On the evening of 23 June 1964, hundreds of young women and men made their way down to the Star Club in Hamburg's Grosse Freiheit in what was for many a familiar ritual. They were looking forward to a night of rock'n’roll fun in the same place The Beatles had played just a few years earlier. But when they arrived at their destination, they found it shuttered by order of city official Kurt Falck on the basis of twenty-three complaints about violence by club employees. Many of those turned away channelled frustration at this denial of their right to leisure space into protest: at least two hundred staged a sit-down strike in the middle of the street, chanting ‘open the Star-Club!’ Some female fans (who had likely been following the escalating conflict between Falck and the club's owner, Manfred Weissleder, in the local press) brandished pacifiersFootnote 1 , perhaps to suggest they were harmless (as one journalist wrote) or maybe just to confound observers. Others jeered police commissioner Fiete Ott when he arrived on the scene. The daily BILD disparaged the protest as a youth riot (Jugend-Krawall), while the Hamburger Morgenpost invoked memories of the 1950s moral panic around rock'n’roll by portraying the demonstrators as ill-mannered, longhaired ‘leather jackets’. In fact, the protesters, nary a leather jacket among them, were peaceful and eventually dispersed. The police exercised restraint and made no arrests. Within days the Star Club reopened under new management.Footnote 2
This action was small and spontaneous, a one-off. It barely registers in the archives or the growing literature on protest in West Germany.Footnote 3 So what is its significance? It can be plotted on the spectrum of social protest in West Germany and Europe from the 1950s through the 1980s, as citizens pushed at the boundaries of democracy by exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly.Footnote 4 It also fits into what sociologist Dieter Baacke saw as the oppositional potential of Beat music (as rock'n’roll was rechristened in 1960s Europe), though there is no evidence that it translated in the short term into tangible political activism.Footnote 5 Perhaps it is most related to Munich's so-called Schwabing Riots, in which young men and women took to the streets over their right to public space, clashing with police for five nights in June 1962.Footnote 6 In Hamburg, however, the protest was much smaller and police demonstrated what Arthur Marwick called ‘measured judgment’, refusing to escalate the situation in order to diffuse it.Footnote 7 Does that mean Hamburg police had made their peace with young people in the Grosse Freiheit? Not exactly. Unlike the university quarter Schwabing, the Star Club protest occurred in a place where youth did not ‘belong’ – Hamburg's main red-light district, St. Pauli. Youths were coming there not for striptease or nude films but for rock and Beat clubs run by entrepreneurs hoping to stand out in a crowded entertainment landscape. These clubs and the related businesses that sprang up from 1960 onward created an alternative urban geography for music fans that harnessed the international impulses flowing through the port city. Teens and ‘twens’ (twenty somethings) across class, gender and national lines moved through the same terrain as sailors, tourists, international performers and denizens of the red-light district. Celebrating the joys of amplified sound and physical connection in a place where the pleasures of the body were the coin of the realm, they used these spaces to create amongst themselves moments of utopia outside the era's sexual conservatism and social conformity.Footnote 8
Local authorities, however, saw a different geography. After 1945 the city played up its reputation as an outpost of liberalism in order to suppress its Nazi past, win back foreign visitors and contribute to the Federal Republic's integration into the West. Tourism professionals successfully marketed St. Pauli as an earthier version of Paris’ Pigalle or London's Soho – a centre of sex- and alcohol-fuelled fun for consenting adults.Footnote 9 Maintaining that touristic product required regulation: visitors came for a walk on the wild side, but unchecked prostitution, violence and swindles could drive them away. Youths flocking to St. Pauli for its music sceneFootnote 10 threatened to upset that balance: not only did they spend less than adults, the law demanded they be protected in this ‘youth-endangering’ (jugendgefährdende) place.Footnote 11 Police, bureaucrats, business leaders and welfare agents allied to monitor and curb their circulation in St. Pauli's entertainment district, especially young females, who were considered particularly vulnerable to the sex trade.Footnote 12 They also targeted music club owners, particularly Weissleder. The fact that his portfolio contained both sex-themed businesses and the youth-oriented Star Club made him a danger in the eyes of the authorities.
While the law considered them ‘in need of protection’ until they were twenty-one, youths possessed undeniable mobility and economic power well before that age. The conditions of the more intense phase of modernity that West Germany entered around 1960 – expanding consumerism and advertising, rising penetration of mass media into daily life, guaranteed leisure time, ability to travel and so forth – brought young people to St. Pauli in search of exciting experiences. They were making a claim on democratic freedoms in a city that touted itself as a model of liberalism. But their presence in a place the law defined as ‘youth-endangering’ revealed the limits of liberalisation in this period. Contemporary press accounts, tax records and protocols of the force set up to monitor young people, Hamburg's Youth Protection Squad reveal ongoing tensions in the first half of the 1960s over the bodies and movements of young people. Police and welfare authorities’ concerns about youth – which were genuine and not without foundation – led them to deploy tactics of surveillance, confinement and sometimes even physical violation that denied agency to young women in particular. In the early 1960s St. Pauli's Beat music clubs became sites of a running battle between pleasure-seeking youths (plus allies like Weissleder) and adults who saw their very presence as a threat to social and sexual order – a battle at whose heart lay competing notions of the everyday meanings of democracy.
