Hamburg by Neville Walker

Just off the Reeperbahn in the heart of Hamburg’s infamous St Pauli district there’s a small, rather scruffy square. The morning after the night before, it’s likely to be decorated with the broken glass and used syringe detritus of the area’s seedy demimonde. These days there’s an admixture of smarter and more respectable nightlife along the Reeperbahn, which has brought in everything from musical comedy to Dr Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds. But even today nobody could call St Pauli refined.

At the centre of the square stands an oddly geometric statue, like the square itself not much to look at. It’s a boldly modern take on the theme of commemorative statuary, and in the way of modern statuary, it looks nothing like its subject. Nearby, a pub sign reproduces the statue’s subject in more familiar pose. Familiar, that is, to Germans of all ages. The statue, the pub sign and the square itself all commemorate Hans Albers, the most popular leading man in German cinema through the turbulent middle years of the twentieth century. On the pub sign he is depicted as millions remember him: as a gruff, accordion-wielding seaman with a secretly sentimental soul.

Albers was a native of Hamburg, and though he starred in films throughout the Nazi era he maintained a cool distance from the era’s politics, much like the people of Hamburg itself, who with their internationalist outlook were of all the Germans the least likely to be convinced by Nazi demagoguery. Outside Germany Albers is best known as the star of the original Münchhausen, one of the mad, extravagant movie blockbusters commissioned by Goebbels as the Nazi state crashed down around its creators. In Germany, though, he will be forever linked with St Pauli, which is why his statue is here, and not across town in the cosmopolitan district of St Georg where he was born.

In 1943, work began in Hamburg on a filmed paean to the raunchy port city, with Albers as the star. Grosse Freiheit number 7 was supposed to be cinematic consolation for the hideous experience of the Hamburg firestorms, which in the hot summer of that year incinerated more than 40,000 of the city’s residents and drove many survivors to the brink of madness. Albers played an ageing sailor, reduced to touting for a nightclub in Grosse Freiheit, which even today is one of the seedier of the streets leading off the Reeperbahn.

But the Germans were not destined to see the film until after the war. It was sad and sentimental – and Albers had traditionally played the Nordic man of action. It had a downbeat ending; he didn’t get the girl, but instead returned to the sea. So the Nazis banned it, wary of the effect it might have on morale.

When it finally appeared after war’s end, Grosse Freiheit Number 7 hit something of a nerve. Perhaps the vision of big, blond Hans with tears in his eyes, resigned to the hopelessness of his love, was cathartic for a shattered nation. Whatever, it spawned sequels through the 1950s, and long before the Reeperbahn rang to the Beatles’ guitars, it echoed to Albers’ gentle accordion. Duck into a cosy neighbourhood restaurant in one of Hamburg’s Kieze and don’t be surprised if, even today, it’s sloppy old sailor Hans’ music playing in the background.

But if it’s just about possible to get away from Hans Albers in Hamburg, it’s not nearly so easy to get away from the water. Nor would it be desirable. There is the harbour, above all: best experienced by boat on a tour from the floating landing stage where liners once docked. The more intriguing tours are the ones that (tide permitting) take you among the redbrick nineteenth century warehouses of the Speicherstadt and beyond into the Fleete, the canyon-like canals of the old city centre, lined with tall , gabled houses, solid nineteenth century office buildings and chic modern shopping complexes.

One of these waterways, the Alsterfleet, runs close by Hamburg’s vast nineteenth century Town Hall, one of the most exuberant in Europe and an emphatic statement of the city’s civic pride. It ends in the Binnenalster, the smaller of the two pleasure lakes around which are ranged many of the city’s best hotels and shops and its most exclusive suburbs. In summer, the larger Aussenalster is a mass of sail as it is transformed into one of Hamburg’s great leisure amenities, but even on a moody winter’s day the superb views back to the city’s handsome copper roofs and tall spires are worth the price of an Alster cruise.

For anyone expecting a German Liverpool or Southampton, Hamburg surprises on two fronts: in its affluence and its genius for gracious living. This isn’t simply a port, it’s also Germany’s media capital and one of the most prosperous cities in the European Union. And it shows. It shows in the grandiose white stucco villas fringing the Alster and lining the elegant Elbchaussee, the avenue that stretches from the old Danish enclave of Altona to the riverside beach suburb of Övelgönne and beyond almost to Blankenese.

Blankenese is a pretty riverside village that was once the home of simple sea captains and is now a Hanseatic Hampstead or Sausalito, full of two-car households and liberal values. It’s here, wandering among the boutiques and galleries of the village, exploring the quaint lanes or lingering over kaffee und kuchen on the riverfront that you might catch the fine featured, elegant burghers of Hamburg out for a stroll in their finest Burberry or Ralph Lauren. If, that is, you don’t see them in the altogether earthier environs of the Sunday morning fish market at St Pauli first.

In either location the chances are they’ll be carrying a stylish umbrella, for this cool, almost Scandinavian city is notorious in Germany for its rainy climate. It’s surely the reason so many of the city’s finest designer shops are to be found in the maze of indoor arcades which thread their way between the canals. Sooner or later in Hamburg, you see, everything comes back to water.