Reeperbahn

Reeperbahn
A sexshop on the Reeperbahn.
Owner:	The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
Postal code:	20359, 22767
Location:	Hamburg, Germany

Entrance to Herbertstraße; red sign to the right of the gate reads "No entrance for juveniles under 18 years of age and women". The large cigarette ad reads literally, "...For more foreplay."

Inside Herbertstraße

Pinoy bar in the red-light district.

The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district, one of the two centres of Hamburg's nightlife and also the city's red-light district. In German it is also sometimes described as die sündige Meile (the sinful mile).

Name

The name Reeperbahn means ropewalk, which is a place where ropes are made (Low German Reep = rope, the standard German word is Seil; Bahn= track). The street was a ropewalk in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The street, and its side streets

The street is lined with restaurants, night clubs, discotheques and bars. There are also strip clubs, sex shops, brothels, a sex museum and similar businesses. The Operettenhaus, a musical theatre, is also located at the Reeperbahn. It played Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats for many years, after that Mamma Mia!, an ABBA-musical, and now "Ich war noch niemals in New York", ("I have never been in New York") featuring hit songs by Austrian singer/songwriter Udo Jürgens. There are other theatres at the Reeperbahn (St. Pauli Theater, Imperial Theater, Schmidts Tivoli) and also several Cabarets/Varietés.

A famous landmark is the Davidwache, a police station located on the South side of the Reeperbahn at the cross street Davidstraße. Street prostitution is legal during certain times of the day on Davidstraße. The Herbertstraße, a short side street off the Davidstraße, has prostitutes behind windows waiting for customers. Since 1933, large screens block the view into Herbertstraße from the adjacent streets. Since the 1970s, there have been signs saying that entrance to the street is prohibited for women and juveniles; however, technically it is a public road which anyone may enter.

The Große Freiheit ("Great Freedom") is a cross street on the North Side with several bars, clubs and a Catholic church. In former years, several sex theatres here (Salambo, Regina, Colibri, Safari) would show live sex acts on stage. As of 2007, the Safari is the only live sex theatre left in Germany. The popular table dance club Dollhouse now takes the place of the Salambo. Hotel Luxor, Hamburg's oldest brothel that had operated on this street for 60 years, was closed in 2008. The street's name comes from the fact that Catholics were allowed to practice their religion here at a time when this district did not yet belong to Hamburg; they were forbidden from doing so in Protestant Hamburg proper.

In 1967, Europe's largest brothel at the time, the six-floor Eros Center, was opened on the Reeperbahn. It was closed in the late 1980s amidst the AIDS scare.

At a major trial during 2006/2007, ten members of the "Marek Gang", which controls brothels on and near the Reeperbahn, were charged with pimping. The judge rejected the charge of forming a criminal gang and handed out suspended sentences: the men had started relationships with young women in local discotheques in order to recruit them to work in their brothels, an illegal practice if the women are under 21 years of age; some men had also abused some of their women.

Due to the problems with prostitution and the high crime rate, in 2007 the Senate of Hamburg enacted a ban on weapons in the Reeperbahn area. The only other such area with a weapons ban in Hamburg is the Hansaplatz, St. Georg.

The St Pauli Preservation Society decries the ongoing gentrification of the area. Several old-timers blamed the decline of the Reeperbahn's prostitution and pornography businesses on the rise of discotheques and cheap bars that attract teenage customers.

The Beatles

Main article: The Beatles in Hamburg

In the early 1960s, The Beatles (who had not yet become world-famous) played in several clubs around the Reeperbahn, including the Star-Club, Kaiserkeller, Top Ten and Indra. Stories about the band's residencies, onstage and offstage antics are legendary; some stories are true (John Lennon played a song set with a toilet seat around his neck), others inflated (the band urinating in an alley as nuns walked past was told rather differently later). A fellow musician, Ted "Kingsize" Taylor, made a crude tape recording of their last New Year's Eve show, at the Star-Club in December 1962; a cleaned-up version of the tape was later released as an album, later characterized by Harrison as "Awful."

Famously John Lennon is quoted: "I might have been born in Liverpool - but I grew up in Hamburg".

In memory of this time a Beatles-Platz was built at the cross of Reeperbahn and Große Freiheit.

Socle of Hans Albers statue at the Hans-Albers-Platz, by Jörg Immendorff 1986. Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins

Popular culture

The popular 1944 movie Große Freiheit Nr. 7 tells the story of a singer (played by Hans Albers) who works in a Reeperbahn club and falls in love with a girl played by Ilse Werner. Hans Albers and Heinz Rühmann played in the 1954 movie Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins ("On the Reeperbahn half past midnight", after an Albers' song from the 1944 movie).

In 1958, Trinidadian calypso artiste, Lord Invader recorded a track entitled My Experience On The Reeperbahn. It recalls a time when he was conned by a transvestite. You cannot tell a man from a woman. I was a man dancing hand in hand with a man dressed as woman on the Reeperbahn. Reeperbahn is a 1978 song by Udo Lindenberg, to the tune of Penny lane, lamenting the decay of the entertainment there.

Reeperbahn is the name of a Swedish 80's band. Finnish artist Irwin Goodman has made a song and an album called "St.Pauli ja Reeperbahn". The street is also mentioned in the Elvis Costello song "Human Hands", in Van Morrison's song "Heavy Connection", in the Midnight Oil song "Mountains of Burma", the Sloppy Seconds song Germany from their album Destroyed and in the Runrig song "Song of the Earth". The heavy metal band Blue Cheer has a song called "Sweet Child of the Reeperbahn" on their 1991 album Dining with the Sharks. The punk band The Toy Dolls has a song titled "Caught up the Reeperbahn", first released on their 1993 album "Absurd-Ditties".

"Reeperbahn" is the name of a track from the Christian rock group Model Engine's CD "The Lean Years Tradition".

The "Reeperbahn" is often mentioned in Karen Duve's 1999 novel, "Regenroman" (English translation Entitled "Rain").

Tom Waits' 2002 release Alice contains a track called "Reeperbahn."

Australian pop-punk band The Hard-Ons have a song called "Don't Fear The Reeperbahn" on their 2007 album Most People Are Nicer Than Us. Its title is a play on the Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper".

See also

• Prostitution in Germany

External links

• http://en.reeperbahn.se - Information about Reeperbahn and the St. Pauli district (in English)
• http://reeperbahn.hamburg.de - links and information about the reeperbahn (in German)
• http://www.szene-in-hamburg.de/reeperbahn.html - the night life in Hamburg on the Reeperbahn. (in German)