Baltic Trip - Hamburg      9th July:

St Jacobi Church

    A bright morning for our walk to the train station. Our train was one of those double-decker types so common on the continent. It was comfortable, smooth and quiet, very conducive to snoozing. However, we were first accosted by a young girl who was doing a survey on where we were travelling to, how did we arrive in Cuxhaven, how would we be travelling once we arrive at our destination etc etc. Our journey took us through seemingly manicured countryside and villages, and the land of nod.

St Petri Church

    It was 41 years since I was last in Hamburg. Then I was a young student seeking industrial training in the UK, but being rebuffed with comments such as, "You should have applied a year earlier". Undeterred, I found an exchange scheme which provided training abroad. I chose Germany since German had been my strongest language at school. In a matter of days I found myself reporting to an office in Hamburg, where questions were fired at me in German. My schoolboy German was clearly not up to this, and in desperation I was given a document to read and sign, which was totally gibberish to me. Stern and concerned looks faced me, and I thought for a moment that I was going to be sent back to the UK.
    My interrogators then pointed to a phrase in the document they had presented me with, and with the help of a dictionary I picked up the context of espionage. I blurted out in my best German, "I am not a spy!" The officials smiled and I was in. I guessed the document must have been akin to our UK Official Secrets Act.

Rathaus

    There followed ten weeks of training in a multitude of departments within the German telecommunications provider at the time. All of it was in German, so my knowledge of German improved by leaps and bounds.
    We alighted at this great city, and after obtaining a set of maps, we set off to explore some of the historic buildings and districts.
    Our first port of call was the St Jacobi Church, founded in the 13th century, and home to the famous Arp Schitger organ. From the outside it was an imposing red brick building with a modern looking spire. Inside it was simply adorned, but still functioned as a church. The church had been destroyed by bombs in 1944, and was rebuilt in the modern brick style some years later. The 17th century organ and paintings must have been stored somewhere safe during the war. We had a chat with the woman on the door, who seemed desperate to have someone to talk to. She could speak some English since she had spent a little time in Surrey, and she could also turn out a tolerable Australian accent. She had spent a few years in Brisbane; her sister was still there. The woman went on and on, telling us all about her sister's drink problem, and how she belonged to a self help group. We managed to escape when some other souls appeared.

Aussenalster and Binnenalster beyond the Rathaus

    Skirting past St Petri Church, the oldest church in the city, which was completely surrounded by roadwork barriers for some reason, and headed across to the Rathaus. This was a splendid sandstone building erected at the end of the 19th century. It is the seat of the cabinet and the legislative assembly.
    We moved on to the St Nikolai Monument, once the third highest church in Germany, it was burned out in the Hamburg firestorm in 1943, "Operation Gomorrah". Today it was a monument to the victims of war, violence and persecution. The tower of the church remained; very little else. A lift gave access to a viewing platform high up in the tower, which afforded splendid views across the city.
    Illustrated boards on the viewing platform showed photographs of the views seen in front of them, but taken just after the war, when the city lay in ruins. A board also gave an account of the bombing, but more importantly it presented an open acknowledgement of the terrible build up to the war by Germany. The actual script follows:

    The Destruction of Hamburg During World War II

St Nikolai Monument

    Hamburg is one of the cities that were most affected by air-raids during WW II. Most momentous among the aerial attacks on the city were the bombings that occurred between 25th July and 3rd August 1943. The Royal Air Force bombed Hamburg's residential areas for several nights in a row, aiming to demoralise the German population, while the US Air Force attacked U-boat shipyards and armaments factories during the day. "Operation Gomorrah" reduced large parts of the city to ashes. 35,000 people died in the flames, among them thousands of slave labourers who had been deported to Germany from other European countries and over 5,000 children. Around one million of its inhabitants fled the city, and the number of injured people is estimated at over 120,000.
    Hamburg's eastern areas were especially hard hit. The three districts of Hammerbrook, Rothenburgsort and Hamm-S�d were completely destroyed by the firestorm and had to be declared prohibited areas. Prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp were forced to recover the bodies , clear the rubble and defuse unexploded bombs.
    In total, the bombings completely destroyed 255,691 flats. At the end of the war 902,000 inhabitants of Hamburg had lost all their belongings and another 265,000 had lost parts of their property, most of them during "Operation Gomorrah".
    These images of destruction remind us of the cruelty which Nazi Germany spread all over Europe with its war of aggression and annihilation. It has rightly been pointed out that the carpet bombings of residential areas were in breach of international law, cruel, and not the right instrument for breaking the German masses' loyalty to Hitler. However, the fuse for the firestorm was lit in Germany. The German air-raids on Guernica(1937), Warsaw(1939), Coventry and Rotterdam(1940), London(1941) and many other cities in Western and Eastern Europe preceded the destruction of Hamburg.
    The original catastrophe occurred ten years earlier, in 1933, when the National Socialists with support of large parts of the elite and the population abolished democracy and the rule of law within a matter of weeks. This catastrophe was to bring on all the other tragedies that followed, such as the air-raids and later the expulsion of the German population from Eastern and Central Europe as well as the partition of Germany. Ultimately the dead, injured, and homeless of the air-raids, too, were victims of Nazi Germany's politics of aggression, its claim for world domination and its barbarisation of war.

