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Football also emerged in the Hanseatic city in the late nineteenth century. As well as the aforementioned Hamburger FC being created in 1888, three other teams (Sports-Club Germania, Cito and Excelsior) had been founded a year before. It was the turn of the century, in 1899, a few months after the death of Otto von Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor) and during the Second Boer War. A group of enthusiasts for the new sport created a team, on this occasion through the games and sports section of Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein. Hamburg-St. Pauli was a male-only institution founded by Franz Reese¹ in 1862 when doing gymnastics was booming on the right side of the city’s river Elbe² (the area made up of the well-off areas of Karolinenviertel and Schanzenviertel). At that time St. Pauli had two clearly differentiated areas: the north (bourgeois and with a notably nationalistic character) and the south (close to the port and inhabited by workers).

Like other similar associations, Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein had two goals: promoting liberalism and spreading an intense nationalist sentiment. The first objective was in order to retrieve citizens’ morale after the humiliating defeats inflicted by Napoleon’s army in Jena and Auerstedt. This would be achieved by physically training the ‘perfect German’ for life and war. The French victory meant reforming the army, introducing the draft and introducing physical education in schools to optimise the performance of future conscripts. For this reason the institution developed a notably militaristic hallmark. The second aim was shown in its freedom of association, which allowed anybody that paid the corresponding membership fees to join the club. Both factors reflected the country’s socio-political reality, which was still being determined by the 1848 March Revolution, an unsuccessful flare-up that sought – as we saw earlier – to abolish the nobility and introduce parliamentarianism and a free press.

The organisation took its name from the area – to the north of the Elbe river – that the city annexed in 1247. Until 1833 this was known as Hamburger Berg (Hamburg mountain)³ as it was then the highest point in the area. Yet St. Pauli’s mountain relief changed as a result of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Then, the Hamburg Senate ordered the building of defensive bastions and the levelling of walls by taking sand and mud from the mountaintop to feed the city’s brickworks. At that time St. Pauli was a kind of no man’s land populated by 2,000 people, located half way between the town of Altona – then under Danish rule – and the port for the boats that sailed along the Elbe.⁴

Until the seventeenth century the area was little populated beyond members of religious orders and gangs of pirates that went there from the river. It was then an unprotected area, a fact that did not favour settlement by a large community. The few that went to live there were day labourers, fishermen, businessmen and craftsmen, who had fled the city because of its high cost of living. Alongside them emerged businesses that were deemed ‘antisocial’ because of the noise, pollution and strong smells they made: for instance, those in which artisans refined whale blubber to produce oil lamps. One of the trades that undoubtedly became the most renowned in the area was rope making, due to the large demand for rope on the boats that docked at the port. This was an activity that required fairly wide spaces because while one rope maker held up a wheel the hemp was rolled around, a second had to stretch and twist the hemp: an impossible job in narrow streets or reduced spaces. Rope making has been immortalised in the name of an archetypal St. Pauli road today: Reeperbahn, which can be translated as ‘rope walk’.

The entrances to this suburb of craftspeople and foul jobs had three gates that allowed people and goods to circulate. One of these – Millerntor – has been documented as going back to 1246. Its name stems from its location, as it was the door between two others, a location that in old German was called milderdor or mid-dele-thor.⁵ Years later, the portal was removed and relocated as a result of the district’s demographic expansion. Indeed for years it was where tolls were collected for the goods that entered the town, making it a kind of customs office of its time. The gateway was open from 1 January 1861, which allowed trading activity to further develop.⁶ Eight centuries later the old gate gave 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 (‘the Holy Spirit’s field’) and on an enclosure close to the gym. In those years Hamburg was a pioneer in spreading football across the country. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in May 1903 the city hosted the final of the first football tournament in Germany, which saw FC Prag take on VfB Leipzig in front of 2,000 spectators.

St. Pauli had to wait until 1907 to have enough footballers to play matches, but that summer it played the first two matches of its history. The ball had literally begun rolling but at the same time matches were informal, lacking rules and regulations. In the following (1907–8) season the number of matches played increased to eleven, of which seven ended with victory for the white-and-brown team. In those first years for the club its opponents were teams from Hamburg or surrounding districts. An increase in members and players made it possible and necessary to create B and reserve teams in the following season (1908–9).

