The first time I made landfall in Hamburg, 30 years ago, the ship nosed its way for hours up the narrow navigable channel of the Elbe estuary in a desert of grey, ribbed mud-flats, seagulls plunging and mewing in its wake. Nowadays the ferry ties up downriver at the Fischerei-Hafen, the better to disgorge cars. But in those days, when finally it sidled up to the timber stanchions of the LandungsBrucken at St Pauli, the passengers would step out across the boardwalk and, it seemed, straight into the city.
On the height above the landing-stages reared the bulk of a pale-coloured building, its tiered windows looking out over the greencopper domes of the old ferry terminal. They took in the cranes of dock-lined Steinwerder island across the water, the vessels of the world's merchant marine passing up and down river, and the entrance to the Old Elbe Tunnel, along whose white-tiled eeriness, if you remember, Jon Voight's girlfriend was pursued in The Odessa File. A steep flight of steps led to the pale building from the waterfront, and I pictured porters meeting the steam packets in the old days, and carrying guests' cabin-trunks up to the hotel. A bit like it used to be with the Royal Marine in Dun Laoghaire, I imagined.
Some day I'll stay there, I promised myself in that impecunious period. And then, long years afterwards, I did, with a room giving on to that panorama. And I discovered that, back then when I first saw it, the establishment wasn't a hotel at all, but a hostel for sailors; had been so, indeed, since 1863, and became the Hotel Hafen Hamburg only in 1979.
For those early seamen, home from a long voyage, the bibulous and carnal delights of St Pauli would have been a convenient short stagger from the hostel, under the censorious gaze of the four golden faces on the clocktower of baroque St Michael's, the mariners' church.
Today, what always charms me amid the tired sleaze of the Reeperbahn is the Cafe Keese, a demure Art Deco establishment with its "Ball Paradox" (lots of ladies' choices). On the swing doors, above the legend "Honi soit qui mal y pense", brass damsels in silhouette lure passersby to a teadance on Sunday afternoons. Nearby, the Operetten-Haus was boasting that it had recently staged its 5,000th performance of Cats, and on a weekend in May people in elegant dress were milling outside before curtain-up on a fine evening as if it was a premiere. How respectable can a red-light district get?
But another anniversary celebration meant that the Hafen Hamburg was booked out, and I couldn't get a room this time. I was glad later because, down below on the landing stages, and for half a mile along the Baum-Wall towards the city, they were marking the 809th birthday of Hamburg port, with stalls and rides and ferris wheels and latenight schlock rock. And as some aesthete said about the First World War, "My dear, the noise! And the people!"
BUT why the 809th, you ask? It was in 1189, apparently, that Frederick Barbarossa first accorded the town the right to trade along the Elbe, and they celebrate that in Hamburg every year. And how do they know it was in May? They don't, but holding the knees-up at that time of year extends the tourist season at the front end. This is known as mercantile opportunism, of which there is no shortage in Hamburg.
So, skirting the stalls and rides, I walked along the waterfront to the Speicherstadt, Hamburg's Warehouse District, in the freeport area. A huge complex built in the 1880s in red-brick neo-Gothic style, the Speicher are being progressively renovated and, while they are still very much workaday, with coffee, tea, spices and oriental carpets stored there in bond, one pile has been turned into a museum. Here, I found, the travelling "Expedition Titanic" exhibition had dropped anchor for a period.
And there's another odd anniversary for you. There is no particular reason for the world to be marking 86 years since the great White Star liner went to the bottom. It's all because of that movie, of course. More mercantile opportunism, but Hamburg feels it has more of a right than most to host the exhibition. It was, after all, the second-largest port of embarkation, after Bremen, for European emigration to the New World.
The vaulted ceilings of the Ratsweinkeller soar nearly as high as the industrial-scale roofs of the Speicher museum. Here, in the cellars of the Town Hall, they carry on the centuries-old German tradition of serving food to citizen and stranger alike. Models of early sailing ships, suspended above your head on stout chains, remind you again, if reminder were needed, of the city's maritime heritage.
No hoity-toity beanery, this. Diners in casual dress are not turned away, and the cuisine is middle-range and middle-price. But the setting of concealed lighting and stained-glass windows, the Herr Ober who greets you on arrival, and the waiters who serve you with just the right degree of attentive formality make for a pleasurable experience.
TO leave Hamburg without getting on to the water would be unthinkable. But which would it be? A cruise from the Jungfern-Stieg jetties up the big Aussen-Alster lake, past the illuminated water-jet and the motionless anglers, to gawk at the bankside villas of Hamburg's Promis (Prominenten, the great and the good)? Or a run down river to Blankenese, the impossibly picturesque fishing village that climbs from the water's edge? To ride to the top through its flowery lanes on the "mountain goat" bus, and walk back down?
In the end I opted for the harbour tour, and for an hour we slipped along narrow watery defiles between cliffs of warehouses, weaved among the tide-borne traffic, swooped close beneath the sterns of supertankers and mega-freighters, their crewmen tiny figures far above, and shot just a few of the 2,000-plus bridges that stitch together the port's 40-square-mile patchwork. Then the tour-boat sidled back into berth again at the LandungsBrucken, and I stepped out into the city. Just like I did 30 years ago.