The Reeperbahn is the threshold between imagined adult life and the harsher reality of St. Pauli’s nightlife. On WH 3’s first independent visit, the street offers neither the romance he fantasizes about nor a safe introduction to the city: he encounters violence before entering Zum Goldenen Handschuh, a bar whose patrons and neighboring establishments connect the street to the novel’s wider account of marginality and decline.

WH 3’s First Visit

On a Tuesday shortly after ten, WH 3 slips out of the house on his bicycle. He has been putting off the trip for two weeks. His only previous visits to St. Pauli were to the Operettenhaus with his parents, followed each time by an immediate return home. Now he means to look around, enter a few bars, and learn the terrain gradually. The Reeperbahn is both an actual street and the first test of a plan he has rehearsed in anticipation.

He locks his bicycle and strides along with his head down, convinced that passersby can tell he is inexperienced, has never been with a girl, and comes from embarrassing circumstances. He avoids establishments with touts outside, fearing that they will single him out for ridicule. Across the street, he sees Hans-Albers-Platz and the sex workers there, and imagines the insult he might receive if he crossed over. His response is not simply to approach or retreat: he turns the possible humiliation over in his mind, while also imagining a future in which he becomes a regular client, befriends a girl his own age, and takes her to dinner or the cinema. The street becomes a surface onto which he projects both fear and an ordinary romance.

The Side Street and the Bar

Near Davidwache, WH 3 turns into a side street, hoping it will be easier to enter a bar there. It is dark and dirty, and the places he passes appear lifeless and closed. After walking the short street to its end, he decides he will have to try his luck back on the Reeperbahn. The quiet detour has not prepared him for what he sees on his return.

A man suddenly flies through an open doorway and lands in the street. Another man, wearing a torn shirt stained with blood, rushes out and kicks him. The aggressor then turns on the frozen WH 3, mocking his appearance and telling him to go home to his mother. WH 3 registers that the man must have been drinking, but the violence also changes his sense of the place: there is, after all, something happening here. He identifies the bar as Zum Goldenen Handschuh and decides to go in.

A Nightlife Network

Inside Zum Goldenen Handschuh, WH 3 sits at the table to the left of the entrance. Anus comes over to take his order. WH 3 first asks for a school slang name for cola, then requests a Coca-Cola; nobody asks him for identification. Among the people present are Soldaten-Norbert, Fanta-Rolf, and Fiete Honka, though WH 3 does not know who they are. His surprise at being left unremarked upon captures the distance between his anxious self-consciousness and the bar’s indifference to him.

Through the greasy window, he watches the man who was thrown out stagger toward Elbschlosskeller, wiping blood from his coat with slow movements. WH 3 concludes that the two bars must be connected, an inference the narrative presents as not entirely wrong. The Reeperbahn is thus rendered not as a single spectacle but as part of a small, connected nightlife geography: the street, its side roads, its bars, and the movement of people between them. For WH 3, this rough scene is also a kind of initiation, though it offers no confirmation of the tender, conventional future he had imagined.

The Street’s Retrospective Significance

The Reeperbahn’s significance extends beyond WH 3’s first night out. In the judgment concerning Fritz Honka, the court describes his long decline through heavy alcohol abuse and personal deterioration, locating its low point in his presence in St. Pauli’s lowest milieu and referring to Zum Goldenen Handschuh among its examples. The area therefore acquires a retrospective association with the conditions in which Honka’s decline is narrated and assessed.

That association is not the same as the location of the crimes. During firefighting at Zeißstraße 74 on July 17, 1975, firefighters discover human remains in a storage space beneath the roof; Fritz Honka is soon suspected, and on July 29 he confesses to the investigating officers after days of silence. The distinction between the Reeperbahn’s bar world and the apartment where the remains are found matters: the street anchors the novel’s account of a social milieu, while Zeißstraße 74 is the site of the discovery that exposes the murders.