HAMBURG

Hamburg, a seaport of Germany, is located where two smaller tributaries flow into the Elbe, approximately fifty miles from the North Sea. For most of its long-standing history, Hamburg has been not only a city but also an independent state with its own government, postal system, flag, and mint. Hamburg merchants, acting as intermediaries for Scandinavian, East European, and Atlantic trade, conducted their own foreign policy, mainly with bilateral commercial treaties. Through politics of strict neutrality, they managed to maintain Hamburg's independence against the pressures of its powerful neighbors, Denmark and Prussia.

hamburg and napoleon

During the early stages of the French Revolution, leading Hamburg circles—in accordance with their city's cosmopolitan, republican, and free-press tradition—openly sympathized with Enlightenment ideals of education, religious tolerance, rational administration, and citizen-based government. Their social clubs, reading circles, pamphlets, and newspapers created a lasting basis for enlightened civic engagement. Initially, Hamburg profited from the French Revolutionary wars, filling the vacuum created by Napoleon's imposition of the anti-English Continental Blockade on conquered territories. Hamburg merchants fought hard (and paid belligerents large sums) to preserve the city's neutrality during the subsequent Prussian-Austrian wars against France, a neutrality often condemned by adherents to the German patriotic movement born in the battle against Napoleonic forces.

This prosperity did not last. In 1806, after Prussia's disastrous defeat at Jena, Hamburg was occupied by French troops and incorporated into the Napoleonic Empire. Trade and manufacture slumped sharply with Hamburg's inclusion in the blockade. Hundreds of ships lay idle; thousands of workers lost their jobs. The French also confiscated English goods, conducted house-searches, conscripted inhabitants into the French army, exacted monetary contributions and bribes, and—when the poor protested—executed rioters. Nonetheless, French rule brought one improvement: the French constitution. For the first time, Hamburg inhabitants were granted uniform civil and economic rights, executive and judiciary powers were separated, and the city administration was rationalized. Thus, for instance, Hamburg's 6,500 Jews—Germany's largest Jewish community—were granted civil rights and government representation. Nonetheless, when French troops withdrew after Napoleon's Russian defeat, city inhabitants greeted Lieutenant Friedrich Karl von Tettenborn (1778–1845) and his Russian cavalry with jubilation and quickly restored their own constitution. This was premature. Tettenborn, no stranger to monetary exactions himself, did little to prepare the city for the next French offensive; he departed soon after the French lay siege to Hamburg in May 1813. This marked the beginning of the city's real suffering.

Now under French martial law, Hamburg was forcibly rebuilt—by means of heavy punitive contributions, massive forced labor, and extensive destruction of housing—into a fortress. The resumption of war worsened conditions further. The French confiscated the silver of Hamburg's bank, turned many churches into stables, and collected troops for a last-ditch defense. In December 1813, all inhabitants without supplies of food to last a six months' siege were expelled from the city. Approximately twenty thousand people were left to wander the winter countryside; many died. In early 1814, Allied troops surrounded a city whose population was disease-ridden and starving. The French refused to surrender the city until April 1814—a full month after Paris itself had fallen to the Allies. Hamburg had suffered more in the war than most other European cities; its population, about 130,000 in 1800, was reduced by almost one-fourth.

It took decades for the city to recover, but its strategic location stood it in good stead. The Vienna Congress guaranteed the city's sovereignty; in 1815, Hamburg became one of the Free Cities of the German Confederation. When the war ended, returning merchants could exploit the expansion of Atlantic trade that had followed the independence of North and then South and Central American countries. Hamburg became the major transit port for grain shipments from eastern Europe and for Britain's increasing production of cheap industrial goods; its merchants participated in the growing trade with Asia, Africa, and the East Indies. The harbor was enlarged and modernized. Between 1820 and 1860, the size of the Hamburg merchant fleet doubled; its

tonnage increased more than six-fold. In 1841, the Hamburg Stock Exchange was established. The city's first railways were built shortly thereafter. The Hamburg-American line HAPAG, which was to assume a dominant position in transatlantic shipping, was founded in 1847. The city was badly hit by a fire in 1842, which destroyed 1,749 houses, 102 warehouses, and rendered over one-tenth of the population homeless. The economic prestige of its merchants—one of whom pledged his family fortune as security for loans—helped raise money to rebuild. By 1850, with a population of 170,000, Hamburg was again a preeminent European port.

citizenship and politics

Hamburg's government, however, remained antiquated. Its city charter, which dated from 1712, was based on corporate privileges—the bulk of which were reserved for merchants and property-owning "burghers." To become a burgher, one had to meet strict religious, income, property, and residence criteria, as well as pay a hefty entrance fee. This restricted burghers to a small, exclusive minority with special voting, employment, marriage, and property-holding privileges. Most other inhabitants, being non-burghers, had fewer rights (Jews did not regain equal rights until the 1850s) and no power over city government. This government was divided between a self-recruiting Rat or senate of prominent merchants and lawyers, and ordinary burghers. The former held the highest executive, administrative, and judiciary powers, and ran foreign affairs. Their power was inadequately balanced by Hamburg's burghers. These were organized in various parish-based administrative bodies; they also met in large assemblies. In 1860, these assemblies were transformed into a Bürgerschaft or City Council, elected by intricate combinations of ordinary, property-owning, and Senate-appointed administrative burghers. This was Hamburg's only representative body.

