Hamburg!

country count!

Trip: 3

Life: 14

My trip to Hamburg was not my first trip to Germany, but it was VERY different from what I had seen of the country before. When my family and I did our grand alps tour in 2006 we stopped in Bovaria briefly. It was all mountains and Leiderhosen, which is not Hamburg at all. This city is an economic powerhouse, and has been basically since it was founded by Charlemagne in the 800s. We did a lot of things while we were there and I have a TON of pictures but I'm just going to pick out the things that struck me while I was there.

We started out our time in Hamburg by going on a walking tour of the city, which was cool but freezing. Northern Europe has been pummelled by absurd amounts of snow (kinda like home). These pictures are all from St. Nicholas' church which used to be one of Hamburgs jewels but was destroyed during the bombing of the city during WWII. Today it stands as an eerie reminder of that period of the cities history. Its also in the dead center of the city, Like St. Patricks in NYC.

We then took a boat tour of the Harbor which was slightly terrifying given the absurd amount of ice we were driving through. You could hear it scraping along the hull the whole time, and people kept nervously making titanic references. I didnt include pictures but the harbor tour was mostly an intro to how obscenely productive Hamburg is, and gave us our first glance at how rich the city really is.



If we didn't get the message then our tour of "townhall" the next day drove the message home. Their town hall has more rooms than buckingham palace and was built in the mid 1800s after a fire destroyed the old one.

Its also connected through this courtyard to the stock exchange. Thats the building you see behind the fountain, slightly less impressive. The fountain is a dedicated to the people who died in the Cholera Epedimic. Its quite breathtaking.

This picture is also from the city hall, from the enterence to the Senate Chamber. If you look above the door, you can see the slogan "gott mit uns" which our German tour guide explained meant "god with us" in German. She said it showed the importance that Christianity in the workings of the Hamburg government at the time the town hall was built. When we got back on the bus, our professor who was Danish told us that that saying had a very different connotation in Denmark, because it had been imprinted on the belt buckles of all the Nazi soldiers and was now permenantly associated with them.

That leads me to the final thing we did in Germany, which was a visit to the Neuengamme concentration camp which is like 30 minutes out side Hamburg. It was not at all what I expected, although I dont know what I expected to be honest. It was a labor camp, not an extermination camp, and it was where teh majority of Danish political prisoners were held. The camp had 106,000 prisoners around 55,000 who last their lives. After the war it was immediately changed into a regular prison and the Cremetorium and the barricks were taken down. The tour guide was extremely good, and set on telling us the whole story, which made it extremely different than other tellings of the holocaust that I had heard previously.