St. Pauli: A ‘Youth-Endangering’ Place
St. Pauli's music clubs appeared in a place with centuries-long traditions of commercialised entertainment, a border zone where those on the margins could carve out space for themselves. Located by the harbour outside Hamburg's medieval walls, St. Pauli attracted the traveller, the immigrant, the sailor and the prostitute. During the nineteenth century its main artery, the Reeperbahn, became a mecca for amusements both high and low.Footnote 13 It was also a zone of racial encounter. Amusement purveyors displayed ‘exotic’ peoples and objects gleaned from colonial expedition; seamen from China, India, Malaya and Java walked its streets and sometimes settled in the neighbourhood.Footnote 14 The 1930s brought clashes between Communists and Nazis in its defiantly proletarian backstreets. Once in power the Nazis worked to ‘clean up’ the area: they corralled prostitutes into the gated bordello street Herbertstrasse and persecuted so-called asocials (particularly habitual prostitutes) and homosexual men. Chinese residents suffered deportation in 1944. At the same time local Nazis who understood entertainment's power to bind the masses to the regime kept the Reeperbahn humming and turned a blind eye to much of the carousing that went on behind blackout curtains. Hitler's architects hoped to remake the harbour into a mighty gateway to the German interior, plans thwarted by Allied bombing. After brief interruptions between 1943 and 1945, St. Pauli resumed its role as what one post-war guidebook called a place of ‘joy and forgetting’.Footnote 15
St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn drew record levels of visitors in the 1950s as a result of the aggressive marketing of raucous good times, which tapped into a widespread desire for distraction facilitated by reconstruction and rising disposable income among Germans and other Europeans. Its role as a frequent setting for crime thrillers heightened its mystique as an antidote to suburban blandness.Footnote 16 But reports in the national press about clip joints (Nepplokale) that preyed on unsuspecting punters fuelled anxiety among local leaders that they could lose the tourists on whom the harbourside economy increasingly relied. That drove a series of initiatives to constrain the district's excesses in the name of protecting the tourist trade.Footnote 17 Public relations campaigns (such as the ‘St. Pauli is here for everyone’ scheme) failed to undo the area's increasingly sleazy reputation, so businessmen (no women were involved) in the St. Pauli Citizens’ Association (St. Pauli Bürgerverein) turned to bureaucrats and law enforcement agents to clamp down on dishonest businesses. Falck, as head of central Hamburg's Economic Regulatory Office (Wirtschafts- und Ordnungsamt, hereafter W&O) took over the charge, supported by future chancellor Helmut Schmidt (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Hamburg's Interior Minister from 1961 to 1965.Footnote 18 Schmidt gave Falck broad authority to conduct undercover surveillance, stage raids and revoke licenses.Footnote 19 Falck also teamed up with Hamburg's Youth Agency (Jugendbehörde) to monitor minors in the district. Together they scrutinised establishments deemed youth-endangering – in practice, every business in the entertainment quarter.
Their buzzword was Jugendschutz – youth protection – a term Weimar-era reformers popularised during the campaign that resulted in the 1926 law against ‘smut and filth’ in media and literature (Schund und Schmutz). The Nazis also invoked it to tighten censorship, push prostitutes behind gates, persecute gay men and keep youths out of St. Pauli.Footnote 20 This broad agenda persisted into the post-war era, even as the harshest Nazi statutes were unwound. Hamburg's Youth Agency, which resumed work already in June 1945, used youth protection to position itself as a key player in city-state politics. It benefited from increased funding after a 1948–49 uproar over displaced teenagers living in bunkers beneath the Bismarck monument near the harbour.Footnote 21 Its reach was further boosted by the 1951 Law for the Protection of Youth in Public, which set new age limits for alcohol consumption, banned smoking in public for those under sixteen, established age-specific movie ratings, barred minors from ‘morally dangerous places’ and shows and set a 10 p.m. curfew on dance hall visits for under eighteens.Footnote 22 The era also saw renewed national debate over censorship as advocates rushed to fill what they saw as the emergence of a legal and moral void after the collapse of the Third Reich. This debate flowed from the widely shared notion that liberation had unleashed a tide of obscene images and texts that imperilled youths’ healthy development. The 1953 Law on Youth Endangering Publications established an index of works that could not legally be sold to minors (while it also covered works that glorified war or Nazism, sex-themed materials were most targeted). The goal was not to stop production of these materials (which would hinder market capitalism) but rather to protect youths from ‘exploitative’ publishers and entertainment operators. This dovetailed with the increasingly heard argument that adults needed to reassert control over children to restore public morality after its perceived breakdown during the rubble years. As Dagmar Herzog writes, ‘the transition from a morality concerned with the aftereffects of fascism to a morality concerned above all with restriction of talk about and representation of sex was now well underway’.Footnote 23 Youths ‘in need of protection’ (schutzbedürftige) became key pretexts for this transition.
As the privations of the rubble years receded, debate about youth shifted to the effects of prosperity on their morality.Footnote 24 1950s commentators decried the phenomenon of latchkey children left unsupervised while their parents – particularly mothers in the nation's many single-parent households – worked to acquire the new consumer goods. West Germans faced what historian Rob Stephens calls a ‘complication of modernization’: how to reconcile indulgence in small luxuries such as tobacco or sweets (and, I would add, experiences like movie going), touted as a good under capitalism, with the spiritual dangers of unbridled materialism.Footnote 25 This debate gained particular urgency with the ‘hooligan riots’ (Halbstarken-Krawalle) of 1956–58, a rash of violence by teenage males at concerts and movies linked to the new fad of rock'n’roll.Footnote 26 German commentators depicted children of prosperity in thrall to the entertainment industry, indulging in mindless destruction that their weak parents failed to prevent. In this discourse youth appeared as both threat – to order and propriety – and threatened – by negligent adults and greedy purveyors of low entertainment who preyed on their impulsiveness.
