After a month of negotiations over the prisoners, Britain finally threatened military action. To emphasize the point, she seized several ships sailing under the Hamburg flag, and stationed a blockade at the mouth of the Elbe. Left with no choice, in 1799 the Hamburg authorities handed over the prisoners. The French, under Napoleon, were furious at what they saw as a betrayal of Hamburg’s neutral status, and immediately set up a complete embargo of goods traded from the city. In the end Hamburg was allowed once again to buy its way out of trouble, by paying the French Republic a huge four million livres in compensation. But Napoleon remained angry, and vowed to bring the city of Hamburg to heel. 4
Finding itself on the wrong side of Napoleon turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes in the city’s history. Ever since the fourteenth century its policy of strict neutrality had been respected, by and large, by the nations of Europe. As a consequence, it had managed to avoid the many wars that had repeatedly devastated other cities in the region over the past four hundred years. But Napoleon was determined to build an empire, and had no intention of allowing this city state to continue trading with his enemies, regardless of whether they did so under a neutral banner or not.
The first stage of Hamburg’s downfall occurred in 1801, when the Danes, who had allied themselves to the French, finally occupied the city. Their intention was only to disrupt British trade, and they stayed for only two months, but it emphasized Hamburg’s powerlessness in the face of a sizeable army. It also showed what the French and Danes thought of the ‘neutrality’ of Hamburg’s relationship with the British. Five years later, after defeating the Prussians at Jena–Auerstadt, Napoleon himself marched on the city, and on 19 November 1806, three thousand French troops entered Hamburg.
In truth, Napoleon was not much interested in Hamburg: it was merely a pawn in a much larger game with the British, his other major enemy. Almost the first thing the French did after invading the city was to confiscate all British property, and to burn British wares in a huge bonfire on the island of Grasbrook. City merchants were told to declare all profits made by trading with Britain, and all correspondence with France’s enemy was banned. The British responded by blockading the entire European continent, cutting off Hamburg from all foreign trade.
The city was to remain in French hands until May 1814, when Marshal Davout finally surrendered to the British/Prussian allies. By this time Hamburg was ruined: its once hugely profitable trading houses were bankrupt, its banks out of business, its industries destroyed and its population on the brink of starvation. Hamburg’s ancient talent for rebuilding and reinventing itself out of every disaster had been stifled, and for a while it seemed as though the city would not recover. But help was on its way, and from an unlikely source. After contributing to the city’s downfall, Britain came to Hamburg’s rescue. In the following years dozens of British firms opened branches in Hamburg, providing much-needed jobs for the people. Penniless Hamburg merchants became commissioning and transport agents for the British, and within a short time the port was trading once more. The city was grateful. It was this era, more than any other in Hamburg’s history, that laid the foundations of the city’s love affair with Britain that continues to this day.
The following decades reflected the new balance of control in the city, as trades opened with British markets in mind. The first steamship to drop anchor in Hamburg’s harbour was British, and by 1825 there was a regular passenger service to Britain. This was followed by trade services to several British colonies and protectorates, such as Sierra Leone and Zanzibar, and in 1851 Godeffroy and Woermann began the city’s first ever trade service to Australia. The world was once again unfurling before Hamburg, but it was a world in which Britain was the undisputed superpower.
While trade increased exponentially in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, the vast majority of the ships that anchored in the harbour were British. In 1835 only 14 per cent flew the flag of Hamburg. 5This did not change until after 1850 when Hamburg became a major centre of shipbuilding in its own right, and giant German shipyards, such as Blohm & Voss and Howaldtswerke, began to transform the south shores of the Elbe into a centre of industry. New freight companies were also founded, such as Ferdinand Laeisz’s Flying P Line and the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), which was soon to become the biggest shipping company in the world.
Despite this renaissance of German trade and industry there remained a distinctly British atmosphere in Hamburg until the Second World War. Hamburg’s relationship with Britain was not merely economic, it was personal. After centuries of trading with one another, wealthy patricians from Hamburg often sent their sons to England to spend half a year or so among the English, and many personal friendships stretched across the North Sea. They were not confined to the rich city merchants – tradesmen, students and even dock workers had close relationships with their counterparts in Britain. 6There were links with the English at all levels of Hamburg society, and by the middle of the twentieth century Hamburg was universally known in Germany as ‘the anglophile city’, which would appear painfully ironic after the events of 1943.
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Hamburg’s relationship with America was of a very different nature from that with Britain. If Britain had treated the city rather paternally in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, America treated it more like an equal partner: right from the start, each side saw the other as an unmissable opportunity to get rich quick. While Hamburg’s relationship with Britain had taken centuries to mature, that with America was virtually love at first sight. Within just ten years of opening formal relations in 1783, America had overtaken the Mediterranean as a trade destination; within fifty years it had overtaken most of Hamburg’s traditional partners. From now on, the city would increasingly turn away from its European brothers and sisters, and devote much more effort to its new relationship across the Atlantic.
Like most other countries, Hamburg did not have any kind of association with the American states before 1783, for the simple reason that they were a British monopoly so trade with them was effectively closed. After America won its independence, however, the city of Hamburg was among the first to send the fledgling nation its best wishes, and to propose a trading relationship. Within a short time, Hamburg merchants, like Voght & Sieveking, were sending ships across the Atlantic with their holds full of Westphalian and Silesian textiles, and returning with all those commodities that had proved so lucrative for British traders over the preceding decades: rice, sugar, cocoa, coffee, cotton and, of course, tobacco.
The links between Hamburg and America were based on the huge volumes of trade that passed between them, but over time a more personal side to the relationship evolved. In the second half of the nineteenth century one of the city’s biggest exports to the USA was not ceramics, textiles or glassware but people. America was opening up as a land of opportunity, and thousands of Germans were emigrating there each year in search of a better life – many of them Hamburgers.
Despite the great wealth of certain sections of the community on the Elbe, poverty was rife among the lower classes, 7and for many in Hamburg’s slum districts the temptation to start afresh on the other side of the Atlantic proved irresistible. It was not a decision that was made lightly. Travelling to America was a desperate business, and conditions during the long sea voyage were comparable to those in eighteenth-century slave ships. Travellers would be crammed into a dark hold with barely anything to eat and only half a pint of water to drink each day. There was little sanitation, no doctors, and after seventy days at sea it was not uncommon for diseases like typhoid or cholera to have claimed up to a fifth of the passengers. For those who survived, conditions on the other side of the Atlantic were often only marginally better than those they had left at home, but a large proportion did find a better life, and the letters they sent back were enough to inspire yet more people to make the journey.