Hope on the Elbe

Boasts a 1950 German travel folder: "Hamburg has everything." To Germans from the shabby towns and the bombed-out cities, the statement seems true.

Stork Club on the Elbe. The shops that line the Binnen-Alster Lake, in the heart of the city, look like those of Fifth Avenue; their windows are filled with French perfumes, Danish silver and Paris gowns, minks and foxes. Splendid restaurants (including the Seute Deern, a three-masted schooner tied up at the waterfront) serve fresh caviar and Prague ham; a meal costs $6 to $8.

Hamburg's opera is superb; its concert stage draws top musicians from all Europe. Night life is gaudier than anywhere north of Paris. The current stage hit, The Czardas Princess, 1950, a fast-paced musical, pokes fun at the Bonn government and the Allied High Commission for Germany (HICOG).

In the waterfront sector of St. Pauli, dozens of nightclubs stretch along a half-mile of neon lights on the Reeperbahn. Seamen of all nations dance with heavily rouged "animation ladies," and pay Stork Club prices for flaccid German champagne. The rule at the Bal Paradox is that the women ask the men to dance. In Hamburg's railroad station is the Treffpunkt agency: for 25 marks ($5.95) a man can leaf through a photo album, select a girl, arrange a date. Says proud Treffpunkt Manager Max Pollack: "All my girls are high-class, and you'd be surprised how many of them find husbands this way. My turnover is high."

A Double Blow. Hamburg has everything. Behind the tourist-trap front and the glitter lie wide acres of postwar rubble --physical and economic and spiritual.

Hamburg is basically worse off than any big German city. Once Europe's greatest port, it throve because of two industries: shipping and shipbuilding.

In shipping, Hamburg got most of its business not from Germany (whose trade moved largely elsewhere, such as in the Rhine River system), but from the vast hinterland of Eastern Europe, via the Elbe. As far as its old trade is concerned, Hamburg is now on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Even if Hamburg had its old cargo to work, it lacks ships. The Potsdam Agreement took many of Germany's remaining ships as reparations.

The Hamburg-Amerika Line has been paying pensions to 2,000 of its old employees. To keep going, the line has resorted to all kinds of makeshifts--it tied the bombed passenger-freighter St. Louis to a dock, ran it as a restaurant-hotel. It has also been operating a mail-order agency, a resort hotel, an insurance company and a fleet of harbor tugs.

Shipbuilding, the other half of Hamburg's prosperity, was also flattened by the war. The mammoth Blohm & Voss shipyards were carted away as reparations after 1945. Today the remaining yards have a capacity of 70,000 tons (those of all other German ports combined, 60,000 tons), but there is little solid business.

Old seamen and shipyard workers have become cab drivers, waiters, elevator operators, janitors, trolley conductors, house painters. During the Christmas rush, a former ship captain worked in a department store as a detective.

Last fall the Paris Foreign Ministers' Conference decided to let Germany build ships of 7,200 tons, provided the speed did not exceed 13 3/4knots. German shipping men sulked at these limits, asserting that they could not compete with larger, faster vessels under other flags. On grounds of military security, the British have opposed all plans to expand German shipping. The Germans claimed that the British were afraid of German competition. Said a U.S. official: "The British are hipped on the subject. You'd think we were advocating that Germany get the atom bomb."

Tired Restaurateurs. Last week hope bloomed in Hamburg. Lord Mayor Max Brauer was home from a six-week visit to the U.S., where he had seen Secretary of State Dean Acheson and talked with investment bankers. "From all I could gather," he told fellow Hamburgers, "restrictions on German shipbuilding will be lifted very soon, certainly by 1952."

At once, Germany's great wounded port stirred to new life and spirit. Some 65,000 shipyard workers might get jobs. Ship operators snapped out of their sulks, began buying old freighters and drafting blueprints for new ones. First construction job: Hamburg Orient Line ordered six small freighters for Middle East runs.

Before 1950 was over, the black, red and gold flag of the West German Federal Republic would fly from masts on the seven seas. Commenting on the amazingly swift change in Hamburg's mood, a Hamburg-Amerika Line official said: "I guess that we just decided we'd been in the restaurant business long enough."

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