the Hanseatic League to make it a hub for trade in the Baltic Sea and North Sea turned it into ‘Germany and Europe’s most important port thanks to the growth of marine transport, which, with the spread of steamships, is introducing commodities and people into other continents’. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 28.
10. From 1809 a record of the area’s prostitutes was kept. We subsequently know that, in 1834, the city had 18 brothels with 120 women sex workers, to which must be added those who did prostitution outside official censuses. Soon after, in 1841, there were 151 women in 20 brothels. In the first third of the nineteenth century the brothels were in today’s Davidstraße. Prostitution was made a criminal offense in 1870 – when the German Reich was being constituted. Existing double standards, however, allowed prostitutes to be able to sit in the window fronts of Herbertstraße – a small alley away from the Reeperbahn. Two decades later there were 20 brothels in the alley. See V Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
11. In that period, while there were ten dancehalls in St. Pauli there were only 13 such establishments in the whole of Hamburg. These figures showed that St. Pauli had become the
