The historiography of Hamburg in the long nineteenth century has been dominated by a debate over the notion of a domestic German Sonderweg. In one variation or another, scholars have compared and contrasted an image of a London on the Elbe, steeped in bourgeois tradition and republican virtue, with that of an increasingly Prussianized Germany, burdened by aristocratic hegemony and bureaucratic autocracy. Some have chosen to tell the story from the perspective of a cosmopolitan mercantile outpost in the northwest reaches of a Teutonic nation, striving bravely or anachronistically to maintain its autonomy and distinctiveness in the face of external levelling forces constantly seeking to crush its independence. Others have witnessed events as a decline and fall of a once proud Hanse community unable to withstand the impact of national unification and industrial development, and the divisive imperialistic and class interests that trailed in their wake. But virtually all have started from a very basic and simple premise: that Hamburg's fundamental role in German history has been to serve ‘as a bastion of bourgeois liberalism, mercantile rule, and laissez-faire, “English” values’. It was, in the words of Richard J. Evans, an example of urban development that ‘seems to confound almost every generalization historians have made about the German Kaiserreich in recent years’.

Such an interpretation, however, has led many historians down a slippery path. Ignoring to a large degree that both before and after the First World War Hamburg proved to be as much a centre of völkisch and antisemitic radicalism as it was a fount of political moderation and cosmopolitan tolerance, they have sought to construct a vision of the city-state as a fortress against the rise of National Socialism and a source of a ‘kinder and gentler’ Nazi rule once it was in place. While recent research has debunked both assertions as at best exaggerated and at worst self-serving, given many of the authors’ checkered political past, it has still left unexplained how Hamburg could so quickly turn from being the poster child of liberal, urban modernization to one of five ‘Führerstädte’ in the Third Reich, alongside Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and Linz.

Hamburg: A City of Two Social Orders

Throughout the long nineteenth century two institutional logics of social order jockeyed for position and at times even supremacy in Hamburg.