In the autumn of 1909, St. Pauli Turnverein joined the Football Association of Northern Germany (Norddeutschen Fußball-Verband, NFV), which mainly consisted of the C teams of the clubs competing in the first division. The club was put in the third district – Hamburg/Altona – and it did not become a fully fledged league member until the spring of the following year. In St. Pauli Turnverein’s debut, on 30 January 1910, it beat SC Germania 1887 by 2 goals to 0. A worthy victory bearing in mind that St. Pauli only fielded ten players. Meanwhile, the club’s B team lost its debut against Eimsbütteler Turnverein.

There seemed to be no end to new developments. In the same year St. Pauli played matches away from Hamburg for the first time ever. These were two friendlies, both ending in defeats for the club: one at Cuxhaven, a conurbation at the mouth of the Elbe River in Lower Saxony;²² another in Denmark²³ – the club’s first international experience. On 22 April 1910, a few days before it was formally founded (on 15 May), the club, which then had five teams, was officially accepted as a fully fledged member of the NFV.²⁴ That year, in which St. Pauli Turnverein played in the third division of Hamburg-Altona’s District III, it played 28 matches, with disappointing results: 20 defeats, six victories and two draws. The trend continued for the rest of the 1910–11 season, frustrating the club’s hopes of promotion. This led to the departure of many players who signed for teams that guaranteed greater competitiveness. Flight by players reached its peak in December 1912 when 57 out of St. Pauli’s 230 players left the club. It was while this exodus was taking place that the First World War (1914–18) broke out. International tensions had sharpened due to the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the pro-Serbian group Young Bosnia. The attack was the pretext for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to declare war on Serbia. The ensuing war was met enthusiastically by many ordinary Germans as well as the political class – including the Social Democrats, who voted in favour of war credits. Nevertheless, the initially feverish ‘1914 spirit’ began to subside when a stalemate in hostilities developed after the Battle of the Marne (6–13 September 1914), when French troops (commanded by Marshal Joffre) halted the German advance. The hope of a blitzkreig (lightning war) was quickly dispelled. October that year witnessed the prolongation of the war on the Western Front (becoming a war of position). This development meant food shortages and hunger in the rearguard, which rebounded into social conflict.

Paradoxically the Great War benefited St. Pauli, which won promotion to the second division after several clubs pulled out of the league due to lack of players. Of the 300 registered clubs in the northern league (NFV) before the First World War only 140 remained in it at the end of the conflict. This is not strange if we bear in mind that two million out of the nearly ten million fatalities caused by the fighting were German. The conflict had other devastating effects on people. Food shortages led to the introduction of rationing, and hunger led to riots (such as in 1917). In a wave of social agitation the revolt by sailors at the ports of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven²⁵ provided historic images, for example when 40,000 workers, soldiers and sailors met at Heiligengeistfeld, in November 1918, to declare the Socialist Republic of Hamburg. Despite the declaration having wide support it did not lead to the creation of a revolutionary government.²⁶

Germany’s defeat in the First World War led to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia and the introduction – after the failed Spartacist uprising (Spartakusaufstand) – of the Weimar Republic, in the summer of 1919, thus ending the Second German Empire. In the elections to the National Assembly held that month the SPD-led coalition won an absolute majority. This put an end to the ‘left-wing adventure’ that was expressed in the conflict between communists and social democrats.

Altogether the socio-political changes also affected the city’s and the country’s football teams. Many could not cope with the impact of war fatalities and their sporting history came to an abrupt end. Others, however, opted to merge. Consequently, on 2 June 1919 the clubs Hamburger FC 1888, Sports-Club Germania von 1887 and FC Falke joined forces to form Hamburger Sport Verein (HSV), which would be FC St. Pauli’s main sporting rival. HSV’s strip included – among other colours²⁷ – the red and white characteristic of the Hanseatic League.²⁸

When the war ended, the disappearances and mergers of clubs meant that out of the 60 football clubs there had been in the Hamburg area, only ten remained. The membership total for the surviving teams was 1,400 – down from 8,000. In those years Sankt Pauli, like others, fielded teenage players, such as Richard Sump who made his debut at the age of 15 (in 1915). To cope with this situation the white and brown team even considered a merger with Favorite Hammonia, which did not take place in the end.

