Pragmatic Portsmanship

With heavy humor, the Dutch claim that they made Rotterdam the Continent's biggest and busiest port by dredging up enough sand to fill in its chief rival: West Germany's Hamburg. Now Hamburg is beginning to laugh back. Continuing a rebuilding and expansion program that has cost more than $500 million since the end of World War II, the city has opened a $16 million "Overseas Center" to speed containerized shipping. And a harbor official foresees the day when "Hamburg will have no competition."

Located 60 miles up the Elbe River from the North Sea, Hamburg handles about a third as much cargo as Rotterdam, which moves 130 million tons a year, mostly as the Common Market's chief oil, grain and general cargo port. But Hamburg can point to some superlatives of its own. Its harbor can handle an impressive 320 oceangoing ships at a time. It claims that its warehouses, grain and fruit storage facilities, located in a duty-free perimeter, are the world's largest. Already a leader in European containerized shipping, the port hopes to attract 500,000 tons of cargo a year to its new Overseas Center, which will offer fast service from dockside sheds marked by color--red for North America, green for Europe, blue for South America, brown for Africa and yellow for Asia.

Not long ago, black and blue might have been more appropriate. Hamburg was reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, then emerged from the war to find itself only 30 miles away from the Iron Curtain, sealed off from a third of its prewar export-import market. But another, more fortunate geographical happenstance has since made up for the loss. Hamburg lies at the major water junction between the six Common Market nations and the seven-nation European Free Trade Association, a fact that has helped boost the port's traffic to 37 million tons--170% more than its prewar peak.

Hamburgers are bargaining for more, with an apolitical pragmatism that sometimes embarrasses the Bonn government. As Britain's traditional Central European port of entry, Hamburg has thumped for British membership in the Common Market, while Bonn has been playing it cool (TIME, Feb. 24). Going ahead with their own independent "policy of the Elbe" to increase East-bloctrade--and possibly raise their port traffic by 10 million tons a year--Hamburg business leaders, led by the mayor, last fall toured Moscow and Leningrad, ignoring Bonn's chilly relationship with the Soviets. Already, dozens of Hamburg brokers and agents specialize in trade with the Communist East Europe.

Bowing to pressure from the city, Bonn has agreed to build the long-disputed 75-mile North-South Canal to link Hamburg with Europe's major canal systems. And within the next decade, Hamburg plans to meet Rotterdam's superiority in handling the new supertankers by building a $125 million harbor "extension" where the shallow Elbe meets the North Sea, thus enabling deep-draft tankers to send their oil to Hamburg via pipeline.

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