Entertainment became a battleground for the soul of youth – in itself nothing new, as mass entertainment's effects had been debated across the industrialised world since the nineteenth century.Footnote 27 But it took on a new quality as demographic and economic expansion made teenagers a formidable commercial force starting in the late 1950s.Footnote 28 They now had more opportunities to buy things and more time to experiment with identity as traditional class milieus weakened and adolescence was prolonged by longer periods in school. In Hamburg, 80 per cent of 15-year-olds earned wages as white- or blue-collar employees or apprentices while still living at home in 1958.Footnote 29 Like their elders, they came to see entertainment as a basic need and right, seeking it out in droves on their precious weekends.Footnote 30 Exposure to advertising preaching instant gratification, as well as to pop culture from the United States, primed some to desire alternatives to West Germany's comparatively parochial, sanitised offerings. Rock'n’roll, a music all but banished from German airwaves, attracted fans, particularly working-class males, with its libidinal energy and transgressive allure.Footnote 31 It also drew small numbers of middle-class youths who romanticised African-American music like jazz and rock'n’roll for its ‘authenticity’ and promise of cultural reinvigoration.Footnote 32 For them this music represented an opening to the world and personal liberation.Footnote 33 St. Pauli, whose stock in trade was licensed deviancy from the norm, became the perfect locale for rock'n’roll – a sexually, racially charged music that fit well into both St. Pauli's history of selling exoticism and the contemporary entertainment landscape.
Young people visiting the district for music alarmed welfare professionals. At a time when mass culture solidified itself as an irrefutable social force and the law guaranteed leisure time to all workers, authorities lamented the trend of young people choosing privatised or commercialised leisure over formal organisations and traditional hobbies.Footnote 34 This trend of youths turning away from organised groups represented not only a backlash against Nazi regimentation but an implicit rejection of bourgeois notions of leisure activities as vehicles for self-improvement. The Social Democrats who dominated Hamburg politics feared the implications of this for the fragile new republic. Hamburg's chief Senator for Youth Policy, Paula Karpinski, wrote that youth needed places where they could pursue diverse interests, which would ‘prepare the young citizen's path into our social and political life and ease their maturity process. . .in order to secure our young democracy’.Footnote 35 Hence the Youth Agency established Houses of Youth, movie clubs and, to compete with rock'n’roll, chaperoned dances featuring square dancing or clean-cut jazz combos.Footnote 36 Karpinski and her allies used this latest crisis of youth to build Hamburg's Youth Agency into a national model.Footnote 37
Their mantra of preventative youth protection also spurred the formation of a force to monitor public spaces, the Youth Protection Squads (Jugendschutztrupps, or ‘Trupps’ for short). Formed in 1958 as a joint effort of welfare authorities, the regular police (Schutzpolizei) and the Female Police (weibliche Polizei), the Trupps’ mandate was to enforce the Law for the Protection of Youth in Public. Patrols consisting of male and female officers plus a social worker made rounds of the clubs, pubs, snack bars and cinemas where young people congregated.Footnote 38 The unit stepped up patrols dramatically in 1961. In 1964 alone they monitored some 170 establishments citywide, trained over 400 police in youth protection techniques, checked the identifications of some 8,000 youths and arrested 1,024.Footnote 39 They tended to descend after 10:00 p.m. on establishments serving alcohol to sweep up curfew violators. As thousands began flocking to its Beat music clubs, St. Pauli came under particular scrutiny at a time when juvenile crime was relatively low but the perception of youths’ susceptibility to criminal behaviour was high. A reading of Trupp reports from 1961 to 1965 reveals that concomitant with their mandate to protect youth was a suspicion of it, rooted in a view of youth as a social threat as well as long-standing fears about moral decay and the inherent threat posed by the city itself.Footnote 40 Youth protection also meshed with Falck's and the Citizens’ Association campaign against businesses they felt were soiling St. Pauli's image. Young people were caught in the middle of these agendas.
Patrolling the Beat Shacks
The Trupps increasingly trained their focus on St. Pauli's ‘Beat shacks’. The first to regularly feature live rock'n’roll there was the Kaiserkeller, located just off the Reeperbahn in the Grosse Freiheit. This side street had long housed St. Pauli's most risqué amusements, as well as a small Chinatown in the adjacent Schmuckstrasse. Grosse Freiheit 36 was reconstructed in 1958 as a multi-story dance palace.Footnote 41 Its main floor contained the Tanzpalast Lido, a ballroom the Trupps deemed respectable for youths; the Kaiserkeller, which opened in October 1959, was relegated to the basement. Its owner was Bruno Koschmider, a gay ex-circus performer who landed after the war in St. Pauli, where he also operated the Indra strip club and the grindhouse Bambi Kino. Koschmider saw the moneymaking potential of teenagers and installed a jukebox at the Kaiserkeller stocked with American rock'n’roll singles. In 1960 he began to import bands from Britain, as Germany did not yet have a crop of professional acts that could sing ‘authentic’ rock in English. Among these were The Beatles, who played their first Hamburg gigs in August 1960.Footnote 42
Early Kaiserkeller audiences were the typical mix found in local nightclubs of seamen, tourists and entertainment professionals, from bouncers to sex workers. All sought release through dance, drink and sex; as long as the entertainment was wild, they were satisfied. But as word of the new bands got around, rock'n’roll fans also found their way there. The club became a bastion of the leather-clad Rockers, working-class devotees of the music and style of early Elvis and Gene Vincent. It eventually also attracted a competing youth subculture of bourgeois students and artists with their own distinctive dress (black turtlenecks, mop-top hairdos) and musical taste (chanson, cool jazz).
