Hamburg in the media: illusory worlds on the Elbe

A literal “lighthouse project” that would have given Hamburg a new landmark may not come to fruition. Work on the Elbtower has been at a standstill since October 2023. Planned to be the third highest skyscraper in Germany at 245 meters, everyone who approaches the city from the south is now presented with a hundred-meter-high ruin, which is popularly known as “Short Olaf”. “As mayor, I want the people of Hamburg to say that Scholz did a good job,” said the current Chancellor in February 2018, after reaching a commercial agreement with René Benko about the construction of the high-rise building. Things turned out differently. The real estate speculator’s “empire” has now collapsed.

At the Elbphilharmonie, failure has become success. Although the concert hall at the harbor swallowed up 866 million euros, 789 million more than originally estimated, in terms of deception and self-deception, the venture paid off and no one had to take responsibility for the waste of taxpayers’ money. The “Elphi” stands for Hamburg like the cathedral stands for Cologne – and it took at least 600 years to finish. Nowadays, no film from the public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) can do without the Elbphilharmonie.

The new landmark at the harbor is of enormous importance for the media representation of the Hanseatic city. However, such productions only have a limited connection with the lives of Hamburg residents. Your everyday life takes place somewhere else, away from the cameras and reporters who continually create an artificial media world away from the reality of life.

A city that doesn’t exist like this

For example, the locations of the ZDF series “Notruf Hafenkante” are chosen in such a way that the city’s tourist highlights are constantly in the picture, as if the supposedly everyday police work described in the city of 1.8 million inhabitants only took place on a few square kilometers , which are also familiar to foreigners.

The territory of the TV police officers, who start their operations from an office directly at the harbor, has a strange layout. It does not only include the surrounding area, the noble Hafen-City and St. Pauli around the Reeperbahn. Always showing red light crime or rich shipowners would be pretty monotonous in the long run. “Completely normal” crimes are also supposed to appear in the series, and that is why the scriptwriters have arranged the topography of the city so that the police officers also have missions in a single-family house area or a high-rise district. But they are not available near the harbor. In reality, another police station would be responsible for this.

Another ZDF series, “Soko Hamburg,” gets its local color from sending the detectives to the fruit-growing idyll on the Süderelbe. Does no one in Stuttgart or Munich notice that the Hamburg police are not responsible there because the villages, which are always picturesquely depicted, are in Lower Saxony? Hamburg does have its own farming villages, the Vierlanden, but they may not be cute enough for the screenwriters.

In the past, films were provided with a disclaimer, according to which any similarities between people and actions and reality were purely coincidental. This is now assumed to be known. What is currently missing is any indication that the combination of locations and actions shown is pure fiction; Hamburg on the screen looks like the actual city, but upon closer inspection it is a production of an illusory world.

Sights play an important role in this. The Elbphilharmonie has now replaced the main church of St. Michaelis as a landmark, which was previously mainly reproduced on postcards. The Michel had the disadvantage that it actually had nothing to do with the port. So he liked to be photographed from the Elbe, with ships and the jetties in the foreground.

Since the end of the 19th century, Hamburg has prided itself as a “world port city”. The nickname “Gateway to the World” became established in the 1920s. Research carried out by the Senate press office in 1940 discovered the earliest mention of the slogan in a novel from 1916. Significantly, the “gate” is locked because the First World War meant that ships from overseas no longer called at the port. A novel by best-selling author Frank Thiess entitled “The Gate to the World” made the port city popular in 1926.

Internationally, the Reeperbahn has become a flagship of the city. St. Pauli’s entertainment district was advertised on postcards, which also became more sexually explicit since the 1960s. This was followed by countless feature films and documentaries set in the milieu of prostitutes and crooks. However, the image of the Reeperbahn and the surrounding streets as a playground for sailors on shore leave no longer corresponded to reality when the iconic film “Great Freedom No. 7.” was made in the middle of the war in 1943/44, which created the maritime image with Hans Albers of Hamburg was held on forever.

