Reeping the Benefits of Neon by Campbell Jefferys

It’s not easy staying at the top of the red light district tree. An effort must be made to move with the times, to keep rampant debaucherie from becoming stagnant. Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn has done just that.

Like a good consumer, a victim of the western world, I associate neon with the sex industry. Is there any other use for neon? I’ve seen ‘Live Sex’ in pink neon enough to know that’s what it’s good for; advertising vices.

It’s a cool November evening on the Reeperbahn, clear and cold. Raindrops aren’t obscuring the view of the ‘Sinful Mile’, the sex stores, bars, and hordes of people illuminated by an array of coloured neon, probing spotlights, and flashing television sets with naked girls dancing. But this is the Reeperbahn of today, relatively safe and not totally ruled by the sex trade like in the past. The Genital Zone is starting to grow up.

To walk the cobblestoned streets of Hamburg by day, taking in the sprawling parks and harbour views, it’s difficult to believe the city would even have a red light district, let alone one as famous as the Reeperbahn. It seems too conservative and quiet. Hamburgers (that’s what they call themselves) follow the rules: they drive safe, keep the city clean, pedestrians wait at traffic lights, and small children eat all their vegetables, but on a 600m stretch west of downtown, they loosen the straps of their lederhosen.

Founded as a port, the harbour has dominated the development of the city. Ruled by commerce and business, Hamburg is now home to more millionaires than any other German city. It remains the ‘Free and Hanseatic City’, its own Bundesland (state). And with the exception of Napoleon in the early 19th century, Hamburg has never had to bow to a foreign leader. Freedom from tyrants, freedom of commerce, and freedom of fetish.

The word Reeperbahn translates as ‘rope road’, and not reeping as in the English sense, which I’m sure has added to its notoriety. Until the 1880s, the road was used for the construction of the heavy ropes required by sailing ships. Even then it was an area frequented by sailors and seamen, with a few bars accomodating the seafarers love for a steiner and a sea shanty.

When sailing ships were replaced by steamers and liners, the heavy ropes were no longer in high demand. Entertainment was always banned from the city’s medieval core, so the Reeperbahn, being outside that area and still frequented by sailors, became the main strip of a new amusement area when rope making died off.

First popular were Hagenbeck’s Dancing Bears, Red Indian displays, and the hippodrome (horse races). But the demand for bears waltzing decreased with louder and more voluptuous cries of ‘Hallo Sailor.’ Prostitution increased and the streets became littered with open debaucherie as moneyed sailors sought relief from months of seafaring lonliness.

Even with the city ravaged by fire and the all but destroyed by two wars, the Reeperbahn sex industry has remained strong; the sailing community pumping in enough money to maintain its constant restoration.

Running off from the west end of the Sinful Mile is Grosse Freiheit (Big Freedom), the famous street for sex shows with that extra something. The first incarnation of the Beatles played in the basement of the Kaiser Keller in 1960. They shared the stage with strippers and bore the insults of rowdy sailors for the skiffle influenced rock’n’roll they played, but mainly for keeping the girls off the stage. The Beatles time in Hamburg has been popularized by the photographs of Astrid Kirscher, girlfriend of then bassist Stu Sutcliffe, and by the film ‘Backbeat’.

In the 80s, it was thought AIDS, poverty and crime had brought the neighbourhood to its knees, but a new generation of young Hamburgers rediscovered the music clubs, discos and bars. Accordingly, the Reeperbahn changed, with young restaurantuers opening modern bars and theatres, revitalising the area in a more upmarket way.

There is a new theatre devoted to musicals, a Bavarian style ‘Bierhaus’, and the Reeperbahn diet is no longer restricted to kebabs and bratwurst. But the sex trade remains dominant, if only for it’s neon brilliance. There are still peep shows, dangerous side streets, roaming packs of males, streetwalkers, dirty old men, fast talking peddlers, and good time seeking sailors, but also wide eyed tourists, theatre goers, and dining and music enthusiasts.

The sex industry is not nearly as bad as it once was. Pimps no longer loiter and leer, or lower (via pulleys) flagons of whiskey to their hardworking street girls like in former days; a nip of German courage to make the night go quicker. Legalized prostitution remains only on Herbert Strasse, a fenced in road open only to men over 18. The girls sitting in shop windows are required to undergo health inspections and pay tax. Streetwalkers are a venereal roulette wheel, but come a lot cheaper.

At the end of Herbert Str. and in the centre of it all is the David Strasse Polizei, Hamburg’s most famous police station. The neon green ‘Polizei’ is a comforting reminder help is not that far away, though they impose no closing hours and their presence on the streets seems solely to be for intimidation and reassurance.

A popular way revellers end a long Saturday night on the Reeperbahn, or perhaps to keep it going, is with a visit to the Fischmarkt. Five minutes walk from the genital zone and operating from 6am 10am every Sunday, the fish market has been a Hamburg icon since it began in 1703. Buy everything from fruit and fish to perfume and pyjamas. Beer flows (yes, even at 9am) and rock music is played in the old fish auction hall. Vendors boisterously hock their wares, some resorting to throwing pineapples into the crowd to get attention.

With about 30,000 revellers on a regular night, the Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s centre of nightlife and neon debaucherie. It remains second to Amsterdam as the world’s most famous red light district and is Hamburg’s number one tourist drawcard. But it’s changing. The ever present sex trade is slowly diminishing in order to cater for wider market. Good time seeking sailors are becoming a thing of the past, and the prostitution industry is suffering as a result.

It’s all still there, though. It’s hard to take the neon glint out of people’s eyes, and as long as women are willing to take their clothes off for money, there will always be men happy to pay $10 for a beer to watch them do it.

But it seems that this too might fade away, as technology has men sitting in darkened rooms with their faces illuminated by the glow of their computer screens, and not watching Swedish films with the curtain drawn tight in soiled peep booths on the Reeperbahn. Perhaps this is how the sinful mile will evolve next, creating a sex trade based on cyberspace, where ‘downloading’ is only a click of the mouse away.

Of course, the last thing I‘d want to see is ‘Internet’ in pink neon on the Reeperbahn. Surely, some things can remain sacred.