Among them was Klaus Voormann, whose account of his introduction to the Kaiserkeller has become an Ur-text in the history of The Beatles and the Hamburg scene. Voormann was walking aimlessly through town and found himself in St. Pauli, where he stumbled upon a club playing ‘irresistible’ music. His entrance into the Kaiserkeller space marks a moment of border crossings. First, a geographic boundary was traversed: this banker's son moved from his bourgeois neighbourhood to a place marked by sexual transgression and violence. Intertwined with this boundary are those of class and race: rock'n’roll in Germany was coded as proletarian, lascivious, racially other.Footnote 43 When Voormann descended into that cellar, he momentarily surrendered his class privilege. Fear of attack by Rockers kept him glued to his seat, meekly sipping his beer. But he soon gained new power through the music, which he calls a life-changing force that hit ‘somewhere below the waistline’.Footnote 44 Rock'n’roll opened him up to a spontaneity suppressed by his bourgeois upbringing. He soon dragged along his friends, who staked out space at the Kaiserkeller and quickly became friends with the Liverpool bands, as they could speak passable English. Their influence shaped the style and attitudes of The Beatles in particular.Footnote 45 This encounter appears in hindsight as a crucial moment in rock'n’roll's evolution from a niche, ‘proletarian’ form into a cross-class, transnational lingua franca of youth in the 1960s. What bridged the divide was not just a love of the music but shared desires for reinvention through an American cultural form. For their part, these Germans distanced themselves through style from the prevailing pieties of Adenauer-era respectability, cultivating a sensibility that celebrated spontaneity, physicality and youthfulness itself. Elements of the style forged in the interactions between German fans and British musicians would travel the world as the pop explosion of Beatlemania.Footnote 46
The Kaiserkeller's success proved there was a market for youth-oriented entertainment in St. Pauli. In late 1960 another club opened in a Reeperbahn building that for decades had housed a hippodrome popular with sailors. As maritime culture shrank with the increasing mechanisation of shipping, Peter Eckhorn converted this hall into a venue for dancing and live rock. The brightly-lit, centrally located Top Ten visibly expanded the audience coming to St. Pauli for music, particularly male and female white-collar workers who might have been put off by the subterranean Kaiserkeller. Its success in turn spawned other venues including the Beat Club, Hit Club and the Star Club, which would attract fans by the thousands and attain international renown as ‘the cradle of The Beatles’.Footnote 47
Contemporaries and scholars have long debated the meanings of this explosion of youth culture around Beat music (which lasted into the late sixties), particularly whether it signified some new, unspoken social opposition.Footnote 48 On the one hand, it opened up opportunities for leisure that were emancipated from the worlds of school or work. Lyrics rejecting parental domination and sexual puritanism resonated with young people of both sexes yearning for bodily liberation. Beat also generated new modes of self-expression and feelings of generational solidarity that led some into leftist politics.Footnote 49 On the other hand, the liberation Beat promised was not equally available to both sexes: females had to look past its misogynist elements and sexually liberated males could be indifferent to their partners’ pleasure.Footnote 50 Furthermore, Beat was a commercial product of the capitalist marketplace. Most fans seamlessly combined this pursuit with the requirements of school or work and generally rejected the notion that they were acting in a consciously oppositional way. Yet the very act of staking out space constituted an assertion of cultural power. Music fans’ consumption practices illustrate what David Chaney calls ‘a mode of radical democratization that put pursuit of pleasure at the heart of citizenship’, especially if we accept a definition of citizenship that encompasses the right to speak through style and claim public space.Footnote 51 Reactions by those in power indicate that they saw the Beat scene's growth in St. Pauli as a challenge to the maintenance of order.
In their reports the Trupps recorded concern about a variety of specific, recurring issues. For example, they noted underage drinking, while the creeping consumption of drugs like the amphetamine Preludin – which could easily be purchased from the Star Club's bathroom attendant, Tante Rosa – went largely unnoticed before 1967.Footnote 52 Concerns of the 1950s – violence by leather-jacketed hoodlums and smut – persisted into the 1960s: patrols wrote up establishments for ‘obscene’ records on the jukebox and cited strip clubs for ads featuring topless women that could be seen by anyone passing by.Footnote 53
The issues that appeared most prominently in Trupp reports were those related to sex. For example, one patrol ordered Club o.k. to remove a condom dispenser from the men's toilets; the legal status of these vending machines was still being contested nationally, but the Trupps created their own facts on the ground.Footnote 54 They appear to have been less worried about young people having sex with each other than them falling into sex work, the ultimate signifier of moral decay (Verwahrlosung). Some of these concerns were directed at male teens as part of a simultaneous crackdown on homosexual subcultures between 1957 and 1965. Widely promulgated stereotypes of gay men as child molesters fused with concerns over youth protection, for example, in Trupp raids on the Millerntor cinema, a meeting place for teenage hustlers and johns.Footnote 55 But overwhelmingly, in a line of continuity stretching back at least to the 1920s, females were the main locus of fear and punishment when it came to sex. Indeed, while the authorities framed boys’ behaviour in the language of crime and delinquency, they cast girls’ in sexual and moral terms.Footnote 56
This appears, for example, in the way Trupp reports discuss runaways in St. Pauli. The Youth Welfare Law defined a runaway as a minor absent from home without parental knowledge or permission, as well as escapees from reformatories.Footnote 57 Fears about youths running away to the big city were as old as urbanisation; Economic Miracle-era authorities now factored in suburbanisation and the mobility offered by expanded transportation networks and affordable motorbikes.Footnote 58 A 1956 police memo singled out truants as especially vulnerable to homosexual activity if male or ‘willingness to tolerate sexual handling’ if female.Footnote 59 Rosamunde Pietsch, head of the Female Police, spelled out her view of the problem in 1965:
The entertainment quarter St. Pauli is of particular cause for concern. . . . Interrogations of girls rounded up there increasingly reveal that female youths, who hitchhike to Hamburg to seek adventure and meet the big wide world, became employed as Animierdamen [women hired to encourage male customers to buy overpriced drinks] or strippers. In 1962 police and welfare authorities knew of roughly 100 such cases of girls aged thirteen to seventeen; one can assume an even larger number of unreported cases.Footnote 60
In response to such facts and fears, in 1966 the Hamburg Senate strengthened the law allowing police to take runaways into custody against their will.
