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Reeperbahn

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Entrance to Herbertstraße; sign to the right of the gate reads "No entrance for juveniles under 18 years of age and women".
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Entrance to Herbertstraße; sign to the right of the gate reads "No entrance for juveniles under 18 years of age and women".

The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district, the centre of Hamburg's nightlife and also the city's red-light district. In German it is also called "die sündige Meile" ("the sinful mile"), or simply "der Kiez". Location: [53°32′58.0″N, 9°57′44.2″E].

Contents

Name

The name Reeperbahn comes from the old Low German word Reep meaning "a heavy rope for a ship"; in former times these ropes were produced here for the nearby harbour.

The street, and its side streets

The street is lined with many restaurants, discos and probably hundreds of bars. There are also strip clubs, sex shops, brothels, a sex museum and the like. The Operettenhaus, a musical-theatre, is also located at the Reeperbahn. It played Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats for many years and now Mamma Mia!, an ABBA-musical. There are other theatres at the Reeperbahn (St. Pauli Theater, Imperial Theater, Schmidts Tivoli) and also several Cabarets/Varietés.

A famous landmark is the Davidwache, a police-station located on the South side of the Reeperbahn at the cross street Davidstraße. Street prostitution is legal during certain times of the day on Davidstraße. The Herbertstraße, a short side street of the Davidstraße, has prostitutes behind windows waiting for customers. Unlike De Wallen, the red-light district in Amsterdam, it is closed off with a large gate and juveniles and female visitors are not allowed in.

The Große Freiheit ("Great Freedom") is a cross street on the North Side with several bars, clubs and a Catholic church. In former years, several sex theatres here (Salambo, Regina, Colibri, Safari) would show live sex acts on stage. As of 2005, the Safari is the only live sex theatre left in Germany. The popular table dance club Dollhouse now takes the place of the Salambo. The street's name comes from the fact that Catholics were allowed to practice their religion here at a time when this district did not yet belong to Hamburg; they were forbidden from doing so in Protestant Hamburg proper.

The Beatles

In the early 1960s, The Beatles (who had not yet become world-famous) played in several clubs around the Reeperbahn, including the Star-Club, Kaiserkeller, Top Ten and Indra. Stories about the band's residencies, onstage and offstage antics are legendary; some stories are true (on a dare, John Lennon played a song set in his underwear, while George Harrison replied by playing a later set with a toilet seat around his neck), others inflated (the band urinating in an alley as nuns walked past was told rather differently later). A fellow musician, Ted "Kingsize" Taylor, made a crude tape recording of their last New Year's Eve show, at the Star-Club in December 1962; a cleaned-up version of the tape was later released as an album. Harrison later famously characterized the album as "Awful."

Movies, songs, etc.

The popular 1944 movie Große Freiheit Nr. 7 tells the story of a singer (played by Hans Albers) who works in a Reeperbahn club and falls in love with a girl played by Ilse Werner. Hans Albers and Heinz Rühmann played in the 1954 movie Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins ("On the Reeperbahn at 12:30 am"). The title song, sung by Albers, is still popular to this day and can often be heard in St. Pauli.

"Reeperbahn" is also the name of a Swedish 80's band, and a song by Tom Waits. It is also mentioned in the Elvis Costello song "Human Hands".

Pubs, Discotheques, Shops

A sexshop
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A sexshop

See also

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
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