Spent a Week at the Top During My Training in 1970

    The Speicherstadt (Old Warehouse District) was our next destination, protected today as an historic monument. It originated from around the end of the 19th century. The area, with its impressive brick buildings, once had fleets passing before it. The Hamburg businessmen chose a picturesque Baroque quarter with trade canals and half-timbered alleys to establish their warehouses. They secured, through the expansion of the free port, their trading power after Hamburg became incorporated in the German customs territory in 1888.

Speicherstadt

    Crossing the Alsterfleet, we made the long climb up to St Michael's Church, considered to be the most beautiful church in the city. It was built in the mid 18th century, and is regarded as the most significant Baroque church building in North Germany. The "Michel" with its tower is the true landmark of the Hanseatic City. The interior was absolutely stunning, with some of the congregational areas situated on curving platforms in the air. The overall feeling of spaciousness was conveyed by the soaring walls, all so white that one could be forgiven for thinking that they were only recently painted. When we arrived, the third wedding of the day was about to take place, so our viewing experience was prematurely curtailed. This building too had been destroyed during the war and rebuilt.
    We ambled down to the Elbe River, where we parted company; Alan wanting to spend the rest of the day at the Maritime Museum. He later reported on how colossal it was, and he had only visited seven out of the nine floors before being asked to leave at closing time.
    Meanwhile, I headed out onto Cap San Diego, a pier out in the river, where a large German warship was moored. I, like many others, only discovered on reaching the warship that it would not be open to the public until the following day. The people I could see on board must have been attending a private function, for which all the ship's officers were kitted out in immaculate uniforms.
    Failing to be deterred, I carried on along the river side to the SS Rickmer Rickmers, a beautiful windjammer, built in 1896 as a full-rigged ship in Bremerhaven. In years gone by it had worked the East Asia shipping route, before ending up as a depot ship.
    A group of Hamburg citizens, as part of the registered society "Windjammer for Hamburg", bought the vessel, and after much refurbishment the ship was moored in its current location in 1983. It now served as a museum and restaurant. I went aboard, and the refurbishments had indeed been immaculate. Sadly only the foredeck could be visited since the rest of the ship was being used for private functions (I guess the society saw this as more of a business venture than a pure museum). I was a bit miffed that I had been conned into paying to enter a museum that was almost totally closed.

SS Rickmer Rickmers

    Weaving my way through the crowds, I made my way to the Landungsbr�cken, my departure point from where I took a ferry back to Harwich in 1970; a moment of nostalgia. Today, the ferry must have been on its passage across the North Sea. There were many more cafes and restaurants along this stretch nowadays, and I took time out to sip a coffee whilst gazing across the river to the busy commercial south bank. Hamburg is the largest seaport in Germany. The sight of the harbour activities had me spellbound as a teenager, and to this very day I am still spellbound by busy river and harbour scenes. The massive floating dry-docks still towered over the opposite banks, and umpteen cranes carried on lifting and shifting countless tons of cargo, though perhaps not as much as on a standard working day. The scene brought back fond memories.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon taking refuge in cafes and restaurants trying to avoid the spate of torrential downpours, and also taking advantage of their facilities; something I had eaten hadn't agreed with my stomach. One such cafe was truly amazing, straight out of the 60s, with dozens of guitars hanging in the windows, and every inch of wall space covered in 60s/70s posters and photos of rock bands. Background music from the era was having to compete against the noisy hum generated by the mixture of old and young customers. I could have spent hours there.
    I ambled down memory lane, firstly along M�nckebergstrasse, a main shopping thoroughfare, and then visited the Alster, a large lake in the city, before finding my way back to the station to meet up with Alan for the last train back to Cuxhaven.
    In less than two hours we were in a bar in Cuxhaven, watching a very large German chap getting rather emotional over a FIFA match between the German and Japanese national women's squads; such is life.
    I had really enjoyed my trip to Hamburg. It had been short and sweet, nevertheless it had revived long dormant memories of this splendid city. I had forgotten what the atmosphere was like all those years ago, but today it was very cosmopolitan and buzzing with life. In a way it reminded me of Manchester, which also had turned itself around to a cosmopolitan centre over the same time frame. I would have loved to have spent more time here, visiting the array of galleries and museums the city has to offer; perhaps one day.