An Imperial Adventus into a City of Warehouses: History, Modernity, and Urbanity in the Symbolic and Material Construction of Hamburg's Free Port

The article analyzes the contemporary material, political, and symbolic construction of Hamburg's free port, zooming in on its festive opening in 1888, when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited to perform this ceremonious act. Asking why the “Speicherstadt” (warehouse city) was right away dubbed a “city” even though this was an exclusively commercial space devoid of inhabitants, the article uses this case study to argue that process concepts like “urbanization” frame our perspectives in ways that eclipse how older ideas about urbanity still defined a late-nineteenth-century political imaginary. The article shows how the opening ceremony, staged as an imperial adventus, alongside the “Speicherstadt's” neo-Gothic red-brick architecture, made recourse to established cultural forms that historians and other commentators often deem premodern. To counteract the prospect that port expansion could turn Hamburg into a working-class city, Hamburg's bourgeois merchant elite tried to construct the free port as a global urban bourgeois space embodying the city's history and its longevity as a space of urban trade privilege. The latter had erstwhile been defined by Hamburg's city walls, which, as the article argues, were symbolically rebuilt in the form of the Speicherstadt. The latter was the “city” into which this modern-day imperial adventus led.