Hamburg, ‘Gate to the World,’ shuts down for G20

Almost two years ago, the citizens of Hamburg, Germany rejected a bid for the 2024 Olympics. They didn’t want the hassle or the costs. Now they’re bracing for something far worse: the world’s leaders are coming to town for the G20 summit. Instead of talented athletes, there’ll be 20,000 cops, dozens of heavily-armed bodyguards and a super-sophisticated “Survivor” tank fit to withstand chemical and nuclear attacks. The city center will be cordoned off for days. The whole thing isn’t cheap either — the summit could run up a bill of close to €185 million.

Hosting this kind of a meeting — G7, G8, G-whatever — has never been fun or easy, of course. Ever since protesters clashed with police in the battle of Seattle, suitable venues have been hard to come by. But preparations for the Hamburg summit are proving especially tricky — and that’s not just because the talks are expected to be more contentious than usual. Thousands of left-wing activists are pouring into the city, hoping to cause as much disruption as possible. Turkish pro-government supporters living in Germany are keen to do battle with local Kurds. Add to that the threat of Islamic terrorism, and the event looks like an increasingly unpleasant affair.

City officials insist Hamburg will be safe from harm. They point to the extraordinary precautions taken in order to ensure everything goes smoothly. But the meeting may prove to be a turning point. In times of rising global tension, critics argue, a mega-summit in the heart of a major Western city just doesn’t make sense anymore. “It would be hard to find a location in Germany that appears less suited to the world’s biggest meeting of politicians than this one,” the newspaper die Welt wrote on Tuesday. “Who had the idea to hold the G20 summit here?”

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Hamburg — Germany’s second largest city after Berlin — has one of the world’s busiest ports, a lively red-light district and a gleaming new concert hall designed to do for the city what Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao in Spain. Hamburgers — yes, that’s what they’re called — depend on global trade for their wealth and like to think of themselves as utterly cosmopolitan. But word that the city is one of the great metropoles hasn’t really gotten out.

A protestor waves an anti-G20 banner during a demonstration called by several NGOs ahead of the summit | John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images

Beautiful though it is, Hamburg attracts fewer tourists from abroad than Berlin, Munich or Frankfurt, and it could use some more visibility. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel — responsible for hosting this year’s event — picked Hamburg in 2015, the city was still in the running for the Olympics. Mayor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, welcomed the decision, presumably hoping a G20 meeting, combined with a successful Olympic bid and the opening of the new concert hall, would raise the city’s international profile.

But that was then. With the Olympic bid gone and global politics in turmoil, the prospect of a G20 meeting suddenly seems less enticing. Who knows what might happen? Hamburg could enter the history books as the place where the Paris climate agreement collapsed for good. Or it could become a synonym for the revival of protectionism. At the very least, there’ll be television images of street battles aired worldwide. It’s not exactly what city officials signed up for.

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To get a sense of what Hamburg is in for, it helps to look at a map. The city is pretty segregated along the lines of race, class and politics. There are lots of quiet and wealthy neighborhoods around Alster Lake and on the banks of River Elbe where conservative citizens reside in Gründerzeit mansions. But that’s not where the talks will be held. The Messehallen, or exhibition halls, are located between the city’s commercial center and a neighborhood called Schanzenviertel that is known, among other things, for its high proportion of left-wing activists. Gentrification has been going on for decades but the neighborhood has somehow retained its grit. Riots on May 1 are a time-honored tradition here. And in the last communal elections, Merkel’s conservative CDU had 3 percent of the area’s vote. If U.S. President Donald Trump were a German politician, he would get even less.

Wooden panels are nailed on windows to protect a shop against riot damage in Hamburg | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images

Some locals consider the fact that Trump will be on their doorstep a provocation. Others see it as a delightful invitation. They’ve announced that they want to “kettle” Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, meaning they’ll try to prevent the leaders from getting to the exhibition halls. In their efforts to do so, they will be joined by protesters from all over Europe. Police estimate that up to 10,000 militant activists are traveling to Hamburg this week. A string of recent incidents — arson attacks on rail services and police vans, the confiscation of large stashes of weapons — indicate that this time around some protesters are intent on wreaking serious havoc. (There are, of course, many more that will refrain from violence.)

As if that weren’t enough, police are worried about other conflicts, too. Three years ago, hundreds of Kurds and Salafists met near Hamburg’s central train station, battling each other with knifes, machetes and baseball bats. This time, Erdoğan’s supporters will have to be kept away from Kurdish protesters, who want to get as close to the Turkish president as they can. It’s the kind of thing Western cities better get used to. Ethnic minorities are increasingly re-enacting conflicts that originated elsewhere — and the media attention that comes with a global summit provides them with a perfect forum.

Then, there’s terrorism. Hamburg reportedly has a higher proportion of Salafists than most other regions of Germany. They reside mainly in the working-class neighborhoods in the city’s east and south, places that are rarely visited by the city’s wealthier inhabitants. (One of these neighborhoods, Harburg, moved into the spotlight when it became known that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had lived there.)

Officials claim that, all things considered, a large-scale terror strike is highly unlikely. During the summit, the city will be teeming with secret-service people and surveillance technology. But the possibility of a lone-wolf attack cannot easily be discounted. “The terror threat right now is the most significant we’ve had in a generation,” Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper. “And, of course, the G20 summit, like any other important public event, is a potential target.”

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Merkel’s people, when asked about the location, say she picked the center of Hamburg because smaller cities or mountainous resort towns don’t have the capacity to hold a G20 meeting. She also argued that the city’s image as a “beacon of free trade” will promote her political agenda. City officials are parroting that line, arguing that liberal and cosmopolitan Hamburg is the perfect place for talks about global issues such as trade and climate change.

A train passes a barbed wire fence installed to prevent possible protesters accessing a railway line next to the G20 summit site | Friedemann Vogel/EPA

But the very qualities that make Hamburg such a bustling port city make it vulnerable, too. The Elbphilharmonie — the new concert hall where leaders will gather on Friday night to listen to (what else?) Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — feels particularly exposed. It sits on top of an old warehouse and overlooks the heavily trafficked Elbe river. For weeks, divers have been scouring the river for suspicious objects. And when it became known that the U.S. president would be staying in a residence on the banks of the Alster lake, they started looking there, too. That just goes to show what absurd length cities have to go to if they want to stage such summits.

If things go badly this time, world leaders may soon decide they have to stop meeting like this. And they’ll resort to video conferencing or secretive get-togethers in mountainous hideaways. But even if they stick to the Hamburg model, they will find it increasingly difficult to sell the idea to a skeptical public.

A performer wearing a mask of Russian President Vladimir Putin at another Hamburg G20 protest | John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images

Hamburg’s decision against the Olympic bid was a close one. A vote on the G20 meeting, on the other hand, would have been a blowout, a resounding “No.” According to an informal survey conducted by a local newspaper, a third of residents are planning to leave the city for the duration of the summit. Schools are closing temporarily, shops will shutter. Speaking to residents, one gets the sense they are preparing for the apocalypse — not a prestigious, high-profile event.

The proud citizens of Hamburg like to call their hometown the “Gate to the World.” But now that the world is finally coming to them, they’ve gone into hiding.

Konstantin Richter is a contributing writer at POLITICO. He is the author of the German-language novel, “The Chancellor: A Fiction,” about Merkel and the refugee crisis.