When Trupps swept up runaway boys, their reports usually noted the arrest without comment unless the offender was labelled a ‘drifter’ (Umhertreiber). An aimless young man represented a social problem because he was out of step with the period's emphasis on hard work (an Economic-Miracle variant on the concept of work-shy). By contrast, an aimless young woman in St. Pauli represented a threat both to society and herself because she was potential fodder for the sex trade. Youth Agency inspector Hermann Brandt wrote that 80 per cent of complaints in 1964 under the Youth Welfare Law involved escapees from reformatories, girls whose cases also involved violations of the laws on pimping and solicitation, indicating high risk of sexual exploitation. Walter Becker, Hamburg's Youth Agency director since 1956 and increasingly a national figure as head of the organisation Aktion Jugendschutz, saw nothing less at work than ‘a modern form of white slavery’.Footnote 61 These fears were not without foundation because of the overall boom in tourism, as well as indications that some who left East Germany before August 1961 ended up on the streets of St. Pauli.Footnote 62 But they must also be read in the context of the explosion of talk about sex in the West German media during this period, the so-called Sex Wave.Footnote 63 The local press contributed pieces on impulsive teenage girls lured by promises of easy money working as models, strippers or Animierdamen, with outright prostitution looming as their final destination.
Indeed, a perceived explosion in both the visibility and amount of prostitution underpinned these concerns about youth. Police assumed Hamburg had roughly 3,500 unregistered and 1,400 registered prostitutes, with numbers in St. Pauli swelling due to the 1963 International Garden Expo as well as prostitutes’ displacement from St. Georg and gentrifying Neustadt.Footnote 64 At a time of both heightened media discussion of sex and the marketing of sex-themed tourism, police saw Hamburg's tolerant reputation as a problem because it made the city a magnet for prostitutes and vagrants. They stepped up efforts to confine prostitution to specific zones, consistent with efforts of business leaders to channel sexual spectacles into designated commercial spaces. Police treated suspected unregistered prostitutes – a category into which female runaways often fell – as carriers of venereal disease, subjecting them to mandatory physical exams.Footnote 65 In light of widely circulated figures showing rising rates of venereal disease among minors, police also viewed these actions as part of youth protection.Footnote 66
The Trupps also searched for underage females working in bars. One inspector's comments encapsulated a century of reformers’ thinking about barmaids from London to Vienna: ‘it's clear that when a young girl works in such a place for a long or even a short time, she must without a doubt fall into prostitution’.Footnote 67 Trupps even monitored these workers if they were over eighteen, as the age of majority was still twenty-one and a 1964 tightening of federal law banned persons under that age from working in ‘morally endangering occupations’.Footnote 68 But even just being in the audience after curfew at a club where alcohol was served could bring a female under suspicion and land her in a reformatory, as in the case of Gitte T., girlfriend of bandleader Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor.Footnote 69 Raids at music clubs regularly brought teenage girls into custody, such as seventeen-year-old Marita Hoeger, who was found with a portfolio of nude self-portraits.Footnote 70
Explanations varied for the perceived increase in girls’ disreputable behaviour. Some were economic: Holger Hoffmann wrote in Die Tat that clubs paid good money to lure strippers out of the mainstream economy and looked the other way when teens lied about their age. Others blamed girls’ desire for excitement and consumer goods.Footnote 71 These discourses betray anxiety that the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ girls was blurring under the force of youth's mobility and economic power, as well as the accelerating sexualisation of the public sphere – displayed most nakedly in the entertainment district. A new element crept into this debate when, in 1964, Karpinski's successor Irma Keilhack linked tourism and entertainment with the growing ‘problem of German girls associating with foreign guest workers’ – racialised concerns echoed in a 1965 Trupp notation on two Asian ‘foreigners’ found ‘in conversation’ with two (presumably European) girls.Footnote 72 Taken broadly, these comments illustrate just how deeply St. Pauli was a site of gendered fears about moral degeneration whose content cycled through a shifting but persistent set of themes: from Weimar-era worries about public health through Nazi obsessions with the health of ‘the race,’ through post-war anxieties about the reputation of German women to newer fears about the corrupting forces of consumerism and the exotic Other.Footnote 73 The voices of the women and girls who were the objects of these anxieties rarely appear in these sources (or, when they do, are presented to conform to the storylines outlined above), but their persistent presence in these spaces bespeaks their real attraction to the pleasures offered there. Some ran away from homes in nearby suburbs, Munich or even Scandinavia to experience them.Footnote 74 These young women were claiming the same social, even sexual, mobility as the adult men to whom St. Pauli was marketed. While some of their stories ended unhappily, enough seemingly found the kicks to be had worth the journey – all the more worrying to authorities trying to interdict them.Footnote 75
However they justified their interventions, and despite their often rough treatment of their charges, the authorities firmly believed their efforts were in youths’ best interest.Footnote 76 Yet they were also motivated by the desire to maintain discipline. Trupp reports betrayed exasperation that they had to step in because other adults would not. While some note parental cooperation, parents more often appear negligent, indifferent or delinquent themselves. One report gratuitously noted that the parents of a girl apprehended at the Top Ten were divorced, implying they were too preoccupied with their own affairs to notice their daughter's whereabouts. Some even abetted immoral or illegal behaviour, like the ‘father of a friend’ who ordered alcohol for two teen girls at Club 64, or another who accompanied his daughter on a night out with some sailors.Footnote 77
Other adults in the entertainment milieu undermined the Trupps’ work to protect youth, as well as the city's financial interest in making sure that Reeperbahn mischief remained safely contained. Waiters were easily bribed into letting minors hide during raids. Elderly doormen and ticket takers were no match for kids determined to sneak into slot parlours or movies rated inappropriate for their age group (amazingly, the Trupps missed Tante Rosa).Footnote 78 But the chief obstacles were club owners and their ‘lust for lucre’.Footnote 79 The animus was mutual: owners resented Trupp interference in their businesses and sometimes worked against them. They could refuse to put up the house lights or stop the band playing when patrols descended. Peter Denk of Club o.k. was prosecuted under the Youth Protection Law for tipping off a teenage girl during a raid. Eckhorn's lack of cooperation earned him this notation: ‘have the Finance Office look into this’, suggesting that the Trupps had a direct line to Falck, who had the power to revoke licenses or pursue back taxes with recalcitrant owners. Even Koschmider, who seems to have enjoyed good relations with the police, gave the Trupps an earful one night in 1962, blaming the recent closure of his Kaiserkeller on more frequent spot checks, which hassled patrons.Footnote 80 But the owner who gave authorities the biggest headaches of all was Star Club boss Manfred Weissleder.
