Hamburg is more than the setting of Heinz Strunk’s novel: it is the city whose social extremes meet in the same night-time world of alcohol, sex, poverty, and crime. The narrative moves between St. Pauli and the grand rooms of the Elbvororte, making the distance between wealth and deprivation visible without suggesting that money guarantees humanity. At the center is the disreputable Zum Goldenen Handschuh, where Fritz Honka drinks and finds his victims; at the other end of the city’s social spectrum, a shipping dynasty follows its formal rituals behind the doors of its Elbchaussee estate.

Nightlife and the city’s margins

The novel introduces Hamburg through a February night in 1974. At three in the morning, on an icy day, a small, crooked man with an indented face and huge hands has already spent twelve hours at his usual seat at the short end of the L-shaped counter. He talks to the man beside him about a woman he once loved, remembering her scent and a birthmark on her stomach. His surroundings make that account of desire inseparable from the present: his companion, known as Leiche, is a former prisoner convicted of murder, so worn down that the waiter sometimes shakes him to check whether he is still alive. The bar is not an incidental stop in the city; it is a place where longing, degradation, and the threat of violence occupy the same small space.

The book describes the Zum Goldenen Handschuh as a drinking den on Hamburg’s St. Pauli, and the surrounding night world as one of bars and rundown housing. Honka takes his victims from the bar. His routine therefore links the public setting of the drinking establishment to the private rooms where his crimes occur. The city’s geography gives that movement its force: an address associated with nightly drinking leads, in the end, to the discovery of human remains in an attic storage space.

St. Pauli is also where the novel places the possibility of losing control. On a Saturday, Fiete weighs a return to the Handschuh against the fragile normality of his recent working week. He estimates that he has had no more than ten beers and a few schnapps in the whole week, but fears that a visit might turn into an all-night spell at the bar and cost him his next workday. He imagines that his brother Siggi could keep watch and decide when they should leave. The plan makes the city’s drinking culture a test of self-command: Fiete hopes that another person can provide the restraint he does not trust himself to maintain.

Two social worlds

On the same day that the novel follows life at the margins, it enters the von Dohren Family Estate on the supposedly proper side of the Elbchaussee, among high-numbered addresses near Hirschpark. The family gathers punctually at 7:30 in the evening in the Red Salon, a room large enough for about eighty people. Its dark, heavy furniture, carpets, gloomy oil paintings, and dead animals mounted on the walls weigh on Margot von Dohren; she would prefer to eat in a smaller room, but while WH 1 is alive she expects no change. The setting is sumptuous, yet its scale and inherited rules feel oppressive rather than welcoming.

The meal follows an elaborate three-course pattern: scallops with beluga lentils, sauerbraten made from the top side of beef, then elderflower semifreddo with marinated strawberries. Margot regards the ritual as an outdated excess, but the family keeps to it. Around the table sit WH 1, aged seventy-nine; his son WH 2, fifty-seven; WH 2’s seventeen-year-old son, WH 3; and Margot, aged fifty-three. Their punctual dinner ritual stands in sharp contrast to the unstable hours and improvised lives of the bar. Yet the contrast is not a simple moral division: the novel’s account of the city’s wealthy households does not equate money with humanity.

Hamburg also connects these worlds through ordinary journeys. Once a month, Margot travels to Kiel to spend Saturday with her brother, Karl von Lützow, and returns to Hamburg early in the evening. The routine matters to Karl, who regards his sister as his personal family and depends on the familiar pattern of their visits. From lunch at the Alte Mühle to coffee and cake at the Strandklause, their day is made of repeated, modest habits. The return to Hamburg places the city within a wider family geography, while the visit’s quiet companionship offers a contrast to the pressure and accusation found elsewhere in the novel.

The harbor as public performance

A harbor tour presents another version of Hamburg: the city advertised to passengers through a captain’s jokes and civic boasts. His patter describes Hamburg as Germany’s second-largest industrial city after Berlin and, with nearly eighty consular offices, the world’s second-largest consular center. About twenty people are aboard; roughly half listen, while others talk or look out of the windows. Fiete notices an old man reading a magazine during the tour and considers the reading a waste of money. His attention turns the excursion from a piece of civic presentation into a view of how he judges the people around him.

The captain’s performance mixes practical information with jokes about navigation, seasickness, and drinking. Fiete tries to make sense of the comic names for drinks by relating them to familiar terms from his own life: one sounds to him like bad coffee, another like tap water. He also watches a family whose children are restless and whose clothes become soiled. These details do not establish an objective portrait of every passenger; they show the city filtered through Fiete’s sharply judgmental gaze. Hamburg appears both as a place being sold to visitors and as the setting in which he continually evaluates strangers from the outside.

Zeißstraße 74 and the city’s evidence

The novel’s most consequential address is Zeißstraße 74. During firefighting there on July 17, 1975, firefighters find human remains in a small attic room, and the discovery points to homicide. Suspicion quickly falls on the forty-year-old night watchman Fritz Honka, who lives at the building. After several days of silence, he confesses to detectives Peter Seeler and Hans-Peter Untermann during questioning on July 29. The movement from the bar to this apartment is thus not only part of the narrative’s geography; it is the route by which concealed violence becomes public evidence.

The trial account locates the four killings in Honka’s third-floor apartment at Zeißstraße 74, in Hamburg 50. The verdict describes him as convicted and confessing to the deaths of four women, probably committed to satisfy his sexual desire. It also records the prolonged personal and social deterioration attributed to years of heavy alcohol abuse, ending in his presence in what the court characterized as the lowest milieu of St. Pauli. After the proceedings, Honka is transferred to the secure unit at Ochsenzoll General Hospital in Hamburg-Langenhorn. The city consequently contains not just the bar and crime scene, but the institutions that investigate, judge, and confine him.

Narrative significance

Hamburg’s decisive role lies in the juxtaposition of places that are near enough to belong to one city but governed by sharply different conditions. The novel sets a twelve-hour drinking vigil beside a punctual family dinner in an eighty-person salon; a harbor tour’s polished civic patter beside Fiete’s suspicion of the passengers; and the public bar beside the apartment where crimes are eventually exposed. These spaces give social difference a concrete form, while the crossings between them prevent the wealthy quarter and the drinking district from becoming wholly separate worlds.

That geography also carries the novel’s central tension between the desire for happiness and the forces that damage human lives. The city contains routines of care, such as Margot and Karl’s monthly visits, but also the vulnerable habits of men who cannot trust themselves to stop drinking. It offers an outwardly confident account of commerce and prosperity, yet the novel repeatedly returns to people whose lives have narrowed to alcohol, sex, and survival. By ending the chain of locations at Zeißstraße 74 and Ochsenzoll, the narrative makes Hamburg both the setting of the violence and the place where its consequences are formally recognized.