A Social History of Rock 'n' Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to the Beatles, 1956–1969 by Julia Sneeringer (review)

The story of the Beatles in Hamburg—driving themselves to exhaustion by playing gig after gig to raucous audiences of sailors and prostitutes, egged on by club owner Bruno Koschmider's cries of "mach Schau!"—has been told and retold many times. But Julia Sneeringer, drawing on previously untapped sources—notably memoirs and police files—elaborates on that familiar tale, including not only the perspective of British musicians, those "rock 'n' roll guest workers" (53), but also that of entrepreneurs, fans, waiters, and doormen in Hamburg's equivalent of the Wild West. As a result, she is able to show that St. Pauli's loud and bawdy music venues were not just an outpost of licentiousness, but also the cradle of an important new musical genre. Presenting a layered account of the "cultural crossroads" (11) of St. Pauli, Sneeringer presents the milieu or Kiez itself as an object of study. Building on the work of Frank Mort, she sketches an alternative urban geography, describing how club entrepreneurs mediated between musicians, fans, police, and local bureaucrats; the visiting bands interacted with local audiences; and bourgeois Exis (young existentialists) mixed with rough-and-tumble rockers.

Local historical accounts and archival evidence are juxtaposed with memoirs and interviews. Sneeringer has a knack for making the ordinary appear exceptional and vice versa. Without judging, she sets out the various actors' perspectives and raisons d'être. Ruthless entrepreneurs exploited the foreign musicians as "living jukeboxes" (74) while deploying well-built, thuggish boxers-cum-waiters to police their clubs. Musicians were poorly accommodated but relatively well paid, often earning four times as much as their working-class fathers at home. Although music was one element in shaping St. Pauli's identity, the district remained marked by organized crime and exploitation. Gangsters were an integral part of the scene, investing in some clubs and partying in others. After World War II, a motley assortment of occupation soldiers, foreign seamen, and black-marketeers bolstered the district's reputation as a lawless and morally corrupt zone. Drugs and violence haunted the encounters of drunk sailors, underworld thugs, pimps, and sex workers. Although it diverged substantially from convention, the milieu had its own moral code.

Sneeringer sees hedonistic dancing not just as a form of self-expression and liberation, but as way of talking back to power and pursuing democratization from below. The establishment feared the corrupting effects of the red-light district on teenagers, who ran away and hitchhiked across the country in order to hear the music and soak up the unique atmosphere. She takes seriously the capacity of music and popular culture to shape new identities, framing how passionate fans see the world. For teenagers, Beat allowed friendships to form across national and class lines, while providing a potent way of challenging adult authority: "Determined to do things differently, young Germans who embraced rock and Beat found new ways of moving, talking, and dressing" (168). The Reeperbahn, marketed as the "assembly line of joys" (40), offered a unique crucible for semicriminal masculinity as well as popcultural hybridization. "Sandwiched between two transvestite bars and an erotic cinema," dance clubs like the Star Club created a novel space for enjoyment and cultural interaction (137).

Taking the long view, and bearing in mind the history of entertainment in St. Pauli stretching back to the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods, Sneeringer argues that political regimes might come and go, but the entrepreneurs persisted in supplying their public with bawdy amusement. The masses repeatedly asserted what they assumed to be their "right" to raucous, but authentically popular entertainment. St. Pauli provided ample opportunities for drinking, dancing, viewing naked flesh, or getting tattoos. By participating in these occasions for expression and pleasure, punters and visitors could explore different personae and forms of self-representation. Sneeringer interprets the milieu as a space belonging, in...