The War on the Star Club
To the youth authorities and Falck, Weissleder embodied everything they were fighting against. Exasperated with what he called the ‘look-the-other-way’ culture of city bureaucrats, Falck – nicknamed the Iron Broom for his reformist zeal – laid out his thoughts in a 1965 article.Footnote 81 While never mentioning the Star Club or Weissleder by name, his article offered up a rationale for the war against both. Falck began by declaring that to his office – whose purview included licensing, regulation of bars and restaurants and taxation in Hamburg-Mitte – youth protection began with club owners. The W&O measured its effectiveness by the degree to which it could scare them out of risking a violation and losing their license, thus the random spot-checks. Falck also described concerns about runaways and ‘unstable youth’ being lured into the sex trade in Hamburg's entertainment districts, which housed 1 per cent of all West German bars and restaurants.Footnote 82 He blasted pubs that served as hangouts for aimless Gammler, young men and women who preferred travel to a life of work. And he attacked Beat music clubs as ‘seedbeds of youth endangerment’.Footnote 83 When Falck wrote about ‘ruthless money makers’ who pretended to care about young women in particular, offering them lodging and work (as Weissleder often did), Weissleder was precisely the type he had in mind. Here we see echoes of the 1950s smut and filth debate with club owners as the exploiters of innocent youth; as a conservative commentator wrote, ‘behind the fanaticism of youth stands the ice-cold calculations of the factory owner and the manager who earn a fortune’ selling them pop culture.Footnote 84 Falck's moves against the Star Club and Weissleder personally suggest that he saw bringing down Weissleder as one of his prime goals as head of the W&O.
Weissleder, born in Dortmund in 1928, came to St. Pauli in the mid-1950s as an electrician. He found work at the nightclub Tabu, making connections there that helped him parlay a small nest egg into nearly a dozen strip clubs. By 1961 his establishments lined almost the entire west side of the Grosse Freiheit's busiest block. Weissleder built an empire by selling men temporary liberation from domesticity in an urban playground where they could exhibit mastery through the consumption of titillating spectacles.Footnote 85 Despite his success, the Dortmunder remained an outsider in the St. Pauli Citizens’ Association.Footnote 86 This lack of allies in the district's business elite – most of whom also sold sexualised entertainment but were rendered respectable by their long-time residency and links to the establishment – left him exposed when Falck attacked.Footnote 87 Even before Falck entered the picture, the police had built a dossier on Weissleder. It noted old claims from Dortmund for petty fraud and assault, as well as ‘suspicion of distributing obscene movies’ – a reference to the Sittenfilme of women undressing that he and his artistic assistant, Erwin Ross, made to show at the Erotic Night Club. Tame by today's standards, they were enough to bring Weissleder up on charges in Hamburg in 1960. The court ordered him to destroy the reels – a slap on the wrist as the profits they generated far outweighed any fines.Footnote 88
Weissleder worked the levers of the era's sexual consumer economy – which he argued was as legitimate as any other type of business – to the hilt, in the process becoming a self-made man who in many ways personified the Economic Miracle.Footnote 89 When he came into possession of a bankrupt cinema space at Grosse Freiheit 39, he decided to dive into the youth market by converting it into the Star Club, which opened in April 1962.Footnote 90 No expense was spared on décor or sound equipment, as Weissleder was determined to run a world-class club that could attract top rock and Beat performers, particularly from the United States. The financial cushion provided by his other businesses allowed him to keep admission prices low, allowing the Star Club to build a devoted following. He also scrupulously complied with licensing requirements here, as in his other nightclubs.Footnote 91 Even the Trupps were impressed on their first visit in May 1962:
Furnishings positively distinguished from those of other youth clubs like Medallion or Club o.k. Unfortunate that this is now the third dance club in Grosse Freiheit. Well attended at 11:15. Indescribably noisy in the main hall; hard to believe people can stay in here for long. Currently only ‘Twist bands’ playing. Majority of guests young people. Spot checks indicated no underage patrons.Footnote 92
But the honeymoon did not last. While music fans’ spatial maps of St. Pauli focused on its music clubs, fan-friendly beer shops and snack bars, the authorities honed in on the Star Club's proximity to risqué establishments like the transvestite bars Roxa and Monika. As the Star Club's popularity exploded it became harder to prevent minors congregating on the pavement or staying in the club after 10:00 p.m. Indeed, this became a game of cat and mouse as Trupp patrols intensified. Horst Jankowiak, whose family owned the nearby tavern Gretel und Alfons, noted that during raids on the Star Club, kids would run into Gretel and Alfons and pretend to be kitchen workers.Footnote 93 Only a week after their initial visit, the Trupps caught five youths after curfew, adding this notation: ‘owner advised and did not complain, but shift advisor later received complaint about inspection from his attorney’.Footnote 94 By announcing that he had a high-profile lawyer in his corner, Weissleder signalled that he would not tolerate harassment by the city.