The following year, 1919, was dramatic for St. Pauli in sporting terms. After managing, for the first time in its brief history, to play in the top flight of German football, it ended the championship at the bottom of the table. That year, 13 teams competed in the tournament and Sankt Pauli won only one game (2–1 against second-to-bottom team SPVGG Blankenese von 1903 – from the similarly named district in west Hamburg). St. Pauli lost all of its other matches, including by a humiliating 9–0 against SC Victoria. It was not all bad news that year: after paying 35,000 marks, St. Pauli gained ownership of the Heiligengeistfeld ground.

A few months earlier, on 5 February, St. Pauli’s games and sports section held its first meeting since the Great War. Until then, gymnastics had been the most practised sport at the club but football was gaining more and more enthusiasts. This did not just happen at St. Pauli. There were social and political tensions in the Weimar Republic (1919–33), and a succession of revolutionary outbursts took place between 1920 and 1923, such as consecutive strikes on the St. Pauli docks.²⁹ But it was then that football became a mass sport in Germany and almost as popular as boxing. Its increased popularity was particularly pronounced among the working class, which since the 1920s had enjoyed more leisure time. Clearly playing the sport also grew. By 1920 the DFB had 756,000 members – almost five times more than before the First World War. It was then when the first big-name footballers emerged, such as Max Breunig, the FV Karlsruher midfielder, and Hans Kalb and Heiner Stuhlfauth, respectively a midfielder and goalkeeper for 1. FC Nürnberg.

Other factors converged to spread football’s popularity. First there was a notable improvement in the players’ quality of game. This was associated with the gradual introduction of the eight-hour working day (between 1918 and 1923), which facilitated footballers’ training. It also was aided by the abolition of both an income tax paid by sports entities and a levy for broadcasting sports events. With regards to political factors, the demise of the anti-socialist laws in 1890 and the rise of the SPD helped football to spread by providing bigger facilities for workers to meet and create their own clubs (such as SK Frisch 04, SC Lorbeer 06 and SC Hansa von 1911 – all three in Hamburg). Additionally, dockers had their own teams, such as BSG Hamburg-Südamerikanische Dampfer and SC Hamburger Seeleute.

So St. Pauli’s rise coincided with this first boom in German football. And it did so with a small change in its football kit: from 1920 its players wore a white shirt and long brown shorts, a kit that the players would wear for three decades.

Meanwhile, Hamburg was in full political turmoil. After the strikes by port workers³⁰ there was an unsuccessful attempt, in October 1923, to forcibly take over the city by the Communist Party of Germany (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 nightlife epicentre.

12. Its definitive opening did not take place until 1860 when a crowd of male and female residents rallied before it to celebrate the New Year. Until then a drawbridge allowed or prevented access to St. Pauli, thus giving the Hamburg bourgeoisie the power to show or hide the city’s shadiest and most mischievous suburb.

13. In 1845, different groups of Hamburg workers came together to create the Bildungsverein für Arbeiter (Workers’ Education Club) – following similar examples in Leipzig or Berlin. This involved workers and craftspeople and encouraging proletarian awareness and culture through education.

14. In May 1875, after the Gotha Congress was held, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD), the forerunner to the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD) – the name used from 1891. One of the SAPD’s most prominent figures, the master carpenter August Bebel, labelled Hamburg as ‘socialism’s capital’. Almost two decades later, in 1890, the city had 84 active trade unions made up of 40,000 workers. Six years later, its port workers went on strike for eleven weeks to defend their rights and were joined by 16,000 workers. This was the first big mobilisation of the local workers’ movement.

15. In 1890, 57 per cent of the Hamburg population earned less than 800 marks a year, putting them below the poverty threshold. These working people even developed a specific dialect, called Kedelkloppersprook, widely used among the steamship crews that docked at Hamburg and the regulars at the Reeperbahn. This could be used to communicate despite the noise caused by the work being carried out in the area. It consisted of placing the first consonant of a syllable at the end and adding an ‘i’ to it. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 26.

16. Ibid., p. 26 and Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 23.

17. In those years playing football was seen as ‘an elitist affair lacking any ethical or philosophical value’, a reason why it did not become a mass sport until it spread among the urban working class. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 26.

