Julia Sneeringer's study of Beatles-era Hamburg is a historian's take on a subject that has been covered by numerous non-academic authors. In her book, Sneeringer argues that the Hamburg Beat music scene was ‘a crucial incubator of the transnational youth culture that became central to our understanding of the 1960s’ (p. 2). Emphasising in particular the transnational alliances between Brits and Germans in Hamburg's red-light district St Pauli, the book with the clunky title A Social History of Early Rock ’n’ Roll in Germany aims to provide ‘an alternative German history from the perspective of a place built on self-expression and bodily liberation’ (p. 2). Sneeringer looks at a broad array of characters (including musicians, audiences, club owners and so-called ‘authorities’) in order to show how West German life was democratised and liberalised in a time period just prior to the better-known social upheavals of the late 1960s. While the study is rich in historical detail, it does not necessarily offer broader insights that could challenge traditional notions of youth, gender and national identity.

Sneeringer begins with a broader history of entertainment in St Pauli, its rise as a cosmopolitan pleasure economy, the pushback and resistance of the Nazi era and the re-emergence of the area after 1945, which drew heavily on sailor nostalgia. In this first chapter, a largely detached historical narrative is interspersed with off-the-cuff statements like ‘survivors danced and drank and screwed as if each time was their last’ (p. 32). The second chapter discusses the three entrepreneurs who ran St Pauli's most important music clubs, Bruno Koschmider of the Kaiserkeller, Peter Eckhorn of the Top Ten and Manfred Weissleder of the Star Club. These venues catered to a rising teenage market and featured rock ’n’ roll and Beat music (rather than the jazz performed at other venues). The club owners appear in the context of the St Pauli underworld, and Sneeringer could have deconstructed or explored the trope of the ‘gangster’ in the way she more closely analyses musicians and audiences later in her book. Unsurprisingly, Sneeringer's third chapter about the British musicians who performed in the above-mentioned clubs between 1960 and 1966 focuses heavily on the Beatles. This material has already been mined extensively by other authors (including book-length treatises in German). While the chapter's section on all-female groups like the Liverbirds is an important contribution to the literature on British groups playing in Hamburg, German bands like the Lords or the Rattles are only discussed in a cursory manner.

In the fourth chapter, Sneeringer shifts her attention to audiences and draws on second-hand accounts and the publication Star Club News. This chapter would have profited from interviews with surviving fans. Instead of an oral history, the reader gets a rehashing and translation of German-language sources, which only benefit those unable to access the original texts. Also, to some extent the author repeats what she criticises other historians for, namely, focusing ‘more on discourses about music than audiences’ experience of it’ (p. 95). Sneeringer's most successful chapter is the following one, which discusses the backlash to youth liberation by what the author labels the ‘authorities’, that is, ‘police, city officials, St. Pauli business leaders and social welfare agents’ (p. 122). This excellent account of the moral panic triggered by transnational music production makes good use of archival sources and offers a compelling argument. A final section rightfully identifies the mainstreaming and de-localisation of Beat music as well as the switch from live music to prerecorded music in discotheques like the Grünspan as catalysts for the decline of the Hamburg scene but ignores later musical developments in the city, which include krautrock, hip-hop, house and a 1990s indie rock scene that was even called the Hamburger Schule (Hamburg School).

As an overall well-researched book, A Social History of Early Rock ’n’ Roll in Germany only contains a few mistakes that could have been easily fixed: Hamburg is described as ‘West Germany's largest city’ (p. 2) although West Berlin was generally considered part of the West (even if technically located in the East), and for the song ‘Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins’, Sneeringer lists the 1954 film of the same title but not its original appearance in Große Freiheit Nr. 7 10 years earlier. While these are small details, they are surprising in such a well-documented study (with 80 pages of footnotes!).

Instead of broader politics, Sneeringer emphasises what she calls Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) and astutely observes how German music fans undermined attempts by the authorities to stifle their creativity and agency. One could add that Ute Poiger's Reference Poiger2000 book Jazz, Rock and Rebels, a path-breaking account of German fan subcultures, challenged common perceptions of the era even more by highlighting the empowerment of female fans, therefore adding politics of gender largely absent from Sneeringer's book. Maybe more importantly, A Social History of Early Rock ’n’ Roll in Germany is a much-needed first step in developing scholarship to the analysis of Hamburg–St Pauli's music scene. Further research could veer from a purely historical interpretation, either to push more daring arguments or to more prominently feature musical analysis (Sneeringer only vaguely describes the Hamburg sound as ‘a stomping four–four beat with amphetamine tempos and raucous songs perfect for group singing’, p. 4). In any case, Sneeringer has identified a topic that is often reduced to a simple nod to St Pauli as the place where the Beatles’ career took off but deserves much more scholarly attention.