On the news, I see that Hamburg flooded a couple days ago. Some pictures show the Altona Fish Market with panel trucks bobbing around in the murky water. Although it’s not immediately evident in calm weather, Hamburg is prone to floods. Apparently, powerful storms on the North Sea blast a tidal surge back at the Elbe’s mouth at Cuxhaven. This causes the river to stall, with waves and tidal currents pressing water back up the river. When there is heavy rain over northern Germany (lower Saxony), the Elbe overflows and the river’s water dammed up at its mouth on the North Sea reverses direction and floods Hamburg and other areas upstream. This part of Germany is very low, flat, and marshy – there are innumerable turgid-looking canals that crisscross the low country; villages are marked by tall steeples and, at any given place on the plain, you can see six or seven towns with their church-towers poking up in the sky, rising over the dreary, monotonous horizon. (The area is called “Lower” Saxony after the German word “Nieder”, meaning “low to the ground” – hence, the “nether” in Netherlands which the area resembles topographically. There are dikes and polders in this part of Germany; the most famous novella from this area is Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter – “The White Horseman” – a story about a great tempest and the collapse of the dikes on the North Sea resulting in deadly flooding. The book has the flavor of the famous narratives from Holland about plucky little lads sticking their thumb in the dike to hold back the sea.) Hamburg, of course, is incised with canals called “Fleets” – these were manmade channels cut into the swamps to provide shipping access to the miles and miles of warehouses around the center of the downtown area. The city is watery in all respects. There are two large lakes where the Elbe was impounded in medieval times to create milling districts – these are the Binnenalster and the Aussenalster, that is, the inner Alster and the Outer Alster, both bodies of water on the scale of the Minneapolis lake once known as a Lake Calhoun (I can’t recall how to spell its Lakota name). In fact, the Outer Alster lined with luxury hotels, for instance the famous Hotel Atlantic Kempinski, a huge white edifice that dips down to the water and, then, further along the sweep of the shore, the gold and silver dome of the Imam Ali Mosque replicates the parks along the rim of the Minneapolis lake, the white hotels on the north side of the water, and the gilded dome of the Greek Orthodox church, St. Mary’s, at 34th and Irving – indeed, the resemblance between the Minneapolis lake and the Aussenalster extends to the multitude of sail boats that ply their waters and the city skyline that hovers over both of these lakes. In fact, I suppose you can make a further comparison – just as the Binnenalster and the Aussenalster are separated by a narrow throat of land (with the John F. Kennedy Bridge over the channel between them), so Lake Calhoun is divided from Lake Harriet by another narrow strip of park land planted with rose gardens. Even several miles from the Elbe River, ruler-straight canals cut through the suburbs of Hamburg, overhung with willow trees and with mansions built along them stretching fingers of dock into the water where pontoon boats and rowing skiffs are moored. All of this water creates a most picturesque effect except, of course, when things get out of hand and the river overflows.
On February 16, 1962, the equivalent of a hurricane whirled down from the North Pole, devastated parts of England, and, then, pushed its storm surge up the so-called German bight at Cuxhaven. The dikes broke apart all along the river and, because the storm had knocked out all power, there was no way to warn people of the flood. One-sixth of Hamburg, about sixty miles from the North Sea, flooded, mostly in the working class neighborhoods to the south of the Elbe. These were the places where the dockworkers and the armies of laborers in the shipbuilding yards lived. (This part of Hamburg always suffers. During Operation Gomorrha in the summer of 1943, the British bombers leveled most of the area of Hamburg south of the Elbe to cripple the shipbuilding and harbor facilities. The Nazi officials all lived, comfortably enough, in the area to the west of the Altersee lakes – this is where we stayed when we visited – and the bombers didn’t waste their munitions on those areas; hence, many elegant and palatial houses from the Imperial period before the First World War survive in those neighborhoods.) Several hundred people were drowned in Hamburg and the city was devastated with 60,000 citizens displaced from their homes. The dikes were all cleft apart and leaking and the situation was dire. The so-called “Police Senator” on the City Council, Helmut Schmidt, called out the German equivalent of the National Guard in violation of the federal constitution – in Germany, the government is forbidden from using the military for civil defense and internal affairs. Army troops stabilized the dikes, set up tent cities, and began work repairing the innumerable buildings wrecked by the cyclone and its attendant flood. At first, Schmidt was threatened with impeachment since his summons to the local units of the Guard was unconstitutional; later, he was praised as the hero who saved Hamburg, fame that led to his later ascent to power as West Germany’s Chancellor. (Schmidt is present all over Hamburg. There are many pictures of him on buildings and monuments – generally, he has a cigarette in his mouth and wears a sailor’s leather cap. His wife, Loki, was apparently very wealthy – many estates and parks in the area bear her name, seemingly tracts of land that she donated to the City. At St. Michael’s Church, there’s a monument to Schmidt that cites one of his famous quotes: Hamburg war dein Revier; St. Michel dein Anker, Tschuess.” This means roughly “Hamburg was your stomping ground; St. Michael’s your anchor, bye-bye.” – in fact, these words, often attributed to Schmidt were spoken by Jan Fedder, a local TV personality – he had a nightly news show broadcast throughout Germany. No one knows about Fedder in this country and so the quote is generally said to be about Schmidt about whom people do know a few things. When I was at Ohlstedt Cemetery, I saw the elaborate monument to Fedder, a huge baroque cross replete with angels and droopy-looking mourners – it’s modern; Fedder died in 2019.)