18. That year the team played two matches as part of a gymnastics festival, both against the same team: the Aegir swimming club. While the first ended in a 1–1 draw, in the second St. Pauli thrashed the swimmers 7–1.

19. As time has progressed, the brown and white has been combined with other colours, such as black and red. The brown-white colour scheme is uncommon among football strips. There are only six other teams in the world that use it: Argentina’s Club Atlético Platense, Poland’s RKS Garbarnia Kraków, the USA’s Brown Bears, Norway’s FK 0rn-Horten and two other Hamburg clubs (FTSV Komet Blankanese von 1907 e.V and SV Billstedt-Horn 1891). C. Nagel and M. Pahl, FC St. Pauli. Das Buch: Der Verein und sein Viertel, (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 2009).

20. [Translator’s note]: non-established refers to the anti-establishment side to the club.

21. This pitch, equipped as a stadium in 1890 on some land previously occupied by the Prussian army as a parade ground, hosted the final of the first German football tournament. This was on 31 May 1903 when VFB Leipzig defeated DFC Prague 7–2 and was proclaimed the first champion in the history of German football. Before being adapted, it was a grass field used by different teams for football matches. Not for nothing the same space included up to nine playing fields. Moreover, it was the headquarters for clubs such as FC Altona 93, SC Sperber Hamburg, FC Viktoria Hamburg, SC Germania Hamburg and HFC 88. After the First World War the space stopped accommodating football matches as the existing clubs had already built their respective stadiums.

22. In Lower Saxony’s capital St. Pauli played against a squad of the city’s sailors, who beat the visitors 5–0.

23. In the Nordic country the club played two matches against Svendborg – from southern Funen and created in 1901. In both, the Sankt Paulianers were thrashed: 6–0 and 6–2.

24. It was only on 15 May 1910 that a section specifically devoted to football was created within the club’s Spiel und Sportabteilung department. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 70.

25. As a result of the victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia and in the midst of attempts to bring about a truce, on 29 October 1918 the crew of the fleets quartered at these two places mutinied. This was against orders from Admiral Reinnard Scheer (commander of the Kaiserliche Marine) to prepare for an imminent naval battle against the British fleet in the English Channel. The German sailors did not want to give up their lives in a war they believed was already lost and refused to obey their officers. They then took control of events through the revolutionary committees they had created. The mutiny began aboard the ships Thüringen and Helgoland, moored at Wilhelmshaven, the headquarters of the German fleet. Their example spread to other coastal garrisons and also to the country’s interior. In Hamburg some sailors managed to get hold of a torpedo boat and control the port area after clashing with patrol guards. Yet the rebellion was neutralised by coinciding with the end of the war (after Socialist Chancellor Friedrich Ebert ordered troops to demobilise).

26. This episode was not the only of its kind in the country. Years before, in 1906, a struggle broke out against a government measure that became known as wahltrechsraub (theft of suffrage), which increased the fee charged for gaining citizenship. This led the SPD to call a political strike for the first time in its history: a day that became known as Red Wednesday (Der Rotte Mittwoch). In Hamburg a march by 30,000 people managed to get into the Town Hall, which led to a violent police response. Social Democrat members tried to calm down tensions. Meanwhile the port workers raised barricades and threw stones at the security forces, while they looted jewellers and other businesses in the city centre. In the end one police charge after another ended the riots. Two demonstrators lost their lives from being hit by police sabres, while dozens more got injured or arrested. Fifty of those arrested were given between five and ten months in prison.

27. Included in its shield are white and black: the colours worn by SC Germania – one of the teams that merged to form HSV Additionally the shield’s diamond shape recalls the traditional symbol of the city’s sea traders.

28. This was the federation between northern German cities such as Lübeck and Hamburg and German traders from the Baltic Sea, the Netherlands, Norway and Britain. Created in 1158 to protect and promote common trade interests, it obtained important trading privileges. The Diet or Hansetag – a kind of council made up of delegates from different member cities – governed it. It began disintegrating in the fifteenth century as a result of Dutch and British maritime power. It languished after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) until its privileges were definitively revoked after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1934. See A. Cowan, Hanseatic League: Oxford Research Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and J. Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture (New York: Dorset Press, 1988).

