Reeperbahn in Decline: Beatles Memories to Revive Hamburg's Sin City

The Reeperbahn has fallen on hard times, and it shows. It looks as shabby as ever, but that's all part of the image for any self-respecting area of ill repute. What is new is that discount supermarkets and cut-price bars offering drinks for 99 cents have sprouted across the world-famous red light district where the Beatles performed in the early 1960s. Recession and a decline in its traditional clientele are taking their toll.

Getting punters has become hard work for the area's prostitutes, many of whom are complaining business is bad. A smile and a "Hello There" or "How Are You?" no longer seem to suffice. Late at night, men coming out of one of the big fast food restaurants on the Reeperbahn run a gauntlet of insistent women. "Got your strength up? Then come on!" is a standard phrase as they grab prospective punters by the arm.

"I know a lot of the girls and they tell me they aren't getting enough punters and are under pressure from their pimps," said Carlo Carstens, 52, a Reeperbahn guide who has lived in the area for 30 years. "There's been a big decline here due to the economy. People just don't have the money these days," said Carstens, drinking the local "Holsten" beer in a pub in the heart of the district. He offers weekend walking tours around the Reeperbahn and tells his clients where to go and "what areas they should definitely avoid."

Roswitha Hirschfeld, a waitress in the Café Möller where the Beatles used to go for breakfast after their gigs, said: "It's changed around here and not for the better. Those big grocery stores that have opened up don't belong here. The city should be doing more to attract people here. This will soon become just a another shopping street."

Hirschfeld, who worked as a trainee in the café in the 1970s, is also sentimental about what seems like a bygone era. "It's not like it was 30 years ago," he said. "We had a lot more to do in the mornings, the girls came in here from the brothels for breakfast after their shifts. Now not so many come. There also used to be more cabaret shows. A lot of brothels have been shut down."

Not that there's a shortage now. Countless bars, sex shops, striptease clubs, live sex shows and transvestite clubs line the Reeperbahn and its side streets in the city's "St. Pauli" quarter. There's something for everyone. If you like wearing a leather mask, being horsewhipped and getting locked in a little cage, that's no problem, according to Carstens.

Slumping demand

It's not just the years of economic stagnation, high unemployment and recent welfare benefit cuts that have hit business in the area, just up the hill from Hamburg's giant port. There simply aren't as many sailors around because merchant ships are becoming more high tech and require smaller crews. Besides, turnaround times for ships are much shorter, giving crews less time to blow their earnings on northern blondes and liters of cold beer.

"Sailors don't spend as long in Hamburg, Ships used to spend two or three weeks here," said Horst Fascher, 70, a local legend who managed the Star Club where the Beatles performed. "The doormen tell me the discount shops are ruining the whole scene. There are pubs where you can go and get drunk for 5 euros now."

That in itself may not seem like a bad thing, but it attracts people who don't have the cash to spend on the Reeperbahn's other attractions. A growing reputation for violence isn't helping, either. "Many people are afraid they'll get knocked over the head with a bottle," said Fascher. "There's too much alcohol, not enough culture, and no style."

For Fascher, a stocky former German boxing champion, the 1960s were the heyday of the Reeperbahn because world class rock & roll acts came to perform in the Star Club he set up with a local investor, and which featured top acts like Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Little Richard.

The Beatles performed at various Hamburg clubs at the start of the 1960s, before they became famous. They honed their skills by playing mainly cover songs at the Star Club for several months in 1962.

Close contact

"When the Star Club opened the Reeperbahn started to boom. The stars came and they were close enough to touch, not like these days where they're so far away they're just tiny figures on the stage," said Fascher. "When it closed it down in 1969 a light went out in St. Pauli."

"I noticed that the girls ran after the Beatles and where the girls go you get boys because they run after the girls. The Beatles were a huge magnet for the area." It was also a time of bar brawls and street fights. Fascher acted as a kind of bodyguard and fixer to the stars as well as head bouncer, and he fondly recalls how he once beat up an entire Austrian soccer team that was making trouble.

The Star Club became a thorn in the eye of local authorities worried that it was luring Hamburg's sons and daughters into an area of moral degeneration. There were frequent police raids to check that the customers weren't under age. But the city fathers now seem to have woken up to the Reeperbahn's importance as its premier tourist attraction. It is supporting a campaign to spruce the area up and make it safer ahead of the soccer World Cup starting in June. As one of the 12 cities where matches will be played, a surge of tourists is expected in Hamburg during the Cup.

The local government is backing plans by a local radio station to build a "Beatles Square" on the Reeperbahn. Round in shape and black, it will resemble an LP record, and glass statues of the Beatles will stand in its center.

Hamburg is also planting exotic trees along a stretch of the Reeperbahn to give it more of a "boulevard" feel and encourage outdoor cafes and restaurants. It is putting up CCTV cameras to discourage mugging, but will ensure the cameras have blind spots so that they don't record people going into sex shops and brothels.

"The Reeperbahn is more famous than Hamburg. When people hear the word Hamburg they think of meatballs in buns rather than the city," said Markus Schreiber, the head of the local authority responsible for the St. Pauli area. He added that Hamburg won't try to make the area any less "sinful", though.

"We shouldn't tinker with it. As long as mankind exists you'll have a demand for prostitution. St. Pauli doesn't work without prostitution, without sin, I think it's got to remain there and it can work there," said Schreiber.

He can't explain why it has taken Hamburg 40 years to start marketing its Beatles heritage. Neither can Martina Mueller, spokeswoman for Hamburg radio station "Oldie '95" which has collected over 80,000 euros to build the square.

"Liverpool has an airport named after John Lennon and Hamburg where they played for so long has nothing to commemorate them," she said. "I think what was lacking was someone to make a start and the luck of the timing."

"The World Cup will bring international visitors to Hamburg and they'll all want to visit the Reeperbahn, which doesn't look that great at the moment," she added. "Having a Beatles square will be ideal. The Star Club was their musical cradle. It will be a sign of how cosmopolitan the city is and will be an added tourist attraction. The Beatles are the best possible way to adorn this town."

City officials have their doubts whether the square will be completed in time for the World Cup given that building work hasn't started yet, but Mueller is confident it will be ready by mid-May. Current plans envisage 200 hundred strobe lights to flash around the circle, giving the impression of a revolving turntable.

The plans go beyond building a square. Mueller says Hamburg will one day have a Beatles museum and offer tours of the group's old haunts, as well as plaques where they lived and played.

Fascher, whose mother washed the Beatles' underwear in her kitchen and whose book "Let The Good Times Roll" recalls the Beatles era in Hamburg, hopes this new awareness of the Reeperbahn's glory days will help lure music clubs back into the area. "Hamburg needs something like that. The Reeperbahn used to be the Mecca of music, why shouldn't it be again?"