Nicknamed the southernmost Scandinavian city, Hamburg is a port city and a business hub, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot to see and do there.
Falling in love with a city in September is like falling in love with a FaceTuned Tinder photo—the weather is just too good, the population too refreshed from summer and their kids being back in school. But if you find yourself charmed by a place in the depths of winter, say, a blustery rainy long weekend in February, and still want to go back—you know it’s the real deal.
Such was my experience just a couple of weeks ago in Hamburg, Germany, where for four days I visited in the rain. It’s the country’s second largest city and the seventh largest in the EU. However, it’s one that, other than to conduct business, Americans rarely visit. A perfect fit, then, for our series on underrated destinations, It’s Still a Big World.
Charmed is precisely what I was after my four days there. Whether it’s architecture, music, food, history, or urban curiosity that motivates you, Hamburg has something for everybody. And, as it’s a city focused more on work and play for its own citizens and not for non-German tourists, there is a sense that as a total foreigner you’re experiencing a place, a way of life, relatively unscathed by our tourism.
The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, as it is formally known, sits in the north of Germany near Denmark, where the rivers Elbe and Alster meet. For centuries it was at the center of a loose confederation of free city states called the Hanseatic League that dominated trade in Northern Europe and the North and Baltic Seas. While its status as a completely independent entity went away long ago, it still sees itself as apart. Some refer to it as “the southernmost Scandinavian city” and native son Karl Lagerfeld once said he felt Hanseatic first, German second. As home to some of the highest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires in Germany, its leafy upscale neighborhoods have plenty of mansions, but they’re often in Anglo styles like Victorian or Georgian.
While it may not bring in Americans, Germans love Hamburg. It’s the world’s third largest musical theater market, with German-language reproductions of The Lion King, Frozen, and Hamilton. Its port, the country’s largest, is a draw. And the odd but overwhelming collection of large-scale miniature cities at Miniatur Wunderland—a place few Americans other than model train enthusiasts have heard of—is often rated Germany’s most popular attraction, higher than Neuschwanstein.
A light drizzle greeted me after a complicated train ride from Amsterdam. Hamburg’s biggest obstacle as a tourist destination is the lack of connections. The sole direct flight from the U.S., operated by Emirates, ended a few years ago, and there’s no direct train from Amsterdam, leaving you especially vulnerable to the vagaries of the Deutsche Bahn—in my case, their decision to park a cargo train without an engine at the only platform available for use along the way.
The walk from the central train station to my hotel in the city’s central business district gave a good taste of what much of this SimCity-like place is like, where all the buildings look like renderings and even when not matching one’s taste, are all done with high levels of quality. Throw in the canals that once made this the Venice of the North, and you’ve got a rather exquisite city.
Very little of the city is “historic” in the sense that just one tenth of it is older than a century—the result of Allied bombing and a lack of sentiment when it comes to historic preservation. While there are a few historic buildings, like the neo-Renaissance city hall, most contemporary work pays homage to Hamburg’s great contribution to architectural history—Brick Expressionism.
My hotel was the Renaissance, a standard Marriott but housed in an elaborate Brick Expressionist work by Fritz Höger, one of the style’s giants. Brick Expressionism was a strain of Expressionist architecture, wherein buildings were pulled and contorted past their historical shapes and proportions (Expressionist painters like Munch and Schiele would do the same to the human form). Brick Expressionism, popular in Northern Europe, was distinct in its use of patterns of clinker bricks to create dizzying facades. Höger’s Broschek House, now the Renaissance, was no different with strings of pyramids of gold jutting out from the brick facade.
The hotel was a quick walk to most of the city’s sights, whether the Elbphilharmonie, the Kunsthalle, Hafencity, and Speicherstadt, and a nice stroll to the “cool” neighborhoods of Schanze and Karolinenviertel. Especially close is Höger’s greatest work, the work that was synonymous with the city until the Elbphilharmonie was completed, and the work that made me always want to visit–Chilehaus.
A dream for the visually hungry
Hamburg is a city of business. To walk its streets on a weekday is to see people with their heads down, on a mission. At the turn of the century, its giant merchant and shipping houses built colossal office buildings across the city. The greatest were concentrated just off the canal warehouses in a district that is now a UNESCO heritage site, Kontorhaus.
With the wind ripping through its streets, turning the rain into a sort of rough-day-at-sea spray, I walked around the area with Tomas Kaiser, one of the city’s top guides who is steeped in all things Hamburg. Chilehaus is the most famous of the group, its ocean liner shape being most apparent when standing before its bow: you’d swear it just might come crashing down upon you.
But the neighborhood as a whole is a dream for the visually hungry. Sprinkenhof, just next door, has a facade decorated with diamond-shaped brickwork and circular terracotta sculptures that are meant to be redolent of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. It was Europe’s largest office building when it was completed. It was initially the work of the Jewish brother architects Hans and Oskar Gerson and the aforementioned Fritz Höger, but after the rise of the Nazis, Oskar was not allowed to work on it (Hans died early) and so it was finished by Höger, who had joined the Nazi Party. While you can just wander the neighborhood and easily spot the works, don’t miss Messberghof, Miramar Haus, Bartholomayhaus, and Montanhof.
Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/hamburg-is-a-cool-secret-the-germans-keep-to-themselves