The Trupps’ chief concerns, as we have seen, revolved around runaways and sex, not violence – it was Falck who linked the violence associated with rock'n’roll to the ‘youth-endangering’ milieu of the Grosse Freiheit. And while dealing with violence by drunken patrons was part of doing business for all nightclubs, Falck singled out the Star Club in this regard.Footnote 95 The timing of his campaign is significant: he became W&O head in December 1963 on the eve of the sensational trial of the Black Gang of St. Paulchen, a nasty criminal ring that shook down businesses for protection money and beat up anyone who rubbed them the wrong way, including random punters in bars around the Reeperbahn. The main defendant in the first Black Gang trial was Paulchen Müller – a man with ties to none other than Weissleder.
Gangsters had deep roots in St. Pauli and businesses had to reach some arrangement with them to survive. Weissleder played this game too, even if the specifics of his association with them remain murky.Footnote 96 Müller, a local ‘godfather’ since the 1950s, appears in various documents as a Weissleder associate. He is named as the owner of Der Lachende Vagabund bar, where Horst Fascher worked just before becoming a manager at the Star Club. A 1964 indictment lists Müller's occupations as waiter, owner of the Rote Katze (formerly owned by Weissleder) and a manager at Manfred Weissleder Ltd.Footnote 97 No evidence exists that Müller had an actual role in the operations of the Star Club, much less that he exercised the kind of brutality there he did elsewhere. Fascher describes documents listing Müller as a manager at the Star Club as an ingenious ‘way to keep peace in [the] shop’, an acknowledgment of and accommodation with the underworld.Footnote 98 In other words, having Müller as an ally kept the mob out of the club's hair.
Violence did infiltrate the club through other means, however, most notably its waiters. Fascher, a son of the local lumpenproletariat, had carved out a role in the music scene as a minder for the musicians (because of his English-speaking ability) and manager of the waiters at the Kaiserkeller, Top Ten and Star Club. Himself a tough who had served jail time for manslaughter, Fascher recruited waiters from among his boxing friends, hiring them as much for their talent in crowd control as their ability to serve drinks. Violence was not indiscriminate but deployed according to a code: judicious use of the fist constituted ‘self-policing’ designed to quash disturbances quickly and keep the police from getting involved in what were usually minor rows. Waiter Fredi Fascher said the goal was to present a façade so tough no one would risk challenging it.Footnote 99 Horst Fascher writes that Weissleder ‘put great store in his employees prevailing physically’, but also demanded that in doing so they not become ‘totally stupid’.Footnote 100 Having been on the wrong side of it much of their lives, these men knew the law: drummer Gibson Kemp always knew a fight was imminent when he saw waiters surreptitiously removing their rings, since these could be construed as a weapon.Footnote 101 Defenders of these practices maintain that fights may have been frequent but they were also brief and, as Jankowiak put it, ‘ended with a drink’.Footnote 102 Waiters directed force at unruly drunks and customers fighting amongst themselves – it was not in their interest to attack the musicians or the fans that were the club's bread and butter.Footnote 103
In the logic of St. Pauli, violence was a necessary tool of doing business and winning respect. Indeed, Weissleder himself was no pacifist. He once pushed photographer Günter Zint down the stairs during an argument and made it known in dealings with band managers that he carried a gun.Footnote 104 In September 1963 he made local headlines when photographer Uwe Laabs accused him of head-butting him and smashing his camera. The Hamburger Echo commented, ‘elements like Weissleder have no business here in Hamburg. The use of such primitive forms of behaviour can only damage the reputation of our city’ – words that could have come from the Youth Agency or the Citizens’ Association. While the courts dismissed Laabs’ case for lack of evidence, such reports confirmed the views of those who saw Weissleder as an unscrupulous outsider and his Star Club as a danger to youth.Footnote 105
Besides violence, taxes were Weissleder's other Achilles heel. W&O records show that the Star Club fell into a vicious cycle of selling thousands of tickets at low prices, luring international stars with hefty fees, then scrambling to pay the taxes.Footnote 106 Weissleder began ransacking his other businesses to support his music club to the point of subletting nearly all of them, so dedicated to the Star Club had he become. By summer 1964 the W&O claimed he owed over 200.000DM in back taxes. Financial pressure and scrutiny intensified. First authorities shut down the Sunday afternoon concerts for twelve to fourteen-year-olds (an idea borrowed from Liverpool's Cavern), as a violation of the Youth Protection Law. Then Trupps stepped up their patrols, with ninety visits paid the club in 1963 alone. A 2:30 a.m. raid on 18 June 1963 by one hundred officers resulted in the arrest of sixty patrons, including numerous minors and runaways, several Norwegian and Israeli tourists and twelve British musicians (including all of The Undertakers) whose work permits had not yet arrived. A livid Weissleder told a reporter the raid was ‘an act of revenge’ because he challenged the youth dance ban and was warned by the W&O he would now be even more closely watched.Footnote 107 Weissleder, who had always been fastidious about regulations, became even more so, instructing employees to be more careful screening IDs and even seeking permission to move a piano on a Sunday. Still, Falck's office amassed evidence against him, with incidents like the Laabs scuffle fattening up the file.