On the second-to-last day that I was in Hamburg, I went to see the huge Flak tower at Friedrichstrasse and, then, planned to walk down to the Reeperbahn, about 15 blocks, and, thence, to the harbor. It was raining pretty hard under the massive concrete ramparts of the Flak Tower and, so, I took the subway down to the Reeperbahn station, walked over to the Davidstrasse Wache, the famous local police station (it’s featured in innumerable crime shows in Germany) and, then, turned south to the harbor. As you might expect, the Red Light district on the Reeperbahn is only four city-blocks from the steep stairs dropping down the river banks to the harbor. (The Reeperbahn is conveniently located for sailors disembarking on the Elbe at the various piers and docks below the hill.) As I walked down to the water, it began to rain again, a soft, all-encompassing drizzle. At the base of the steps leading from the bluff to the water, I walked west along the dike to the Altona Fish Market. The Fish Market opens directly onto the river, occupying a terrace about eight feet below the adjacent boulevard. The building is a sort of temple to fish; it has a bronze weathervane depicting a dolphin and the huge doors to the place are decorated with bronze lobsters and octopus. The structure was built around 1906 and extends for a hundred yards along the waterfront. When I visited, some husky workmen were hauling tables out of the shadowy interior of the market building. (The place is well-known for the show that the fish vendors put on every Sunday morning at six a.m. Restaurant supply companies send emissaries to pick out the best fish for the tables of their clients and, since everyone knows everyone else, the fish merchants insult the buyers and vice-versa and, apparently, a good time is had by all, including hundreds of German tourists who come to enjoy the witty and obscene repartee – something that would be opaque to me since, of course, the merchants and buyers speak in vulgar, idiomatic Low German, Platt-Deutsch, and, since I couldn’t understand even conventional High German as spoken in Hamburg, all of the witticisms would have been completely Greek to me.) I slipped around the side of the truck into which the stevedores were loading their tables and ventured a few feet into the Fish Market building. The structure was full of wonderful-looking balconies and stairs all made from black wrought iron, a sort of architectural cast-iron fantasia soaring up over the cold concrete floors.
But the place was forbidden. One of the laborers hailed me and said a few words of which I understood only one: heraus – that is, “get out.” I obliged and walked down the promenade at the edge of the water. This is where the flood struck in late December. The water surged over the dikes along the river and set afloat the few panel trucks parked alongside the fish-market temple – at least, this is what the photos depicted. Guidebooks to Hamburg warn visitors not to park too close to the Elbe in foul weather. Apparently, this happens frequently and cars stranded in the flood are destroyed by the salty sea water knocked back up the channels by the tempest at sea. The North Sea is called “blanke Hans” – that is, “empty, naked, sheer, barren” Hans (the adjective blank doesn’t translate well into English). There’s a poem about the city of Rungholdt, a prosperous medieval town that was destroyed in the great Mannetrunkene (“man-drowning”flood) of St. Marcellus Day in 1364. The poem is called Trutz, blanke Hans – that is, “I defy you bare Hans” – and was written by the Prussian poet, Detlev von Lilienkron. The verse begins Heut bin ich ueber Rungholt gefahren / Die Stadt geht unter vor sechshundert Jahren – “Today I sailed over Rungholt / The city sank 600 years ago.”
