Wouldn’t it be fascinating if you could travel back in time to the flourishing Hamburg of the 17th century? A new app from an international research project makes this possible and brings the history of five European cities to life
There are cities that have hardly changed their appearance, at least as far as their center is concerned, over the last few centuries. Hamburg is definitely not in this category. As a vibrant trading metropolis and especially after the devastating bombings in the Second World War, the city was subject to constant change, so that the former inhabitants would often find it difficult to find their way around today.
At the end of the 17th century, the free imperial city was considered the “florentissimum Emporium totius Germaniae”, the most flourishing city in Germany. Not yet united with the Danish city of Altona, Hamburg already had 75,000 inhabitants. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if you could travel back in time to the flourishing Hamburg of the 17th century?
This is now possible with the Hidden Cities app. Four other European cities can also be explored in this way. With the Hidden Cities app, you can find out which trades made up the wealth of the city, how public space was used there in the 15th and 16th centuries and which buildings were important for the community at the time.
It was developed by the international research project “PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present” (PURE), which is funded by the EU with one million euros. The German partner is the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), which is researching early modern Hamburg and has developed an app and a website with an interactive city tour through the year 1686, among other things.
“Moin, Moin, my name is Johann and I am a Hamburg paper merchant” – this is the greeting of the fictional character who guides you through Hamburg in 1686 in the app. The inventors of “Johann” and his tour through the city are Prof. Dr. Daniel Bellingradt, Junior Professor of Book Studies, in particular Historical Communication Research at FAU, and his research assistant Claudia Heise. The team developed an approximately one-hour city tour – available in German and English – free of charge.
“We have selected seven stations from contemporary Hamburg to which the listeners have to walk,” explains Bellingradt. “And if their GPS tracking sends the right signal, a selected stage of the story about the fictional paper merchant is activated at each station.” All stations can also be accessed virtually on the screen – i.e. without GPS tracking and real movement through Hamburg. The texts, images and sounds are explained and categorized in a generally understandable way and offer a lively insight into previously hidden stories of the city with museum objects and archive materials.
The FAU team is cooperating with the Museum of Hamburg History, among others, to make it easier to experience Hamburg at that time. “The city tour is actually a walk through Hamburg with a geolocalized historical map of the year 1686 and a current city map. Our tour takes us to a Hamburg in turmoil, where two Hamburg politicians have just been publicly executed and pamphlets burned,” says Heise.
It is astonishing that despite all the changes over the past centuries, the streets have largely remained the same. GPS tracking is used to determine the user’s location. Where columns of trucks and cars push through the city today, back then there were only horses, carriages and carts. The noise and stench certainly had a different quality, but they are still omnipresent. Johann is constantly on the hunt for news and rumors, using a wide variety of information sources. He takes users of the app on his way to marketplaces, churches and coffee houses and the news stands in front of the Hamburg Opera House.
Other cities for which an interactive website and app have been developed are Exeter, Valencia, Deventer and Trento. The project partners here are the Dutch Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the British University of Exeter, the Spanish Universitat de València and the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento. The apps are available to download free of charge from the Google Play Store (Android) and the Apple App Store.
Scientific contact person:
Prof. Dr. Daniel Bellingradt, Junior Professor of Book Studies, in particular Historical Communication Research, daniel.bellingradt@fau.de, https://hiddencities.eu
You can find out more about the research project “PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present” (PURE) in the video. The aim is to make everyday life in European cities between 1450 and 1700 visible.