Tensions came to a head in 1964 as the weather turned warm and Beatlemania swelled the crowds making the pilgrimage to their Hamburg haunts. A premonition of trouble came on 15 May when a car rammed a Trupp patrol outside the Top Ten.Footnote 108 Then Paulchen Müller's trial climaxed in early June. The explosion came on 15 June 1964 when Falck ordered the closure of the Star Club, citing unpaid taxes and ‘vigilante justice’. Headlines blared, ‘Enough is Enough!’ The local press and even Der Spiegel followed the story, painting it as an epic showdown between Falck and Weissleder. Falck, whose national profile rose dramatically, was interviewed at length in the liberal Hamburger Abendblatt, linking Weissleder to ‘bruiser king’ Müller and another incident in which boxer Norbert Grupe tussled with Star Club waiters.Footnote 109 Other articles relayed support for the crackdown from the business community and Schmidt. The Hamburger Morgenpost quoted Dieter Blotz, spokesman for the St. Pauli Committee of Hamburg-Mitte: ‘we are one hundred percent behind Mr. Falck's moves to rid St. Pauli of violence and rip-offs’.Footnote 110
While the Hamburg press promoted Falck and local business leaders’ agenda, their portrayals of Weissleder unwittingly constructed him as a working-class hero. Photos made him appear suave and sympathetic (affirming the positive opinion of him consistently expressed by Star Club employees and musicians).Footnote 111 Articles described his path to becoming ‘one of the great St. Pauli bosses’, outlining his role in nurturing The Beatles and making the Star Club a world-famous destination.Footnote 112 They also noted the expressions of sympathy pouring into his office at the news of the club's closure – a flood of support that acquired a street presence with the 23 June demonstration with which this article began. Persecution had the curious effect of transforming Weissleder into a dogged advocate for the young people who saw themselves as the Star Club community. He subsequently founded Germany's first serious rock and Beat magazine, the Star-Club News – a fan-oriented publication that not only discussed music but offered new languages with which to articulate the identity of the generation born in the 1940s that questioned prevailing notions of respectability, authority, authenticity and even democracy.Footnote 113
Within a week of the protests, the city allowed the Star Club to reopen after Weissleder transferred its license to one of his managers and sacked twelve waiters.Footnote 114 It is unclear whether the protests prompted this move – surely the economic impact of closing the club at the height of Beatlemania played a role in inducing all parties to work out a deal. But the fight over the Beat scene's existence was far from over. Forbidden now from entering the club (though in fact still running it), Weissleder threw himself into the Star-Club News and other aspects of marketing the club, including a record label, merchandise and leasing its name to venues from Berlin to Mombassa. He also battled to win back his license and clear his reputation in court, accusing Falck of slander (a charge the court refused to consider).Footnote 115 He worked to keep the club operational and expand its offerings with culturally ambitious events such as ‘Beat und Prosa’ in 1966, which featured Hubert Fichte reading from his forthcoming novel Die Palette to accompaniment by Ian and the Zodiacs.
Weissleder regained his license in 1966, but the legal battles had sapped his energy and he retreated into the role of landlord in 1967. He sublet the Star Club to a group of Hamburg musicians who tried to keep it afloat in the face of changing musical tastes, the rise of the psychedelic discotheque and shifts in the music industry that left the club unable to attract the big, profitable rock acts. Economic forces – not the authorities – eventually forced the Star Club to close for good on New Year's Eve 1969.
Conclusion
This article's exploration of the battle over youth in St. Pauli aims to capture a charged period in a contested geography. The entertainment district served as West Germany's id at a time when the disgraced nation was working overtime to rebuild and cultivate a new respectability. Music club entrepreneurs found their own clientele in that subset of bourgeois and working-class youth who rejected parochial German fare in favour of Anglo-American rock'n’roll. Those clubs’ location in St. Pauli scared off many, but that very unruliness made them all the more attractive to rock and Beat fans for whom the clubs became outposts of freedom in a world hostile to their pleasure.
Thus St. Pauli became a battleground between young men and women and the forces established to monitor them. This conflict expressed itself in questions of style and tone, as seen in the sources. The ideal St. Pauli envisioned by business leaders and officials like Falck resembled the convivial maritime world simulated in Hans Albers films, not rock'n’roll redoubts ruled by pugilistic waiters. The Trupps’ reports leave little doubt that they disliked the styles of entertainment, music, dress and dance of their charges, as well as the claims of young women to an equal right to pleasure. Weissleder, with his complicated advocacy of young people's right to determine their own leisure, embodied what the authorities hoped to eradicate because his businesses brought together sex and youth in ways deeply unsettling to this socially conservative nation. Zint (who knew Weissleder's shortcomings firsthand) argues that the authorities ultimately targeted him because ‘anyone who put himself out there for youth [was] automatically suspect, especially in the raw milieu of St. Pauli’.Footnote 116
While the authorities had long worried about youths’ presence in St. Pauli, these concerns shifted shape during West Germany's new, more intense phase of modernity, which was marked by expanding mediatisation and consumerism, guaranteed leisure and the possibility of travel and the anchoring of American-infused pop culture in everyday life. These forces weakened older forms of belonging rooted in party or class even as they offered new ways for people to connect. They also had political implications in terms of how actors conceived the right to public space or citizenship as practiced in daily life. In St. Pauli the struggle between youths demanding the right to their own spaces for leisure and authorities seeking to regulate them under the rubric of youth protection dramatised changing notions of what constituted a well-ordered society, the proper role of the police, the boundaries of censorship and the tensions between commerce and sexual morality in a period torn between social conservatism and dynamic capitalist expansion. The Trupp reports, as well as the very popularity of the Beat clubs, suggest that young people were busily constructing their own vision of all these things, embracing the possibilities for individual liberation offered by popular culture. Their participation in the Beat music scene, combined with harassment by the authorities, promoted feelings of solidarity with the potential to translate that into collective action. They found an ally in Weissleder, a figure from an older generation who shared their disdain for prevailing authority and the state's claims on the bodies of youths. The effects of the Star Club protest are difficult to measure – even though the club soon reopened, Falck and his allies were able to continue their work to ‘clean up’ St. Pauli until the late sixties. But they suggest a growing understanding among youth of space as a right to be defended, part of ongoing struggles to democratise West Germany within a transnational youth culture that had music at its heart.Footnote 117