29. From August to September 1923, St. Pauli’s dockers led different industrial disputes. Increases in the prices of basic products, which reached a high of 662.6 per cent, and unemployment stirred discontent, which turned into violent revolt. Clashes with the security forces were accompanied by looting of food shops. In response to these events, the Hamburg SPD told workers to go back to work, and the Communist KPD, surprised by the mobilisations, failed to join them. The government under Chancellor Gustav Stresemann decreed martial law to re-establish order. This came into effect on 26 September, while ‘proletarian defence’ governments had been formed in Saxony and Thuringia. Because of the magnitude of the events the government mobilised the army. In Hamburg, on 23 October, around 2,000 armed men attacked 20 police stations. All of this was part of an insurrectional plan dreamed up by the KPD’s Thälmann, who was ignoring his own party’s instructions. In the days prior to the insurrection the call to act had been spreading by word of mouth around St. Pauli’s port and factories. On the chosen day the workers went on to the streets. Cut off from the rest of country and badly equipped, they were overcome by the police. The workers’ resistance lasted three days. The subsequent repression was extremely harsh. Hamburg’s communist organisations had their activity suspended and property confiscated. On 23 November the KPD was banned as an organisation.

30. The most notable example was the demonstration in March 1921 by Hamburg’s dockers, which left Heiligengeistfeld to reach the cranes at the Blohm and Voss shipyards. After occupying the firm’s facilities and raising the red flag over the office building, the police confronted the workers and reimposed order. Overall the repression caused 19 deaths and over 40 injuries. Two years later a strike was called at the port against the ‘Great Inflation’ and unemployment, which ended with the workers looting the quays and the boats moored there. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, pp. 35–6.

31. There were three tendencies in the Hamburg KPD: a moderate one led by teacher Hugo Urbanhns; the so-called ‘right-wing sector’ with an intellectual leaning and that advocated joining social-democrats in a coalition government (‘united front’); and the Thalmänn-led section, in favour of direct action, which was the bigger fraction in Hamburg. The failure of the revolutionary attempt in the Hanseatic city forced the KPD to go underground. Later, in 1924, the Red Front Fighters’ League (Rote Frontkämpferbund) was created. This had about 100,000 members and became the party’s armed wing. Its role was to protect demonstrators and strike pickets and block Nazi squads from acting in proletarian neighbourhoods, making it a kind of ‘working-class army’. In October 1928, Thalmänn supported a solidarity strike at the Hamburg docks in support of the British miners’ strike at the time. A year later, the Red Front Fighters’ League was banned by the Prussian interior minister, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD member.

32. Thälmann became an institution in the Hamburg communist movement. He was born and grew up in the port area. There he worked in different insecure jobs, first as a machinist in a fishmeal factory and later in a laundry. He was called up at the beginning of the First World War and fought on the Western Front. In 1917 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joining the pro-Communist wing that merged with the KPD three years later. In December 1920 he joined the KPD’s Central Committee. As a result of his political activity he was sacked from the company he worked for. In October 1923 he actively participated in the Hamburg Uprising, whose failure forced him underground. In February 1925 he was made president of the Red Front Fighters’ League. Months later he was elected as KPD leader. He was the party’s main candidate in the 1932 presidential elections, in which the Communists had as a slogan, ‘a vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler. A vote for Hitler is a vote for war.’ On 3 March 1933 Thälmann was arrested by the Gestapo. After eleven years in the Bautzen prison he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was shot dead, on 18 August 1944, under direct orders from Hitler. R.J. Evans, La nascita del Terzo Reich (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), p. 273. See also R. Lemmons, Hitler’s Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).

33. In January 1933 unemployment in Hamburg reached 30 per cent – compared to 22 per cent in the rest of the country.

34. In the September 1930 elections the Nazi Party won 18 per cent of the vote, making them the country’s second biggest political force. Just two years later, in June 1932, in the second round of the presidential elections the NSDAP obtained 38 per cent of the vote. This was the first time that they had won a parliamentary majority. On 5 March 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi Party won 47.2 per cent of the vote. In all, 17,277,180 people cast a vote for them in the elections to the Reichstag (German parliament) and the party became the main political force there. A few days earlier, Hitler scrapped the Constitution and suspended civil liberties. Then he began mass arrests of Communist and Social Democrat members.