9. Hamburg

I travelled to Hamburg, by way of Osnabrück and Bremen, and arrived in the early evening. I hadn’t been to Hamburg before. Katz and I passed through it by train on our way to Scandinavia, but it was late at night and all I recalled was a dark city and a dark station where we stopped for half an hour while more carriages were hooked on. The station was much as I remembered it, vaulted and echoing, but brighter and busier at six in the evening. People were everywhere, hurrying to catch trains.

I threaded my way through the crowds to the tourist information desk and, having had so much trouble finding a room in Amsterdam, gladly paid a handsome fee to have accommodation found for me, and then was chagrined to discover that the Hotel Popp, the establishment to which the pleasant and well-spoken young man directed me after relieving me of a handful of notes and a selection of coins, was directly opposite the station. I could have found it on my own in thirty seconds and applied the money to a night of abandon in the Reeperbahn. Still, it was convenient and had a bar and restaurant, so I couldn’t complain. Actually I could. The room was tiny and depressingly basic, with a twenty-watt bulb in the reading light, no carpet, no television and a bed that could have passed for an ironing board. But at least with a place called the Hotel Popp I wouldn’t forget the name and end up, as I often do in strange cities, asking a cabbie to just drive around until I spotted it.

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I went out for a stroll before dinner. Lounging at intervals along the side streets around the station were some of the most astonishingly unattractive prostitutes I had ever seen – fifty-year-old women in mini-skirts and black fishnet stockings, with crooked lipstick and tits that grazed their kneecaps. Where on earth they get their trade from I couldn’t begin to guess. One of them gave me a ‘Hello, dearie’ look and I was nearly crushed by a bus as I faltered backwards into the street. But within a block or two things improved considerably. I had left my city map behind in the hotel so I had no idea where I was going, but it all looked inviting in every direction. It was a warm spring evening, with dusk settling cosily over the city, like a blanket around one’s shoulders, and people were out walking aimlessly and browsing in shop windows. I was pleased to find myself among them.

I had expected Hamburg to be grimmer, a sort of German Liverpool, full of crumbling flyovers and vacant lots – I already knew that it had the highest unemployment rate in Germany, over twelve per cent, half as high again as the national average, so I expected the worst – but Hamburg proved to be anything but struggling, at least on the surface. The department stores along the Mönckebergstrasse, the main shopping street, were bright and spotless and full of fancy goods – much finer than anything on Oxford Street – and the side streets glowed with restaurants and bistros through whose yellowy windows I could see people dining elegantly and well.

I walked through the big town hall square and around the darkened streets of the warehouse district, handsome and silent, then rounded a corner to find one of the more arresting city sights I have ever seen – the Inner Alster, the smaller of the two lakes around which Hamburg is built. I knew from maps that Hamburg had these lakes, but nothing I had read or seen in pictures had prepared me for just how beautiful they were. The Inner Alster is much the smaller of the two, but it is still large enough to present a great rectangular pool of silence and darkness in the midst of the city. The lakeside is agreeably lined with trees and benches, overlooked by office buildings and a couple of hotels of the old school, the sort of places where the doormen are dressed like Albanian admirals and rich old ladies in furs constantly go in and out with little dogs under their arms.

I sat on a bench in the darkness for perhaps half an hour just watching the lights shimmering on the surface and listening to the lapping of water, then stirred myself enough to walk over to the Kennedybrücke, a bridge across the channel where the two lakes meet. The Outer Alster, seen from here, was more massive and irregular and even more fetching, but I would leave that for tomorrow.

