Handling Hamburg

I used to tell my German friends how much I enjoyed Hamburg as an art critic. It was all so easy to handle: A few steps to the left of the main train station and I was at the Kunsthalle. A few steps to the right and I was in the Kunstgewerbe Museum. But last weekend my wife and I spent a long weekend in the Harbor City, and we discovered there is so much more than art in Hamburg. It’s one of the most exciting cities I have experienced in the entire world. And the fabulous thing is that you leave the city eager to have another go at it. We found some keys to the city that will make your first visit easier and cheaper.

First is the Hamburg a la Card. It gives you free access to the entire mass transport system, one of the easiest to get around in. And it gives you reduced admission to most museums and many other attractions. The price varies with the number of days you use it. But believe me we got our full price back just from using the S and U Bahns.

Second is the free handy monthly guides to what’s going on. You’ll find them in the brochure racks most hotels have.

Our first bargain was an hour-long boat ride around the Harbor. I have never seen such vitality before. Not in Shanghai. Not in Hong Kong. Not in New York. I can honestly say I never understood globalization before we saw the docks loading and unloading cargo 24/7, and dry docks where ships were being repaired.

And at Bridge Five you can descend in a handsome Jugendstil head house (1907-11) to walk under the Elbe River. Save some film for the end of your ten minute trek. The view of Hamburg from the other side of the Elbe is breathtaking.

And the quays where you board your ship are dotted with every level of restaurant. We picked The Captain’s Dinner because it was shielded from the sun (but not from the fresh breezes off the Elbe). I’m a fish nut so I chose number 77, called Nordischer Fischertopf—Seelachs, Steinbeisser, Fjordlachs, Muschels, Shrimps, and Mushrooms. Served on a base of Siamese rice. Man, big chunks of fish, all mushy in a rich sauce. My wife claims I’m a superlativizer, but I still have to say that it was the best fish dinner I ever had, even at the stiff price of 14.50 Euros.

In my guide I read that there was a free jazz concert that night in the public gardens called “Plants and Flowers” in Plattdeutsch. Man was there ever. The walk through the gardens from the subway was a visual treat in itself, the Japanese configurations most pleasing to my eyes. But the featured act was a German woman vocalist who had spent a lot of time in Senegal and the Cameroons—and it showed in her rendition of a mix of evergreens and originals with an African ambience.

Her singing was surging because of an extraordinary rhythm section—piano, marimba, bass, regular drums, and African drums. An interesting angle was a patio to the right of the stage where every kind of jazz lover, from babies to senile couples, were allowed to dance together or by themselves. All of this ended by what I can only call a water/fireworks—Duke Ellington and Count Basie sound tracks accompanied by synchronized water works illuminated by color lights. I have never seen anything like it. What a way to spend a Saturday night.

Sunday morning was Fish Market time, a ten minute walk from our Altona Ibis hotel. It gets more than a little jammed on the river bank level where the people were giving in to the wiles of the fruit peddlers, so we stayed on the street level, finally running into the 78 settees that led to the Grun und Jahn HQ which was sponsoring the show with “Wohnen”, one of its magazines.

Then we ambled over to the Altona Museum where there was a fascinating show on the “Heidi” phenomenon. As well as many outstanding exhibits on the history of design in Germany. We took the subway to the Museum of Work to see a show with a strange title, “Architecture for the Homeless”. The serious point was that they had no architecture other than the cardboard mini-shacks.

My wife hated the painful photos of the poor and homeless, but I responded to their pathos. The museum has recycled an old factory for New York/Hamburg Rubber, where damn near everything was made from hard rubber. Now they’ve limited themselves to making rubber combs. Strangely bizarre on their grounds was the great machine used to bore the fourth Elbe tunnel. It looked like a huge sculpture until you got close enough to read its story.

Heh, what about Art with a capital A. No problem, baby. At the Kunsthalle, there was a show on the Max Liebermann paintings about his garden on the Wannsee. At the Applied Art Museum a glorious celebration of the House of Wettin in Dresden in the year 1600. All the glamourous appurtenances of the Duke’s retinue. This museum is always an exhausting experience: you go to see the main show, and you’re eventually overwhelmed by subsidiary exhibits, especially this time by “Pictures that Lie”, a lively explorations of how the media are used to divert viewers from the truth. Don’t go to this museum at the end of a hard day. It will take every bit of your energy to survive the visit!

And then there was the Bucerius Forum kitty korner from City Hall. It was a first class exploration of how CLOUDS entered the vocabulary of Western painters especially during the Baroque period, and particularly in expressing the Christian phenomenon of an ascent into Heaven, but also examining the nineteenth century experiments of painters like Turner and Monet.

And finally, there was the Gourmet Fest next door, in front of City Hall. We chose Indian Cuisine for our splurge into uninhibited eating. For 9 Euros we got a mixed plate of all the hot stuff they were peddling. If you can curry favor with curry, it was heavenly.

Since we are regular DB hounds, we hold a Comfort Bahn card which entitles us to visit their Lounge whether we’re riding that day or not. So we used their facilities to relax in when the pressure of 24/7 Hamburg. Our final sortie was in the so-called Speicher district which had all the nineteenth century warehouses needed for global trade. They have been gentrified in a variety of ways, just as the nearby Deichtorhalle have been turned into art museums. We climbed exhaustedly onto our ICE back to Weimar, whipped but delirious with having survived so dynamic a city.