Abstract
When we think of rock and roll, Germany is not usually the place that comes to mind. But one German place had a profound impact on rock and roll’s development: Hamburg, particularly its entertainment and red-light district St. Pauli. This chapter takes a close look at the spaces of early rock and roll in St. Pauli, including the Star Club, Kaiserkeller, and Gruenspan. An exploration of the history of particular venues reveals how Hamburg created something new: a music scene that brought together German fans and British musicians who used American sounds to forge new identities and communities starting in 1960. A deep dive into these venues also reveals continuities in St. Pauli’s role as a site of popular entertainment. From ballrooms, hippodromes, and cinemas to Nazi-era Swing haunts, Beat music meccas, and psychedelic discotheques, these spaces reveal new aspects of the histories of leisure, sexuality, and youth culture as they brought people together in search of pleasure through music.
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Notes
- 1.
A good discussion of this concept of the ‘global sixties’ is Brown (2013), esp. pp. 3–12.
- 2.
Grosse Freiheit actually belonged to the neighboring city of Altona before its 1937 incorporation into Greater Hamburg.
- 3.
- 4.
Gestapo Hamburg to Herrn Polizeipräsidenten, 2 March 1942, in Staatsarchiv Hamburg 376–2 Gewerbepolizei, file Spz X C 3.
- 5.
Wiese’s license was transferred to one Margarethe Halbroth, who promised to offer accordion music. The bar was closed altogether in 1943 under wartime emergency decrees.
- 6.
This establishment at Paul-Roosen-Strasse 33 dates to 1908 as a dance hall and ‘Saalkino’—a space without fixed seating where early motion pictures were projected. In the 1930s it was known as Seidel’s Club and Ballhaus. Damaged during the war, it later reopened as the Luna cinema, then the Bambi Kino (Töteberg and Reissmann 2008, p. 255).
- 7.
The Star Club struggled financially after 1967 and closed for good on 31 December 1969.
- 8.
Reports from 1964 and 1965 in Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 331–1 II Polizeibehörde II, files Abl. 2/41.10 Jugendschutz und-kriminalitat and Streifenbericht des Jugenschutztrupps von 21.Mai bis Okt. 1964. See also Sneeringer (2017, pp. 313–37).
- 9.
Krautrock had several other hubs in West Germany, including Düsseldorf and Munich.
- 10.
West Germany’s first television show to feature rock and Beat music, which premiered in September 1965.
- 11.
‘Das Tor zur Welt’ has long been Hamburg’s unofficial slogan.
- 12.
Hamburg was also a key site of West Germany’s music industry in the second half of the twentieth century. That industry, however, had limited impact on music scenes within the city itself.
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Sneeringer, J. (2019). The Spaces of Early Rock and Roll in Hamburg-St. Pauli. In: Lashua, B., Wagg, S., Spracklen, K., Yavuz, M.S. (eds) Sounds and the City. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94081-6_11
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