Instead, famished, I strolled back to the welcoming glow of the Popp, where I dined amply and surprisingly well for what was after all just a small station hotel, bloating my cheeks with bread rolls and salad and meat and potatoes till I could eat no more, and then filled all the remaining space inside me with good German beer and read half a book, until at last, at about half-past midnight, I arose from my table, nodded genteelly to the six Turkish waiters who had been waiting hours for me to go and ascended in a tiny slow-motion lift to the fourth floor, where I spent no more than half an hour stabbing at the keyhole with my key before bursting unexpectedly into the room, pushing the door shut with the back of my foot, shedding some clothes (one sock, half a shirt) and falling onto the bed, where I dropped more or less immediately into a deep, contented and, I dare say, grotesquely blubbery sleep.

I woke in a square of sunshine, too hot and bright to sleep through, and stumbled to the window to find a gorgeous morning blazing away outside, much too gorgeous to waste. The Hauptbahnhoff concourse and the street below, the Kirchenallee, were so brightly bathed in sunlight that I had to shield my eyes. I had a hangover you could sell to science, but after two cups of strong coffee at a sunny table outside the Popp, a handful of aspirins, two cigarettes and a cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm, I felt tolerably human and was able to undertake a gentle stroll to the waterfront through the dappled sunshine of St Pauli Park. There wasn’t much to see upon arrival, just cranes and dockyards and the broad, sluggish estuary of the Elbe. I thought of what Konrad Adenauer used to say: ‘You can smell Prussia when you get to the Elbe.’ I could only smell dead fish, or at least I assumed it was dead fish. Maybe it was Prussians.

In the 1930s, the docks at Hamburg employed 100,000 people. Now the number is barely 1,200, though it is still the second busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam), with a volume of trade equal to the whole of Austria’s. Until just a couple of weeks before, I could have witnessed the interesting sight of freighters unloading grain from their aft holds and redepositing it in their forward holds as a way of extracting additional funds from the ever-beneficent EEC. With its flair for grandiose fuck-ups, the EEC for years paid special subsidies to shippers for grain that was produced in one part of the Common Market and re-exported from another, so shippers taking a consignment from, say, France to Russia discovered that they could make a fortune by stopping off at Hamburg en route and pointlessly unloading the cargo and then reloading it. This little ruse enriched the shippers by a mere £42 million before the bureaucrats of the EEC realized that the money could be much better spent on something else – themselves, say – and put a stop to the practice.

I walked a few hundred yards inland and uphill to the Reeperbahn, that famed mile-long avenue of sin. It looked disappointingly unlusty. Of course, sinful places never look their best in daylight. I remember thinking even in Las Vegas that it all looked rather endearingly pathetic when viewed over a cup of coffee and a doughnut. All that noise and electric energy that is loosed at dusk vanishes with the desert sun and it all suddenly seems as thin and one-dimensional as a film set. But even allowing for this, the Reeperbahn looked tame stuff, especially after Amsterdam. I had envisioned it as a narrow, pedestrianized street packed on both sides with bars, sex shops, peep shows, strip clubs and all the other things a sailor needs to revive a salty dick, but this was almost a normal city street, busy with traffic flowing between the western suburbs and the downtown. There was a fair sprinkling of seamy joints, but also a lot of more or less normal establishments – restaurants, coffee shops, souvenir stores, jeans shops, even a furniture store and a theatre showing the inescapable Cats. Almost the only thing that told you this was a neighbourhood of dim repute was the hard look on the people’s faces. They all had that gaunt, washed-out look of people who run funfair stalls.

The really seedy attractions were on the side streets, like Grosse Freiheit, which I turned up now. I walked as far as the Kaiserkeller at No. 36, where the Beatles used to play. Most of the other businesses along the street were given over to live sex shows, and I was interested to note that the photos of the artistes on display outside were unusually – I am tempted to say unwisely – candid. In my experience, places such as these always show pictures of famously beautiful women like Christie Brinkley and Raquel Welsh, which I dare say even the most inexperienced sailor from Tristan da Cunha must realize is not what he’s likely to encounter inside, but at least they leave you wondering what you are going to find. These pictures, however, showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years – women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They weren’t just over the hill; they were pinpricks on the horizon.