Political influence was thus the purview of a small minority. Although the Hamburg constitution of 1860 abolished burghers' economic-corporatist privileges and abrogated the judicial power of the senate, both retained their political monopoly. The result was strongly elitist: in 1879, for instance, 22,000 burghers—out of an adult male population of 103,000 and a total population of 450,000—could vote for and participate in the city-state's government.

This mercantile-burgher oligarchy had its challengers. An anti-elite, guild-friendly burgher group had long sought to curtail the power of Hamburg's free-trading merchants. This division within Hamburg's government helped fuel the (brief and unsuccessful) 1848–1849 revolution. The protectionists were defeated in the 1850s, as industrialization and favorable trade conditions promoted the abolition of guilds and tariffs throughout German states. A liberal, professional intelligentsia with a large following among educational and artisans' organizations then raised the banner of democratization. By the 1870s, their leadership had been usurped by Hamburg's social democrats, whose further development of artisans' and workers' organizations soon made them the largest oppositional group in Hamburg. During the 1890s, socialists' democratic challenge to Hamburg's oligarchy was unattractively echoed by petty-bourgeois and white-collar nationalists within the anti-Semitic German-Social Reform Party.

All these sought to broaden the Hamburg franchise, break the government oligarchy, and, not least, gain insight and power over the Hamburg administration. For Hamburg was also administered by burghers—amateurs appointed by the senate or by various parish and neighborhood burgher associations. The resultant unsupervised multitude of administrative mini-jurisdictions was a byword for sluggishness and opacity. Some reforms had been undertaken after the 1842 fire. But both administration and government ignored Hamburg's recurrent and deadly cholera epidemics (which primarily hit the poor) until, in 1892, 17,000 people sickened and 8,600 died. The appalling housing and sanitary conditions exposed by subsequent investigations promoted reconsideration of government scope and responsibility. It was decided to ease burgher entrance requirements. In 1894, around 14 percent of the adult male population could vote in city elections. By 1904, the figure had risen to 23 percent.

hamburg as germany's port

These changes reflected Hamburg's new position as a self-administering city within the new German Empire (formed in 1871). The loss of Free City status had been less painful than anticipated. Victories over Austria and France, increased German patriotism, and the security of belonging to a major power outweighed the suspicion that cosmopolitan, republican Hamburg merchants felt toward the Prussian aristocrat Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). Hamburg's increasing importance as a trading center and the city's acceptance, in 1888, of the Zollverein or German Customs Union (encouraged by imperial co-finance of a massive, modern Free Harbor) soon reconciled it to the empire. By the 1890s, imperial plans for both colonies and a vastly expanded navy gained enthusiastic support from leading Hamburg circles.

Incorporation into the empire gave Hamburg three seats in the German parliament, which was elected by an all-male suffrage. The experience of national elections proved traumatic, as Hamburg's social democrats quickly conquered the city's three parliamentary districts (the third was taken in 1890). The fact that Hamburg was thus represented, at the national level, by elements regarded as foreign to the burgher population, reinforced antisocialist sentiment at home.

The powerful Hamburg socialist vote reflected the city's economic modernization. Incorporation into the empire had stimulated both trade and industry. Shipbuilding expanded dramatically; by 1900, Hamburg's more than eighty shipyards were dominated by three giants, building, among other things, warships for an increasingly expansionist Germany. The Hamburg steamship fleet increased more than five-fold between 1880 and 1907. Great shipping concerns (among them HAPAG, now the world's largest) transported both goods and people; between 1870 and 1914, over 2.3 million emigrants passed through Hamburg. In 1914, Hamburg placed third—after London and New York—among the harbors of the world.

Hamburg was also industrializing. In 1866, 600 factories had employed 18,000 workers; by 1914, 5,000 plants employed 150,000. Hamburg's food, alcohol, and tobacco-processing industries, always important to the city's economy, had expanded in scope and variety, and were complemented by industries processing jute, rubber, oil, and other raw materials, often for re-export within the Free Harbor itself. By the 1880s, chemical, electrical, metal, and machinery factories further diversified Hamburg's economy. This expansion was fueled by massive work-force immigration. In 1860, 250,000 people lived in Hamburg; by 1890, 620,000. In 1905, the population exceeded 800,000; on the eve of World War I, Hamburg had more than a million inhabitants. Hamburg's inefficient and narrow government made it difficult to adjust police, housing, educational, or welfare institutions to this rapid expansion. Workers turned to self-help, establishing a self-contained subculture of "red" cooperatives, insurance associations, and leisure and educational organizations that reinforced Hamburg's social divides.

The depth of this division was evident in 1906. By then, both social democrats and populist anti-Semites had entered city council elections. The still-narrow franchise severely limited their chances of success. The anti-Semites peaked in 1901 at three representatives (out of a council of 160). The social democrats did better, gaining thirteen seats in 1904. Despite these low numbers, many Hamburg burghers were appalled at the "introduction of race-hate and class-hate" into the city council. In 1906, Hamburg's municipal electorate was, therefore, again narrowed: the votes of poorer burghers were devalued. This "suffrage robbery" was not soon forgotten by Hamburg's working classes. The continuing division between Hamburg workers and burghers would, in fact, stamp Hamburg's postwar history.

See alsoBerlin; Cities and Towns; Denmark; Germany; Prussia; Trade and Economic Growth; Zollverein.

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Madeleine Hurd