Harbor folklore is always attractive

“The Hanseatic city comes into the colored widescreen image with all the places that are important for attracting tourists,” wrote “Der Spiegel” in 1954 about another feature film with Albers in the leading role. In the film “On the Reeperbahn at half past twelve at night” he again plays a sailor who makes a living as a “landlubber”. A square in the red light district was dedicated to him four years after his death in 1964. In 1984, the Düsseldorf painter Jörg Immendorff bought a pub nearby and in 1986 erected a statue of “blond Hans” with a ship’s piano in front of “La Paloma”.. Harbor folklore still thrives.

Bloody turf wars over the Reeperbahn in the 1980s made it clear that the environment is only trustworthy in films. To this day, reports of violent clashes are part of the image of St. Pauli and may make the area even more attractive to visitors due to the hint of danger. The NDR is heavily involved in identifying the red light district as the city’s brand core. In June, positions were advertised for a podcast about sex work. “Webcam girls, tantra masseuses or street prostitutes” should report on their everyday lives – a privilege that other professional groups do not have.

For example, the dock workers who only get attention when they go on strike. How current. The Verdi union is seeking a social collective agreement for them that is intended to protect the approximately 6,600 employees from the social and health consequences of the planned corporate restructuring of Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA). At the beginning of September, the city parliament, the citizens, decided to transfer 49.9 percent of the city’s logistics group to the world’s largest shipping company MSC. The employees are probably facing an uncertain future.

The city’s sights play an important role in the media presentation of Hamburg.

For average Hamburg residents, however, the port hardly plays a role in everyday life. They only go to the Elbe or the Reeperbahn when they have visitors from abroad with whom they are completing a tourist program. These hotspots are undoubtedly part of the Hanseatic city, but they mostly live in neighborhoods that are less exciting, where a camera team from NDR comes every few months at best when they bring special reports about the parts of the city that are not otherwise featured in the program. The “Hamburger Abendblatt”, as the newspaper with the highest circulation, regularly reports only on catering establishments from different parts of the city. Or about scandals.

Niendorf, for example, delivered one in the spring after it became known that a homeless shelter was to be set up in an abandoned old people’s home – and residents protested against it. »We specifically chose Niendorf to live there. It’s a Bullerbü life in which we can let the children grow up freely,” a citizen was quoted as saying. Another mother claimed she cried herself to sleep every night. The “Abendblatt” describes the life of the well-protected middle class who want to distance themselves from the bottom.

Those who don’t have an apartment are often said to be close to crime. The red-green Senate of the Hanseatic city is not exempt from this prejudice. Interior Senator Andy Grote (SPD) identified the main train station and the adjacent shopping streets as the source of the disaster. A weapons and alcohol ban zone was declared there. Since then, the newspapers have been looking for headlines and reporting on every knife discovery.

The displacement of the poorest has now worked. At the main train station you can no longer see any of the 2,000 homeless people, according to conservative estimates. Of course they haven’t disappeared, but have spread across the entire city. You can see them in Niendorf as well as at the Eppendorfer Baum, in the Hoheluftchaussee or at the Rödingsmarkt. They don’t appear in groups like they do around the main train station, but instead huddle individually in a corner of the house, which increases their chance of being left alone by police, security guards or concerned residents.

The closest to everyday reality are the free weekly newspapers, which, like the “Abendblatt”, belong to the Funke media group. They report calmly from the neighborhoods, depicting everyday life. However, because they are financed by advertisements and their staffing leeway is limited, you cannot expect in-depth research.

However, there is not much left in Hamburg of its former reputation as the “press capital”. The city-based publishers of “Spiegel” and “Zeit” still pay particular attention to the events on their doorstep. But their houses are in the city center and at the harbor. Her view is also limited. On “Spiegel-TV” Hamburg is a code for picturesque misery. Reports regularly show scenes from a specific supermarket in St. Pauli. Or they benevolently accompany police patrols around the main train station. The rest of the city is underexposed. There is a chasm between the media productions and reality.

A former anti-aircraft bunker on the Heiligengeistfeld is currently being established as a new landmark. The concrete block was converted into a hotel and given a green roof that can be climbed via a “mountain path”. From there you can see “short Olaf” on a clear day.