The sex shops, too, were as nothing compared to those of Amsterdam, though they did do a nice line in inflatable dolls, which I studied closely, never having seen one outside a Benny Hill sketch. I was particularly taken with an inflatable companion called the Aphrodite, which sold for 129 marks. The photograph on the front was of a delectably attractive brunette in a transparent négligée. Either this was cruelly misleading or they have made more progress with vinyl in recent years than I had realized.

In large, lurid letters the box listed Aphrodite’s many features: LIFE SIZED!, SOFT FLESH-LIKE SKIN!, INVITING ANUS! (Beg pardon?), MOVABLE EYES! (Ugh) and LUSCIOUS VAGINA THAT VIBRATES AT YOUR COMMAND!

Yeah, but can she cook? I thought.

There was another one called a Chinese Love Doll 980. ‘For a Long-Lasting Relationship,’ it promised sincerely, and then in bolder letters added: EXTRA THICK VINYL RUBBER. Kind of takes the romance out of it, don’t you think? This was clearly a model for the more practical types. On the other hand it also had a VIBRATING VAGINA AND ANUS and TITS THAT GET HOT! ! Below this it promised: SMELL LIKE A REAL WOMAN.

All these claims were given in a variety of languages. It was interesting to see that the German versions all sounded coarse and bestial: LEBENGROSSE, VOLLE JUNGE BRUSTE, LIEBENDER MUND. The same words in Spanish sounded delicate and romantic: ANO TENTADOR, DELICIOSA VAGINA QUE VIBRA A TU ORDEN, LABIOS AMOROSOS. You could almost imagine ordering these in a restaurant (‘I’ll have the Ano Tentador lightly grilled and a bottle of Labios Amorosos ’88’). The same things in German sounded like a wake-up call at a prison camp.

I was fascinated. Who buys these things? Presumably the manufacturers wouldn’t include a vibrating anus or tits that get hot if the demand wasn’t there. So who’s clamouring for them? And how does anyone bring himself to make the purchase? Do you tell the person behind the counter it’s for a friend? Can you imagine taking it home on the tram and worrying all the time that the bag will split and it will flop out or self-inflate or, worse still, that you’ll be killed in a crash and all the next week the papers will be full of headlines like ‘POLICE IDENTIFY RUBBER-DOLL MAN’ above a smiling picture of you from your high-school year book? I couldn’t handle the tension. Imagine having friends drop in unexpectedly when you were just about to pop the champagne cork and settle down for a romantic evening with your vinyl companion and having to shove her up the chimney and then worry for the rest of the evening that you’ve left the box on the bed or some other give-away lying around. (‘By the way, who’s the other place setting for, Bill?’)

Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps these people aren’t the least embarrassed about their abnormal infatuations. Perhaps they talk about it freely with their friends, sit around bars saying, ‘Did I tell you I just traded up to an Arabian Nights Model 280? The eyes don’t move, but the anus gives good action.’ Maybe they even bring them along. ‘Helmut, I’d like you to meet my new 440. Mind her tits. They get hot.’

With this intriguing thought to chew on, I strolled back to the city centre past the massive law courts and concert hall and along an avenue interestingly named Gorch-Fock-Wall, which sounded to me like the answer to a riddle (‘What does Gorch do when he can’t find his inflatable doll?’), and had a look around the shopping streets and classy arcades packed into the area between the huge town hall and Inner Alster.

It was getting on for midday and people were sitting out in the sunny plazas having lunch or eating ice-creams. Almost without exception they looked healthy and prosperous and often were strikingly good-looking. I remembered German cities from twenty years before being full of businessmen who looked just as Germans were supposed to look – fat and arrogant. You would see them gorging themselves on piles of sausages and potatoes and gulping with full mouths from litre tankards of golden beer at all hours of the day, but now they seemed to be picking delicately at salads and fish, and looking fit and tanned – and, more than that, friendly and happy. Maybe this was just a Hamburg trait. Hamburg is after all closer to Denmark and Sweden and even England than it is to Munich, so perhaps it is atypical of Germany.

