Today, Hamburg's Speicherstadt—the name means Warehouse City—is a mix of wholesale trading companies, tourism attractions, apartments and museums, not least of which is a museum of the Speicherstadt itself.
The Speicherstadt's history is a key part of the story of Hamburg, of the Hanseatic League, of 19th century German nationalism and unification and the Industrial Revolution. And it has big names to go with it: Frederick Barbarossa, Bismarck and more.
Inside the Speicherstadt Museum, a detailed model of one of the buildings.
Hamburg was one of the leading cities of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of independent cities, towns and guilds along the Baltic that were a major trading power from the 13th century on, owing allegiance to each other and to the Holy Roman Emperor, but not to any local rulers.
A quick look at the top of this image shows it's also a scale model, this one part of the huge Miniatur Wunderland model train and world exhibit that occupies one of the buildings today.
As that power slowly eroded with the rise of national states, the Hansa declined, but Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen kept their key privileges: exemption from anyone's import-export taxes, and the right to their own diplomatic representation in the many places they traded with.
But with the unification of Germany in mid-19th century, even that was under serious pressure; the other German territories were tied together in a customs union, but the three greatest ports were not. Hamburg was the final holdout, negotiating an 1881 agreement that it would join the customs union in 1888, but would retain a separate area for foreign trade where no taxes would apply and goods were only made or shipped for export.
And that's where the Speicherstadt came in. Hamburg's Senate selected a prime waterfront area on several of Hamburg's many islands, ordered demolition of hundreds of medieval houses there, and designated it as the location for the new free port. A canal, the Zollkanal, was dug along one side of it to allow non-free port trade to bypass the area.
Franz Andreas Meyer designed the massive new buildings, red brick with Gothic-like towers, ornaments and alcoves. Each building was set with a land entrance on one side, and a water entrance, either for ships or barges, on the other.
The fortress-like design of the entire area was emphasized by the design of its original bridges, which carried the theme of medieval city gate to almost an extreme, emphasizing that you were entering a separate area. A quick look shows that it's just a facade built onto a modern steel bridge. When the bridges were rebuilt after World War II bombing, the fancywork was abandoned.
Given its location at the heart of Germany's busiest port, Speicherstadt was a prime bombing target in World War II; about 50% of the buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged. Rebuilding started a few years later, but not at full speed, and with design alterations. As trade shifted to containers, they were put to other uses; twenty years ago they were the heart of the world's wholesale carpet industry.
Other adaptations have followed Hamburg's work at revitalizing and reusing its oldest waterfront areas, including the wave-and-water-like Elbphilharmonie, a new concert hall that sits atop the rebuilt Kaispeicher A building. Other non-traditional tenants of the Speicherstadt include a tourist 'Dungeon,' the German Customs Museum and MiniaturWunderland, a huge multi-story representation in minute detail of large parts of Germany and the world, laced through with model trains, planes and ships.
The exhibits at the Speicherstadt Museum cover the history and operations of the area in good detail, and then focus in on some of the key industries where Hamburg played a major role, starting with coffee. Hamburg was, until the 1960s, one of the three world centers of coffee trade. Above, traders examining bulk beans before laboratory test roasting. Below, an industrial grinder.
Coffee for sampling was obtained by slipping a funnel into the weave of the jute sacks to draw out a small amount. After sampling, duty-free samples could be sent from a special blue post-office box that was only for samples and had round-the-clock collection.
Tea was another high-value commodity
The tools of dockwork are also on display, as well as other aspects of the port's work. It's actually a quite compact museum, operating as a branch of Hamburg's Museum of Work. I spent about an hour and a half there, but if you can't read the German signage and use the brief English summaries, then less.
It might be a good combo either with a boat tour around the harbor, which leaves from not far away, or to visit the Interrnational Maritime Museum, also in one of the Speichers, and home to one of the world's largest collection of model ships.
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