As a lover and defender of most things Hamburg, I want to give the Reeperbahn a postmodern or…read moreself-sure ironic pass, because while I was a judgmental, moralistic teenager the first time I came here with my high-school classmates, their German exchange partners, and my German exchange partner, I would eventually learn a great deal about the history of the street, the St. Pauli quarter it's part of, and early-Beatles lore.
So it's a red-light district? Who cares? If you're not paying, you're not part of the problem, and there's plenty of people-watching to be done nonetheless. This is mostly the attitude I had when I returned to Hamburg when I was a bit older, less innocent, and more idealistic about the world and how to solve its problems.
Now, though, I think of it more like I did in high school--but not because I'm that judgmental jerk anymore.
How you experience the Reeperbahn depends on why you're here. If you're a tourist coming by yourself or with other tourists, you should know that it's not a particularly dangerous place--OK, it might be a dangerous place if you go into any of the brothels, but the street itself is very safe, even when it's crowded on a weekend night. So you don't have to be afraid to come here. But why are you coming here? To see the scantily clad/partially nude/fully nude women in their windows? Like Amsterdam's red-light district, the Reeperbahn's sex workers sit, stand, and recline in large picture windows that are often surrounded by colorful lights.
If you're coming with Germans who live in or around Hamburg, they'll have their opinions about it, and while the people who really despise it probably won't bring you here at all, it's probably best to experience it as part of a local's understanding of their city.
From an American's perspective, it's shocking to see sex work so out in the open, along with cartoony signs and lights you've come to expect at the seediest liquor store you can find. But once you get used to it, which doesn't take long when you've walked along the street for a while, the entire thing is just sad. Most of the sex workers in the windows now are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and a large percentage of them are probably sex-trafficking victims. You'll occasionally see guys in their early twenties offering the girls money to take selfies with them, or people won't even interact with the women and will just use them as Instagram backgrounds, but you'll see very soon that the sex workers have no patience for pranksters. They are good at cussing men out in German, English, and possibly other languages; and the pimps or whoever the men are who work in the brothels will often come out and threaten to beat up groups of drunk men if they don't move along.
There are other clubs, bars, and restaurants that have nothing to do with sex or sex work all over the Reeperbahn. If anything, it feels like a sex-and-urban-decay-themed tourist trap, like combining Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco with Hollywood Boulevard in L.A. and replacing the sea lions and clam chowder in bread bowls with prostitutes and greasy carnival food, respectively. It's definitely not a place for families or for any children, really, but then Germany has this very strange way of accepting that children are exposed to stuff they shouldn't be exposed to, not doing anything to stop it, and then expecting the same children not to be influenced by what they see. I don't mean that the Reeperbahn turns little boys into johns and little girls into sex workers, but the line between what's respectable and what's sleazy in German culture is both very bright and very thin. It's a difficult concept to explain, but I often felt that way in the Reeperbahn (and in St. Pauli in general) and in parts of Berlin.
Yes, the Beatles did play lots of early shows here before they made it big, but even the Beatles-kitsch isn't very well done and definitely isn't worth a visit if that's the only reason you're coming here. Again, it feels like a safer, not necessarily cleaner Hollywood Boulevard.
If you want to experience Hamburg nightlight without being reminded of desperation and sex trafficking, I would recommend the Sternschanze. It's not far away (it has its own S- and U-Bahn station, but the other station that services Sternschanze [Feldstraße] is actually in St. Pauli, but right on the border), has much better restaurants, and it also has quite a history as a center of all kinds of protests.
Oh, and if you don't already feel icky about the Reeperbahn, you should know that in German the "Reeper" part of the word rhymes with "paper."