Hamburg, suspended over the Elbe waters, is sometimes called the Venice of the North. At the end of the 19th century, elite shopping districts were built along the canal that stretches from the Binnenalster to the Elbe – this lane of water is called the Alsterfleet, debouching into the Elbe at the Baumwalle dike a mile southwest on the waterfront. Where the Alsterfleet arrows into the so-called “Old City”, passing the famous Rathaus and its large plaza, shops were built under a vaguely Moorish arcade, elegant white arches imitating buildings in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. One can imagine, if with some difficulty, gondoliers plying the coffee-colored water next to the Rathaus square. Seagulls strut on the granite escarpment over the Alsterfleet and there are swans with black beaks skating over the chilly water and, under the looming, statue-studded facade of the Rathaus, a tall monolith shadows the water, a memorial to 40,000 of the city’s sons who perished in the Great Wall. The vertical slab stands about 35 feet tall and the Gedenkstein or stela is incised with a low relief showing a mother and child enclosed within a single oblong groove. The mother and child, sculpted by Ernst Barlach, are austerely linear, depicted in simplified outline and resemble at outsized Egyptian hieroglyph. Barlach was friends with Kaethe Koellwitz and his female figures default to her mournful, gaunt features. The monolith was controversial from the outset. Its unveiling in August 1931 was accompanied by the removal of an equestrian statue of the late German emperor from the Rathaus Marktplatz and, as with Confederate monuments recently in this country, responses to stela were polarized; of course, there were plenty of German Nationalists who resented the extraction of the Kaiser from the promenade overlooking the canal. Of course, when the Nazis came to power, grieving figures sculpted by Barlach onto the face of the monolith overlooking the canal were chiseled away, replaced by a relief of an eagle soaring over the Alsterfleet. In 1948, the City Fathers restored the Barlach relief.
Angelica and I crossed the John F. Kennedy bridge over the channel between the Binnenalster at the Rathaus and the larger Aussenalster. It was dark, cold, and raining and we were on a mission, walking to a sushi restaurant selected by Angelica for our evening meal. She had directions on her phone, an ambitious hike of 1.9 miles to the restaurant, rather too far, I thought, but she was responsible for managing this meal and so I deferred to her judgment. We set out about forty-five minutes before our reservation, hurrying through the Moorweide park to sidewalks skirting the station at Dammtor and, then, along a diagonal road running parallel to the embankment on which elevated trains scooted back and forth. For the first half-mile, the chief peril was bicycles spinning suddenly toward us out of the darkness or appearing at our elbows as they zoomed by. In alcoves under the elevated train tracks, homeless people lurked, crouching next to small barricades built from cardboard boxes. At the Kennedy bridge, the way opened up and we could see across the estuary. The lights of the downtown Christmas market made a brilliant pattern in the dark waters, reflections that looked like an abstraction by Paul Klee, and the inky ridge of the Rathaus hung over the lagoon like a mountain range. On a raft floating in the middle of the Binnenalster, a forty-foot Christmas tree made a ladder of lights up into the falling rain, a similar ladder descending into the water was mirrored below.
On the other side of the JFK bridge, the phone directions didn’t make any sense. The great white ice-berg of the Kempinski Atlantic rose over the treelined promenades along the Aussenalster. We made our way through alley-like fissures next to the hotel and, then, walked along empty sidewalks toward a bright cluster of lights a couple blocks away. As it happened, we were on the east side of the Hauptbahnhof and the streets became more crowded as we made our way toward the train station. The square around the train shed and its rows of kiosks and fast food places was busy and there were buses arriving every minute or so, pulling up to a big terminal with high, greenish windows. The sushi place was a stone’ throw from the main train station, on the other side of some divided one-way lanes where buses and taxis were servicing the Bahnhof. This was a bright area, a relief after traversing the windy and wet darkness around the JFK bridge. The moral seemed to be that the city folds in on itself – you can expand distances by choosing bad or improbable routes, but everything is actually tightly clenched together, with folds almost meeting. The Hauptbahnhof is only a ninety-second ride by elevated train from the Dammtor. We could have reached this place in twelve minutes, not the forty that it took us to reach the restaurant on foot. After eating, we rode the El, here designated as S-Bahn, from out of the teeming bowels of the Hauptbahnhof to the Dammtor and, then, were back home in only a quarter of an hour, mostly high and dry on the train.
Transport over the Elbe and its neighboring wetlands was once perilous. The oldest artifact on display in the Museum of the City of Hamburg is a fifteen-hundred year old sword fished out of a bog when the edges of the river were dredged a century ago. The sword was found embedded in the mud with several daggers and lance-points. The waters here were once perceived as mortal enemies, unpredictable, swift with secretive currents, and prone to flood. Warriors placated this foe by drowning their weapons in the river as a kind of offering to the water-gods that haunted the place.
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