Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. It’s crossed by hundreds of canals, and also contains large areas of parkland. Near its core, Inner Alster lake is dotted with boats and surrounded by cafes. The city’s central Jungfernstieg boulevard connects the Neustadt (new town) with the Altstadt (old town), home to landmarks like 18th-century St. Michael’s Church. Hamburg is at a sheltered natural harbor on the southern fanning-out of the Jutland Peninsula, between Continental Europe to the south and Scandinavia to the north, with the North Sea to the west and the Baltic Sea to the northeast. It is on the River Elbe at its confluence with the Alster and Bille.
Historical, Cultural facts & Religion
The history of Hamburg begins with its foundation in the 9th century as a mission settlement to convert the Saxons. Since the Middle Ages, Hamburg was an important trading centre in Europe. The city was a member in the medieval Hanseatic trading league and a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. The Hamburg culture or Hamburgian (15,500-13,100 BP) was a Late Upper Paleolithic culture of reindeer hunters in north-western Europe during the last part of the Weichsel Glaciation beginning during the Bölling interstadial. Sites are found close to the ice caps of the time. The religions represented in Hamburg are not as extensive as in other cities. Currently, statistics show that 65% of the overall population claim that they are Christian, 23% claim to be Protestants, and 31% claim Catholicism as their main religion.
Brief City History
Hamburg is proud of its long history as an independent and cosmopolitan harbour city, Germany’s ‘gateway to the world‘. Here is all you need to know about the adventurous (and calamitous) past of this bustling North German metropolis. The first settlement on the grounds of modern-day Hamburg was the Hammaburg fortress, built-in 825 between the Elbe and Alster rivers. It was from here that Saint Ansgar lead missions to evangelize Scandinavia. The Vikings didn’t appreciate his efforts and burned down the moated fortress in 845. It was rebuilt only to be burned down time and again in the following three centuries. Eventually, by the 12th-century trade took over missionary work and Hamburg established itself as a city of merchants. In 1189, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa granted Hamburg special trading rights, toll exemptions and navigation privileges. It became a Free Imperial City, a status that was the cornerstone of Hamburg’s growth and wealth in the centuries to come. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Hamburg was one of the key members of the Hanseatic League, a commercial and defensive alliance of market towns that dominated the Baltic and the North Sea trade for three centuries. The league lost importance, with the discovery of the New World, and was dissolved in the 17th century. Yet Hamburg succeeded in dominating the new trade routes, continued to prosper and soon surpassed its former Hanseatic sister cities. Over the next centuries, Hamburg continued to flourish. The city’s stock exchange was founded in 1558, the Bank of Hamburg in 1619. It was the first German city to introduce marine insurance and the first who established a convoy system to protect merchant ships on the high seas. In the 19th century, Hamburg became part of the German Empire but retained its free city status. But the city experienced numerous setbacks as well. In 1810, it was briefly annexed to the French Empire by Napoleon’s troops. In 1842 the Great Fire of Hamburg destroyed a third of the city and left around 20,000 people homeless. From the rubble a new modern city centre was built, followed by the grand Speicherstadt warehouse district. Prosperity lost to war and wreckage was quickly regained and trade routes now extended to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hamburg’s population had grown to one million.
Also, the two world wars have left their traces in Hamburg’s history. The First World War saw the collapse of international trade, and most of Hamburg’s commercial fleet was given over to the Allies as war reparation. During the Second World War, air raids destroyed 55% of housing, 80% of the port, and 40% of the city’s industry. Over 55,000 people were killed, among them the city’s Jewish community, once the largest in Germany.
Language (s) Written & Spoken
The dialect spoken in Hamburg is “Plattdeutsch” (“flat German”). A table comparing words in German, English and Plattdeutsch shows how close it is to English. In English, Plattdeutsch and German.
Important Types of Commerce in Hamburg
Hamburg’s most important economic sectors are the maritime industry, aviation, automotive, media and biotechnologies (Hamburg Official Website, 2019). Hamburg’s port fulfills important functions in support of foreign trade, both for the German economy and for Germany’s immediate European neighbors.
Language Services US and others will provide working with Hamburg
Plattdeutsch language service is important to consider when doing business in Hamburg as it is the major language used in the country. Individuals or companies in various sector such as Legal, Machinery and technologies, Business, Finance, Medicine, Advertising, communications, PR, Transport, Computer hardware and software, Science, Agriculture, Automotive, European Union Documents, Legal, Government, Industrial, Life Science, Retail, and Technology would require to indulge in professional translation to adapt documents expertly to and from Hamburg.
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