St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

leading sports club had been built in 1816 (Hamburger Turnerschaft von 1 816) but three years later its activity was suspended because the authorities suspected that the sportsmen’s ideas were too liberal. This prohibition lasted until 1842. Today a few minutes away from the Millerntor stadium is Turnerstrasße – the street that included St. Pauli Turnverein von 1862’s first head office.

      3. The city the mountain was named after was founded in 808 and initially called Treva. It took its name from its first building: a castle built to defend a baptistery built in 810 by order of Emperor Charlemagne. The fort was raised on top of the rocky patch of a marsh between the rivers Alster and Elbe, a key strategic point for resisting attacks by Slavic peoples. The castle was named Hammaburg (‘Mamma’ probably derives from ‘woods’ and ‘burg’ from ‘castle’). After 1189, the city gained the right to trade freely and its ships were exempted from paying customs duties, a prerogative awarded by King Frederick I of Hohenstaufen (1122–90, popularly known as ‘Red Beard’). This allowed Hamburg to have free access to the sea, be economically independent and govern itself. That is, it was a de facto ‘free’ and autonomous city with its own diplomatic and military policies. This is reflected today in its official name Freie und Hansestadt Mamburg (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg). It kept these privileges when in 1871 it became a member of the German Reich.

      4. St. Pauli’s geographical location explains why it became a place for leisure. It was here that the inhabitants of Altona, a conservative town that had preserved the puritanism of the Hanseatic spirit, relaxed. The area’s first wooden theatres were built in the very centre of St. Pauli. These Spielbuden hosted the wildest shows. Also, unsurprisingly, the district had a red-light district where sailors coming offshore at the port would go for a drink and some company. The place gradually began to urbanise in 1864 when Altona was annexed to Prussia. This led to a curve in construction and demographic growth – as was shown by the 72,000 inhabitants counted in 1894. But it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that Sankt Pauli became a significant urban hub with its own workers’ community. This happened under the wing of several newly established factories which located there due to lack of space inside the city walls. Alongside this growth, St. Pauli progressively became Hamburg’s red-light district.

      5. Curiously, the German word ‘tor means ‘goal’. N. Davidson, Pirates, Punks and Politics. FC St. Pauli: Falling in Love with a Radical Football Club (York: Sport Books, 2014), p. 25.

      6. The gate’s opening also encouraged the first theatres and dancehalls to be opened in the area. Also, there were the kneipen (taverns), then frequented by prostitutes. According to the socialist theoretician Kautsky, these were ‘the proletariat’s only bastion of political freedom’. N. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici: FC St. Pauli tra calcio e resistenza (Lecce: Bepress Edizioni, 2015), p. 24.

      7. In 1963 the club built the ground, which seven years later was named the Wilhelm Koch Stadion in honour of St. Pauli’s president over two periods (193145 and 1948–69). Yet after fans discovered he had been a Nazi Party member they put a motion to the club’s General Assembly in 1997 to remove his name from the stadium. A year later, in October 1998, the resolution was narrowly passed. From the 1999–2000 season the venue was renamed Millerntor Stadion. In 2007, St. Pauli members agreed that its name would not be used for commercial purposes nor would it be sold to any company or sponsor.

      8. The fire happened on 5 May 1842, beginning in a cigarette factory at 42 Deichstraße. It spread fast due to drought and strong winds. Also affected were 100 wine cellars, two synagogues and around 60 schools and public buildings – among them the Bank of Hamburg and the city’s Town Hall itself. The authorities even pulled down some buildings to create firewalls. Half of Hamburg’s population – about 70,000 people – fled in panic, while 20,000 residents were left homeless. Economic losses have been estimated at 100 million marks.

      9. The city’s port grew in strength. An increase in transoceanic expeditions, its strategic position and the will of the Hanseatic League to make it a hub for trade in the Baltic Sea and North Sea turned it into ‘Germany and Europe’s most important port thanks to the growth of marine transport, which, with the spread of steamships, is introducing commodities and people into other continents’. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 28.

      10. From 1809 a record of the area’s prostitutes was kept. We subsequently know that, in 1834, the city had 18 brothels with 120 women sex workers, to which must be added those who did prostitution outside official censuses. Soon after, in 1841, there were 151 women in 20 brothels. In the first third of the nineteenth century the brothels were in today’s Davidstraße. Prostitution was made a criminal offense in 1870 – when the German Reich was being constituted. Existing double standards, however, allowed prostitutes to be able to sit in the window fronts of Herbertstraße – a small alley away from the Reeperbahn. Two decades later there were 20 brothels in the alley. See V Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

      11. In that period, while there were ten dancehalls in St. Pauli there were only 13 such establishments in the whole of Hamburg. These figures showed that St. Pauli had become the nightlife epicentre.

      12. Its definitive opening did not take place until 1860 when a crowd of male and female residents rallied before it to celebrate the New Year. Until then a drawbridge allowed or prevented access to St. Pauli, thus giving the Hamburg bourgeoisie the power to show or hide the city’s shadiest and most mischievous suburb.

      13. In 1845, different groups of Hamburg workers came together to create the Bildungsverein für Arbeiter (Workers’ Education Club) – following similar examples in Leipzig or Berlin. This involved workers and craftspeople and encouraging proletarian awareness and culture through education.

      14. In May 1875, after the Gotha Congress was held, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD), the forerunner to the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD) – the name used from 1891. One of the SAPD’s most prominent figures, the master carpenter August Bebel, labelled Hamburg as ‘socialism’s capital’. Almost two decades later, in 1890, the city had 84 active trade unions made up of 40,000 workers. Six years later, its port workers went on strike for eleven weeks to defend their rights and were joined by 16,000 workers. This was the first big mobilisation of the local workers’ movement.

      15. In 1890, 57 per cent of the Hamburg population earned less than 800 marks a year, putting them below the poverty threshold. These working people even developed a specific dialect, called Kedelkloppersprook, widely used among the steamship crews that docked at Hamburg and the regulars at the Reeperbahn. This could be used to communicate despite the noise caused by the work being carried out in the area. It consisted of placing the first consonant of a syllable at the end and adding an ‘i’ to it. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 26.

      16. Ibid., p. 26 and Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 23.

      17. In those years playing football was seen as ‘an elitist affair lacking any ethical or philosophical value’, a reason why it did not become a mass sport until it spread among the urban working class. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 26.

      18. That year the team played two matches as part of a gymnastics festival, both against the same team: the Aegir swimming club. While the first ended in a 1–1 draw, in the second St. Pauli thrashed the swimmers 7–1.

      19. As time has progressed, the brown and white has been combined with other colours, such as black and red. The brown-white colour scheme is uncommon among football strips. There are only six other teams in the world that use it: Argentina’s Club Atlético Platense, Poland’s RKS Garbarnia Kraków, the USA’s Brown Bears, Norway’s FK 0rn-Horten and two other Hamburg clubs (FTSV Komet Blankanese von 1907 e.V and SV Billstedt-Horn 1891). C. Nagel and M. Pahl, FC St. Pauli. Das Buch: Der Verein und sein Viertel, (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 2009).

      20. [Translator’s note]: non-established refers to the anti-establishment side to the club.

      21. This pitch, equipped