At all events, this relaxed and genial air was something that I hadn’t associated with Germans before, at least not those aged over twenty-five. There was no whiff of arrogance here, just a quiet confidence, which was clearly justified by the material wealth around them. All those little doubts we’ve all had about the wisdom of letting the Germans become the masters of Europe evaporated in the Hamburg sunshine. Forty-five years ago Hamburg was rubble. Virtually everything around me was new, even when it didn’t look it. The people had made their city, and even themselves, rich and elegant and handsome through their cleverness and hard work, and they had every right to be arrogant about it, but they were not, and I admired them for that.

I don’t think I can ever altogether forgive the Germans their past, not as long as I can wonder if that friendly old waiter who brings me my coffee might have spent his youth bayonetting babies or herding Jews into gas ovens. Some things are so monstrous as to be unpardonable. But I don’t see how anyone could go to Germany now and believe for a moment that that could ever happen again. Germans, it struck me, are becoming the new Americans – rich, ambitious, hard-working, health-conscious, sure of their place in the world. Seeing Hamburg now, I was happy to hand them my destiny – happier, at any rate, than leaving it to those who have spent the last forty years turning Britain into a kind of nation-state equivalent of Woolworth’s.

One thing hadn’t changed: the women still don’t shave their armpits. This has always puzzled me in a vague sort of way. They all look so beautiful and stylish, and then they lift up their arms and there’s a Brillo pad hanging there. I know some people think it’s earthy, but so are turnips and I don’t see anyone hanging those in their armpits. Still, if failure to deal with secondary pubic hairs is the worst trait the Germans take with them into the closing years of the century, then I for my part shall be content to let them lead us into the new millennium. Not that we will have the slightest fucking choice, mind you.

All these lithe and attractive bodies began to depress me, especially after I caught sight of myself reflected in a store window and realized that I was the fat one now. After spending the first twenty-five years of my life looking as if my mother had mated with a stick insect, these sudden reflected glimpses of rolling blubber still come as a shock. Even now I have to stop myself from giving a good-morning smile to the fat guy every time I get into a mirrored lift. I tried a diet once, but the trouble is they so easily get out of control. I lost four pounds in the first week and was delighted until it occurred to me that at this rate in only a little over a year I would vanish altogether. So it came as something of a relief to discover that in the second week I put all the weight back on (I was on a special diet of my own devising called the Pizza and Ice-Cream Diet) and I still draw comfort from the thought that if there is ever a global famine I will still be bounding around, possibly even playing a little tennis, while the rest of you are lying there twitching your last.

I devoted the afternoon to a walk around the immense Outer Alster. I hadn’t intended to spend the whole afternoon there, but it was so beautiful that I couldn’t pull myself away. Sailing boats dotted the water, and little red and white ferries plied endlessly beneath a sky of benign clouds, taking passengers between the rich northern quarters of the city and the distant downtown. A narrow park, full of joggers and lovers and occasional benchloads of winos (who looked remarkably fit and prosperous considering their vocation), encircled the lake and offered one enchantment after another. Every view across the water was framed by sturdy oaks and trembling willows, and offered distant prospects of the city: the space-needle eminence of a TV tower, a few scattered skyscrapers, and for the rest copper roofs and church spires that looked as if they had been there for ever.

On the streets around the perimeter of the lake, and as far back into the surrounding streets as you cared to wander, stood huge houses of every architectural style, with nothing in common but their grandness. Where the lake occasionally wandered off into placid backwaters, the houses had immense shady lawns running down to the water’s edge, with gazebos and summer houses and their own jetties. It must be very agreeable to live on a lake in a grand house and go to work by foot or bike around the lake or by ferry across it or even aboard your own boat and to emerge at the other end at such a rich and handsome city centre. What a perfect life you could lead in Hamburg.