How does one write the history of a place? There are many different options. The Annales historians started with the physical facts of geography, working up from the brute facts of a terrain through layers of social structure, economic activity, and lived experience. From Montaillou to Marpingen, histories of specific places have often opened outward, highlighting connections to larger collectivities: the imagined community of the Christian faithful, the administrative reality of the German nation-state. The novelist Bruce Chatwin took a different approach; The Songlines illuminates a terrain as mapped by the stories told by its inhabitants. Matthew Jefferies's new book on Hamburg follows none of these models. Rather, his approach has roots in the place he is analyzing. Under the influence of the Heimat movements of the early twentieth century, the director of the Hamburg Art Museum, Alfred Lichtwark, furthered a particular perspective for the telling of local history. As Lichtwark wrote in his Deutsche Königstädte. Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden, München, Stuttgart of 1912, the cultural landscape of a place was the key to its identity. Echoing the guidebooks and popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century writings on Kunstdenkmäler that Lichtwark supported, Jefferies's new book also reads the history of a place—in this case the city-state of Hamburg—off of its architecture and monuments.

This is a hybrid work, part city history and part tour guide, that straddles the line between a research monograph and a popular treatment. Published in the series “Cities of the Imagination,” it appears to be written by the historian for the curious traveler. Jefferies, an authority on the politics and culture of Imperial Germany, tells the history of Hamburg via a walking tour. Following an introductory chapter, which sets out chronology and themes, the book takes the reader through Hamburg's various cityscapes, each organized around a central idea. A chapter on “history lessons in stone” opens the story with the Town Hall (1898) before touring several central monuments, such as the World War I memorial directly adjacent to the Town Hall and the Bismarck memorial (1906), which towers over the Reeperbahn. From the old city center, the narrative moves through Hamburg's famous harbor, long the city's raison d'être. The “City on Water” is followed by the “City on Fire,” which delves into both the history of the Great Fire of 1842 and the urban modernization that accompanied its mid-century rebuilding, as well as the incineration of the city during the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah, the Allied bombing attack on Hamburg in 1943. The “City of Brick” centers on the century between these two developments, exploring Hamburg's better-known modernist urban monuments: Fritz Höger's expressionist Chilehaus (1924) and the central business district, the Mönckebergstrasse's commercial urbanity, and the red-brick public architecture created by Hamburg's most famous Baudirektor, Fritz Schumacher, who took the position in 1909 and gave the city his particular stamp. The chapter entitled “City of Neon” explores the alternative scene of St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn with forays into popular culture. The final chapter “The World City” finishes the book where others would have started, describing its far-flung trade networks and place in both Germany's colonial project and the wider reaches of the global economy.

In keeping with its character as a guidebook, chapters largely walk the reader through the city, pointing out central features and structures and narrating the history of the place one monument at a time, but without exhaustive detail. Rather, Jefferies is the guide that every visitor to Hamburg would wish to have, as he unravels this urban history with telling details and salient facts in a manner both educational and entertaining. Lichtwark would have been pleased.

Lichtwark would also have liked Jefferies's focus on Hamburg's culture and history, given his own battles with its merchant senators and against the city's reputation as a place without culture fit only for the infamous Pfeffersäcke feeding their gullets and counting their money. Jefferies's particular way of narrating the city, however, does raise questions. Hamburg is traditionally described as a city of merchants, of commerce and trade, where economic power trumped all other considerations. That theme is present here, but it is overshadowed by others. The merchant city appears fully only at its end. Opening the book are the themes of destruction, violence, and death. After the political narrative set out in the first section, the chapter that inaugurates the walking tour opens—literally stumbles over—the “stumbling stones” (Stolpersteine) commemorating the violence of Nazism and the Holocaust. Monuments to the victims of violence are the central focus of the chapter. From the historicist decoration of the Town Hall and the monumental Bismarck statue (large structures in the landscape), Jefferies moves through the monuments at Dammtor and into the municipal cemetery at Ohlsdorf and three monuments built between 1949 and 1952: the Monument for the Victims of Fascism (1949), a memorial for Hamburg's murdered Jewish population (1951), and a monument for the victims of the bombings (1952). These monuments are not well known, particularly to outsiders, and highlighting them is welcome. A thoughtful discussion characterizes this part of the tour, and readers will benefit in general from Jefferies's knowledge and his eye for detail. Yet, one should acknowledge that this is a particular way to narrate the history of Hamburg, with death coming at the beginning and life—or the promise of life—coming at the end (in an epilogue entitled “The Future City”).

There is a large monographic literature on Hamburg that covers its economic development, merchant culture, and political history. Numerous studies focus on its modernist culture and civic institutions. Those who wish for a more monographic and exhaustive approach to the city's built environment should pick up Hermann Hipp's Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg published by DuMont. The history of the labor movement has also been intensively analyzed, with the life of the docks and the city's social democratic and communist lifeworlds explored in depth. This book does a bit of all of these things, starting with Hamburg's current cityscape and going down through its urban layers. The reader receives a panoramic tour of the past told as an entertaining history of the present.