Café Lehmitz and the Photographs of Anders Petersen: A Portrait of Hamburg’s Red-Light District
Café Lehmitz was never destined for guidebooks or glamorous postcards. Nestled on Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn, it thrived as a haven for the working-class men and women of the city’s bustling red-light district. In the late 1960s, its smoky interior became the unlikely stage for one of photography’s most intimate and raw studies of human life, courtesy of Anders Petersen.
Petersen’s journey to Café Lehmitz began years before, in 1962, when he first visited Hamburg as an 18-year-old Swede. The city’s vibrant, unpolished energy left a lasting impression. By 1967, Petersen was back, not as a tourist, but with a camera in hand. “I went back there to find my friends and take pictures of their lives,” he later recalled. But the passage of time had taken its toll: “People told me they were almost all dead.”
It was a chance encounter that steered Petersen to Café Lehmitz. In a bar, he bumped into Gertrude, an old friend, and shared his plans to document the area’s colourful life. Gertrude suggested they meet the next night at Café Lehmitz, a spot she assured him was teeming with characters worth capturing. True to her word, Petersen arrived promptly at 1 a.m. and found a seat at a corner table, camera in tow. What followed was an unexpectedly collaborative start to his project. Patrons picked up the camera, snapped pictures of one another, and tossed it back to him. “I kept it and started to shoot,” Petersen recounted. Hours later, Gertrude arrived. Her reaction was immediate and enthusiastic: “Look! It’s working! So stay here and take some more pictures.”
Petersen did exactly that, remaining at Café Lehmitz for a month. Over the next two and a half years, he returned regularly, creating a body of work that encapsulates the raw humanity of the café’s clientele. The images are a study in contrasts: moments of tenderness juxtaposed with scenes of brutality, camaraderie alongside isolation.
One subject, Uschi, left a deep impression on Petersen. “She was a very nice woman, very kind, very generous,” he said. But her life bore the scars of trauma. Raped at 14 by her cousin, she was blamed for the incident and ostracised. “So she went out and started to earn money in the way, you know, that is very common,” Petersen said, hinting at her work as a sex worker.
“In another there is a woman – I don’t remember her name – together with a man in a big hat. He was being very hard and rude to her. It was a horrible and upsetting situation. I was asking myself, should I really publish this? But I also have to show this side of life at the cafe. Not only the romantic things…
Indeed, Petersen’s work at Café Lehmitz has often been compared to Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, another seminal photographic series that documents an urban underworld. While Petersen acknowledged the influence, he later reflected on the evolution of his style: “I don’t have the same taste today. Then I was very much concerned about the atmosphere, the milieu. But now I’m more into what I think I’m connected to, what I can identify with. I’m more direct.”
What Petersen captured at Café Lehmitz was a world on the margins, populated by sex workers, drifters, and labourers. Yet his lens never reduced them to stereotypes. His photographs, black-and-white and brimming with unvarnished intimacy, convey their resilience, humour, and humanity. They depict lives lived outside the boundaries of conventional respectability, but never without dignity.
The legacy of Café Lehmitz endures not just as a visual record of a bygone era, but as a testament to Petersen’s deep connection with his subjects. His work reminds us that even in society’s forgotten corners, there are stories worth telling – raw, complicated, and profoundly human.
