St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

the final of the first German football tournament. This was on 31 May 1903 when VFB Leipzig defeated DFC Prague 7–2 and was proclaimed the first champion in the history of German football. Before being adapted, it was a grass field used by different teams for football matches. Not for nothing the same space included up to nine playing fields. Moreover, it was the headquarters for clubs such as FC Altona 93, SC Sperber Hamburg, FC Viktoria Hamburg, SC Germania Hamburg and HFC 88. After the First World War the space stopped accommodating football matches as the existing clubs had already built their respective stadiums.

      22. In Lower Saxony’s capital St. Pauli played against a squad of the city’s sailors, who beat the visitors 5–0.

      23. In the Nordic country the club played two matches against Svendborg – from southern Funen and created in 1901. In both, the Sankt Paulianers were thrashed: 6–0 and 6–2.

      24. It was only on 15 May 1910 that a section specifically devoted to football was created within the club’s Spiel und Sportabteilung department. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 70.

      25. As a result of the victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia and in the midst of attempts to bring about a truce, on 29 October 1918 the crew of the fleets quartered at these two places mutinied. This was against orders from Admiral Reinnard Scheer (commander of the Kaiserliche Marine) to prepare for an imminent naval battle against the British fleet in the English Channel. The German sailors did not want to give up their lives in a war they believed was already lost and refused to obey their officers. They then took control of events through the revolutionary committees they had created. The mutiny began aboard the ships Thüringen and Helgoland, moored at Wilhelmshaven, the headquarters of the German fleet. Their example spread to other coastal garrisons and also to the country’s interior. In Hamburg some sailors managed to get hold of a torpedo boat and control the port area after clashing with patrol guards. Yet the rebellion was neutralised by coinciding with the end of the war (after Socialist Chancellor Friedrich Ebert ordered troops to demobilise).

      26. This episode was not the only of its kind in the country. Years before, in 1906, a struggle broke out against a government measure that became known as wahltrechsraub (theft of suffrage), which increased the fee charged for gaining citizenship. This led the SPD to call a political strike for the first time in its history: a day that became known as Red Wednesday (Der Rotte Mittwoch). In Hamburg a march by 30,000 people managed to get into the Town Hall, which led to a violent police response. Social Democrat members tried to calm down tensions. Meanwhile the port workers raised barricades and threw stones at the security forces, while they looted jewellers and other businesses in the city centre. In the end one police charge after another ended the riots. Two demonstrators lost their lives from being hit by police sabres, while dozens more got injured or arrested. Fifty of those arrested were given between five and ten months in prison.

      27. Included in its shield are white and black: the colours worn by SC Germania – one of the teams that merged to form HSV Additionally the shield’s diamond shape recalls the traditional symbol of the city’s sea traders.

      28. This was the federation between northern German cities such as Lübeck and Hamburg and German traders from the Baltic Sea, the Netherlands, Norway and Britain. Created in 1158 to protect and promote common trade interests, it obtained important trading privileges. The Diet or Hansetag – a kind of council made up of delegates from different member cities – governed it. It began disintegrating in the fifteenth century as a result of Dutch and British maritime power. It languished after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) until its privileges were definitively revoked after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1934. See A. Cowan, Hanseatic League: Oxford Research Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and J. Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture (New York: Dorset Press, 1988).

      29. From August to September 1923, St. Pauli’s dockers led different industrial disputes. Increases in the prices of basic products, which reached a high of 662.6 per cent, and unemployment stirred discontent, which turned into violent revolt. Clashes with the security forces were accompanied by looting of food shops. In response to these events, the Hamburg SPD told workers to go back to work, and the Communist KPD, surprised by the mobilisations, failed to join them. The government under Chancellor Gustav Stresemann decreed martial law to re-establish order. This came into effect on 26 September, while ‘proletarian defence’ governments had been formed in Saxony and Thuringia. Because of the magnitude of the events the government mobilised the army. In Hamburg, on 23 October, around 2,000 armed men attacked 20 police stations. All of this was part of an insurrectional plan dreamed up by the KPD’s Thälmann, who was ignoring his own party’s instructions. In the days prior to the insurrection the call to act had been spreading by word of mouth around St. Pauli’s port and factories. On the chosen day the workers went on to the streets. Cut off from the rest of country and badly equipped, they were overcome by the police. The workers’ resistance lasted three days. The subsequent repression was extremely harsh. Hamburg’s communist organisations had their activity suspended and property confiscated. On 23 November the KPD was banned as an organisation.

      30. The most notable example was the demonstration in March 1921 by Hamburg’s dockers, which left Heiligengeistfeld to reach the cranes at the Blohm and Voss shipyards. After occupying the firm’s facilities and raising the red flag over the office building, the police confronted the workers and reimposed order. Overall the repression caused 19 deaths and over 40 injuries. Two years later a strike was called at the port against the ‘Great Inflation’ and unemployment, which ended with the workers looting the quays and the boats moored there. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, pp. 35–6.

      31. There were three tendencies in the Hamburg KPD: a moderate one led by teacher Hugo Urbanhns; the so-called ‘right-wing sector’ with an intellectual leaning and that advocated joining social-democrats in a coalition government (‘united front’); and the Thalmänn-led section, in favour of direct action, which was the bigger fraction in Hamburg. The failure of the revolutionary attempt in the Hanseatic city forced the KPD to go underground. Later, in 1924, the Red Front Fighters’ League (Rote Frontkämpferbund) was created. This had about 100,000 members and became the party’s armed wing. Its role was to protect demonstrators and strike pickets and block Nazi squads from acting in proletarian neighbourhoods, making it a kind of ‘working-class army’. In October 1928, Thalmänn supported a solidarity strike at the Hamburg docks in support of the British miners’ strike at the time. A year later, the Red Front Fighters’ League was banned by the Prussian interior minister, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD member.

      32. Thälmann became an institution in the Hamburg communist movement. He was born and grew up in the port area. There he worked in different insecure jobs, first as a machinist in a fishmeal factory and later in a laundry. He was called up at the beginning of the First World War and fought on the Western Front. In 1917 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joining the pro-Communist wing that merged with the KPD three years later. In December 1920 he joined the KPD’s Central Committee. As a result of his political activity he was sacked from the company he worked for. In October 1923 he actively participated in the Hamburg Uprising, whose failure forced him underground. In February 1925 he was made president of the Red Front Fighters’ League. Months later he was elected as KPD leader. He was the party’s main candidate in the 1932 presidential elections, in which the Communists had as a slogan, ‘a vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler. A vote for Hitler is a vote for war.’ On 3 March 1933 Thälmann was arrested by the Gestapo. After eleven years in the Bautzen prison he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was shot dead, on 18 August 1944, under direct orders from Hitler. R.J. Evans, La nascita del Terzo Reich (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), p. 273. See also R. Lemmons, Hitler’s Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).

      33. In January 1933 unemployment in Hamburg reached 30 per cent – compared to 22 per cent in the rest of the country.

      34. In the September 1930 elections the Nazi Party won 18 per cent of the vote, making them the country’s second biggest political force. Just two years later, in June 1932, in the second round of the presidential elections the NSDAP obtained 38 per cent of the vote. This was the first time that