St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

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      Football Reaches Hamburg, Sankt Pauli is Founded

      Football also emerged in the Hanseatic city in the late nineteenth century. As well as the aforementioned Hamburger FC being created in 1888, three other teams (Sports-Club Germania, Cito and Excelsior) had been founded a year before. It was the turn of the century, in 1899, a few months after the death of Otto von Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor) and during the Second Boer War. A group of enthusiasts for the new sport created a team, on this occasion through the games and sports section of Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein. Hamburg-St. Pauli was a male-only institution founded by Franz Reese¹ in 1862 when doing gymnastics was booming on the right side of the city’s river Elbe² (the area made up of the well-off areas of Karolinenviertel and Schanzenviertel). At that time St. Pauli had two clearly differentiated areas: the north (bourgeois and with a notably nationalistic character) and the south (close to the port and inhabited by workers).

      Like other similar associations, Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein had two goals: promoting liberalism and spreading an intense nationalist sentiment. The first objective was in order to retrieve citizens’ morale after the humiliating defeats inflicted by Napoleon’s army in Jena and Auerstedt. This would be achieved by physically training the ‘perfect German’ for life and war. The French victory meant reforming the army, introducing the draft and introducing physical education in schools to optimise the performance of future conscripts. For this reason the institution developed a notably militaristic hallmark. The second aim was shown in its freedom of association, which allowed anybody that paid the corresponding membership fees to join the club. Both factors reflected the country’s socio-political reality, which was still being determined by the 1848 March Revolution, an unsuccessful flare-up that sought – as we saw earlier – to abolish the nobility and introduce parliamentarianism and a free press.

      The organisation took its name from the area – to the north of the Elbe river – that the city annexed in 1247. Until 1833 this was known as Hamburger Berg (Hamburg mountain)³ as it was then the highest point in the area. Yet St. Pauli’s mountain relief changed as a result of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Then, the Hamburg Senate ordered the building of defensive bastions and the levelling of walls by taking sand and mud from the mountaintop to feed the city’s brickworks. At that time St. Pauli was a kind of no man’s land populated by 2,000 people, located half way between the town of Altona – then under Danish rule – and the port for the boats that sailed along the Elbe.⁴

      Until the seventeenth century the area was little populated beyond members of religious orders and gangs of pirates that went there from the river. It was then an unprotected area, a fact that did not favour settlement by a large community. The few that went to live there were day labourers, fishermen, businessmen and craftsmen, who had fled the city because of its high cost of living. Alongside them emerged businesses that were deemed ‘antisocial’ because of the noise, pollution and strong smells they made: for instance, those in which artisans refined whale blubber to produce oil lamps. One of the trades that undoubtedly became the most renowned in the area was rope making, due to the large demand for rope on the boats that docked at the port. This was an activity that required fairly wide spaces because while one rope maker held up a wheel the hemp was rolled around, a second had to stretch and twist the hemp: an impossible job in narrow streets or reduced spaces. Rope making has been immortalised in the name of an archetypal St. Pauli road today: Reeperbahn, which can be translated as ‘rope walk’.

      The entrances to this suburb of craftspeople and foul jobs had three gates that allowed people and goods to circulate. One of these – Millerntor – has been documented as going back to 1246. Its name stems from its location, as it was the door between two others, a location that in old German was called milderdor or mid-dele-thor.⁵ Years later, the portal was removed and relocated as a result of the district’s demographic expansion. Indeed for years it was where tolls were collected for the goods that entered the town, making it a kind of customs office of its time. The gateway was open from 1 January 1861, which allowed trading activity to further develop.⁶ Eight centuries later the old gate gave FC St. Pauli’s stadium its name.⁷

      In the late seventeenth century the Hamburg Senate ordered that hospices and hospitals (Pesthof) be moved beyond the city’s ramparts to the area that today is the St. Pauli district. That is when the so-called ‘undesirables’ came, the many diseased and destitute who joined the area’s initial inhabitants. None were spared during the siege the Danish army subjected the area to at the end of that century. During the assault the church – built in 1682 and dedicated to Saint Paul – was totally destroyed. From then, as well as giving the neighbourhood its name, the church became an important symbol. It was rebuilt in the eighteenth century but suffered another disaster in 1814. This time it was by France’s Grand Armée during the War of the Sixth Coalition (1812–14). It was Napoleon himself who ordered burning ‘that suburb of ungovernable people’ to avoid enemy soldiers from hiding in St. Pauli homes and premises. Finally, in 1833, the conurbation adopted the name of the church, which that very year was rebuilt on the spot of its original construction. Around that time, St. Pauli’s 11,000 residents obtained civil rights and could enjoy advances such as the arrival of electricity and gas.

      In the mid-nineteenth century the area went through enormous expansion and change. This was partly because of the ‘Great Fire’ that devastated central Hamburg on 5 May 1842, causing 51 fatalities and destroying 1,700 buildings.⁸ It was also due to a growth in industrialisation linked to the activities of the port.⁹ These two developments sparked a mass exodus to St. Pauli. It is calculated that as a consequence of the catastrophe and creation of new industries, around 20,000 people moved outside the city walls, seeking decent wages, to St. Pauli. The exodus produced urban crowding and sanitary deficiencies. This demographic growth, which transformed St. Pauli’s social structure, encouraged the emergence in the area of brothels,¹⁰ theatres, music halls and dancehalls.¹¹ The increase in inhabitants led the Hamburg Senate to agree to open the Millerntorn gate at night, although, of course, anyone going through it after midnight had to pay (16 shillings).¹² Most of the newcomers settled in the port and Reeperbahn areas that became a centre for nightlife at the end of century. As a result of industrial growth a working-class community emerged,¹³ turning St. Pauli into a left-wing stronghold.¹⁴ Many