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The Free and Hanseatic City of
Hamburg
Germany's gateway to the world. Hamburg is the second largest
German city, Germany's principal seaport and the country's largest
overseas trade center. "Hamburg's domain is the world.”
150 firms from China have offices here, for example, along with
135 from Japan, 65 from Taiwan and 25 from Hong Kong; all in all,
more than 3,000 firms are engaged in the transaction of import
and export business in Hamburg. Traditional port-related industries
are shipyards, refineries and processing plants for raw materials
from abroad. Through a consistent policy of structural change,
the Hanseatic City has developed into a northern European service
metropolis. Future-oriented sectors such as the aerospace, microelectronics
and media industries are laying a modern foundation for the future
of this attractive site for business and industry.
Founded around the year 811 (as Hammaburg) during the reign of
Charlemagne, Hamburg began to flourish as a commercial town in
1189, when it was granted customs and commercial rights. One of
the first members of the Hanseatic League, it was the League's
main transshipment port on the North Sea. When Hamburg actually
became a free imperial city is a matter of dispute. The emperors
Sigismund and Maximilian termed the city imperial and free in
1410 and 1510 respectively in order to collect taxes. In 1618
the Imperial Court declared Hamburg a free imperial city, a fact
that Denmark, however, did not acknowledge until 1768. Hamburg
has retained its sovereignty to this day. Kings and princes never
ruled Hamburg: It was always the citizens themselves who governed
the city-state. The devastating fire of 1842, a readiness to continually
modernize and the Second World War spared little of the crowded
heart of the old commercial metropolis. Prominent structures include
the Late Baroque St. Michael's Church (whose 132-meter-high tower
- affectionately called "Michel” by Hamburg's residents
- is the city landmark), the 100-year-old Town Hall, and the Chilehaus,
an Expressionist brick building dating from the 1920s. A distinctive
type of cultural monument is the old "Speicherstadt”
in the port area, a complex of brick warehouses erected toward
the end of the last century. It is not, however, individual buildings
which lend Hamburg its special flair, but rather the expansive
panorama afforded by the Alster, a body of water in the center
of the city that has been dammed up to form two lakes, and the
colorful picture presented by the port and houses along the broad
Elbe River.
The green industrial city. Hamburg is Germany's second
largest industrial
center and the heart of a metropolitan area
with a population of 3.3 million. It is nevertheless one of the
greenest cities in Germany. Nearly half of Hamburg's total area
consists of arable land and garden plots, parks and public gardens,
woodlands, moors and heaths. Landscape reserves and nature reserves
cover 28 percent of the city's area. In addition to the 120 parks,
more than 200,000 trees line Hamburg's streets. Ohlsdorf Cemetery
is the largest park cemetery in the world. As a result of the
unification of Germany and the opening up of Eastern Europe, the
port of Hamburg has regained its old hinterland. This enhances
the city-state's prospects of once again becoming the hub of trade,
services and communications between East and West - and "the
southernmost metropolis of Scandinavia”. Firm plans have
been made for the construction of the Transrapid magnetic-levitation
train, which is to link Hamburg's city center with the center
of the German capital Berlin in less than one hour.
The port, one of the largest in the world, spreads out over 75 square kilometers, occupying one tenth of Hamburg's city area. In terms of container transshipment volume, Hamburg ranks second in Europe after Rotterdam. Approximately 280 scheduled shipping lines, more than 100 of them container, roll-on/roll-off and around-the-world lines, offer about 7,000 departures each year from the port of Hamburg to points all over the globe. Every day more than 220,000 people from the surrounding area commute to work in the Hanseatic City. Hamburg is the banking center for northern Germany and Germany's largest insurance headquarters. With 95 consulates-general and consulates, Hamburg is the world's principal consular city. The Congress Center conveniently located in the heart of the city is one of the most modern and most popular conference centers in Europe. The immediately adjacent trade fair halls further enhance its attractiveness as a venue for important trade exhibitions.
Hamburg is the center of the German media industry. The more than
3,300 firms active in this sector employ a work force of approximately
50,000 and utilize the services of numerous free-lancers. Their
annual turnover exceeds DM 40 billion. In recent years the media
sector has been the most rapidly expanding economic sector in
Hamburg. The city is the also the seat of the German Press Agency
(dpa), major television and radio stations and studios (NDR, Studio
Hamburg), and numerous advertising agencies. 15 of the 20 magazines
with the largest circulations are published here. Hamburg publications
account for more than 50 percent of the total circulation of all
German newspapers and
magazines. The Hanseatic City is also Germany's
center for the production of CDs, music cassettes and records.
Civic pride and a passion for the arts. The mercantile
city of Hamburg is and always has been a place of freedom and
tolerance and a city with a rich cultural tradition. It was here
that Germany's first permanent opera house was established in
1678: George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) staged his first opera
("Almira”) in the Hanseatic City. Both Georg Philipp
Telemann and Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach lived and worked in Hamburg.
One of the city's famous sons was the composer Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897); the name of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (born in
Hamburg in 1809) is likewise closely tied to the city on the Elbe.
Influenced by England and France, Hamburg was a cradle of the
Enlightenment in Germany. In 1767 the Deutsches Nationaltheater
was founded here, an institution linked with the name of Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing ("Hamburgische Dramaturgie”, 1767-1769)
which became renowned especially for its performances of Shakespeare's
works. "Minna von Barnhelm” (Lessing) and "Don
Carlos” (Schiller) were performed for the first time here.
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) and Matthias Claudius
(1740-1815) were Hamburg's "literary institutions” at
the time. During the period of reaction in the 19th century, Julius
Campe of Hamburg published the works of Heinrich Heine and other
"rabble-rousing” writers of the "Young Germany”.
After World War II, the directors Rolf Liebermann and Gustav Gründgens
gave the opera and theater modern accents with a strong international
appeal. Unforgotten is the Hamburg-born actor Hans Albers (1891-1960).
Today four state theaters and roughly 40 private theaters enhance
the city's cultural profile. Especially successful in recent years
were the musicals "Cats” and "Phantom of the Opera”
by Andrew Lloyd Webber, productions famous far beyond Hamburg's
city limits. The Hamburg Ballet under the direction of John Neumeier
is internationally renowned. It was here in Hamburg that the graphic
artist and painter Horst Janssen (who died in 1995) created his
extensive portfolio of works independent of any particular school.
At the beginning of the 1960s the Beatles embarked on their international
career in the Hamburg district of St. Pauli.
Hamburg is even mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records: as the city with the most bridges in Europe. After all, the Hanseatic City has more bridges than Venice, Amsterdam and London combined.