The Hamburg Reeperbahn is celebrating its 400th birthday, and NDR is dedicating a program to the occasion. As the broadcaster announced, a special edition of the NDR Talk Show will air on Friday at 10:00 p.m. on NDR Fernsehen, and simultaneously on hr-Fernsehen and Radio-Bremen-Fernsehen. Afterwards, the program will be available in the ARD Mediathek. The evening will be hosted by Barbara Schöneberger (52) and Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt (70). Eight guests sit in the round, and their life stories illustrate how differently people can view this one street.
For Lilo Wanders, the Kiez was home for a long time
Few people are as closely connected to Hamburg’s St. Pauli district culture as Lilo Wanders (70). She broke through in the late 1980s on the Schmidt Theater stage. Soon she became a formative figure in the drag scene and an important voice for the queer community. She became nationally known as the host of the VOX show Wa(h)re Liebe, which she presented from 1994 to 2004. With her open and humorous demeanor, she turned sexuality and education into topics of conversation. Behind the glittering stage persona sits actor Ernie Reinhardt. For Wanders, the Reeperbahn was for many years more than just a workplace and a stage—it was her home. She calls the neighborhood “home” and recalls having spent the longest stretch of her life there.
Heinz Strunk still waits for his free beer
Heinz Strunk (64) has left a literary monument to the neighborhood with Der Goldene Handschuh in 2016. The novel about the female killer Fritz Honka, and its adaptation to film (2019) by Fatih Akin (52), brought the bar into the spotlight far beyond Hamburg.
“I still don’t get free beer,” Strunk says. “I live between Schanze and Kiez, but I was never really a night owl. I’m rarely, perhaps twice a year, at the Handschuh,” he adds.
A performance at the Top Ten changed Hugo Egon Balder’s life
Hugo Egon Balder (76) arrived on the Reeperbahn via music. At 16 or 17, the Berlin-born Balder, with his band, played at the music club “Top Ten,” where the Beatles had performed before. “That changed my life,” says the host, known to audiences from Tutti Frutti, RTL Samstag Nacht and Genial daneben.
Since the 2010 opening, he has run the cult bar and sports pub Zwick St. Pauli with a partner, and occasionally takes the mic himself there. In the NDR program, he plans to reveal what, in his view, makes a perfect bar.
From the St. Pauli Museum to the Davidwache
Five more guests know the district from a professional point of view: The Vienna-born historian Eva Decker has led, among other things, the St.-Pauli-Museum. Belle la Donna is among the co-founders of the German burlesque scene. Franca Cuneo runs in the fourth generation the “Cuneo,” which, according to her, is Hamburg’s oldest Italian restaurant.
Esther Lindemann was in the 1980s the first female police officer on the Davidwache, right in the heart of the district’s gang milieu. And finally there is Fabian Zahrt, a star of the RTL2 cult documentary “Reeperbahn privat.” He knows the red-light district as a “cult bouncer”—the doorman who draws guests into venues—and today belongs to the Olivia Jones family.
